Dara Birnbaum | Rough Edits. Popular Image Video 1977-1980

Dara Birnbaum

Rough Edits. Popular Image Video 1977-1980

Halifax, Canada: Press of The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1987

130 pp., 26.5 x 19 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

After a two-year hiatus owing to limited funds, the Nova Scotia College of Art Press resumed publishing in 1978. President Garry Neill Kennedy invited Benjamin Buchloh to relocate from Dusseldorf and serve as editor. An admirer of the Nova Scotia Series (“I considered it to be one of the best edited and produced series in the field of contemporary art” he later wrote), he proposed the Nova Scotia Pamphlets as a companion project. 

His goal was to provide "artists who work outside traditional media an adequate form of publishing their work and to make it accessible when galleries and museums are reluctant to even consider the historical consequences that conceptual art and contemporary thinking in other fields have had on the definition of aesthetic practice in the beginning of the eighties.”

Martha Rosler’s 3 Works was published in 1980 and was followed by Gerhard Richter’s 128 Details from a Picture and Jenny Holzer’s Truisms and Essays. 

The fourth and final pamphlet was Rough Edits: Popular Image Video Works - 1977-1980. The booklet was based on a seminar Birnbaum gave when she taught at the school in the late seventies. Some biographies suggest that it was while teaching at NSCAD that she first began producing the edited video works that she became known for. 

This publication - one of the artist’s earliest - explores these early television appropriation works, with stills from Kiss the Girls: Make them Cry (1979) and the iconic Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-79). Birnbaum describes these works as 

Recognized as one of the first video artists to employ the appropriation of television images as a subversive strategy, Birnbaum recontextualizes pop cultural icons and TV genres ( to reveal their subtexts. Birnbaum describes her tapes as new “ready-mades for the late 20th Century” and as works that “manipulate a medium which is itself highly manipulative.”

The reader also features interviews with the artist and an essay by Norman Klein titled Audience Culture and the Video Screen.

Birnbaum died May 2nd of this year, at the age of 78.