MTV as Form: Dara Birnbaum and Corporate Patronage

A belief commonly held in Marxist cultural theory is that artworks, once entering into a corporate space, become de-radicalized and co-opted. By commissioning an artwork, the company in turn performs accumulation, acquiring cultural capital regardless of transgressive content. But might there be a third or liminal space outside of this binary? The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing offers a notion of pericapitalism, or sites of capitalist accumulation that are “simultaneously inside and outside capitalism.” An artist grappling with these notions and making work in this peripheral register is the pioneering video artist Dara Birnbaum, and the site was MTV (“Music Television”) in the 1980s–90s. She produced two works that were commissioned by the ascendant cable network, which, with the distance of thirty-plus years, demonstrate tactics that resist immediate co-optation. Birnbaum’s videos insert an affective friction at a moment when screen-based communication and art-washing by corporations began to take shape as common practice.