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
Copied
Artwork Details
- Title
- TV Text & Image (DREAM NATION)
- Artist
- Date
- 1989
- Location
- 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
Artwork Description
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.