Gunshots scream and scatter through the gallery, politicians bellow and protesters chant as you stand in the shadow of a steel transmission tower. There’s war in Dara Birnbaum’s show at the Marian Goodman Gallery, but it’s not a physical one: this is a war of information. The pioneering American video artist steals and manipulates images of conflict to create swirling, contrasting narratives that expose the cracks and chasms in the information we’re fed.
One piece is spread across multiple small screens, showing images from various sources of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest. To make anything out you have to get so close to one screen that you obscure the others. Each narrative cancels the next out.
Another piece, made out of screens on a looming transmission tower, sets the poet Allen Ginsberg against George Bush Snr. One rails against war, the other advocates for it, and it all happens at once. In another, Birnbaum covers images of the kidnapping of Hanns Martin Schleyer in 1977 by the Red Army Faction with shooting targets. As you approach, you realise that you are in the sights now, you’re the target.
Throughout this neat mini retrospective, the brutal, machine gun ratatat scream of Birnbaum’s message hits you over and over again. We are the targets of missiles of information, of countless ricocheting bullets of propaganda. Dodge one and you’ll just get hit by another.
The images here are from long lost conflicts, but Birnbaum’s work still feels horrifyingly relevant. We face a tide of fake news, Fox ire, BBC bias, Ofcom whinges etc etc etc. We risk drowning in it all, and the only way to stay afloat is to be aware. That’s what Birnbaum is asking you to do: think.
