Dara Birnbaum’s reinvention of video art was born of frustration. In 1977 the American artist was reading Screen magazine, then full of academic essays deconstructing the language of cinema.
While she was keen on applying psychoanalysis to understand moving image, and felt a strong kinship with the burgeoning feminist discourse, Birnbaum, who has died aged 78, became exasperated by the lack of interest in the predominant mass medium of the age.
