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Works by Dara Birnbaum
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Dara Birnbaum tackles issues of female representation in television. She’d probably be a hoot to watch The Bachelor with.
Dara Birnbaum is a New York-based artist. She originally studied architecture, but soon decided that painting was her real passion while attending SFAI. From there, she decided that it was film. She finally settled on television. I know we all have to lower our standards at some point, but Dara here took it a little far.
Birnbaum entered the video art and feminist art movements in the mid-to-late 1970’. Her video art generally makes use of footage of attractive women in game shows, nightly shows, and daytime series alike. She heavily edited these clips to analyze and highlight the way the “grammar” and genres of television create stereotypes—especially sexist ones.
Eventually, she found modest fame and sold out a little, making works for clients including MTV and the Rio Shopping/Entertainment Complex. We all have to make a living at some point.
Birnbaum is currently a professor at the School of Visual Arts. According to this guy I know who TA’d for her, she’s kind of a witch. She continues to make art, and will probably downgrade to Vines and cat videos within the next few years.
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Here is what Wikipedia says about Dara Birnbaum
Dara Birnbaum (born 1946) is an American video and installation artist. Birnbaum entered the nascent field of video art in the mid-to-late 1970s challenging the gendered biases of the period and television’s ever-growing presence within the American household. Her oeuvre primarily addresses ideological and aesthetic features of mass media through the intersection of video art and television. She uses video to reconstruct television imagery using as materials such archetypal formats as quizzes, soap operas, and sports programmes. Her techniques involve the repetition of images and interruption of flow with text and music. She is also well known for forming part of the feminist art movement that emerged within video art in the mid-1970s. Birnbaum lives and works in New York.
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