Dara Birnbaum

Time Active

1970

-

Present

Artist Statement

Dara Birnbaum (born 1946[1]) is an American video and installation artist.[2] Birnbaum entered the nascent field of video art in the mid-to-late 1970s challenging the gendered biases of the period and television’s ever-growing presence within the American household. Her oeuvre primarily addresses ideological and aesthetic features of mass media through the intersection of video art and television.[3] She uses video to reconstruct television imagery using materials such as archetypal formats as quizzes, soap operas, and sports programmes. Her techniques involve the repetition of images and interruption of flow with text and music. She is also well known for forming part of the feminist art movement that emerged within video art in the mid-1970s. Landmarks, the public art program of The University of Texas at Austin, exhibited Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-1979) and archived an essay dedicated to Birnbaum and her work on their website.[4] Birnbaum lives and works in New York.

bio

exhibition

Latest/Featured work

Dara Birnbaum's 'Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-79)'

Explosive bursts of fire open Technology/Transformation, an incendiary deconstruction of the ideology embedded in television form and pop cultural iconography. Appropriating imagery from the 1970s TV series Wonder Woman, Birnbaum isolates and repeats the moment of the "real" woman's symbolic transformation into super-hero. Entrapped in her magical metamorphosis by Birnbaum's stuttering edits, Wonder Woman spins dizzily like a music-box doll. Through radical manipulation of this female Pop icon, she subverts its meaning within the television text. Arresting the flow of images through fragmentation and repetition, Birnbaum condenses the comic-book narrative — Wonder Woman deflects bullets off her bracelets, "cuts" her throat in a hall of mirrors — distilling its essence to allow the subtext to emerge. In a further textual deconstruction, she spells out the words to the song Wonder Woman in Discoland on the screen. The lyrics' double entendres ("Get us out from under... Wonder Woman") reveal the sexual source of the superwoman's supposed empowerment: "Shake thy Wonder Maker." Writing about the "stutter-step progression of 'extended moments' of transformation from Wonder Woman," Birnbaum states, "The abbreviated narrative — running, spinning, saving a man — allows the underlying theme to surface: psychological transformation versus television product. Real becomes Wonder in order to "do good" (be moral) in an (a) or (im)moral society." http://www.eai.org/titles/1673 Technical Assistance: Ed Slopek/Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; Ted Estabrook/Jim Peithman; Exploring Post #1; Devlin Productions Inc. Original Television Footage: CBS Inc. "Wonder Woman." Sound: The Wonderland Disco Band. RS International, Hippopotamus Productions.

video-posts
Dara Birnbaum – Installation & Video...

Artist and MFA Art Practice...

video-posts