Dara Birnbaum

Dara Birnbaum is a contemporary artist who works with video technologies. Her works tend to incorporate themes of questioning societal norms, such as gender roles in the institution of popular television. She has background experience with architecture and painting which help her design pictorial representations through an innovative and narrative form. She also helped form part of the feminist art movement.

In her video work, “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman,” she uses many repetitive clips of imagery and creates a sense of tension and disassociation of time. The clips were extracted from a popular television series, “Wonder Woman,” and Birnbaum manipulates them in a manner to critique society’s delusional representation of women in the mass media. In the beginning of the video, Wonder Woman spins around out of control, while an explosion occurs with every rotation. It’s as if Birnbaum is trying to destroy the limiting mold that women are supposed to fit according to the media and society. Music played a significant role in this work, especially at the end of the video, when the highly sexualized Wonder Woman theme song can be heard and read with the use of scrolling text. I felt like the video, in its entirety, conveys how prominent the male gaze is in the media, even in a show with a supposedly “powerful” female figure.

Another Birnbaum work, “Damnation of Faust,” focuses primarily on gender roles. This work, however, is made with her own footage. She slows down clips, multiplies images in the same frame, and uses box inserts to serve as glimpses into alternate realities. The video was filmed in an inner city atmosphere and shows boys playing basketball, while young girls wearing makeup sit around in clusters talking and flipping their hair. The background sound in the film evokes a very uncomfortable feeling at times. One cannot define past and present, but everyone can relate to the subject at hand—the struggle with personal identify while growing up.

I felt that Birnbaum’s work is successful in evoking a feeling of uneasiness with the viewer. I think her works are meant to make you think critically about your position in society.

VIEW: "Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman"---> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2wi2ow6wAY