Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Gretchen Bender American (b.1951)
UNTITLED (FROM THE PLEASURE IS BACK SERIES) (1982) photo/serigraph on sign tin
19" x 21"
STYLE: mass media ©Gretchen Bender
Gretchen Bender uses photo-silkscreening as a mass-media tool which allows her to re-present cultural information. This untitled work is from her "The Pleasure is Back" series, a group of images printed on commercial sign-tin. Her use of this material is an important indication of her attitude. She views these images as her own sign language, even though they are usually "found" or appropriated images. Bender has said, "I believe in my right to exhibit whatever I feel expresses a relationship between cultural politics and images." (quoted from 1991 interview with Peter Doroshenko)

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Gretchen Bender, Work 1981-1991, Everson Museum, Syracuse, 1991 Interview with Peter Doroshenko:
"GB: I had earned my living as a silkscreener and I had silkscreening equipment but no money, so silkscreening was the cheapest thing to use. But what was really important about it was that it was a mass-media tool. That I had printed on sign-tin was an important indication of my attitude. I was viewing them as signs, scans, a sign language...I started to do work with T.V. in early 1982...I started by putting the film positives from my silkscreened images over the face of the TV so that the broadcast flow of pictures across the screen continually interacted with the static transparency adhered to the screen...The TV imagery became recharged psychologically and became an interactive form for the viewer. This was a very critical step in my development...Given material that is violent, racist, and sexist, I try to make it a little less violent, less racist, and less sexist. I'm still involved in a kind of questionable propaganda, but one small step makes a difference. At first, I turned down that work because of all the complications and all the incredible decisions you have to make about what you're promoting. But I decided to do it because I had a way to do what I considered socially positive propaganda."

Roberta Smith, NYTimes, 11/21/86
" Gretchen Bender's roughly burnished steel reliefs are sinister - if Darth Vader made art, it might look like this - yet they require intimate contact. The narrow slots that run across or down their centers contain tiny illuminated messages or equally small filmstrip-size rows of images. ''Revolution'' gleams out of one slot, once you have your nose to it: a high-tech incitement to riot that also invokes the Beatles' hit tune. ''No Death'' promises another piece, and then, a couple of feet along the slot, comes an equally tiny, passive response, ''O.K.'' Another piece consists of a blown-up news photo of stone-throwing South Korean students that Bender has draped with rows of long strips of images taken from television and rendered abstract. This may be intended to contrast ''art'' with ''life,'' but the effect remains sophomoric. So far Bender's main accomplishment lies in the way the metal reliefs force one to be personal with the impersonal, that is, with the forces of technology that shape our lives. The encounter she sets up is perhaps esthetically limited and emotionally fleeting - like a scary one-liner - but it has a philosophical and spatial quotient that is quite unsettling and worth developing."

Interview by Cindy Sherman with Gretchen Bender (journal unknown)
"GB: The only constant to the style you develop is the necessity to change it. Style gets absorbed really fast by the culture, basically by absorbing the formal elements or the structure and then subverting the content...It's constantly having to accept the fact that your work will lose its strength...Accepting the fact that your work is going to become neutralized—faster than you ever dreamed...I don't think the media is something that listens in the way we're talking about. I think of the media as a cannibalistic river. A flow or a current that absorbs everything. It's not "about." There is no consciousness or mind. It's about absorbing and converting..."