Pop Pop Video (1980)
Colour, sound. 9’
Pop Pop Video is a key work of mass media critique. In this two-part work, Birnbaum appropriates standard television genres the soap opera, the sports event, the action drama to deconstruct the meaning of television's codes and conventions. General Hospital/Olympic Women Speed Skating is a fragmented collage that cuts between two iconic television sources Olympic sports coverage and a classic American soap opera to analyze the syntax and gestures of television language in relation to female representations. Kojak/Wang is a pastiche of fast-paced, repeated images from the famous television crime drama Kojak and an advertisement for an early Wang computer. Birnbaum equates the violence of the crime drama shootout and the violence of corporate America.
