DARA BIRNBAUM

Transmission Tower: Sentinel (1992), first commissioned by documenta IX, and conceived in the immediateaftermath of the first Gulf War, uses the armature of telecommunication (the Rohn transmission tower) andjuxtaposes three forms of political speech. Deploying two sections of a Rohn tower as the floor-to-ceilingscaffold for eight video monitors, through which images and sound juxtapose and rub against each other, theinstallation lays bare the deep imbrication of media and the military, entertainment and politics, visibility andthe possibilities of protest.

The Rohn small television tower, invented in Peoria, Illinois in 1948, became the keystone of broadcastinginfrastructure across the United States and a ubiquitous presence in military telecommunications worldwide.Like the steel lines forming the tower, the formulated video wall operates via verticals. Falling from one screento the next is Birnbaum’s recording of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg reading his anti-war poem Hum Bom! atthe 1988 National Student Convention. Simultaneously, her footage of other scenes of student participantsfrom this convention rise up the tower. The passion, idiosyncrasy, and relative chaos of these representationsare in stark contrast to the tightly polished, controlled messaging of other video footage, in which PresidentGeorge H. W. Bush delivers his Thousand Points of Light speech at the Republican National Convention ofthe same year. A green wave pattern visually represents the measured rise and fall of his voice as the videodrips downward from screen to screen. With thanks to Ania Szremski. Text excerpted from Dara Birnbaum:Reaction, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, June 25 – November 27, 2022

Antenna/Fist’ __(1992), is a series of seventeen prints which appropriate imagery from street posters made in thefervency of May 1968 in France, when student revolution planted the seeds for a state-wide general strike.Collectively produced and widely dispersed, the street displayed posters were created by a collective of artistsbased at the occupied École des Beaux-Arts. With their iconography – the raised fist of the revolutionary, theblocky silhouette of a spiked antenna – they are an expression of the counterculture of the period, and carrythe ferment of idealism, rebellion, and rejection of the status quo that permeated French society and markedthe second half of the 20th century.

These messages of protest are juxtaposted with the single-channel video Canon: Taking to the Streets, (1990).Composed of archival footage of the 1987 Take Back the Night demonstration at Princeton University, the workabstractly depicts the march through the campus to sites where acts of sexual violence occurred. Shot bystudents with a low-grade VHS camera, the work simultaneously portrays the highly personal and emotiveaccounts of assault with an encounter with males from fraternity-type houses jeering at the demonstrators.

The pathos of popular imagery is crystallized in Quiet Disaster (1999), a trio of circular Duratrans prints onPlexiglas panels. Birnbaum utilised three specifically cropped and enlarged anime drawings portraying thereactions of characters in danger that emphasise a look of fear. To create these works, Birnbaum examinedelemental disasters portrayed through comic and anime from different countries and cultures, showcasingthis universal gesture within individual expression.

Dara Birnbaum was born in New York City, in 1946, where she continues to live and work. She received aBachelor of Architecture degree from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, a B.F.A. in Painting from theSan Francisco Art Institute, and a Certificate in Video and Electronic Editing at the Video Study Center at theNew School for Social Research, New York. Birnbaum’s work has been widely exhibited, at venues including:Tai Kwun, Hong Kong (2023), the Fondazione Prada Osservatorio, Milan (2023); Prada Aoyama, Tokyo(2023); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023; also 2008), MoMA PS1, New York (2019); National PortraitGallery, London (2018); Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio (2018), among many others.

Major retrospectives and surveys of her work have been presented at the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York (2022); Miller Institute of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh (2022); Museu de ArteContemporånea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2010) and S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst,Gent, Belgium (2009). Her work was exhibited in Documenta 7, 8, and 9.

Birnbaum has been the recipient of various distinguished awards, such as: John Simon GuggenheimMemorial Foundation Fellowship (2021); The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts Residency (2011);the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2011); and the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship (2010). Sheis the first woman in video to receive the prestigious Maya Deren Award by the American Film Institute, in1987. In February 2017, Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art created The Birnbaum Award in theartist’s honour.