Courtesy Dara Birnbaum

Portrait of Dara Birnbaum

Courtesy Dara Birnbaum

Dara Birnbaum, "taegukki" (2000). Digital video on billboard, Seoul, Korea.

March 2009 Field Guide

Paris: The Jazz Century

Interview: Second Trienal Poli/Graficá de San Juan

New York, Paris and Stockholm: Survey of Surveys

London: Focus on Forsythe

Minneapolis: The Quick and the Dead

Washingon, DC: Guido van der Werve

North Adams, MA: These Days: Elegies for Modern Times

Nuremberg, Germany: Katinka Bock

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A survey opening this month at SMAK (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst) in Ghent, Belgium, will chronicle four decades of work by the New York-based artist Dara Birnbaum, a pioneer of media critique. Since the mid-’70s, Birnbaum has consistently mined the telecommunications industry to make videos that are at once feminist polemic, critical essay, and aesthetic exploration. Her seminal 1978 piece, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, is an example of virtuosic video editing, looping actress Linda Carter’s trademark spin so that she never completes the shift from svelte superhero to ordinary working woman, while simultaneously casting an analytical eye on television’s representation of a "super woman," red bustier, star-flecked hot pants, knee-high boots and all.

You’ve said that while other early new-media artists were interested in translating the medium, you wanted to "arrest the image without translating it ... put video onto video ... television on television." Where did that impulse come from?

It came from what I consider my basic "politics," to engage in an activist position. The translation of media-based imagery into more traditional art forms — painting and photography — for me aestheticized the image. It created "end products" for the art marketplace. When I started, in 1975, I felt that video was already bastardized — separated from the mainstream of art production. I was more interested in what became known as "talking back to the media." To do so you must speak the same language.

How do you view the advent of reality television, since your work often touches on the individual’s representation in media?

I do not believe that "reality TV" represents reality. Those who participate are used by the television industry as fodder. Those on TV do not really represents "themselves" — they are product, and our reality is replaced by theirs. We have hard " realities" to face in this country in the next years, while television has the need to keep its belly full and constantly deliver streams of imagery, whether that be informational or illusionistic programming.

Does the idea of the multiple factor into your show? How do your videos relate to the graphic works that you’re including?

The fact that video is, by its very nature, a multiple is an axiom. But each video is made to have its own voice. The graphic works, posters, and postcards, are also "multiples," especially due to their potential as "unlimited" editions. I am a popularist at heart. I need to feel that the work can get out into the public sphere.

How does your activist agenda manifest itself in recent works, for example taegukki, from 2000, and Tapestry for Donna: Elegy, from 2005?

Taegukki is based on the flag of South Korea. It was commissioned by the First Seoul Biennale and constructed using motion graphics: the trigrams of the flag spin to form hexagrams from the I Ching, all in regard to peace and unity. The end sequence shows the flags of North and South Korea side by side. The work was forcibly taken down from its sites on electronic billboards, when local businessmen protested. Tapestry: Elegy for Donna features images of a female DJ, Jasmine, which are amplified to reveal her seeming disinterest in her television role. Her imagery was woven onto an antique loom. Jasmine quit Radio Donna, the Belgian TV show on which she was a music presenter, just as the piece went on view. The audio composed for my work, a mash of electronic version of Bird on a Wire, became a more truthful rendition of her situation than I anticipated.

What do you think about the way in which television is now used in warfare and terrorism? Hostage, from 1994, obliquely addresses the first bombing of the World Trade Center. Taking distance from that event, I let Hostage display multiple aspects of the 1977 Hanns-Martin Schleyer kidnapping [by the Baader-Meinhof gang], including his forced TV-transmission, where he openly declares himself an "enemy of the state." Here TV immediately can be seen as a potent weapon.