Video Art Trailblazer Dara Birnbaum Has Died Aged 78

Dara Birnbaum, a pioneering video and installation artist who appropriated televisual content and strategies to probe systems of subjugation and control, has died at the age of 78. A longtime fixture in both feminist and video art canons, Birnbaum was included in The New York Times’s 2019 list of ‘The 25 Works of Art That Define the Contemporary Age’. In a statement on her passing, Marian Goodman Gallery noted that ‘Birnbaum’s practice continues to resonate, particularly in a media-saturated world, and her legacy remains an inspiration and influence for new generations of artists, scholars, and cultural thinkers worldwide.’

Born in Queens, New York, in 1946 to an architect and a biologist, Birnbaum earned a degree in architecture from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1969. ‘I was the only woman in my class,’ she recalled in a 2017 oral history with Linda Yablonsky for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. After graduating, she worked for architectural firms Emery Roth & Sons in New York and Lawrence Halprin & Associates in San Francisco. Through Halprin’s wife, experimental choreographer Anna Halprin, she became involved with the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop. Birnbaum eventually took a leave of absence to study drawing and painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1973.

An enduring interest in artmaking had taken hold, but Birnbaum hadn’t quite yet become enamoured with her hallmark medium: video. That would come after graduation, when she traveled to Florence in hopes of pursuing graduate studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti. There, in 1974, she stumbled upon Centro Diffusione Grafica (later, art/tapes/22), an experimental space run by Maria Gloria Conti Bicocchi. Encountering video pieces by Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim in the gallery’s windows – and, inside, a video work by Allan Kaprow – Birnbaum was, as she put it in a 2018 Artnet piece, shaken ‘to [her] very core’. Birnbaum befriended Bicocchi, and other artists in the gallerist’s circle – among them, Acconci and Dickie Landry – encouraged her to return to New York.

Back in New York, Birnbaum began creating experimental videos using a Portapak loaned by Alan Sondheim, studied video and electronic editing at the New School for Social Research and immersed herself in film theory. In Mirroring (1975), she filmed herself and her reflection simultaneously; as she twisted the lens, the non-mirrored image gradually came into focus. Her best-known work, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79), was presented in a hair salon window several years later. Using re-edited clips of Lynda Carter from the 1970s TV show Wonder Woman, Birnbaum critiqued media portrayals of women and the figure of the supposedly empowering female superhero. ‘Her role [as a superhero] is as much entrapment as … being a secretary,’ she told Yablonsky. ‘There’s Wonder Woman, and then there’s supposedly a real secretary, and there was no place in between, and I thought, “That’s where most women are living, in that in-between”’.

Birnbaum explored protest and political speech in subsequent works such as Transmission Tower: Sentinel (1992), an eight-channel video installation meditating on the First Gulf War (1990–91) with juxtaposed scenes of George H.W. Bush and Allen Ginsberg. The screens were scaffolded by a transmission tower used in broadcast television and military telecommunications alike, alluding to violent interconnections. As her techniques evolved for a changing media landscape, Birnbaum remained committed to critiquing sexism. In Arabesque (2011), she juxtaposed YouTube clips of performances of compositions by Robert and Clara Schumann with a still image from a biopic that featured only his composition: a meditation on legacy, gender and digital circulation.

In 2009 and 2010, respectively, Birnbaum was honored with retrospectives at S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent, Belgium, and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves in Porto, Portugal. In 2022, she received her first US retrospective at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art. For the October issue of frieze that year, curator Lauren Cornell moderated a conversation between Birnbaum and artist Martine Syms. ‘We’re in an era where the image is no longer grounded in a certain way,’ said Birnbaum. ‘Either with or without our permission, it slips and slides a certain amount into other means or methods, so that a work you might have considered more intimate might end up on a billboard. Currently, artists and creative voices find themselves faced with this overload of images in society. It’s a profound shift that begs the question: can independent voices still exist with purpose today?’

^{Main image: Dara Birnbaum at her solo show at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan, 2023. Courtesy: Marian Goodman Gallery; photograph: Francesca D’Amico}