Dara Birnbaum, a pioneering video artist whose work deconstructed television and mass media, died on May 2nd at 78. Marian Goodman Gallery, which has represented her since 2001, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.
Birnbaum rose to prominence in the 1970s, at a time when television was largely dismissed by the art world. She spliced and manipulated footage from game shows, sports broadcasts, soap operas, and internet videos to examine the construction and transmission of information. Her work scrutinized the visual codes of mass communication and their effect on identity, politics, and power.
Born in 1946 in Queens, New York, Birnbaum studied architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, graduating in 1969. She moved to San Francisco shortly after and worked at major landscape architecture firm Lawrence Halprin & Associates. She later shifted toward art and video, using the medium of television to address broader social and political themes.
Perhaps her best-known work is Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978). This video work isolates and repeats moments from the titular superhero television series starring Lynda Carter. Birnbaum spliced together scenes where Wonder Woman transforms, combining them with explosions and a disco soundtrack to question the feminist image presented by the show.
In the 1980s, Birnbaum released the three-part series, the “Damnation of Faust,” which reimagines the Faust myth as a meditation on the self and society. By 1985, she was tapped to participate in the Whitney Biennial. She became the first woman to be awarded the Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute in 1987.
Birnbaum’s work in the 1990s and through the aughts continued to criticize global politics. For instance, Transmission Tower: Sentinel (1992), commissioned for Documenta IX, features eight stacked televisions each playing different styles of political speech following the Gulf War. Later in her life, her work Journey: Shadow of the American Dream (2022) mused on her past, incorporating 16mm family footage shot by her father.
Her most recent exhibition, “Four Works: Accountability,” was mounted by Marian Goodman Gallery in 2024. The show revisited works from the 1990s concerned with the media’s role in shaping public opinion—a theme that’s increasingly pertinent in today’s political landscape. Other major solo exhibitions and surveys have been presented by The Belvedere in Vienna in 2024, Tokyo’s Prada Aoyama in 2023, and the Miller Institute of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh in 2022.
