Affiliated with the 1980s Pictures Generation artists in New York, Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) gained a reputation for her piercing observations on the effects of mass media within the increasingly exploitative late-capitalist society she found herself in. Galvanised by philosophers like Roland Barthes who grappled with fundamental notions of authenticity, originality and individuality, Pictures artists sought out appropriation techniques to uncover the contrived basis of images and encourage a more incisive viewing culture. Where Pictures artists worked predominantly through the medium of photography, it was Bender’s trailblazing use of film and television technology that so firmly distinguished her work.
So why is Gretchen Bender a name that largely eludes our popular consciousness, while those of her contemporaries like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger remain immediately recognisable?
The answer lies in the essence of her work. Bender understood America in the 1980s as a “culture saturated by corporate self-representation”, whereby the perpetual deluge of images in everyday life inhibited the public from grasping and discerning their own reality. Her aim as an artist was to disrupt the pervasiveness of mass media by recontextualising and redefining the very way in which we consumed images. Hence, the inception of Bender’s ‘electronic theater’ installations - intensely sensorial amalgamations of video, sculpture, sound and performance that highlighted the subliminal effects of then-prolific technology like television and thereby warned about their conduciveness towards corporate manipulation and control. These installations, as cutting-edge as they were, also marked her for commercial obscurity. Their sheer ambition and physicality moved so far beyond the conditions of gallery and institutional spaces that she was left with no representation by the 1990s.
The other problem Bender faced with making art so reliant on mediums and messages of the time was that they always sat precariously on the precipice of irrelevance. She intuited that: “style gets absorbed really fast by the culture…you have to make some kind of break or glitch in the media somewhere else…and shove your content into it there. It’s constantly having to accept the fact that your work will lose its strength.”. Indeed, for all that Bender foretold, the extent to which technology has developed today has likely far exceeded both her imagination and ours. Her concerns specific to television may seem dated, but she would be wrong in thinking that this would cause her work to ‘lose its strength’. Even as our technology changes, the same convoluted ethical webs necessarily subsist. If anything, the intellectual curiosity revealed in Bender’s works can help us to navigate these webs both now and in the future. Where we typically value artworks for their permanence, eternally framed and fossilised, Bender shows us that there is much to gain from heeding the present. She shoved her content into the culture, not because she thought there was money or a name to be made but simply because she believed it was important. Such relentless artistic integrity is what we remember Gretchen Bender for.
Here, we revisit some of Bender’s key installation works and consider what fresh insight they might offer about our continuous barrage towards new forms of media.
Bender’s earliest multichannel video installations Wild Dead and Dumping Core (1984) formed the blueprint for much of her work to come. In Wild Dead, discordant frames salvaged from pop culture, advertisements and corporate logos are looped endlessly across four television screens. One of the screens, flipped on its side, invokes a particularly jarring viewing experience. Staring at these screens, we seem to plummet into total oblivion, unable to distill a single intelligible image yet also unable to tear ourselves away from the hypnotic blitz of visual stimuli. This phenomenon is expanded upon in Dumping Core, in which found images play in random combinations across 13 synchronised television screens. The title of this work, derived from the technological term ‘core dump’, refers to the recording of a computer’s memory captured just before it crashes. For Bender, this aptly translated to the mimicry of mass media. At first instance, the act of splitting our attention across the various screens seems thrilling, but eventually we find ourselves becoming numb, worn out and indifferent to the images. Through Bender’s frenetic editing and thumping synth soundtracks, ordinary mechanisms of filmic realism and continuity are hurtled to their limit, leaving them no other fate but violent breakdown. In Bender’s words, “I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there.”.
In what is now widely considered to be Bender’s masterpiece, Total Recall (1987) demonstrates the detrimental effects of such a breakdown when applied on a larger scale. Set up across 24 television screens, the projections consist of dizzyingly spliced clips from wars, Hollywood films and even generic family Christmases. The highly specific narratives indicated here are short-circuited, each condemned to fold back upon the other in a whirl of meaninglessness. Total Recall represents Bender’s blatant distrust in television as an aggressive, inexorable fixture of society- less a democratising force of information, more a gateway to states of heightened chaos and disorder. Television, in this sense, acted as a virtual surrogate for lived human experience; by synthesising mass media’s own mechanisms of seduction into her work, Bender not only emphasises the fetishistic nature of such viewership, but also forces us to finally understand what it means to be active participants rather than passive consumers in a late-capitalist society.
It is this dichotomy that Bender examines with staggering potency in her TV Text Image (1986-89) and Aggressive Witness – Active Participant (1990) works. Lined up on the walls like paintings, these works involved several muted television screens, each tuned to a mixture of live news broadcasts, teleshopping and mindless sitcoms. On the glass of each screen were stenciled words and phrases like ‘PEOPLE WITH AIDS’, ‘NO CRITICISM’ and ‘LESBIAN AND GAY RIGHTS’- their imposing, all-caps seriousness overlaying round the clock scenes of prosaic programming. In turn, creating a gaping chasm between issues of colossal importance and the indiscriminate labels they were simultaneously reduced to. This was Bender’s way of alerting us to the falsity that was the so-called expansion of consumer choice and power vis-à-vis the advent of television. These works offer what are perhaps Bender’s most thought-provoking analysis of the malleability and vulnerability of the human mind at the merciless hands of corporate-driven media. Stripped of our basic empathy and political agency, we confront the sinister truth of how we are led to act in the most irrational of ways- to buy, buy and buy more things, to start senseless wars, and worst of all to dehumanise ourselves and others.
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Both gripping and critically stimulating, it is no exaggeration to say that Bender paved the way for many of today’s most significant immersive installation artists. Bender once described the media as a “cannibalistic river…a flow or current that absorbs everything.”, but the reinvigoration of her works over the past decade suggests otherwise. By virtue of the inherent circularity of life and art, we are now granted the privilege of encountering her work in a new stream of consciousness. Especially in this age of fake news, ‘sponcon’ and doom-scrolling, there is much we can learn from Bender’s resistance against the powers that be and their insidious capacity for sowing disinformation and discontent.
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Gretchen Bender: Image World is on view at Sprüth Magers until 25th March 2023. The show includes several of her TV Text Image installations displayed across two floors of the gallery, along with unseen archival material.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Affiliated with the 1980s Pictures Generation artists in New York, Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) gained a reputation for her piercing observations on the effects of mass media within the increasingly exploitative late-capitalist society she found herself in. Galvanised by philosophers like Roland Barthes who grappled with fundamental notions of authenticity, originality and individuality, Pictures artists sought out appropriation techniques to uncover the contrived basis of images and encourage a more incisive viewing culture. Where Pictures artists worked predominantly through the medium of photography, it was Bender’s trailblazing use of film and television technology that so firmly distinguished her work.
So why is Gretchen Bender a name that largely eludes our popular consciousness, while those of her contemporaries like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger remain immediately recognisable?
The answer lies in the essence of her work. Bender understood America in the 1980s as a “culture saturated by corporate self-representation”, whereby the perpetual deluge of images in everyday life inhibited the public from grasping and discerning their own reality. Her aim as an artist was to disrupt the pervasiveness of mass media by recontextualising and redefining the very way in which we consumed images. Hence, the inception of Bender’s ‘electronic theater’ installations - intensely sensorial amalgamations of video, sculpture, sound and performance that highlighted the subliminal effects of then-prolific technology like television and thereby warned about their conduciveness towards corporate manipulation and control. These installations, as cutting-edge as they were, also marked her for commercial obscurity. Their sheer ambition and physicality moved so far beyond the conditions of gallery and institutional spaces that she was left with no representation by the 1990s.
The other problem Bender faced with making art so reliant on mediums and messages of the time was that they always sat precariously on the precipice of irrelevance. She intuited that: “style gets absorbed really fast by the culture…you have to make some kind of break or glitch in the media somewhere else…and shove your content into it there. It’s constantly having to accept the fact that your work will lose its strength.”. Indeed, for all that Bender foretold, the extent to which technology has developed today has likely far exceeded both her imagination and ours. Her concerns specific to television may seem dated, but she would be wrong in thinking that this would cause her work to ‘lose its strength’. Even as our technology changes, the same convoluted ethical webs necessarily subsist. If anything, the intellectual curiosity revealed in Bender’s works can help us to navigate these webs both now and in the future. Where we typically value artworks for their permanence, eternally framed and fossilised, Bender shows us that there is much to gain from heeding the present. She shoved her content into the culture, not because she thought there was money or a name to be made but simply because she believed it was important. Such relentless artistic integrity is what we remember Gretchen Bender for.
Here, we revisit some of Bender’s key installation works and consider what fresh insight they might offer about our continuous barrage towards new forms of media.
Bender’s earliest multichannel video installations Wild Dead and Dumping Core (1984) formed the blueprint for much of her work to come. In Wild Dead, discordant frames salvaged from pop culture, advertisements and corporate logos are looped endlessly across four television screens. One of the screens, flipped on its side, invokes a particularly jarring viewing experience. Staring at these screens, we seem to plummet into total oblivion, unable to distill a single intelligible image yet also unable to tear ourselves away from the hypnotic blitz of visual stimuli. This phenomenon is expanded upon in Dumping Core, in which found images play in random combinations across 13 synchronised television screens. The title of this work, derived from the technological term ‘core dump’, refers to the recording of a computer’s memory captured just before it crashes. For Bender, this aptly translated to the mimicry of mass media. At first instance, the act of splitting our attention across the various screens seems thrilling, but eventually we find ourselves becoming numb, worn out and indifferent to the images. Through Bender’s frenetic editing and thumping synth soundtracks, ordinary mechanisms of filmic realism and continuity are hurtled to their limit, leaving them no other fate but violent breakdown. In Bender’s words, “I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there.”.
In what is now widely considered to be Bender’s masterpiece, Total Recall (1987) demonstrates the detrimental effects of such a breakdown when applied on a larger scale. Set up across 24 television screens, the projections consist of dizzyingly spliced clips from wars, Hollywood films and even generic family Christmases. The highly specific narratives indicated here are short-circuited, each condemned to fold back upon the other in a whirl of meaninglessness. Total Recall represents Bender’s blatant distrust in television as an aggressive, inexorable fixture of society- less a democratising force of information, more a gateway to states of heightened chaos and disorder. Television, in this sense, acted as a virtual surrogate for lived human experience; by synthesising mass media’s own mechanisms of seduction into her work, Bender not only emphasises the fetishistic nature of such viewership, but also forces us to finally understand what it means to be active participants rather than passive consumers in a late-capitalist society.
It is this dichotomy that Bender examines with staggering potency in her TV Text Image (1986-89) and Aggressive Witness – Active Participant (1990) works. Lined up on the walls like paintings, these works involved several muted television screens, each tuned to a mixture of live news broadcasts, teleshopping and mindless sitcoms. On the glass of each screen were stenciled words and phrases like ‘PEOPLE WITH AIDS’, ‘NO CRITICISM’ and ‘LESBIAN AND GAY RIGHTS’- their imposing, all-caps seriousness overlaying round the clock scenes of prosaic programming. In turn, creating a gaping chasm between issues of colossal importance and the indiscriminate labels they were simultaneously reduced to. This was Bender’s way of alerting us to the falsity that was the so-called expansion of consumer choice and power vis-à-vis the advent of television. These works offer what are perhaps Bender’s most thought-provoking analysis of the malleability and vulnerability of the human mind at the merciless hands of corporate-driven media. Stripped of our basic empathy and political agency, we confront the sinister truth of how we are led to act in the most irrational of ways- to buy, buy and buy more things, to start senseless wars, and worst of all to dehumanise ourselves and others.
Both gripping and critically stimulating, it is no exaggeration to say that Bender paved the way for many of today’s most significant immersive installation artists. Bender once described the media as a “cannibalistic river…a flow or current that absorbs everything.”, but the reinvigoration of her works over the past decade suggests otherwise. By virtue of the inherent circularity of life and art, we are now granted the privilege of encountering her work in a new stream of consciousness. Especially in this age of fake news, ‘sponcon’ and doom-scrolling, there is much we can learn from Bender’s resistance against the powers that be and their insidious capacity for sowing disinformation and discontent.
Gretchen Bender: Image World is on view at Sprüth Magers until 25th March 2023. The show includes several of her TV Text Image installations displayed across two floors of the gallery, along with unseen archival material.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Affiliated with the 1980s Pictures Generation artists in New York, Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) gained a reputation for her piercing observations on the effects of mass media within the increasingly exploitative late-capitalist society she found herself in. Galvanised by philosophers like Roland Barthes who grappled with fundamental notions of authenticity, originality and individuality, Pictures artists sought out appropriation techniques to uncover the contrived basis of images and encourage a more incisive viewing culture. Where Pictures artists worked predominantly through the medium of photography, it was Bender’s trailblazing use of film and television technology that so firmly distinguished her work.
So why is Gretchen Bender a name that largely eludes our popular consciousness, while those of her contemporaries like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger remain immediately recognisable?
The answer lies in the essence of her work. Bender understood America in the 1980s as a “culture saturated by corporate self-representation”, whereby the perpetual deluge of images in everyday life inhibited the public from grasping and discerning their own reality. Her aim as an artist was to disrupt the pervasiveness of mass media by recontextualising and redefining the very way in which we consumed images. Hence, the inception of Bender’s ‘electronic theater’ installations - intensely sensorial amalgamations of video, sculpture, sound and performance that highlighted the subliminal effects of then-prolific technology like television and thereby warned about their conduciveness towards corporate manipulation and control. These installations, as cutting-edge as they were, also marked her for commercial obscurity. Their sheer ambition and physicality moved so far beyond the conditions of gallery and institutional spaces that she was left with no representation by the 1990s.
The other problem Bender faced with making art so reliant on mediums and messages of the time was that they always sat precariously on the precipice of irrelevance. She intuited that: “style gets absorbed really fast by the culture…you have to make some kind of break or glitch in the media somewhere else…and shove your content into it there. It’s constantly having to accept the fact that your work will lose its strength.”. Indeed, for all that Bender foretold, the extent to which technology has developed today has likely far exceeded both her imagination and ours. Her concerns specific to television may seem dated, but she would be wrong in thinking that this would cause her work to ‘lose its strength’. Even as our technology changes, the same convoluted ethical webs necessarily subsist. If anything, the intellectual curiosity revealed in Bender’s works can help us to navigate these webs both now and in the future. Where we typically value artworks for their permanence, eternally framed and fossilised, Bender shows us that there is much to gain from heeding the present. She shoved her content into the culture, not because she thought there was money or a name to be made but simply because she believed it was important. Such relentless artistic integrity is what we remember Gretchen Bender for.
Here, we revisit some of Bender’s key installation works and consider what fresh insight they might offer about our continuous barrage towards new forms of media.
Bender’s earliest multichannel video installations Wild Dead and Dumping Core (1984) formed the blueprint for much of her work to come. In Wild Dead, discordant frames salvaged from pop culture, advertisements and corporate logos are looped endlessly across four television screens. One of the screens, flipped on its side, invokes a particularly jarring viewing experience. Staring at these screens, we seem to plummet into total oblivion, unable to distill a single intelligible image yet also unable to tear ourselves away from the hypnotic blitz of visual stimuli. This phenomenon is expanded upon in Dumping Core, in which found images play in random combinations across 13 synchronised television screens. The title of this work, derived from the technological term ‘core dump’, refers to the recording of a computer’s memory captured just before it crashes. For Bender, this aptly translated to the mimicry of mass media. At first instance, the act of splitting our attention across the various screens seems thrilling, but eventually we find ourselves becoming numb, worn out and indifferent to the images. Through Bender’s frenetic editing and thumping synth soundtracks, ordinary mechanisms of filmic realism and continuity are hurtled to their limit, leaving them no other fate but violent breakdown. In Bender’s words, “I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there.”.
In what is now widely considered to be Bender’s masterpiece, Total Recall (1987) demonstrates the detrimental effects of such a breakdown when applied on a larger scale. Set up across 24 television screens, the projections consist of dizzyingly spliced clips from wars, Hollywood films and even generic family Christmases. The highly specific narratives indicated here are short-circuited, each condemned to fold back upon the other in a whirl of meaninglessness. Total Recall represents Bender’s blatant distrust in television as an aggressive, inexorable fixture of society- less a democratising force of information, more a gateway to states of heightened chaos and disorder. Television, in this sense, acted as a virtual surrogate for lived human experience; by synthesising mass media’s own mechanisms of seduction into her work, Bender not only emphasises the fetishistic nature of such viewership, but also forces us to finally understand what it means to be active participants rather than passive consumers in a late-capitalist society.
It is this dichotomy that Bender examines with staggering potency in her TV Text Image (1986-89) and Aggressive Witness – Active Participant (1990) works. Lined up on the walls like paintings, these works involved several muted television screens, each tuned to a mixture of live news broadcasts, teleshopping and mindless sitcoms. On the glass of each screen were stenciled words and phrases like ‘PEOPLE WITH AIDS’, ‘NO CRITICISM’ and ‘LESBIAN AND GAY RIGHTS’- their imposing, all-caps seriousness overlaying round the clock scenes of prosaic programming. In turn, creating a gaping chasm between issues of colossal importance and the indiscriminate labels they were simultaneously reduced to. This was Bender’s way of alerting us to the falsity that was the so-called expansion of consumer choice and power vis-à-vis the advent of television. These works offer what are perhaps Bender’s most thought-provoking analysis of the malleability and vulnerability of the human mind at the merciless hands of corporate-driven media. Stripped of our basic empathy and political agency, we confront the sinister truth of how we are led to act in the most irrational of ways- to buy, buy and buy more things, to start senseless wars, and worst of all to dehumanise ourselves and others.
Both gripping and critically stimulating, it is no exaggeration to say that Bender paved the way for many of today’s most significant immersive installation artists. Bender once described the media as a “cannibalistic river…a flow or current that absorbs everything.”, but the reinvigoration of her works over the past decade suggests otherwise. By virtue of the inherent circularity of life and art, we are now granted the privilege of encountering her work in a new stream of consciousness. Especially in this age of fake news, ‘sponcon’ and doom-scrolling, there is much we can learn from Bender’s resistance against the powers that be and their insidious capacity for sowing disinformation and discontent.
Gretchen Bender: Image World is on view at Sprüth Magers until 25th March 2023. The show includes several of her TV Text Image installations displayed across two floors of the gallery, along with unseen archival material.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Affiliated with the 1980s Pictures Generation artists in New York, Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) gained a reputation for her piercing observations on the effects of mass media within the increasingly exploitative late-capitalist society she found herself in. Galvanised by philosophers like Roland Barthes who grappled with fundamental notions of authenticity, originality and individuality, Pictures artists sought out appropriation techniques to uncover the contrived basis of images and encourage a more incisive viewing culture. Where Pictures artists worked predominantly through the medium of photography, it was Bender’s trailblazing use of film and television technology that so firmly distinguished her work.
So why is Gretchen Bender a name that largely eludes our popular consciousness, while those of her contemporaries like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger remain immediately recognisable?
The answer lies in the essence of her work. Bender understood America in the 1980s as a “culture saturated by corporate self-representation”, whereby the perpetual deluge of images in everyday life inhibited the public from grasping and discerning their own reality. Her aim as an artist was to disrupt the pervasiveness of mass media by recontextualising and redefining the very way in which we consumed images. Hence, the inception of Bender’s ‘electronic theater’ installations - intensely sensorial amalgamations of video, sculpture, sound and performance that highlighted the subliminal effects of then-prolific technology like television and thereby warned about their conduciveness towards corporate manipulation and control. These installations, as cutting-edge as they were, also marked her for commercial obscurity. Their sheer ambition and physicality moved so far beyond the conditions of gallery and institutional spaces that she was left with no representation by the 1990s.
The other problem Bender faced with making art so reliant on mediums and messages of the time was that they always sat precariously on the precipice of irrelevance. She intuited that: “style gets absorbed really fast by the culture…you have to make some kind of break or glitch in the media somewhere else…and shove your content into it there. It’s constantly having to accept the fact that your work will lose its strength.”. Indeed, for all that Bender foretold, the extent to which technology has developed today has likely far exceeded both her imagination and ours. Her concerns specific to television may seem dated, but she would be wrong in thinking that this would cause her work to ‘lose its strength’. Even as our technology changes, the same convoluted ethical webs necessarily subsist. If anything, the intellectual curiosity revealed in Bender’s works can help us to navigate these webs both now and in the future. Where we typically value artworks for their permanence, eternally framed and fossilised, Bender shows us that there is much to gain from heeding the present. She shoved her content into the culture, not because she thought there was money or a name to be made but simply because she believed it was important. Such relentless artistic integrity is what we remember Gretchen Bender for.
Here, we revisit some of Bender’s key installation works and consider what fresh insight they might offer about our continuous barrage towards new forms of media.
Bender’s earliest multichannel video installations Wild Dead and Dumping Core (1984) formed the blueprint for much of her work to come. In Wild Dead, discordant frames salvaged from pop culture, advertisements and corporate logos are looped endlessly across four television screens. One of the screens, flipped on its side, invokes a particularly jarring viewing experience. Staring at these screens, we seem to plummet into total oblivion, unable to distill a single intelligible image yet also unable to tear ourselves away from the hypnotic blitz of visual stimuli. This phenomenon is expanded upon in Dumping Core, in which found images play in random combinations across 13 synchronised television screens. The title of this work, derived from the technological term ‘core dump’, refers to the recording of a computer’s memory captured just before it crashes. For Bender, this aptly translated to the mimicry of mass media. At first instance, the act of splitting our attention across the various screens seems thrilling, but eventually we find ourselves becoming numb, worn out and indifferent to the images. Through Bender’s frenetic editing and thumping synth soundtracks, ordinary mechanisms of filmic realism and continuity are hurtled to their limit, leaving them no other fate but violent breakdown. In Bender’s words, “I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there.”.
In what is now widely considered to be Bender’s masterpiece, Total Recall (1987) demonstrates the detrimental effects of such a breakdown when applied on a larger scale. Set up across 24 television screens, the projections consist of dizzyingly spliced clips from wars, Hollywood films and even generic family Christmases. The highly specific narratives indicated here are short-circuited, each condemned to fold back upon the other in a whirl of meaninglessness. Total Recall represents Bender’s blatant distrust in television as an aggressive, inexorable fixture of society- less a democratising force of information, more a gateway to states of heightened chaos and disorder. Television, in this sense, acted as a virtual surrogate for lived human experience; by synthesising mass media’s own mechanisms of seduction into her work, Bender not only emphasises the fetishistic nature of such viewership, but also forces us to finally understand what it means to be active participants rather than passive consumers in a late-capitalist society.
It is this dichotomy that Bender examines with staggering potency in her TV Text Image (1986-89) and Aggressive Witness – Active Participant (1990) works. Lined up on the walls like paintings, these works involved several muted television screens, each tuned to a mixture of live news broadcasts, teleshopping and mindless sitcoms. On the glass of each screen were stenciled words and phrases like ‘PEOPLE WITH AIDS’, ‘NO CRITICISM’ and ‘LESBIAN AND GAY RIGHTS’- their imposing, all-caps seriousness overlaying round the clock scenes of prosaic programming. In turn, creating a gaping chasm between issues of colossal importance and the indiscriminate labels they were simultaneously reduced to. This was Bender’s way of alerting us to the falsity that was the so-called expansion of consumer choice and power vis-à-vis the advent of television. These works offer what are perhaps Bender’s most thought-provoking analysis of the malleability and vulnerability of the human mind at the merciless hands of corporate-driven media. Stripped of our basic empathy and political agency, we confront the sinister truth of how we are led to act in the most irrational of ways- to buy, buy and buy more things, to start senseless wars, and worst of all to dehumanise ourselves and others.
Both gripping and critically stimulating, it is no exaggeration to say that Bender paved the way for many of today’s most significant immersive installation artists. Bender once described the media as a “cannibalistic river…a flow or current that absorbs everything.”, but the reinvigoration of her works over the past decade suggests otherwise. By virtue of the inherent circularity of life and art, we are now granted the privilege of encountering her work in a new stream of consciousness. Especially in this age of fake news, ‘sponcon’ and doom-scrolling, there is much we can learn from Bender’s resistance against the powers that be and their insidious capacity for sowing disinformation and discontent.
Gretchen Bender: Image World is on view at Sprüth Magers until 25th March 2023. The show includes several of her TV Text Image installations displayed across two floors of the gallery, along with unseen archival material.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Affiliated with the 1980s Pictures Generation artists in New York, Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) gained a reputation for her piercing observations on the effects of mass media within the increasingly exploitative late-capitalist society she found herself in. Galvanised by philosophers like Roland Barthes who grappled with fundamental notions of authenticity, originality and individuality, Pictures artists sought out appropriation techniques to uncover the contrived basis of images and encourage a more incisive viewing culture. Where Pictures artists worked predominantly through the medium of photography, it was Bender’s trailblazing use of film and television technology that so firmly distinguished her work.
So why is Gretchen Bender a name that largely eludes our popular consciousness, while those of her contemporaries like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger remain immediately recognisable?
The answer lies in the essence of her work. Bender understood America in the 1980s as a “culture saturated by corporate self-representation”, whereby the perpetual deluge of images in everyday life inhibited the public from grasping and discerning their own reality. Her aim as an artist was to disrupt the pervasiveness of mass media by recontextualising and redefining the very way in which we consumed images. Hence, the inception of Bender’s ‘electronic theater’ installations - intensely sensorial amalgamations of video, sculpture, sound and performance that highlighted the subliminal effects of then-prolific technology like television and thereby warned about their conduciveness towards corporate manipulation and control. These installations, as cutting-edge as they were, also marked her for commercial obscurity. Their sheer ambition and physicality moved so far beyond the conditions of gallery and institutional spaces that she was left with no representation by the 1990s.
The other problem Bender faced with making art so reliant on mediums and messages of the time was that they always sat precariously on the precipice of irrelevance. She intuited that: “style gets absorbed really fast by the culture…you have to make some kind of break or glitch in the media somewhere else…and shove your content into it there. It’s constantly having to accept the fact that your work will lose its strength.”. Indeed, for all that Bender foretold, the extent to which technology has developed today has likely far exceeded both her imagination and ours. Her concerns specific to television may seem dated, but she would be wrong in thinking that this would cause her work to ‘lose its strength’. Even as our technology changes, the same convoluted ethical webs necessarily subsist. If anything, the intellectual curiosity revealed in Bender’s works can help us to navigate these webs both now and in the future. Where we typically value artworks for their permanence, eternally framed and fossilised, Bender shows us that there is much to gain from heeding the present. She shoved her content into the culture, not because she thought there was money or a name to be made but simply because she believed it was important. Such relentless artistic integrity is what we remember Gretchen Bender for.
Here, we revisit some of Bender’s key installation works and consider what fresh insight they might offer about our continuous barrage towards new forms of media.
Bender’s earliest multichannel video installations Wild Dead and Dumping Core (1984) formed the blueprint for much of her work to come. In Wild Dead, discordant frames salvaged from pop culture, advertisements and corporate logos are looped endlessly across four television screens. One of the screens, flipped on its side, invokes a particularly jarring viewing experience. Staring at these screens, we seem to plummet into total oblivion, unable to distill a single intelligible image yet also unable to tear ourselves away from the hypnotic blitz of visual stimuli. This phenomenon is expanded upon in Dumping Core, in which found images play in random combinations across 13 synchronised television screens. The title of this work, derived from the technological term ‘core dump’, refers to the recording of a computer’s memory captured just before it crashes. For Bender, this aptly translated to the mimicry of mass media. At first instance, the act of splitting our attention across the various screens seems thrilling, but eventually we find ourselves becoming numb, worn out and indifferent to the images. Through Bender’s frenetic editing and thumping synth soundtracks, ordinary mechanisms of filmic realism and continuity are hurtled to their limit, leaving them no other fate but violent breakdown. In Bender’s words, “I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there.”.
In what is now widely considered to be Bender’s masterpiece, Total Recall (1987) demonstrates the detrimental effects of such a breakdown when applied on a larger scale. Set up across 24 television screens, the projections consist of dizzyingly spliced clips from wars, Hollywood films and even generic family Christmases. The highly specific narratives indicated here are short-circuited, each condemned to fold back upon the other in a whirl of meaninglessness. Total Recall represents Bender’s blatant distrust in television as an aggressive, inexorable fixture of society- less a democratising force of information, more a gateway to states of heightened chaos and disorder. Television, in this sense, acted as a virtual surrogate for lived human experience; by synthesising mass media’s own mechanisms of seduction into her work, Bender not only emphasises the fetishistic nature of such viewership, but also forces us to finally understand what it means to be active participants rather than passive consumers in a late-capitalist society.
It is this dichotomy that Bender examines with staggering potency in her TV Text Image (1986-89) and Aggressive Witness – Active Participant (1990) works. Lined up on the walls like paintings, these works involved several muted television screens, each tuned to a mixture of live news broadcasts, teleshopping and mindless sitcoms. On the glass of each screen were stenciled words and phrases like ‘PEOPLE WITH AIDS’, ‘NO CRITICISM’ and ‘LESBIAN AND GAY RIGHTS’- their imposing, all-caps seriousness overlaying round the clock scenes of prosaic programming. In turn, creating a gaping chasm between issues of colossal importance and the indiscriminate labels they were simultaneously reduced to. This was Bender’s way of alerting us to the falsity that was the so-called expansion of consumer choice and power vis-à-vis the advent of television. These works offer what are perhaps Bender’s most thought-provoking analysis of the malleability and vulnerability of the human mind at the merciless hands of corporate-driven media. Stripped of our basic empathy and political agency, we confront the sinister truth of how we are led to act in the most irrational of ways- to buy, buy and buy more things, to start senseless wars, and worst of all to dehumanise ourselves and others.
Both gripping and critically stimulating, it is no exaggeration to say that Bender paved the way for many of today’s most significant immersive installation artists. Bender once described the media as a “cannibalistic river…a flow or current that absorbs everything.”, but the reinvigoration of her works over the past decade suggests otherwise. By virtue of the inherent circularity of life and art, we are now granted the privilege of encountering her work in a new stream of consciousness. Especially in this age of fake news, ‘sponcon’ and doom-scrolling, there is much we can learn from Bender’s resistance against the powers that be and their insidious capacity for sowing disinformation and discontent.
Gretchen Bender: Image World is on view at Sprüth Magers until 25th March 2023. The show includes several of her TV Text Image installations displayed across two floors of the gallery, along with unseen archival material.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Affiliated with the 1980s Pictures Generation artists in New York, Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) gained a reputation for her piercing observations on the effects of mass media within the increasingly exploitative late-capitalist society she found herself in. Galvanised by philosophers like Roland Barthes who grappled with fundamental notions of authenticity, originality and individuality, Pictures artists sought out appropriation techniques to uncover the contrived basis of images and encourage a more incisive viewing culture. Where Pictures artists worked predominantly through the medium of photography, it was Bender’s trailblazing use of film and television technology that so firmly distinguished her work.
So why is Gretchen Bender a name that largely eludes our popular consciousness, while those of her contemporaries like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger remain immediately recognisable?
The answer lies in the essence of her work. Bender understood America in the 1980s as a “culture saturated by corporate self-representation”, whereby the perpetual deluge of images in everyday life inhibited the public from grasping and discerning their own reality. Her aim as an artist was to disrupt the pervasiveness of mass media by recontextualising and redefining the very way in which we consumed images. Hence, the inception of Bender’s ‘electronic theater’ installations - intensely sensorial amalgamations of video, sculpture, sound and performance that highlighted the subliminal effects of then-prolific technology like television and thereby warned about their conduciveness towards corporate manipulation and control. These installations, as cutting-edge as they were, also marked her for commercial obscurity. Their sheer ambition and physicality moved so far beyond the conditions of gallery and institutional spaces that she was left with no representation by the 1990s.
The other problem Bender faced with making art so reliant on mediums and messages of the time was that they always sat precariously on the precipice of irrelevance. She intuited that: “style gets absorbed really fast by the culture…you have to make some kind of break or glitch in the media somewhere else…and shove your content into it there. It’s constantly having to accept the fact that your work will lose its strength.”. Indeed, for all that Bender foretold, the extent to which technology has developed today has likely far exceeded both her imagination and ours. Her concerns specific to television may seem dated, but she would be wrong in thinking that this would cause her work to ‘lose its strength’. Even as our technology changes, the same convoluted ethical webs necessarily subsist. If anything, the intellectual curiosity revealed in Bender’s works can help us to navigate these webs both now and in the future. Where we typically value artworks for their permanence, eternally framed and fossilised, Bender shows us that there is much to gain from heeding the present. She shoved her content into the culture, not because she thought there was money or a name to be made but simply because she believed it was important. Such relentless artistic integrity is what we remember Gretchen Bender for.
Here, we revisit some of Bender’s key installation works and consider what fresh insight they might offer about our continuous barrage towards new forms of media.
Bender’s earliest multichannel video installations Wild Dead and Dumping Core (1984) formed the blueprint for much of her work to come. In Wild Dead, discordant frames salvaged from pop culture, advertisements and corporate logos are looped endlessly across four television screens. One of the screens, flipped on its side, invokes a particularly jarring viewing experience. Staring at these screens, we seem to plummet into total oblivion, unable to distill a single intelligible image yet also unable to tear ourselves away from the hypnotic blitz of visual stimuli. This phenomenon is expanded upon in Dumping Core, in which found images play in random combinations across 13 synchronised television screens. The title of this work, derived from the technological term ‘core dump’, refers to the recording of a computer’s memory captured just before it crashes. For Bender, this aptly translated to the mimicry of mass media. At first instance, the act of splitting our attention across the various screens seems thrilling, but eventually we find ourselves becoming numb, worn out and indifferent to the images. Through Bender’s frenetic editing and thumping synth soundtracks, ordinary mechanisms of filmic realism and continuity are hurtled to their limit, leaving them no other fate but violent breakdown. In Bender’s words, “I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there.”.
In what is now widely considered to be Bender’s masterpiece, Total Recall (1987) demonstrates the detrimental effects of such a breakdown when applied on a larger scale. Set up across 24 television screens, the projections consist of dizzyingly spliced clips from wars, Hollywood films and even generic family Christmases. The highly specific narratives indicated here are short-circuited, each condemned to fold back upon the other in a whirl of meaninglessness. Total Recall represents Bender’s blatant distrust in television as an aggressive, inexorable fixture of society- less a democratising force of information, more a gateway to states of heightened chaos and disorder. Television, in this sense, acted as a virtual surrogate for lived human experience; by synthesising mass media’s own mechanisms of seduction into her work, Bender not only emphasises the fetishistic nature of such viewership, but also forces us to finally understand what it means to be active participants rather than passive consumers in a late-capitalist society.
It is this dichotomy that Bender examines with staggering potency in her TV Text Image (1986-89) and Aggressive Witness – Active Participant (1990) works. Lined up on the walls like paintings, these works involved several muted television screens, each tuned to a mixture of live news broadcasts, teleshopping and mindless sitcoms. On the glass of each screen were stenciled words and phrases like ‘PEOPLE WITH AIDS’, ‘NO CRITICISM’ and ‘LESBIAN AND GAY RIGHTS’- their imposing, all-caps seriousness overlaying round the clock scenes of prosaic programming. In turn, creating a gaping chasm between issues of colossal importance and the indiscriminate labels they were simultaneously reduced to. This was Bender’s way of alerting us to the falsity that was the so-called expansion of consumer choice and power vis-à-vis the advent of television. These works offer what are perhaps Bender’s most thought-provoking analysis of the malleability and vulnerability of the human mind at the merciless hands of corporate-driven media. Stripped of our basic empathy and political agency, we confront the sinister truth of how we are led to act in the most irrational of ways- to buy, buy and buy more things, to start senseless wars, and worst of all to dehumanise ourselves and others.
Both gripping and critically stimulating, it is no exaggeration to say that Bender paved the way for many of today’s most significant immersive installation artists. Bender once described the media as a “cannibalistic river…a flow or current that absorbs everything.”, but the reinvigoration of her works over the past decade suggests otherwise. By virtue of the inherent circularity of life and art, we are now granted the privilege of encountering her work in a new stream of consciousness. Especially in this age of fake news, ‘sponcon’ and doom-scrolling, there is much we can learn from Bender’s resistance against the powers that be and their insidious capacity for sowing disinformation and discontent.
Gretchen Bender: Image World is on view at Sprüth Magers until 25th March 2023. The show includes several of her TV Text Image installations displayed across two floors of the gallery, along with unseen archival material.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Affiliated with the 1980s Pictures Generation artists in New York, Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) gained a reputation for her piercing observations on the effects of mass media within the increasingly exploitative late-capitalist society she found herself in. Galvanised by philosophers like Roland Barthes who grappled with fundamental notions of authenticity, originality and individuality, Pictures artists sought out appropriation techniques to uncover the contrived basis of images and encourage a more incisive viewing culture. Where Pictures artists worked predominantly through the medium of photography, it was Bender’s trailblazing use of film and television technology that so firmly distinguished her work.
So why is Gretchen Bender a name that largely eludes our popular consciousness, while those of her contemporaries like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger remain immediately recognisable?
The answer lies in the essence of her work. Bender understood America in the 1980s as a “culture saturated by corporate self-representation”, whereby the perpetual deluge of images in everyday life inhibited the public from grasping and discerning their own reality. Her aim as an artist was to disrupt the pervasiveness of mass media by recontextualising and redefining the very way in which we consumed images. Hence, the inception of Bender’s ‘electronic theater’ installations - intensely sensorial amalgamations of video, sculpture, sound and performance that highlighted the subliminal effects of then-prolific technology like television and thereby warned about their conduciveness towards corporate manipulation and control. These installations, as cutting-edge as they were, also marked her for commercial obscurity. Their sheer ambition and physicality moved so far beyond the conditions of gallery and institutional spaces that she was left with no representation by the 1990s.
The other problem Bender faced with making art so reliant on mediums and messages of the time was that they always sat precariously on the precipice of irrelevance. She intuited that: “style gets absorbed really fast by the culture…you have to make some kind of break or glitch in the media somewhere else…and shove your content into it there. It’s constantly having to accept the fact that your work will lose its strength.”. Indeed, for all that Bender foretold, the extent to which technology has developed today has likely far exceeded both her imagination and ours. Her concerns specific to television may seem dated, but she would be wrong in thinking that this would cause her work to ‘lose its strength’. Even as our technology changes, the same convoluted ethical webs necessarily subsist. If anything, the intellectual curiosity revealed in Bender’s works can help us to navigate these webs both now and in the future. Where we typically value artworks for their permanence, eternally framed and fossilised, Bender shows us that there is much to gain from heeding the present. She shoved her content into the culture, not because she thought there was money or a name to be made but simply because she believed it was important. Such relentless artistic integrity is what we remember Gretchen Bender for.
Here, we revisit some of Bender’s key installation works and consider what fresh insight they might offer about our continuous barrage towards new forms of media.
Bender’s earliest multichannel video installations Wild Dead and Dumping Core (1984) formed the blueprint for much of her work to come. In Wild Dead, discordant frames salvaged from pop culture, advertisements and corporate logos are looped endlessly across four television screens. One of the screens, flipped on its side, invokes a particularly jarring viewing experience. Staring at these screens, we seem to plummet into total oblivion, unable to distill a single intelligible image yet also unable to tear ourselves away from the hypnotic blitz of visual stimuli. This phenomenon is expanded upon in Dumping Core, in which found images play in random combinations across 13 synchronised television screens. The title of this work, derived from the technological term ‘core dump’, refers to the recording of a computer’s memory captured just before it crashes. For Bender, this aptly translated to the mimicry of mass media. At first instance, the act of splitting our attention across the various screens seems thrilling, but eventually we find ourselves becoming numb, worn out and indifferent to the images. Through Bender’s frenetic editing and thumping synth soundtracks, ordinary mechanisms of filmic realism and continuity are hurtled to their limit, leaving them no other fate but violent breakdown. In Bender’s words, “I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there.”.
In what is now widely considered to be Bender’s masterpiece, Total Recall (1987) demonstrates the detrimental effects of such a breakdown when applied on a larger scale. Set up across 24 television screens, the projections consist of dizzyingly spliced clips from wars, Hollywood films and even generic family Christmases. The highly specific narratives indicated here are short-circuited, each condemned to fold back upon the other in a whirl of meaninglessness. Total Recall represents Bender’s blatant distrust in television as an aggressive, inexorable fixture of society- less a democratising force of information, more a gateway to states of heightened chaos and disorder. Television, in this sense, acted as a virtual surrogate for lived human experience; by synthesising mass media’s own mechanisms of seduction into her work, Bender not only emphasises the fetishistic nature of such viewership, but also forces us to finally understand what it means to be active participants rather than passive consumers in a late-capitalist society.
It is this dichotomy that Bender examines with staggering potency in her TV Text Image (1986-89) and Aggressive Witness – Active Participant (1990) works. Lined up on the walls like paintings, these works involved several muted television screens, each tuned to a mixture of live news broadcasts, teleshopping and mindless sitcoms. On the glass of each screen were stenciled words and phrases like ‘PEOPLE WITH AIDS’, ‘NO CRITICISM’ and ‘LESBIAN AND GAY RIGHTS’- their imposing, all-caps seriousness overlaying round the clock scenes of prosaic programming. In turn, creating a gaping chasm between issues of colossal importance and the indiscriminate labels they were simultaneously reduced to. This was Bender’s way of alerting us to the falsity that was the so-called expansion of consumer choice and power vis-à-vis the advent of television. These works offer what are perhaps Bender’s most thought-provoking analysis of the malleability and vulnerability of the human mind at the merciless hands of corporate-driven media. Stripped of our basic empathy and political agency, we confront the sinister truth of how we are led to act in the most irrational of ways- to buy, buy and buy more things, to start senseless wars, and worst of all to dehumanise ourselves and others.
Both gripping and critically stimulating, it is no exaggeration to say that Bender paved the way for many of today’s most significant immersive installation artists. Bender once described the media as a “cannibalistic river…a flow or current that absorbs everything.”, but the reinvigoration of her works over the past decade suggests otherwise. By virtue of the inherent circularity of life and art, we are now granted the privilege of encountering her work in a new stream of consciousness. Especially in this age of fake news, ‘sponcon’ and doom-scrolling, there is much we can learn from Bender’s resistance against the powers that be and their insidious capacity for sowing disinformation and discontent.
Gretchen Bender: Image World is on view at Sprüth Magers until 25th March 2023. The show includes several of her TV Text Image installations displayed across two floors of the gallery, along with unseen archival material.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Affiliated with the 1980s Pictures Generation artists in New York, Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) gained a reputation for her piercing observations on the effects of mass media within the increasingly exploitative late-capitalist society she found herself in. Galvanised by philosophers like Roland Barthes who grappled with fundamental notions of authenticity, originality and individuality, Pictures artists sought out appropriation techniques to uncover the contrived basis of images and encourage a more incisive viewing culture. Where Pictures artists worked predominantly through the medium of photography, it was Bender’s trailblazing use of film and television technology that so firmly distinguished her work.
So why is Gretchen Bender a name that largely eludes our popular consciousness, while those of her contemporaries like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger remain immediately recognisable?
The answer lies in the essence of her work. Bender understood America in the 1980s as a “culture saturated by corporate self-representation”, whereby the perpetual deluge of images in everyday life inhibited the public from grasping and discerning their own reality. Her aim as an artist was to disrupt the pervasiveness of mass media by recontextualising and redefining the very way in which we consumed images. Hence, the inception of Bender’s ‘electronic theater’ installations - intensely sensorial amalgamations of video, sculpture, sound and performance that highlighted the subliminal effects of then-prolific technology like television and thereby warned about their conduciveness towards corporate manipulation and control. These installations, as cutting-edge as they were, also marked her for commercial obscurity. Their sheer ambition and physicality moved so far beyond the conditions of gallery and institutional spaces that she was left with no representation by the 1990s.
The other problem Bender faced with making art so reliant on mediums and messages of the time was that they always sat precariously on the precipice of irrelevance. She intuited that: “style gets absorbed really fast by the culture…you have to make some kind of break or glitch in the media somewhere else…and shove your content into it there. It’s constantly having to accept the fact that your work will lose its strength.”. Indeed, for all that Bender foretold, the extent to which technology has developed today has likely far exceeded both her imagination and ours. Her concerns specific to television may seem dated, but she would be wrong in thinking that this would cause her work to ‘lose its strength’. Even as our technology changes, the same convoluted ethical webs necessarily subsist. If anything, the intellectual curiosity revealed in Bender’s works can help us to navigate these webs both now and in the future. Where we typically value artworks for their permanence, eternally framed and fossilised, Bender shows us that there is much to gain from heeding the present. She shoved her content into the culture, not because she thought there was money or a name to be made but simply because she believed it was important. Such relentless artistic integrity is what we remember Gretchen Bender for.
Here, we revisit some of Bender’s key installation works and consider what fresh insight they might offer about our continuous barrage towards new forms of media.
Bender’s earliest multichannel video installations Wild Dead and Dumping Core (1984) formed the blueprint for much of her work to come. In Wild Dead, discordant frames salvaged from pop culture, advertisements and corporate logos are looped endlessly across four television screens. One of the screens, flipped on its side, invokes a particularly jarring viewing experience. Staring at these screens, we seem to plummet into total oblivion, unable to distill a single intelligible image yet also unable to tear ourselves away from the hypnotic blitz of visual stimuli. This phenomenon is expanded upon in Dumping Core, in which found images play in random combinations across 13 synchronised television screens. The title of this work, derived from the technological term ‘core dump’, refers to the recording of a computer’s memory captured just before it crashes. For Bender, this aptly translated to the mimicry of mass media. At first instance, the act of splitting our attention across the various screens seems thrilling, but eventually we find ourselves becoming numb, worn out and indifferent to the images. Through Bender’s frenetic editing and thumping synth soundtracks, ordinary mechanisms of filmic realism and continuity are hurtled to their limit, leaving them no other fate but violent breakdown. In Bender’s words, “I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there.”.
In what is now widely considered to be Bender’s masterpiece, Total Recall (1987) demonstrates the detrimental effects of such a breakdown when applied on a larger scale. Set up across 24 television screens, the projections consist of dizzyingly spliced clips from wars, Hollywood films and even generic family Christmases. The highly specific narratives indicated here are short-circuited, each condemned to fold back upon the other in a whirl of meaninglessness. Total Recall represents Bender’s blatant distrust in television as an aggressive, inexorable fixture of society- less a democratising force of information, more a gateway to states of heightened chaos and disorder. Television, in this sense, acted as a virtual surrogate for lived human experience; by synthesising mass media’s own mechanisms of seduction into her work, Bender not only emphasises the fetishistic nature of such viewership, but also forces us to finally understand what it means to be active participants rather than passive consumers in a late-capitalist society.
It is this dichotomy that Bender examines with staggering potency in her TV Text Image (1986-89) and Aggressive Witness – Active Participant (1990) works. Lined up on the walls like paintings, these works involved several muted television screens, each tuned to a mixture of live news broadcasts, teleshopping and mindless sitcoms. On the glass of each screen were stenciled words and phrases like ‘PEOPLE WITH AIDS’, ‘NO CRITICISM’ and ‘LESBIAN AND GAY RIGHTS’- their imposing, all-caps seriousness overlaying round the clock scenes of prosaic programming. In turn, creating a gaping chasm between issues of colossal importance and the indiscriminate labels they were simultaneously reduced to. This was Bender’s way of alerting us to the falsity that was the so-called expansion of consumer choice and power vis-à-vis the advent of television. These works offer what are perhaps Bender’s most thought-provoking analysis of the malleability and vulnerability of the human mind at the merciless hands of corporate-driven media. Stripped of our basic empathy and political agency, we confront the sinister truth of how we are led to act in the most irrational of ways- to buy, buy and buy more things, to start senseless wars, and worst of all to dehumanise ourselves and others.
Both gripping and critically stimulating, it is no exaggeration to say that Bender paved the way for many of today’s most significant immersive installation artists. Bender once described the media as a “cannibalistic river…a flow or current that absorbs everything.”, but the reinvigoration of her works over the past decade suggests otherwise. By virtue of the inherent circularity of life and art, we are now granted the privilege of encountering her work in a new stream of consciousness. Especially in this age of fake news, ‘sponcon’ and doom-scrolling, there is much we can learn from Bender’s resistance against the powers that be and their insidious capacity for sowing disinformation and discontent.
Gretchen Bender: Image World is on view at Sprüth Magers until 25th March 2023. The show includes several of her TV Text Image installations displayed across two floors of the gallery, along with unseen archival material.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Affiliated with the 1980s Pictures Generation artists in New York, Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) gained a reputation for her piercing observations on the effects of mass media within the increasingly exploitative late-capitalist society she found herself in. Galvanised by philosophers like Roland Barthes who grappled with fundamental notions of authenticity, originality and individuality, Pictures artists sought out appropriation techniques to uncover the contrived basis of images and encourage a more incisive viewing culture. Where Pictures artists worked predominantly through the medium of photography, it was Bender’s trailblazing use of film and television technology that so firmly distinguished her work.
So why is Gretchen Bender a name that largely eludes our popular consciousness, while those of her contemporaries like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger remain immediately recognisable?
The answer lies in the essence of her work. Bender understood America in the 1980s as a “culture saturated by corporate self-representation”, whereby the perpetual deluge of images in everyday life inhibited the public from grasping and discerning their own reality. Her aim as an artist was to disrupt the pervasiveness of mass media by recontextualising and redefining the very way in which we consumed images. Hence, the inception of Bender’s ‘electronic theater’ installations - intensely sensorial amalgamations of video, sculpture, sound and performance that highlighted the subliminal effects of then-prolific technology like television and thereby warned about their conduciveness towards corporate manipulation and control. These installations, as cutting-edge as they were, also marked her for commercial obscurity. Their sheer ambition and physicality moved so far beyond the conditions of gallery and institutional spaces that she was left with no representation by the 1990s.
The other problem Bender faced with making art so reliant on mediums and messages of the time was that they always sat precariously on the precipice of irrelevance. She intuited that: “style gets absorbed really fast by the culture…you have to make some kind of break or glitch in the media somewhere else…and shove your content into it there. It’s constantly having to accept the fact that your work will lose its strength.”. Indeed, for all that Bender foretold, the extent to which technology has developed today has likely far exceeded both her imagination and ours. Her concerns specific to television may seem dated, but she would be wrong in thinking that this would cause her work to ‘lose its strength’. Even as our technology changes, the same convoluted ethical webs necessarily subsist. If anything, the intellectual curiosity revealed in Bender’s works can help us to navigate these webs both now and in the future. Where we typically value artworks for their permanence, eternally framed and fossilised, Bender shows us that there is much to gain from heeding the present. She shoved her content into the culture, not because she thought there was money or a name to be made but simply because she believed it was important. Such relentless artistic integrity is what we remember Gretchen Bender for.
Here, we revisit some of Bender’s key installation works and consider what fresh insight they might offer about our continuous barrage towards new forms of media.
Bender’s earliest multichannel video installations Wild Dead and Dumping Core (1984) formed the blueprint for much of her work to come. In Wild Dead, discordant frames salvaged from pop culture, advertisements and corporate logos are looped endlessly across four television screens. One of the screens, flipped on its side, invokes a particularly jarring viewing experience. Staring at these screens, we seem to plummet into total oblivion, unable to distill a single intelligible image yet also unable to tear ourselves away from the hypnotic blitz of visual stimuli. This phenomenon is expanded upon in Dumping Core, in which found images play in random combinations across 13 synchronised television screens. The title of this work, derived from the technological term ‘core dump’, refers to the recording of a computer’s memory captured just before it crashes. For Bender, this aptly translated to the mimicry of mass media. At first instance, the act of splitting our attention across the various screens seems thrilling, but eventually we find ourselves becoming numb, worn out and indifferent to the images. Through Bender’s frenetic editing and thumping synth soundtracks, ordinary mechanisms of filmic realism and continuity are hurtled to their limit, leaving them no other fate but violent breakdown. In Bender’s words, “I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there.”.
In what is now widely considered to be Bender’s masterpiece, Total Recall (1987) demonstrates the detrimental effects of such a breakdown when applied on a larger scale. Set up across 24 television screens, the projections consist of dizzyingly spliced clips from wars, Hollywood films and even generic family Christmases. The highly specific narratives indicated here are short-circuited, each condemned to fold back upon the other in a whirl of meaninglessness. Total Recall represents Bender’s blatant distrust in television as an aggressive, inexorable fixture of society- less a democratising force of information, more a gateway to states of heightened chaos and disorder. Television, in this sense, acted as a virtual surrogate for lived human experience; by synthesising mass media’s own mechanisms of seduction into her work, Bender not only emphasises the fetishistic nature of such viewership, but also forces us to finally understand what it means to be active participants rather than passive consumers in a late-capitalist society.
It is this dichotomy that Bender examines with staggering potency in her TV Text Image (1986-89) and Aggressive Witness – Active Participant (1990) works. Lined up on the walls like paintings, these works involved several muted television screens, each tuned to a mixture of live news broadcasts, teleshopping and mindless sitcoms. On the glass of each screen were stenciled words and phrases like ‘PEOPLE WITH AIDS’, ‘NO CRITICISM’ and ‘LESBIAN AND GAY RIGHTS’- their imposing, all-caps seriousness overlaying round the clock scenes of prosaic programming. In turn, creating a gaping chasm between issues of colossal importance and the indiscriminate labels they were simultaneously reduced to. This was Bender’s way of alerting us to the falsity that was the so-called expansion of consumer choice and power vis-à-vis the advent of television. These works offer what are perhaps Bender’s most thought-provoking analysis of the malleability and vulnerability of the human mind at the merciless hands of corporate-driven media. Stripped of our basic empathy and political agency, we confront the sinister truth of how we are led to act in the most irrational of ways- to buy, buy and buy more things, to start senseless wars, and worst of all to dehumanise ourselves and others.
Both gripping and critically stimulating, it is no exaggeration to say that Bender paved the way for many of today’s most significant immersive installation artists. Bender once described the media as a “cannibalistic river…a flow or current that absorbs everything.”, but the reinvigoration of her works over the past decade suggests otherwise. By virtue of the inherent circularity of life and art, we are now granted the privilege of encountering her work in a new stream of consciousness. Especially in this age of fake news, ‘sponcon’ and doom-scrolling, there is much we can learn from Bender’s resistance against the powers that be and their insidious capacity for sowing disinformation and discontent.
Gretchen Bender: Image World is on view at Sprüth Magers until 25th March 2023. The show includes several of her TV Text Image installations displayed across two floors of the gallery, along with unseen archival material.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Affiliated with the 1980s Pictures Generation artists in New York, Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) gained a reputation for her piercing observations on the effects of mass media within the increasingly exploitative late-capitalist society she found herself in. Galvanised by philosophers like Roland Barthes who grappled with fundamental notions of authenticity, originality and individuality, Pictures artists sought out appropriation techniques to uncover the contrived basis of images and encourage a more incisive viewing culture. Where Pictures artists worked predominantly through the medium of photography, it was Bender’s trailblazing use of film and television technology that so firmly distinguished her work.
So why is Gretchen Bender a name that largely eludes our popular consciousness, while those of her contemporaries like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger remain immediately recognisable?
The answer lies in the essence of her work. Bender understood America in the 1980s as a “culture saturated by corporate self-representation”, whereby the perpetual deluge of images in everyday life inhibited the public from grasping and discerning their own reality. Her aim as an artist was to disrupt the pervasiveness of mass media by recontextualising and redefining the very way in which we consumed images. Hence, the inception of Bender’s ‘electronic theater’ installations - intensely sensorial amalgamations of video, sculpture, sound and performance that highlighted the subliminal effects of then-prolific technology like television and thereby warned about their conduciveness towards corporate manipulation and control. These installations, as cutting-edge as they were, also marked her for commercial obscurity. Their sheer ambition and physicality moved so far beyond the conditions of gallery and institutional spaces that she was left with no representation by the 1990s.
The other problem Bender faced with making art so reliant on mediums and messages of the time was that they always sat precariously on the precipice of irrelevance. She intuited that: “style gets absorbed really fast by the culture…you have to make some kind of break or glitch in the media somewhere else…and shove your content into it there. It’s constantly having to accept the fact that your work will lose its strength.”. Indeed, for all that Bender foretold, the extent to which technology has developed today has likely far exceeded both her imagination and ours. Her concerns specific to television may seem dated, but she would be wrong in thinking that this would cause her work to ‘lose its strength’. Even as our technology changes, the same convoluted ethical webs necessarily subsist. If anything, the intellectual curiosity revealed in Bender’s works can help us to navigate these webs both now and in the future. Where we typically value artworks for their permanence, eternally framed and fossilised, Bender shows us that there is much to gain from heeding the present. She shoved her content into the culture, not because she thought there was money or a name to be made but simply because she believed it was important. Such relentless artistic integrity is what we remember Gretchen Bender for.
Here, we revisit some of Bender’s key installation works and consider what fresh insight they might offer about our continuous barrage towards new forms of media.
Bender’s earliest multichannel video installations Wild Dead and Dumping Core (1984) formed the blueprint for much of her work to come. In Wild Dead, discordant frames salvaged from pop culture, advertisements and corporate logos are looped endlessly across four television screens. One of the screens, flipped on its side, invokes a particularly jarring viewing experience. Staring at these screens, we seem to plummet into total oblivion, unable to distill a single intelligible image yet also unable to tear ourselves away from the hypnotic blitz of visual stimuli. This phenomenon is expanded upon in Dumping Core, in which found images play in random combinations across 13 synchronised television screens. The title of this work, derived from the technological term ‘core dump’, refers to the recording of a computer’s memory captured just before it crashes. For Bender, this aptly translated to the mimicry of mass media. At first instance, the act of splitting our attention across the various screens seems thrilling, but eventually we find ourselves becoming numb, worn out and indifferent to the images. Through Bender’s frenetic editing and thumping synth soundtracks, ordinary mechanisms of filmic realism and continuity are hurtled to their limit, leaving them no other fate but violent breakdown. In Bender’s words, “I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there.”.
In what is now widely considered to be Bender’s masterpiece, Total Recall (1987) demonstrates the detrimental effects of such a breakdown when applied on a larger scale. Set up across 24 television screens, the projections consist of dizzyingly spliced clips from wars, Hollywood films and even generic family Christmases. The highly specific narratives indicated here are short-circuited, each condemned to fold back upon the other in a whirl of meaninglessness. Total Recall represents Bender’s blatant distrust in television as an aggressive, inexorable fixture of society- less a democratising force of information, more a gateway to states of heightened chaos and disorder. Television, in this sense, acted as a virtual surrogate for lived human experience; by synthesising mass media’s own mechanisms of seduction into her work, Bender not only emphasises the fetishistic nature of such viewership, but also forces us to finally understand what it means to be active participants rather than passive consumers in a late-capitalist society.
It is this dichotomy that Bender examines with staggering potency in her TV Text Image (1986-89) and Aggressive Witness – Active Participant (1990) works. Lined up on the walls like paintings, these works involved several muted television screens, each tuned to a mixture of live news broadcasts, teleshopping and mindless sitcoms. On the glass of each screen were stenciled words and phrases like ‘PEOPLE WITH AIDS’, ‘NO CRITICISM’ and ‘LESBIAN AND GAY RIGHTS’- their imposing, all-caps seriousness overlaying round the clock scenes of prosaic programming. In turn, creating a gaping chasm between issues of colossal importance and the indiscriminate labels they were simultaneously reduced to. This was Bender’s way of alerting us to the falsity that was the so-called expansion of consumer choice and power vis-à-vis the advent of television. These works offer what are perhaps Bender’s most thought-provoking analysis of the malleability and vulnerability of the human mind at the merciless hands of corporate-driven media. Stripped of our basic empathy and political agency, we confront the sinister truth of how we are led to act in the most irrational of ways- to buy, buy and buy more things, to start senseless wars, and worst of all to dehumanise ourselves and others.
Both gripping and critically stimulating, it is no exaggeration to say that Bender paved the way for many of today’s most significant immersive installation artists. Bender once described the media as a “cannibalistic river…a flow or current that absorbs everything.”, but the reinvigoration of her works over the past decade suggests otherwise. By virtue of the inherent circularity of life and art, we are now granted the privilege of encountering her work in a new stream of consciousness. Especially in this age of fake news, ‘sponcon’ and doom-scrolling, there is much we can learn from Bender’s resistance against the powers that be and their insidious capacity for sowing disinformation and discontent.
Gretchen Bender: Image World is on view at Sprüth Magers until 25th March 2023. The show includes several of her TV Text Image installations displayed across two floors of the gallery, along with unseen archival material.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Affiliated with the 1980s Pictures Generation artists in New York, Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) gained a reputation for her piercing observations on the effects of mass media within the increasingly exploitative late-capitalist society she found herself in. Galvanised by philosophers like Roland Barthes who grappled with fundamental notions of authenticity, originality and individuality, Pictures artists sought out appropriation techniques to uncover the contrived basis of images and encourage a more incisive viewing culture. Where Pictures artists worked predominantly through the medium of photography, it was Bender’s trailblazing use of film and television technology that so firmly distinguished her work.
So why is Gretchen Bender a name that largely eludes our popular consciousness, while those of her contemporaries like Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger remain immediately recognisable?
The answer lies in the essence of her work. Bender understood America in the 1980s as a “culture saturated by corporate self-representation”, whereby the perpetual deluge of images in everyday life inhibited the public from grasping and discerning their own reality. Her aim as an artist was to disrupt the pervasiveness of mass media by recontextualising and redefining the very way in which we consumed images. Hence, the inception of Bender’s ‘electronic theater’ installations - intensely sensorial amalgamations of video, sculpture, sound and performance that highlighted the subliminal effects of then-prolific technology like television and thereby warned about their conduciveness towards corporate manipulation and control. These installations, as cutting-edge as they were, also marked her for commercial obscurity. Their sheer ambition and physicality moved so far beyond the conditions of gallery and institutional spaces that she was left with no representation by the 1990s.
The other problem Bender faced with making art so reliant on mediums and messages of the time was that they always sat precariously on the precipice of irrelevance. She intuited that: “style gets absorbed really fast by the culture…you have to make some kind of break or glitch in the media somewhere else…and shove your content into it there. It’s constantly having to accept the fact that your work will lose its strength.”. Indeed, for all that Bender foretold, the extent to which technology has developed today has likely far exceeded both her imagination and ours. Her concerns specific to television may seem dated, but she would be wrong in thinking that this would cause her work to ‘lose its strength’. Even as our technology changes, the same convoluted ethical webs necessarily subsist. If anything, the intellectual curiosity revealed in Bender’s works can help us to navigate these webs both now and in the future. Where we typically value artworks for their permanence, eternally framed and fossilised, Bender shows us that there is much to gain from heeding the present. She shoved her content into the culture, not because she thought there was money or a name to be made but simply because she believed it was important. Such relentless artistic integrity is what we remember Gretchen Bender for.
Here, we revisit some of Bender’s key installation works and consider what fresh insight they might offer about our continuous barrage towards new forms of media.
Bender’s earliest multichannel video installations Wild Dead and Dumping Core (1984) formed the blueprint for much of her work to come. In Wild Dead, discordant frames salvaged from pop culture, advertisements and corporate logos are looped endlessly across four television screens. One of the screens, flipped on its side, invokes a particularly jarring viewing experience. Staring at these screens, we seem to plummet into total oblivion, unable to distill a single intelligible image yet also unable to tear ourselves away from the hypnotic blitz of visual stimuli. This phenomenon is expanded upon in Dumping Core, in which found images play in random combinations across 13 synchronised television screens. The title of this work, derived from the technological term ‘core dump’, refers to the recording of a computer’s memory captured just before it crashes. For Bender, this aptly translated to the mimicry of mass media. At first instance, the act of splitting our attention across the various screens seems thrilling, but eventually we find ourselves becoming numb, worn out and indifferent to the images. Through Bender’s frenetic editing and thumping synth soundtracks, ordinary mechanisms of filmic realism and continuity are hurtled to their limit, leaving them no other fate but violent breakdown. In Bender’s words, “I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there.”.
In what is now widely considered to be Bender’s masterpiece, Total Recall (1987) demonstrates the detrimental effects of such a breakdown when applied on a larger scale. Set up across 24 television screens, the projections consist of dizzyingly spliced clips from wars, Hollywood films and even generic family Christmases. The highly specific narratives indicated here are short-circuited, each condemned to fold back upon the other in a whirl of meaninglessness. Total Recall represents Bender’s blatant distrust in television as an aggressive, inexorable fixture of society- less a democratising force of information, more a gateway to states of heightened chaos and disorder. Television, in this sense, acted as a virtual surrogate for lived human experience; by synthesising mass media’s own mechanisms of seduction into her work, Bender not only emphasises the fetishistic nature of such viewership, but also forces us to finally understand what it means to be active participants rather than passive consumers in a late-capitalist society.
It is this dichotomy that Bender examines with staggering potency in her TV Text Image (1986-89) and Aggressive Witness – Active Participant (1990) works. Lined up on the walls like paintings, these works involved several muted television screens, each tuned to a mixture of live news broadcasts, teleshopping and mindless sitcoms. On the glass of each screen were stenciled words and phrases like ‘PEOPLE WITH AIDS’, ‘NO CRITICISM’ and ‘LESBIAN AND GAY RIGHTS’- their imposing, all-caps seriousness overlaying round the clock scenes of prosaic programming. In turn, creating a gaping chasm between issues of colossal importance and the indiscriminate labels they were simultaneously reduced to. This was Bender’s way of alerting us to the falsity that was the so-called expansion of consumer choice and power vis-à-vis the advent of television. These works offer what are perhaps Bender’s most thought-provoking analysis of the malleability and vulnerability of the human mind at the merciless hands of corporate-driven media. Stripped of our basic empathy and political agency, we confront the sinister truth of how we are led to act in the most irrational of ways- to buy, buy and buy more things, to start senseless wars, and worst of all to dehumanise ourselves and others.
Both gripping and critically stimulating, it is no exaggeration to say that Bender paved the way for many of today’s most significant immersive installation artists. Bender once described the media as a “cannibalistic river…a flow or current that absorbs everything.”, but the reinvigoration of her works over the past decade suggests otherwise. By virtue of the inherent circularity of life and art, we are now granted the privilege of encountering her work in a new stream of consciousness. Especially in this age of fake news, ‘sponcon’ and doom-scrolling, there is much we can learn from Bender’s resistance against the powers that be and their insidious capacity for sowing disinformation and discontent.
Gretchen Bender: Image World is on view at Sprüth Magers until 25th March 2023. The show includes several of her TV Text Image installations displayed across two floors of the gallery, along with unseen archival material.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
