As a younger artist within the Nineteen Seventies, at the same time as tv was being consummately ignored in movie and artwork circles, Birnbaum grasped its potential as a dominant power in American tradition. Over a half-century profession, she spliced, resequenced, and repeated excerpts from sources as various as recreation present quizzes, sports activities programming, cleaning soap operas, and YouTube movies to discover and manipulate how info is disseminated, remodeled, and assimilated.
Birnbaum was born in New York Metropolis in 1946, the place she lived and labored her total life. She obtained her bachelor’s diploma in Structure from Carnegie Mellon College in Pittsburgh, a bachelor’s in Portray from the San Francisco Artwork Institute, and a certificates in Video and Digital Enhancing from the Video Examine Heart on the New College for Social Analysis. Early influences — together with an opportunity encounter with works by Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci from exterior a gallery window — and friendships with friends like conceptual artist Dan Graham and author Alan Sondheim steered her towards her curiosity in feminist movie and experimental media.
Nonetheless from Dara Birnbaum’s “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman” (1978–79) (picture courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery)
“Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman” (1978–79), maybe Birnbaum’s best-known work, noticed her applicable footage of the eponymous superhero to interrogate depictions of gender in well-liked media, incorporating repetition of her metamorphosis from secretary to superhero to topple the concept of feminine identification as fastened and seize the emergence of a “new woman.” She continued her improvements in experimental media into her 60s and 70s. “Arabesque” (2011) plumbed the connection between composers and musicians Robert and Clara Schumann, incorporating clips from their performances discovered on YouTube and archival movie clips right into a single-channel work for a e-book containing digital artwork.
Set up view of Dara Birnbaum, “Journey: Shadow of the American Dream” (2022) on the Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon College, 2022 (picture by Tom Little, courtesy Dara Birnbaum studio and Marian Goodman Gallery)
Her work is held within the collections of museums internationally, together with the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, MoMA PS1, the Whitney Museum of American Artwork, and the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York; the Smithsonian in Washington, DC; the Nationwide Portrait Gallery in London; and the Fondazione Prada in Milan. Latest surveys and main solo exhibitions have been held at Belvedere Palace, in Vienna, final 12 months; the Prada Aoyama in Tokyo in 2023; the Miller Institute of Modern Artwork in Pittsburgh in 2022, and numerous iterations of Documenta in Kassel, Germany.
Nonetheless from Dara Birnbaum, “Journey: Shadow of the American Dream” (2022) (courtesy Dara Birnbaum studio and Marian Goodman Gallery)
Throughout her profession, she obtained awards and fellowships from establishments such because the Guggenheim, Pollock-Krasner Basis, and the Academy of Arts and Letters, and have become the primary lady to obtain the Maya Deren Award from the American Movie Institute in 1987.
However Birnbaum’s affect is maybe finest measured in her persevering with affect on the careers of numerous up to date artists, writers, and students: Cory Arcangel and Martine Syms cite her as inspiration, and curators like David Breslin and Kelly Taxter credited her with creating work that defines the up to date age. As Birnbaum herself put it in a 2019 interview with Frédéric Moffet recalling her burgeoning fame, she is perhaps remembered as “the one who talk[ed] back to the media.”
