In the Studio: Dara Birnbaum

Dara Birnbaum has been creating video installations since the 1970s. The videos are
gathered from free-use sources, edited, and then displayed on multiple screens arranged in a
room to give maximum effect. Her criticism of the double standard for women being portrayed
in tv as dramatic and helpless versus their professionalism and admirable skills in olympic sport
in real life is expressed in her video Pop-Pop Video: General Hospital/Olympic Women Speed
Skating (1980). While her focus was once on historical television broadcasts, the primary source
of information during the 1970s, she has remained adaptable to the changes in how information
is communicated. As the internet has become the primary venue for our consumption of news
and information, so too has her focus changed to fit modern trends. In 2011 she assembled
videos she found on YouTube of female musicians playing Roman-era piano piece into her
installation titled Arabesque, gaining the express permission of the performers before
appropriating their work. She uses her background in architectural design to map out how her
installations will be laid out on the showroom floor. The final segment of the article is an
interview of Birnbaums artistic process and growth. She feels that the issues today are so loud
and pressing, war has become a spectacle in its presentation of destruction and intense violence.
She hopes to create a space for more peaceful reflection that allows for empathy to develop.
Birnbaums use of juxtaposing pieces of mass market media to provide the opposite
message originally intended in them that then speaks to a larger truth is an effective form of
subversion. To keep up with current events gives her pieces relevance, and her adherence to
analog technology a signature style.

Cornell, L. (2016, May). In the studio: dara birnbaum. Art in America, May 2016, 136-143.