Artbreak, MTV Networks, Inc.

Dara Birnbaum’s thirty-second piece produced for MTV’s "Artbreak" series in 1987 looks at the representation of women by focusing on the history of film animation. Birnbaum adapts a cartoon from the "Koko the Clown" series by the animation pioneer Max Fleischer. The piece begins with a shot of Fleischer as he draws Koko. A mechanical pen then draws a picture of a woman for Koko, and she blows a heart towards him. The heart transforms into the MTV logo and pushes Koko out of the frame. After a rapid succession of drawings of women from different epochs, cartoon bubbles depicting images of women from MTV videos arise from a pool of ink. Finally we see an animator at work, and on her “video palette” we can see Max Fleischer. The piece reverses the traditional gender roles of producer and product found in commercial imagery.