Dara Birnbaum is a groundbreaking figure in the emergence of media art. Among the earliest practitioners working in video, among the first women to adapt the medium, and the first to focus on TV specifically.
Over the course of her nearly 50-year career, she has created a prescient body of work that in many ways prefigures our current digital realities, where anyone on social media can now “talk back” to media in ways similar to what Birnbaum has done throughout her artistic practice. Her early works from the late 1970s took on American popular culture—Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman being among her most famous—finding homes in exhibitions at nontraditional venues such as hair salons and nightclubs in the East Village.
She and Zuckerman discuss joy, awakening to nature, Monet, how art saves lives, being a “video maker,” winning, and spiritual practice.