TV Text & Image (DREAM NATION)

Gretchen Bender, TV Text & Image (DREAM NATION), 1989, live television broadcast on a monitor with vinyl lettering, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Scott Hoffman, 2022.65A-B
Copied Gretchen Bender, TV Text & Image (DREAM NATION), 1989, live television broadcast on a monitor with vinyl lettering, dimensions variable, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Scott Hoffman, 2022.65A-B

Artwork Details

Title
TV Text & Image (DREAM NATION)
Artist
Date
1989
Location
Not on view
Dimensions
dimensions variable
Credit Line
Gift of Scott Hoffman
Mediums
Mediums Description
live television broadcast on a monitor with vinyl lettering
Classifications
Subjects
  • State of being — phenomenon — dream
  • Figure group
Object Number
2022.65A-B
Linked Open Data
https://edan.si.edu/saam/id/object/2022.65A-B

Artwork Description

How does today's news relate--or not--to your idea of a "dream nation"?

Unlike most screens in an art gallery, this monitor is not showing prerecorded, artist-made imagery. Instead, the artist intervenes in regular broadcast television by printing DREAM NATION on the surface of the screen. Gretchen Bender's work invites you to contrast your current take on these words with what is on TV at this very moment. When displayed in the nation's capital of Washington, DC, it can also feel site-specific, invoking this country's dreams and dreamers.

Bender was part of a generation of artists, including Barbara Kruger (whose work is on view nearby), who responded to the rising power of mass media. Using what she described as "guerilla tactics . . . to make some kind of break or glitch in the media," Bender took on television to make the "underlying patterns of social control" visible.