The Modern Art Notes Podcast · Tyler Green

Holiday clips: Dara Birnbaum

January 2, 2026·55 min·5 clips

Dara Birnbaum reveals how her 1980 video work exposed the formulaic nature of local TV news through three concurrent realities.

The occasion is a holiday clips program with a memorial weight. Tyler Green opens a New Year's weekend episode on Dara Birnbaum, noting her death at 78 and Karen Archie's view of her place in feminist video art. The setting stays specific. The 2017 conversation connects to the J. Paul Getty Museum exhibition Breaking News Turning the Lens on Mass Media, which included a local TV news analysis Birnbaum made with Dan Graham. Green places her work beside mass media: entertainment, journalism, retrospectives in Ghent, Porto, and Vienna, and pieces available through the show's page. Then the interview gets closer to how she thinks. Birnbaum describes video less as camera work than as a mental act, arranging pieces until structure starts to show. Her comparison is chess. That makes the medium feel like timing, sequence, pressure, and placement, not simple documentation. Green tests a familiar art history claim: women moved into new media in the 1970s because it carried fewer inherited male structures. Birnbaum gives the idea some room. She acknowledges openings for women in early video culture and names Raindance Corporation, Radical Software, Beryl Coral, and Ira Schneider with care. But she does not let the story settle there. New media as a natural home for women is too neat for her account of how an artist finds a voice. Her own path matters. Birnbaum came from architecture, entered very young, and was the only woman to graduate in her class. The point shifts from access to formation. What she learned was not just that a field was available. She had to build a strong voice from herself. The closing note is somber. A later passage treats a work as prayer rather than humor, with prayer reaching outward through devastation. Green leaves the thought alone. The episode returns to Birnbaum's terms: video as strategy, feminism as lived pressure, and art as one possible way through damage.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Modern Art Notes Podcast