Dara Birnbaum, a pioneer of the feminist and video art movements who probed, mimicked, and remixed mass media, died today, May 2, at age 78. The news of her death was announced by Marian Goodman Gallery, which has represented the artist since 2001.
As a young artist in the 1970s, even as television was being consummately ignored in film and art circles, Birnbaum grasped its potential as a dominant force in American culture. Over a half-century career, she spliced, resequenced, and repeated excerpts from sources as diverse as game show quizzes, sports programming, soap operas, and YouTube videos to explore and manipulate how information is disseminated, transformed, and assimilated.
Birnbaum was born in New York City in 1946, where she lived and worked her entire life. She received her bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a bachelor’s in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a certificate in Video and Electronic Editing from the Video Study Center at the New School for Social Research. Early influences — including a chance encounter with works by Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci from outside a gallery window — and friendships with peers like conceptual artist Dan Graham and writer Alan Sondheim steered her toward her interest in feminist film and experimental media.
“Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman” (1978–79), perhaps Birnbaum’s best-known work, saw her appropriate footage of the eponymous superhero to interrogate depictions of gender in popular media, incorporating repetition of her metamorphosis from secretary to superhero to topple the idea of female identity as fixed and capture the emergence of a “new woman.” She continued her innovations in experimental media into her 60s and 70s. “Arabesque” (2011) plumbed the relationship between composers and musicians Robert and Clara Schumann, incorporating clips from their performances found on YouTube and archival film clips into a single-channel work for a book containing digital art.
Her work is held in the collections of museums across the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Smithsonian in Washington, DC; the National Portrait Gallery in London; and the Fondazione Prada in Milan. Recent surveys and major solo exhibitions have been held at Belvedere Palace, in Vienna, last year; the Prada Aoyama in Tokyo in 2023; the Miller Institute of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh in 2022, and various iterations of Documenta in Kassel, Germany.
Across her career, she received awards and fellowships from institutions such as the Guggenheim, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Academy of Arts and Letters, and became the first woman to receive the Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute in 1987.
But Birnbaum’s impact is perhaps best measured in her continuing influence on the careers of countless contemporary artists, writers, and scholars: 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 contemporary age. As Birnbaum herself put it in a 2019 interview with Frédéric Moffet recalling her burgeoning reputation, she might be remembered as “the one who talk[ed] back to the media.”