Gretchen Bender
1951-2004
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, our guide to Tate Liverpool’s programme – ‘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…
Films