Dara Birnbaum: An Interview

An architect and urban planner by training, Dara Birnbaum began using video in 1978 while teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where she worked with Dan Graham. Recognized as one of the first video artists to employ the appropriation of television images as a subversive strategy, Birnbaum recontextualizes pop cultural icons (Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79) and TV genres (Kiss the Girls: Make them Cry, 1979) to reveal their subtexts. Birnbaum describes her tapes as new “ready-mades” for the late 20th Century—works that “manipulate a medium which is itself highly manipulative.”

In this interview with Frédéric Moffet, Birnbaum talks about her entry into making video art, appropriation in art and her real feelings about Wonder Woman as an icon, and women in the media art field. She also discusses the relationship between her installation art and her single-channel works and the presence of music in her works.