Dara Birnbaum

Dara Birnbaum
New York
USA

Born 1946 in New York. 1963-73, study of architecture and urban planning at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and of painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, USA. 1973-76, study of video technology at the New School for Social Research, New York. Dara Birnbaum has taught at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, at Princeton University, at the School of Visual Arts, New York and at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax. She has received numerous national prizes and research grants, including awards from Contemporary Art Television (CAT) and from WNET/WGBH-TV.

Dara Birnbaum has been making her video collages, for which she uses TV images, since 1972. She directs the viewer's attention along fresh paths with the media themes and images she selects, lending these new structure and so critically illuminating them by means of her collage technique. She not only examines the pictorial worlds, but also the production methods and the manipulative effect of the mass media. With regard to content, the focal point of her interest has always been the problems of women. In 1978, in her video WONDER WOMAN, for example, she used only material from the popular prime-time TV series. From 1982 onwards, she introduced her own recorded images in addition to the TV collages. She began her work with photo and video installations involving architectural space, which are centrally important to her artistic oeuvre. Dara Birnbaum examines the connections between people's perception of the often overwhelming external world of images and their internal processing of this world. In the trilogy DAMNATION OF FAUST (1983-87) a monologue of recollection is contrasted by observed sections of the everyday world. Using modern video technology, the reality of external perception is poetically concentrated, meaning that the everyday in the image receives a special character; new dimensions of reality become visible. (Video-Forum, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein 2001)

An architect and urban planner by training, Dara Birnbaum studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the San Francisco Art Institute. She began using video in 1978 while teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she worked with Dan Graham. Recognized as one of the first video artists to employ the appropriation of television images as a subversive strategy, Birnbaum describes her early video tapes as "attempts at slowing down 'technological speed' in order to arrest movements of TV-time for the viewer. For it is the speed at which issues are absorbed and consumed through the medium of video/television, without examination and self-questioning, that remains astonishing." Recontextualizing pop cultural icons (Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79) and TV genres (Kiss the Girls and Make them Cry, 1979) to reveal their subtexts, Birnbaum described her tapes as new "ready-mades" for the late twentieth century, works that "manipulate a medium which is itself highly manipulative." (Video Data Bank, Chicago)

1992:

Transgressions from "TRANS-VOICES" (production, realization)

1990:

Canon: Taking to the Streets, Part One: Princeton University - Take Back the Night (production, realization)

1987:

Artbreak, MTV Networks, Inc. (realization)
Damnation of Faust: Charming Landscape (camera, production, realization)

1985:

Damnation of Faust: Will-o'-the-Wisp (A Deceitful Goal) (camera, editing, production, realization)

1983:

Damnation of Faust: Evocation (camera, production, realization)

1982:

PM Magazine/Acid Rock (music, realization)
Fire! Hendrix (camera, realization)

1981:

New Music Shorts and Excerpts Branca No. 1 (realization)

1980:

Kojak/Wang (realization)
Pop-Pop Video: A. General Hospital/Olympic Women Speed Skate (realization)
General Hospital/Olympic Women Speed Skating (realization)
Pop-Pop Video: B. Kojak/Wang (realization)
Remy/Grand Central: Trains and Boats and Planes (realization)

1979:

Kiss The Girls: Make Them Cry (realization)
Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (realization)

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