Gretchen Bender:The Perversion of the Visual

Gretchen Bender emerged in the early 1980s in New York as a contemporary of the Pictures
Generation. A commentator on the age of television, her work continues its relevancy in today’s
privatized and multi-screened cultural landscape—in many ways, even predicting its
development. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present The Perversion of
the Visual, Bender’s second exhibition with the gallery and her first in Los Angeles since 1989.
The show focuses on her efforts to break into mass media’s attempt to gloss over the severity
of cultural events and depictions of violence.

1984 marked a transition in Bender’s career; the focus of her critique shifted from
recontextualizing images by her art-world peers to targeting broader cultural issues and the
corporatized media landscape. As she once remarked, “I’m trying to examine what it is we’re
really promoting to ourselves—the cultural lies, the cultural anxieties, the cultural truths.”[1] She
adopted cutting-edge technologies, moving from silkscreens and photographs to video,
broadcast media and computer graphics, ensuring her work was never a step behind. This
allowed her to subvert the culture as it was developing. Her early use of video quickly evolved
into a multi-screen approach: the initial two-monitor work Unprotected developed into the fourmonitor Wild Dead and soon after that into the thirteen-monitor Dumping Core (all 1984), the
first of her two career-defining “electronic theater” works.

Titled in reference to the documented memory retained after a hard drive crashes and also
alluding to nuclear fears from the then-recent Three Mile Island accident, Dumping Core
combines computer animations created with Amber Denker, corporate logo graphics pulled
from broadcast TV, and images of the Salvadoran Civil War with an original soundtrack by
Stuart Argabright, Michael Diekmann and Shin Shimokawa. As Jonathan Crary noted during the
premiere staged at The Kitchen in New York: “Bender is not simply celebrating some idea of
image chaos and overload. She seems quite aware that while any image can be absorbed into
an undifferentiated flux, it can also conjoin with rigid structures of hierarchy and control.”[2]
Through her obsessive sampling of broadcast television, Bender became aware of the
psychological implications of corporate logos and branding (GE, AT&T, CBS, and NBC). These
corporations were using the most advanced technologies to not only claim authority over the
content being presented but also seduce the viewer into a passive state: “I think that corporate
computer graphics take these abstract, idealistic, deathless images and use them in a way that
makes us feel enthralled when we watch them on TV. they’re bigger, more powerful, more eternal than we are, even though these logos represent corporations that are made up of human beings. In some ways, these logos can depict
surrogates for our psyches, abstractions that make death more surreal and less real in our
imaginations.”[1]
Her early investigations into these state-of-the-art graphics can be seen in Ghostbusters (1984),
where she has combined two computer-generated heads that also appear in Dumping Core and
her earlier video, Reality Fever (1983), together with an image of her friend Cindy Sherman. The
portrait image is a precedent to the short film Volatile Memory (1988), written and directed by
Bender and Sandy Tait, whose William Gibson-inspired plot features Sherman as a cyborg
protagonist. In Untitled (Daydream Nation) (1989), Bender assembles a group of computergenerated fractal images facing forward in a psychedelic landscape, only revealing on the
backside a photograph of a Tangiers cityscape.
Also in 1984, as Dumping Core was developing, Bender encountered the photographs compiled
by Susan Meiselas in the book El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers, which depicted the
horrific violence of the US-backed Salvadoran Civil War. The undeniable horrors in the
photographs by Meiselas and her peers, like John Hoagland, have an urgency and viciousness
that are impossible to ignore. For Bender, the images laid bare the real-life tragedies that
popular television and media was trying to diminish.
Bender initially combined Hoagland’s photograph from the El Salvador publication in her work
Gremlins, which was included in 1984’s multi-venue project Artists Call Against US Intervention
in Central America. Later, in 1988, in her exhibition at Metro Pictures Gallery, she included
images by Meiselas in her works Relax and Open the Door. For the exhibition, she licensed
photographs from the library of Magnum Photos, though without a clearly defined purpose. It
was an anomaly for Bender to seek any type of permission; perhaps it was the severity of the
context that made this an exception. By then, it was known that many of the photographers in
Meiselas’ book were included on “death lists” by Salvadoran paramilitary groups.
Her attempted deference to protocol stopped as soon as she had access to the images, and
outside of Magnum’s and Meiselas’ expectations, Bender blew the images up and showed them
alongside broadcast television sets and computer-generated graphics. By combining the
corporate-funded graphics with images of US Government-funded violence, Bender was, like in
her video work, confronting the numbed viewer with an undeniable reminder of the real world
while also implicating the sources of the deception. As her friend and collaborator Denker
noted: “By taking the sexy graphics of whirling international corporate logos and interjecting
them with images of the consequences of policies that were tooled for such corporations’ gain
and profit, she questioned what America was about.”[3]
In Bender’s works Hell Raiser (1988–91) and Gremlins (1984), the use of John Hoagland’s
photograph Two young girls found alongside the highway to Comalapa Airport (1980) is now
shown with the permission of his family. Hoagland was killed in 1984 during an ambush in El
Salvador by a bullet from a large-caliber M60 machine gun, same as those supplied by the US
Government to the Salvadoran Army.
Another image from the El Salvador civil war, by an as-of-yet unknown photographer, is
presented in the work Untitled (Landscape, Computer Graphics, Death Squad) (1987). As the
artist herself puts it, “The work is about how we allow ourselves to see and, simultaneously, not
to see the socio-political landscape we’ve created for ourselves. We know we fund death
squads in El Salvador, but we never have to see the dead bodies, or we see the aestheticized
versions of them through photographs. I want us to feel how disturbing it is that we flatten our
politics of death through visual representation“.[1]
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[1] Interview with Peter Doroshenko in Gretchen Bender: Work 1981–1991 (Syracuse NY: Everson
Museum of Art, 1991).
[2] Jonathan Crary, “Gretchen Bender at Nature Morte,” Art in America 72, no. 4 (April 1984).
[3] Amber Denker in Gretchen Bender: Tracking the Thrill (Wisconsin: Poor Farm Press, 2013).
Gretchen Bender (1951–2004). Solo exhibitions include Image World, Sprüth Magers London
(2023), So Much Deathless, Red Bull Arts, New York (2019), Gretchen Bender: Work 1981–1991,
Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (both 1991), and
Total Recall, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1988). Selected group shows include the Cantor
Arts Center, Stanford (2024), Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (2023), The Menil Collection,
Houston (2023), Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth (2023), UCCA Center for Contemporary Art,
Beijing (2022), Kunsthalle Basel (2020), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023, 2019),
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2018, 1986), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
(2012), New Museum, New York (2004, 1986), and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
(1989). Her major installation Total Recall has been exhibited at The Kitchen, New York, and
Moderna Museet, Stockholm (both 1987), and Tate, Liverpool, and Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (both
2015). Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Menil Collection,
Houston.