Dara Birnbaum on her life and art

Pioneering video artist Dara Birnbaum, who inspired generations of artists by taking mass media as her subject, died on May 2 at the age of seventy-eight. Birnbaum subverted the relationship between viewers and the television they consumed by editing and recontextualizing pirated footage; her best-known work, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978–79, features clips from the titular ’70s TV series starring Lynda Carter, chopped and screwed, looped and spliced, to interrogate the feminist ideal supposedly represented by the glamorous superhuman heroine. Technology/Transformation was featured on the cover of Artforum’s March 2009 issue, in which Birnbaum joined Cory Arcangel for a marathon conversation about the history, present, and future of video art.

“I didn’t want to translate popular imagery from television and film into painting and photography. I wanted to use video on video; I wanted to use television on television,” recalls Birnbaum. “There was no way to talk back to the media. That’s why I [pirated]. The stuff was coming one way at you, and there was no way to arrest it, stop the action, divert it, alter the vocabulary, or change the syntax. So I had to go in there pretty much illegally, take the footage from TV programs, and reassemble it. . . . The important thing for me was to use the most common vocabulary of the time, and the most common vocabulary was television.”