Dara Birnbaum’s reinvention of video art was born of frustration. In 1977 the American artist was reading Screen magazine, then full of academic essays deconstructing the language of cinema.
While she was keen on applying psychoanalysis to understand moving image, and felt a strong kinship with the burgeoning feminist discourse, Birnbaum, who has died aged 78, became exasperated by the lack of interest in the predominant mass medium of the age.
“I’m reading these things that I really care about, but no one is talking about television. At the time they weren’t. And I just made that jump,” she recalled. Her first solo exhibition, she decided, had “to be something about television and television language”.
Television would become her enduring material, using pirated and appropriated footage in work that addressed mass culture, gender, body language and semiotics.
Her work was never dry, the humour and kitsch aesthetics of her most famous video, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79), typical in its seduction of the viewer. The first 20 seconds of the little under six-minute video features found footage of an explosion culled from the titular TV series, repeated several times so the screen remains just a ball of fire, until the character Diana Prince, played by Lynda Carter, emerges, again edited into short repeated cuts, to perform her transformative spin from secretarial into superhero role.
“The show made me very angry,” Birnbaum recalled. “To turn around two and a half times and, with the special effect, to become a super-power woman … [this] role is as much entrapment as, you know, being a secretary.”
The second half of the work is preoccupied with the remixed version of the Wonder Woman theme tune, played out in full over a blue screen and the lyrics rolling past.
Before the widespread advent of VCR, Birnbaum was forced to rely on friends smuggling out raw footage from local television stations. “It was like dealing drugs, you know, to take a tape out. It was illegal.”
In 1979 she made Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry, from a recording of the television gameshow Hollywood Squares, the introductory gurning smiles and folksy gestures of the celebrity contestants isolated and collaged; followed by the three-minute video Kojak/Wang (1980), using stolen clips from the television police procedural and an advert for Wang computers, intercutting them to equate criminal violence with corporate aggression.
Born in Queens, New York City, Dara was the daughter of Mary, a pathologist, and Philip Birnbaum, the architect behind many high-rise Manhattan residential blocks, including Trump Plaza. Her parents were socially conservative with fixed views on the appropriate career path for girls, but took her on trips to MoMA and introduced her to Alfred Hitchcock films from an early age.
She excelled at Forest Hills high school, skipping two grades and leaving aged 16. She enrolled in pre-med courses at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, but lasted just three weeks before swapping to architecture, against her parents’ wishes, the only woman on the course. “It was a tough road,” she recalled, but graduated in 1969.
After first working with the practice Emery Roth & Sons, including rendering designs for the World Trade Center, Birnbaum moved to San Francisco to join the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin’s firm. There she took courses at San Francisco Art Institute, hoping it would help in her architecture work, but when the college offered her a full-time scholarship in drawing and painting, she left her job to study full time, graduating with her second degree in 1973.
She travelled to Florence with the intention of further study at the Academy of Art, but left after it proved too academic for her taste. Instead, one night walking to the opera along Via Ricasoli, she passed an art gallery advertising shows for Vito Acconci and Meret Oppenheim. Centro Diffusione became her alternative school, meeting artists including Charlemagne Palestine, Joan Jonas and the artist and musician Dickie Landry, the latter encouraging her to return to New York.
Her earliest work, made in the melee of the downtown New York scene of happenings and performance art, featured the artist herself. In Mirroring (1975), made after reading the philosopher Jacques Lacan’s ideas of the mirror stage of child development, a close cropped portrait of Birnbaum is revealed to be a reflection as she moved across the camera frame; in the silent, black-and-white Control Piece (also 1975), Birnbaum films herself placing her hands on a blank projector screen and interrupting the projector light with her body.
Birnbaum had her first exhibition in 1977 at Artists Space, New York. It was also her first foray into using television as a calling card, the exhibition featuring pairs of printed still images extracted from primetime crime dramas, each over-the-shoulder shot depicting characters in dialogue with each other. Each image was coupled with texts containing imagined conversation. The work was a comment on perception and political ideology, the title Lesson Plans (To Keep the Revolution Alive) a reference to an apparent Maoist edict against such techniques in order to promote realism in film-making.
Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman followed, Birnbaum showing the work in film festivals, on public access cable TV and even, on her own initiative, in the window of a SoHo hairdresser’s.
In 1982 she was invited to take part in Documenta VII, the German quinquennial exhibition in Kassel regarded as one of the most prestigious stages for an artist. She exhibited PM Magazine/Acid Rock, a frenetic and psychedelic multichannel work layering a droning rock soundtrack with remixed footage from a nightly news show and, again, an advert for Wang computers.
In 1983 she had amassed enough of a reputation to merit her first retrospective, at the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal, followed by a retrospective screening of her work in 1984 at the ICA in London. She showed again at two subsequent editions of Documenta, in 1987 and 1992.
While she turned down requests to make music videos, in 1987 she produced a 30-second work for MTV in which she took a clip from the Koko the Clown cartoon. The character has a mechanical arm with which anything it draws is brought to life; in the original cartoon, the clown draws a woman who blows him a kiss. In Birnbaum’s redrawing, the woman instead exhales the MTV logo – which she shoots into the clown’s crotch. “I hated the use of women – the representation of them on MTV,” Birnbaum explained. This was her revenge.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s her installations grew in size and ambition, as museum exhibitions became more frequent, but she remained politically engaged throughout. The 1992 work Transmission Tower: Sentinel, made in the aftermath of the first Gulf war, featured a steel structure holding several monitors, displaying variously a recording of the beat poet Allen Ginsberg reading his anti-war poem Hum Bom!, to George HW Bush’s presidential inauguration speech.
Arabesque (2011), shown at South London Gallery, was a two-screen work featuring two compositions – one composed by Robert Schumann for his wife Clara; the other composed by Clara Schumann for her husband Robert – which returned to Birnbaum’s themes of gender and representation.
She remained influential and relevant, with her work included in the New York Times’s 2019 list of the “25 Works of Art That Define the Contemporary Age”. In a 2022 interview with Frieze magazine, Birnbaum said: “We’re in an era where the image is no longer grounded in a certain way. Either with or without our permission, it slips and slides … into other means or methods … It’s a profound shift that begs the question: can independent voices still exist with purpose today?”
She is survived by her brother, Robert.
• Dara Birnbaum, artist, born 29 October 1946; died 2 May 2025
