Gretchen Bender

"I'll mimic the media—but I'll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there."

–– Gretchen Bender, 1987

Gretchen Bender was an artist whose multidisciplinary practice, including printmaking, video, television, and sculpture, examined rising mass media, developing technologies, and an increasingly pervasive corporate culture.

After studying printmaking at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Bender worked in Washington, DC, for five years as part of the activist printmaking collective P Street Paperworks, advocating for women artists. In 1978, she moved to New York City. There, Bender began to focus her political critiques on mass media's growing prevalence and power, joining artists like Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman in utilizing pre-existing imagery to examine societal values. In an early silkscreen series, The Pleasure is Back (1982), Bender engaged with the effects of mediation, using shared scale and medium to create visual equivalences across a stream of sources: reproductions of contemporary paintings, television scenes, commercial advertising, and other found images. "You couldn't fall into the pieces and contemplate," Bender remarked. Instead, the resulting works conjure the "scan" of mass media.

In 1982, Bender pivoted from still images to television, which she posited as "the more visually overwhelming environment." In her TV Text & Image series (1986–97), Bender affixed black vinyl text onto television monitors that screen live programming. By forcing viewers to read the live broadcast through her added phrases—like "DREAM NATION" in SAAM's TV Text & Image (DREAM NATION) (1989)—Bender brings critical connections into daily viewing. Around mid-decade, Bender began producing videos that subverted the medium's usually seamless transitions, using dizzyingly quick cuts to join network news, computer graphics, Hollywood movies, and more.

During this period, Bender also worked on immersive multi-screen and sound installations, like her groundbreaking Total Recall (1987), which featured twenty-four monitors and three projection screens. Such works created what she deemed a "'sense-around' feeling" and posed questions about how to be an active viewer in the face of mass media's barrage of visual information. Bender engaged with the volume and pacing of mass media production in subsequent sculptures, such as the large-scale People in Pain (1988, The Hirshhorn), which tackles the "throw-away quality" of popular film.

Bender was well aware that the object of her critiques always threatened to neutralize her work, calling the media "a cannibalistic river. A flow or current that absorbs everything." She even infiltrated this dynamic by utilizing her signature quick cuts for commercial enterprises. Bender edited music videos for metal band Megadeath (1986) and rock band R.E.M. (1987) and crafted the title sequence of the television show America's Most Wanted (1988) in a way that she hoped would make the program "a little less racist or sexist."

In all contexts, Bender recognized the inescapability of this rush of images and so encouraged broader attention to its workings. Her progressive thinking reverberated beyond her premature death. As Bender claimed, "We need to stay alert to the political implications of the conceptual evolutions of our newer technologies."

Authored by Katherine Markoski, American Women's History Initiative Writer and Editor, 2024.