Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry, 1979

As televisions became increasingly common in American living rooms in the 1970s, Birnbaum was among the earliest artists to use television content as source material. Altering, glitching, cutting, and splicing it without seeking legal permission, she claimed she was manipulating “a medium which is itself highly manipulative.”

Here, Birnbaum isolates and repeats ad nauseum passages from the show Wonder Woman in which secretary Diana Prince transforms into a superhero. Highlighting the deceptive portrayal of women as either heroic or trivial, Birnbaum stated, “the in-between is the reality we need to live in.”