Gretchen Bender at Project Arts Centre: Gallery Guide

Gallery guide Gretchen Bender Total Recall PROJECT ARTS CENTRE 23 October – 23 December 2015 with Oisín Byrne

Gretchen Bender Total Recall, 1987–2015 8-channel video installation; 24 monitors, 3 screen projections, colour, sound 18 minutes Courtesy the Estate of Gretchen Bender

Gretchen Bender

Oisín Byrne Test Screen Divider, 2015 Screen print, digital print, paint and devoré on cotton canvas, molton and satin viscose curtain.

Commissioned by Project Arts Centre

Oisín Byrne

Total Recall launches itself on our senses. It hits us in the eyes, the memory, the ears, the body, and our index of meaning – the part of us that recognises a corporate logo, a scene from a film or a title, and then wrenches to mind its associations. Careening across the numerous screens and television box-sets, images and sound are edited to participate in the making of a symphony – the performance and now installation of what Gretchen Bender called ‘electronic theatre’. Through this single seminal work of art, we can feel the power of an extraordinary artist, who Hal Foster calls an ‘oxymoron: a feminist futurist’. Bender ricochets between cinema samples and graphic symbols, advertisements and her own footage, and zooms in repeatedly to examples of military propaganda and corporate self-representation. The concept of electronic theatre couldn’t be more apt, with its dynamic rhythm, waxing and waning tempo and crescendo of intensity.

Installed in the gallery of Project Arts Centre (also a natural home of theatre and performance), Total Recall has prompted the commissioning of a new work by artist Oisín Byrne. The printed and painted curtain is designed as a graphic entrance to Bender’s theatre – its thick and layered fabric protecting and containing the audio visual environment. Oisín Byrne has drawn from a variety of image sources, including TV static and TV test cards, and worked them into a combination of optical patterns and manual gestures.

Static, the image a TV displays before, after, or in the absence of a programme or signal, is particularly poignant in an era when television programming and broadcasting is all but over. The image of static also raises complexity for the care and archiving of Gretchen Bender’s wider body of work, some of which included the live feed of televisual transmission. Developing from previous artworks that also function as exhibition furniture, performance stages, and lecture interventions, Oisín Byrne’s entrance curtain brings an artist of the current generation into dialogue with an artist whose influence continues to grow after her death.

Curated by Tessa Giblin Project Arts Centre extends warm thanks to the Estate of Gretchen Bender and Cay-Sophie Rabinowitz; Darren Pih, Francesco Manacorda and Mike Pinnington of Tate Liverpool; and Jonathan Ellis King for their generous support in realising ‘Gretchen Bender’.

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Who was Gretchen Bender?

Mike Pinnington

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With a number of recent exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic recognising her practice, the work of American multi-media artist Gretchen Bender is experiencing something of a moment. What took so long, asks Mike Pinnington.

In the 1980s Gretchen Bender was immersed in New York’s vibrant art scene, a contemporary of the ‘Pictures’ generation of artists (Robert Longo, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman et al) who appropriated mass media imagery for critical ends. Working with TV, video and computer generated graphics, her own work put her in the vanguard of new media artists. Commenting on the cultural landscape of late twentieth century capitalism which was, as she saw it, ‘a culture saturated by corporate self-representation’, Bender was artist as saboteur, infiltrating mass media and – as argued in Compass, Tate Liverpool’s programme guide – ‘attacking the zeitgeist on its own terms’.

Earlier in the decade she had experimented with combining multiple images in static form, perhaps most notably in The Pleasure is Back 1982, where imagery scanned from TV and art history is applied to sign-tin and highlights processes of signification and mediation. But it was works such as Wild Dead 1984 and Total Recall 1987 – examples of what Bender referred to as ‘electronic theatre’ – that displayed her tendency toward and real proficiency with cutting edge technology. This subversion of mainstream platforms went a step further still in her more commercial endeavours – music videos for REM and New Order, among others, as well as the title sequence for reality TV show America’s Most Wanted; all of which utilised Bender’s by-now-signature barrage-editing style.

Her most seminal work, which takes centre stage in the exhibition at Project Arts Centre and previously Tate Liverpool, remains Total Recall (its name a result of Bender’s trawling through movie industry trade publications such as Variety for as yet unreleased film titles): the large-scale installation consisting of 24 colour monitors and three projection screens is a startlingly pointed piece, splicing together and juxtaposing imagery from ostensibly disparate sources. The result is deeply affecting. A disconcerting, almost sinister assault on the senses (‘veteran cyberpunk composer’ Stuart Argabright’s soundtrack only augments the experience) combines clips from movies, TV commercials and broadcast news, to reframe the effect of mass media imagery on an audience, whose expectations of a traditionally passive relationship with the ‘box in the corner’ of our living rooms, is repackaged to become anything but.

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Given all of this, you may be forgiven for thinking: ‘She sounds great; why haven’t I heard of her before now?’. In the intervening years it is true that, unlike peers such as Barbara Kruger, Bender’s work hadn’t so much fallen out of vogue as it had been largely forgotten; passed over and side-lined as trends changed and moved on. Just as her work had astutely foreshadowed the coming unfettered cultural surfeit of the digital age, Bender predicted (and accepted) that her work, given its reliance on then-current technology, was likely to have a shelf-life. In a 1987 interview with Cindy Sherman (in Bomb Magazine), Bender, at a point where conversation turns to how works can run the risk of becoming ‘neutralized’, says: I think that the time limit to media-oriented artwork is an element that many media involved artists are unwilling to confront: art as I practice it or develop my ideas or aesthetics, has to do with a temporal limit to its meaningfulness in the culture – and that’s real tough.’ Acknowledging that ‘Style gets absorbed really fast by the culture,’ she continued: ‘You have to make some kind of break or glitch in the media somewhere else with a different style and shove your content into it there. It’s constantly having to accept the fact that your work will lose its strength.

While the technology with which Bender was working at the height of her creative powers may have changed exponentially, the prevailing concerns that informed and were at the centre of her practice, remain and continue to resonate today. If anything society’s reliance on the now commonplace accoutrements of twenty first century living: email, iPhones, social networking and YouTube, to name a few, renders Bender’s investigations into the mass media and political and corporate ideology increasingly relevant. So, no wonder that, if a little belatedly (and around a decade since her death), this has led to a subsequent critical re-evaluation of her work.

This text was originally published on the Tate website to accompany the exhibition Gretchen Bender at Tate Liverpool 7 November 2014 – 8 February 2015. © Tate. Reproduced with kind permission from Tate Liverpool.

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