Dara Birnbaum

Dara Birnbaum is a pioneer in the exploration of the possibilities of video as a form of expressing contemporary culture, turning the vocabulary of the television medium into a critical discourse. Attack Piece is one of the artist’s first two-monitor installations, and one of her most outstanding works. It is a performative struggle or confrontation in which Birnbaum, with a 35mm camera, ‘defends’ her physical and psychological space from invasion by four young men ‘armed’ with a super-8 camera, among whom are the artists Dan Graham, Ian Murray and David Askevold. The two facing monitors reproduce the images: while the first shows the still shots taken by Birnbaum, the second presents the moving images recorded with the super-8 camera.