a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Dara Birnbaum, 78, Dies; Video Was Her Medium and Her Message
In 1978, turning television footage into a work of art wasn't as easy as opening up your smartphone or computer. As the artist Dara Birnbaum told Frieze magazine in 2022, there was no home video recording equipment, and 'it was illegal to record any imagery from television, punishable by stringent mandates.'
But she felt it was important to pay attention to the medium that Americans were spending, on average, nearly a third of their lives consuming. So she found access to editing equipment and to original footage smuggled out of studios by friends, most famously from the hit show 'Wonder Woman.'
'Television was a one-way medium, its audience tending to become passive,' she later explained. 'I wanted to show the aggressive conditioning forced upon viewers by these programs.'
The six-minute piece that resulted, 'Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman,' begins with 11 straight explosions, followed by Lynda Carter spinning in circles under more explosions as she transforms into the Amazon superhero of the show's title.
It was a simple change, but a profound one. By stripping these effects from their ordinary fairy-tale context, Ms. Birnbaum made it easier to see the violence and sexual objectification they transmitted along with their nominal story. Perhaps more important, she also demonstrated — to a whole cohort of later artists, including Cory Arcangel and Martine Syms — that mass media was fair game as artistic material, and that its power could, if only temporarily or in principle, be turned against itself.
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