Mirroring, 1975, 6:01 min, b&w, silent
Images from Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-1979), 5:50 min, color, sound.
Description from EAI:
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.”
MTV “Artbreak” (1987)
Hostage, 1994
six-channel color video with five stereo-channels, audio, interactive laser, custom-designed mounts, Plexiglas shields
Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry, 1979, 6:50 min, color, sound
Description from EAI:
Birnbaum manipulates off-air imagery from the TV game show Hollywood Squares in Kiss The Girls: Make Them Cry, a bold deconstruction of the gestures of sexual representation in pop cultural imagery and music. Minor celebrities (who Birnbaum terms “iconic women and receding men”) confined in a flashing tic-tac-toe board greet millions of TV viewers, animating themselves as they say “hello.” Birnbaum isolates and repeats these banal and at times bizarre gestures of male and female presentation — “repetitive baroque neck-snapping triple takes, guffaws, and paranoid eye darts” — wrenching them from their television context to expose stereotyped gestures of power and submission. Linking TV and Top 40, Birnbaum spells out the lyrics to disco songs (“Georgie Porgie puddin’ and pie/kissed the girls and made them cry”) with on-screen text, as the sound provides originally scored jazz interpolation and a harsh new wave coda. The result is a powerful, layered analysis of the meaning of the gestures of mass cultural idioms.
PM Magazine (1982)
Four-channel video (color, three channels of stereo sound; 6:30 min.), two chromogenic prints, Speed Rail® structural support system, aluminum trim, one wall painted Chroma Key Blue, and one wall painted red
PM Magazine is one of Birnbaum’s earliest multi-channel installations. Responding to the marginalization of video artworks in museums and institutions at the time, the artist claimed a space for video by painting two freestanding walls with colors significant to television production of the 1980s: Chroma Key Blue and red, which was considered too vibrant for the broadcast of a stable signal. Four monitors are framed by an industrial Speed Rail support structure similar to hardware used in television production and trade shows. Manipulating and re-editing sequences from the television program PM Magazineand a Wang Laboratories computer commercial, Birnbaum draws on strategies from feminism and institutional critique to alter the meaning and fundamental syntax of mass-media imagery. Set to a post-punk cover of The Doors’ “LA Woman,” PM Magazineundermines popular culture’s emphasis on consumption, leisure, and gender stereotypes.
Museum of Modern Art, Gallery label from Cut to Swipe, October 11, 2014–March 22, 2015.
Psalm 29(30) (2016), six-channel video and sound installation
The genesis of this new work dates back to 2014 when, following an extended period of hospitalization, the chanted Psalm 29(30) provided Birnbaum with the possibilities of healing and became a source of inspiration. This is a psalm of thanksgiving, to be sung in pious solemnity. It is believed it was written upon King David’s recovery from a dangerous fit of sickness, and therefore for Birnbaum the psalm also “addresses the contradiction between light and dark, life and death”.
Upon entering the ground floor of the gallery, visitors first encounter serene images of the foothills of the Italian Alps, which were videoed by the artist in 2011 during her Arts Residency at The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center at Lake Como. Visitors are then invited to enter a central chamber, which houses a video projection portraying aspects of the Syrian Civil War in 2014. These specially selected images from varying Internet sources are historical traces that are intended to be shown with a sensitivity not usually provided by the mass media.
“The whole installation is a meditation on the possibility of healing, an environment formulated so that within its central position one can confront images of war without the spectacle deployed by most mass media and the news industry.” Dara Birnbaum, 2016
Birnbaum’s concern regarding the spectacle of war recalls Susan Sontag’s questioning of war photography. “Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war?” contemplates Sontag. With Psalm 29(30), Birnbaum asks the question: “Can suffering be portrayed in such a way that reflection can take place, in place of manipulated fear, anguish, or anger?”
With Birnbaum’s input, Michael Saia edited the six-channels of video and acted as post-production collaborator. The two sound compositions, by Neil Benezra, are unique to this work. Psalm 29(30), as recited by monks of the Carthusian Order, is one primary source material for the harmonious composition playing outside the chamber. Inside the chamber, Benezra’s original composition is inspired by Syrian music. It also combines, amongst other sounds, the melody of church bells and environmental sounds.
A pioneering video, media, and installation artist, Birnbaum made her first video installation entitled “Attack piece” in 1975. She always resisted the idea of limiting video to being solely a projection in a darkened space. She is one of the first artists to have designed complex and innovative video installations, juxtaposing video imagery from various sources while integrating large-scale photographs with sculptural or architectural elements. She is also known for having used groundbreaking strategies when manipulating television footage. Over the past four decades Dara Birnbaum has developed a body of work that addresses both the ideological and the aesthetic characters of mass media imagery, and is today considered fundamental to the history of media art.