Influential Video Artist Dies at 78

Dara Birnbaum, a video artist who without end modified her medium with works that rebelled in opposition to the mainstream media, has died on Friday at 78. A spokesperson for Marian Goodman Gallery, her longtime consultant, confirmed her loss of life however didn’t specify a trigger.

Hosts of video artists working at this time owe a debt to Birnbaum, who discovered intelligent methods of upending the one-way stream of data that pours forth within the media, and specifically on tv. Through the late ’70s and ’80s, she started harvesting photographs from pirated tapes of TV packages, then reediting their photographs. Resequenced and remixed, these photographs now stuttered and repeated, discouraging passive viewing.

She produced installations from her televisual materials, using know-how that was on the time comparatively new to the artwork world and troublesome for artists to wield, and within the course of, she discovered methods of making tears within the media’s cloth, exposing latent types of bias that usually went invisible to most watching at dwelling.

In an Artwork in America interview with curator Lauren Cornell, who would go on to prepare the artist’s first US retrospective in 2022, Birnbaum stated, “I’d wish to create an area for viewing and reflection that doesn’t often happen inside this society, particularly via mass media.”

Her most well-known work stays Know-how/Transformation: Surprise Lady (1978–79), through which clips of Lynda Carter enjoying the titular superhero are looped, with the blasts and musical cues from the TV sequence now making a musical soundtrack of Birnbaum’s making. As viewers repeatedly watch Carter showing to twirl round, run via a forest, and slice a line in a mirror utilizing her nail, they’re made to muse on what sort of feminism is basically being supplied by the present from which these segments got here. Halfway via, Birnbaum loops a brief clip of an explosion, then follows it with a sequence set to the Wonderland Disco Band track “Shake Thy Wondermaker!,” whose lyrics scroll karaoke-style, with no photographs to match them.

Birnbaum had meant the video to query the hidden politics of Surprise Lady. “I wouldn’t name that liberation,” she stated of the present, talking to ARTnews in 2018. “How dare you confront me with this supposedly super-powered picture of a girl who’s stronger than I’m and can even save mankind? I can’t try this, and I gained’t—and there’s no center floor in between. The center floor is what we have to work from.”

Know-how/Transformation is now thought to be a touchstone, each inside the historical past of feminist artwork and video artwork. In 2019, T: The New York Instances Fashion Journal labeled the work one of many defining artwork items of our period. Lori Zippay, the previous director of the video artwork–centered group Digital Arts Intermix, advised ARTnews that works by Birnbaum comparable to this one “profoundly affected the best way we view photographs and tradition.”

Whereas video artwork is now a fixture in museums and business galleries, it was not that means when Birnbaum produced Know-how/Transformation, which she first exhibited within the storefront of a SoHo hair salon in New York and later introduced at Danceteria and the Mudd Membership. However later works by Birnbaum did enter mainstream areas, figuring at biennials comparable to Documenta. Artist Martha Rosler advised T, “Dara found out tips on how to get her work into the artwork world,” not like different video artists who “weren’t enthusiastic about that.”

Birnbaum’s improvements have been seen far and huge. She crafted what has typically been labeled the primary video wall ever mounted within the US—a 1989 multiscreen set up that featured a dwell feed from CNN and numerous results that appeared in an Atlanta purchasing middle—and aired her artwork on MTV. Her work acted as the duvet of the catalog for a 2023 video artwork survey on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, and Know-how/Transformation has appeared in quite a few surveys, together with Hannah Gadsby’s controversial “It’s Pablo-Matic” present on the Brooklyn Museum in 2023.

Her affect is so huge that it has formed the best way multitudes of artists—and even non-artists—assume. In a 2023 Artforum dialog, Cory Arcangel, a number one digital artist, advised her, “You anticipated the best way folks would specific themselves at this time via know-how.” That very same yr, additionally in Artforum, artist Martine Syms referred to as Birnbaum “certainly one of my heroes.”

Dara Birnbaum was born in 1946 in Queens, New York. Her father was an architect; her mom a scientist who turned a housewife. She attended Carnegie Mellon College with the intention of changing into an architect and, upon graduating in 1969, moved to San Francisco and received a job on the agency Lawrence Halprin & Associates.

She stated that “architectural planning at all times appeared to come back all the way down to economics and politics,” and so she determined to maneuver towards the sector of artwork, enrolling on the San Francisco Artwork Institute. Although she thought on the time that she would possibly return to structure, she by no means appeared again. She received a BFA in portray after which went to artwork faculty in Florence.

All the things modified in 1974, when, whereas strolling down a Florence avenue, she came across a gallery with prints by Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci seen from the skin. Though the gallery was closed, she was invited in to look at a video by Allan Kaprow, spurring an curiosity in that medium. “This opportunity engagement modified my life,” she as soon as stated in an interview with Drawing Matter.

Birnbaum’s early movies, filmed utilizing a Portapak digicam, comprise footage of her personal making, and although they’re lower-tech than the works that adopted, these movies nonetheless are provocative in their very own means. Assault Piece (1975) incorporates two channels: one displaying nonetheless photographs photographed by Birnbaum whereas being encircled by women and men with cameras, the opposite exhibiting footage of Birnbaum snapping her pictures. Produced two years after a famed essay by movie scholar Laura Mulvey that theorized the “male gaze,” the discomfiting set up explores what it means to be an energetic viewer—and who will get to be one.

Round this time, Birnbaum had begun immersing herself in concept about artwork and movie, religiously studying problems with October that she bought utilizing cash accrued from her waitressing job. “After saving cash to purchase Display screen and October by waitressing, I’d learn these positions and say, ‘My gosh, they’re not speaking in any respect about tv!’” she advised ARTnews. Thus ensued what she referred to as a “rebel.”

This was an age earlier than streaming, when it was way more troublesome to see reruns and acquire recordings of previous televisual programming. “There was no direct entry to tv, and that meant lots to me,” Birnbaum stated. Her methodology of gaining entry was not strictly talking authorized: she labored with sources cultivated at networks to acquire hard-to-find tapes, then labored with the footage by hand.

Her targets have been a number of the most generally seen packages of her day: the sitcom Laverne & Shirley, the crime drama Kojak, the truth present Hollywood Squares. She scrambled these exhibits, ungluing sound from picture and breaking pictures free from the narratives to which they as soon as belonged. Regularly, the artwork world took discover: she was certainly one of two artists to indicate video artwork on the 1982’s Documenta 7, whose curator, Rudi Fuchs, notoriously geared that exhibition round portray.

Whereas Birnbaum’s artwork had at all times been political, her engagement with current-day points solely deepened within the years that adopted. In 1990, she made Tiananmen Sq.: Break-In Transmission, a response to a scholar rebel in China the yr earlier than. Footage of stories broadcasts about these occasions seems on tiny screens that dangle from the ceiling, their photographs disrupted sometimes when a switcher forces the video feeds to vary out. A whole image of the protests by no means emerges.

Later works by Birnbaum sometimes turned their consideration to the digital sphere. Arabesque (2011), a wide-ranging video set up about feminine pianists throughout time, options YouTube clips of girls instrumentalists alongside footage from Track of Love, a 1947 movie starring Katharine Hepburn as composer Clara Schumann. Schumann has largely been sidelined in favor of her husband, the composer Robert Schumann, and Birnbaum now facilities Clara, in addition to different girls who adopted after her. Video, Birnbaum proposes, can assist reorganize historical past.

Whereas Birnbaum has lengthy been extensively acknowledged as a power inside video artwork, she regularly acquired higher consideration overseas. A 2009 retrospective appeared on the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK) in Ghent, Belgium, and the Serralves Basis in Porto, Portugal, however it by no means made it to the US, the nation the place Birnbaum spent her complete profession. It took 13 extra years for a retrospective to seem in her dwelling nation, at Bard School’s Hessel Museum of Artwork.

Her output had slowed in recent times, however she remained dedicated to the beliefs that had at all times guided her artwork. The catalog for her Bard present quoted a 2020 Zoom lecture she gave to college students on the faculty: “You will need to take this time to determine what all of us need to combat for, to pause, to decelerate and set our sights on what is basically vital to face up for.”