Dara Birnbaum

Dara Birnbaum is an American video artist who is perhaps most famous for her provocative and influential contributions to the contemporary discourse on art and popular culture. Through video works and multi media installations, Birnbaum subverts, critiques and deconstructs hegemony of mass media images and gestures to confront the mythologies of culture and history. If we define appropriation as an act that takes possession of another’s imagery or idea, often without permission, then Dara Birnbaum fits the bill.

[Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79, video, Electronic Arts Intermix, NY.]
In her video Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, Dara Birnbaum created one of the first examples of appropriation imagery from mainstream television, something that is now quite common. Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, features, as one might expect, Wonder Woman, the main character of the prime-time television programm of the same name which was based on an action-adventure comic book. Using actual sceans from the series, Birnbaum “plung[es] the viewer headlong into the ver experience of TV- unveiling TV’s steriotypical gestures of power and submission, of male and female egos.” – http://www.eai.org/eai/artist.jsp?artistID=430

Birnbaum isolates and repeats the moments of the ‘real’ womans transformation into superhero. In doing so, Birnabaum is subverting its meaning within the television context. She is also appropriating televison filming conventions to deconstruct the idiomatic meaning of televisions structural codes, she uses these to anayze the syntax and gestures of what Birnbaum calls “TV treatmeant”.
On Birnbaum’s “TV treatmeant” in, General Hospital/Olympic Women Speed Skating, 1980, 6 min, colour: “in this case, the cross-cut and the reverse shot. The “cross-over” in an Olympic women’s speed skating race is juxtaposed with daytime drama General Hospital’s “whites” in reverse angle shots. A couple tries to reach an understanding. Skaters continuously return to the starting line. Frustration and exertion combine with originally scored soundtracks of disco, rock and jazz. The female soap opera character’s emotional stress, her gestures and rhetoric of paranoia and self-doubt are countered with the pure physical performance of the female sports figures.” -http://www.eai.org/eai/tape.jsp?itemID=2713

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