Dara Birnbaum (1946–2025)

Dara Birnbaum (1946–2025)

Trailblazing video and installation artistDara Birnbaum, who in the 1970s began dicing and splicing television footage to produce stuttering, explosive videos that explored the politics of image making and dissemination, died on May 2. She was seventy-eight. Her death was announced by Marian Goodman Gallery, her longtime representative. Recognizing television as the dominant visual medium of the twentieth century at a time when the fine-art world was almost exclusively invested in film, Birnbaum detourned such popular fare asKojak, Wonder Woman,andLaverne & Shirleyin eye-popping videos that centered themes of feminism, consumerism, power, and control, and exposed the hidden agendas and mechanisms of mass media. “The urge for immediacy had a lot to do with being the first generation to grow up entirely on television,” Birnbaum toldCabinet’s Nicolás Guagnini in 2002. “It was an apparatus that was introduced in our houses like a gun. It was a weapon, and that is how I wanted to use it.”

Dara Birnbaum was born in Queens, New York, on October 29, 1946. Her father was an architect; her mother, a pathologist who gave up her career to raise a family. “My parents never [said], ‘You could be president of the United States if you want to,’” she told Linda Yablonsky in a 2017interview for the Smithsonian. “It was more, ‘You have good handwriting; you could design envelopes for people, and write, you know, like cards for wedding announcements or things like that.’” Graduating from high school at sixteen, Birnbaum enrolled in the premed program at Carnegie Mellon University but soon switched to the architecture program, in which she was the only woman. “I didn’t have one woman teacher, one woman professor. I felt prejudiced against,” she told Yablonsky. “When we were doing charrette [an intense design discussion], . . . the guys would say, ‘Dara, you order the pizza.’”

Following her 1969 graduation and a stint at the New York firm Emery Roth & Sons, where she worked on the World Trade Center, Birnbaum took a job with Lawrence Halprin & Associates in San Francsico. While there, she was exposed to the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, run by Halprin’s wife, Anna Halprin. Finding herself increasingly drawn to art, she enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute and in 1973 obtained her second undergraduate degree, in painting. The following year, in Florence, where she was pursuing a graduate degree, she happened upon a storefront art space, Centro Diffusione Grafica, run by Maria Gloria Conti Bicocchi. Initially captivated by two images in the window—a “biting” pieceby Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim’sReading Position for Second Degree Burn, 1970—she spied in the back a group of people gathered around a television, which turned out to be playing video by Allan Kaprow. “That was my first encounter with video, and that started everything for me,” she toldArtforumin 2019.

Birnbaum became friendly with Acconci, and he encouraged her to return to New York. There, she became close with Dan Graham and fell in with a group of younger artists, including Scott Billingsley, Willoughby Sharp, and Robin Winters. Beginning with photographs and slide shows, she quickly moved into video. “I really felt that this was a more populist medium. It felt like a new time that would encourage a new language and a new way to approach a public,” she toldArtforum. Shooting many of these early video works on a Portapak borrowed from Alan Sondheim, she took herself as her subject. InChaired Anxieties: Abandoned, 1975, she explores the discrepancy in accepted behavioral norms between men and women. Perched atop a wooden chair, she adopts various poses, eventually spreading her knees wide, the camera pointed directly at her crotch, where it lingers. “The effect is shocking,” wrote Eva Díaz inArtforumin 2011. The two-channelAttack Piece, also made that year, features Birnbaum, armed with a 35-mm camera, “defending” herself from a group of men wielding a Super 8 film camera. Presenting the stills of the men shot by Birnbaum on one channel and the footage of her shot by her assailants on the other, the work comments at once on the relentless, active role and the assumed power of media in relation to its passive viewers, and on the societal positions of men and women.

Aware that the average American family was watching more than six hours of television a day, Birnbaum harnessed the medium to reveal its means, objectives, and consequences, with the goal of prodding her audience into questioning rather than simply accepting the motives behind their production. “My energy was toward doing what I thought was necessary for a public to hear,” she explained. Rather than train a camera on the TV screen, she enlisted friends working in the field to sneak images out to her. Her first work of spliced TV footage, (A)Drift of Politics: Two Women Are Active in a Space, 1978, isolates the stars ofLaverne & Shirleyin only the shots in which both appear, gazing out at the audience, suggesting the characters’ desperate search for validation, which in the world of the sitcom could only arrive in the form of a man. For her next foray,Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978–79, she edited footage from the titular television show to point up the yawning chasm between the expectations placed on women, whom society at once idolizes and trivializes. “Where am I between the two?” she said of the work. “I’m a secretary, I’m a Wonder Woman, and there’s nothing in-between. And the in-between is the reality we need to live in.”Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry, 1979, similarly explores feminine stereotypes and the expectations placed on women, remixing and rewinding the introductory motions of the female celebrities appearing onHollywood Squares, emphasizing their tight smiles as they attempt to adopt the pleasing expressions demanded of their sex.

Birnbaum’s work of the 1990s became more overtly political, as embodied for example inTiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission, 1990, in which five monitors present video interspersing footage from various news broadcasts of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations with that of Chinese singers in a recording studio. By the mid-2000s, she was mining YouTube, as she did for 2011’sArabesque, which elevates composer Clara Schumann, long overlooked in favor of her composer husband, Robert Schumann, through the intercutting footage of a 1947 film starring Katharine Hepburn as Clara Schumann with clips of female instrumentalists.

Birnbaum exhibited widely during her lifetime, participating in the seventh, eighth, and ninth iterations of Documenta. In recent years, she enjoyed solo shows at institutions including the Cleveland Museum of Art; MoMA PS1 and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York; the National Portrait Gallery, London; and Tai Kwun, Hong Kong. Birnbaum was the subject of surveys at Belvedere Palace, Vienna (2024); Prada Aoyama, Tokyo (2023); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2023); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2022); Miller Institute for Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh (2022); Museu de Arte Contemporånea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2010); and Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium (2009). Her work is held in the collections of institutions around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York; the Smithsonian in Washington, DC; the National Portrait Gallery in London; and the Fondazione Prada in Milan.

“I was very much excited by video moving image,” Birnbaum told Cultured’s Mara Veitch in 2024. “I was in the first digital editing room in New York. I thought the older I got, the more I could challenge myself, and the field that I chose is so challenging in itself. The surprise is that I am seeing and experiencing things that I want to dive into and challenge. I think A.I. will change the way we live. It’s already doing that. And am I there with two feet on the ground, alive, at my age to challenge it? Even after forty-five or fifty years,” she concluded, “there is still nothing I want more than to give myself and my voice to a world that I feel has gone awry.”