Gretchen Bender was an American artist who worked primarily
in film, video, and photography. Her work shares the concerns of the generation
of early 1980s Pictures Artists, which included household names such as Cindy
Sherman. Although seemingly overlooked in recent years, Bender stars as part of
Tate’s Autumn/Winter season Making Things Public, with an
exhibition addressing how she experimented with found images to explore ideas
surrounding the transmission and distribution of culture.
According to the New York observer, “Gretchen Bender’s art
is having a moment” but sadly, this somehow doesn’t translate to the show at the
Tate. Having visited the exhibition twice now, the emptiness of the gallery has
been apparent – both of people and of art. The sparseness of the
exhibition space hits you as you enter the gallery, and with barely ten works
to fill the huge white cube, the stark contrast from the bustling,
conversation-inspiring buzz of the Warhol exhibition next door is apparent.
Works on display include Bender’s opening credits for US TV
show America’s Most Wanted along with four music videos she
produced in collaboration with director Robert Longo. As interesting as these
could potentially be, the films are housed in a small room on one screen on
constant rotation. I found this a perplexing curatorial decision, given that
next door, Warhol’s archive of film and television programmes are each awarded
their own screen, suggesting a level of importance granted to the Warhol’s work
which is severely lacking in the Bender exhibition.
The real coup of the show is Total Recall (1987),
an eight-channel installation with 24 TV monitors and two rear projections
combining corporate logos from TV commercials with computer-generated graphics
by Amber Denker, doctored clips from Oliver Stone’s Salvador and
a post-punk soundtrack by Stuart Argabright. The installation is walled off,
taking up half of the entire exhibition space and is overwhelming to
behold: as the darkened room is gradually filled with light, colour and sound
from the huge wall of screens, the viewer is immersed in a nightmare of
cascading corporate iconography, and snippets of eerily smiling faces from
American TV advertising. The booming electronic soundtrack pulses through the
floor as your eyes struggle to keep up with the aggressively rapid barrage
of flashing images on the screens. Total Recall provides a
mesmerising critique of the violence and commoditisation of images
in society, as Bender exposes the false nature of corporate messaging
and the sinister excesses of television itself.
Elsewhere, a small handful of Bender’s photographic works,
including an unsettling image of recently killed bodies make up the rest of the
show. There isn’t enough here to reassure the visitor of Bender’s photographic
prowess and the installed works do little to capture the imagination in
the same way as her incredible installation piece.
In the 1980s, Bender anticipated our current state of image
saturation, using hypnotic repetitions of television footage, and aggressive
walls of sound to create immersive viewing experiences. Appropriating
images from mass media and using a plethora of cultural references, Bender
directly addresses the powerful influence of mass broadcast media. By
contrasting the menacing force of corporations and technology with
the struggle of individual human beings through pictorial references, Bender’s
work is overtly political and subversive in its intent.
With all this fascinating theory behind the work, it would
have been great to see more of her famed “electronic theatre” (sic). Where are
digital installations Dumping Core and Wild Dead (both
1984)? And what about the infamous People in Pain (1988) which
is noticeably missing here? It’s a shame that Tate were unable to acquire
more of her works for the show, as without these large-scale immersive pieces,
what we are left with hardly uncovers anything new, nor showcases the talent
and influence boasted of this artist in the interpretation.
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