Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry
<p>Dara Birnbaum emerged as a pioneer of video art in the mid-1970s, when many women artists challenged the gender biases of mass media and popular culture. Early on she disrupted and deconstructed the language of television, in order to reveal embedded stereotypes and expectations. Indeed, Birnbaum’s works are among the most influential and innovative contributions to the contemporary discourse on art and television.<p> <p><em>Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry</em> comprises two video monitors and four speakers presented atop their shipping crates, installed like technical “gear” rather than on conventional pedestals. The screens alternate between off-air imagery from the TV game show Hollywood Squares and a chroma-key blue screen displaying the lyrics of two hit disco songs, juxtaposed with independent covers of the original soundtracks. In this raucous yet meticulously composed work, Birnbaum underlines the ways in which gender is represented through familiar structures of entertainment.<p>
Catalogue
- Year
- 1979
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Artist
- Dara Birnbaum
Artist
Installation
Dara Birnbaum is an American video artist whose work was central to the critical practice of appropriating broadcast television imagery in the late 1970s and 1980s. She is best known for works that fragment and loop found footage from commercial television to expose the ideological structures embedded in mass media. Her practice has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Full artist profile →Record
Verified by WattsOS- Artist
- Dara Birnbaum
- Year
- 1979
- Watts ID
- WW-1979-115203
Source
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Source
- aic
- Reference
- View at source
- Status
- verified