Dara Birnbaum (1946-2025)

Dara Birnbaum was one of only a small group of artists in the past fifty or so years to have been deeply attuned to the changing codes and conventions of popular media. After graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology with a degree in architecture in 1969 (she was the first woman to do so), Birnbaum moved to San Francisco to work for the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, enroll at the San Francisco Art Institute, and participate in the countercultural activities still underway there. It was in the Bay Area that she made a painting, inspired in part by Andy Warhol, that began with the cropping of a press photograph of John F. Kennedy's funeral. Birnbaum eventually returned to New York, but only after a fateful stint in Florence where she stumbled upon the first generation of American video art at Maria Gloria Bicocchi's gallery art/tapes/22. (Through this encounter she met Vito Acconci and Dan Graham, who would become crucial contacts.) Her initial works used the camera as a tool of self-interrogation, but her signal innovation came soon after when she used the medium to examine the specter haunting it, namely TV. Her key works from the late 1970s, collected in Rough Edits: Popular Image Video, edited by Benjamin Buchloh for the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1987, are didactic and pedagogical (Buchloh speaks of their “resistance” and an “actual critique of the imperialism of media”), and yet they are also music videos, catchy numbers that relish the appropriation and destruction of sitcoms, game shows, and other televisual media. (In an interview with the artist, reprinted in this issue, Buchloh wonders if they might not be “too seductive.”) Particularly concerned with the ways network television constructed social roles for women, Birnbaum picked apart its messages and exploded the rest. The penultimate sequence in Technology / Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79) features the title character transforming, again and again, into a ball of flame

Art · Art history · Media studies · Painting · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Architecture