SEASON: SS 2019 SEASON: SS 2019

GRETCHEN BENDER: Electronic Theater

words by Lola Kramer

Gretchen Bender arrived in New York from Washington D.C. in 1978 Here (1994), a multi-disciplinary collaboration with choreographer Bill and broke into the art world after chance encounters with two in- T. Jones that poetically confronts body horror and is about mortality. dividuals who would remain in her life forever: Walter Hopps and In one room, live-streaming television from major networks plays Robert Longo. When she met them, she was part of a feminist-Marx- across monitors with phrases in black vinyl adhered to the screens. ist silkscreening collective using the immediacy of image-making At any given moment, NUCLEAR WARHEADS announces a commer- to push against a misogynist culture intent on keeping women out cial for Target; DEATHSQUAD BUDGET designates a woman winning of the canon. After moving in with Longo, Bender immediately con- the lottery; CLASS, RACE, GENDER labels a show on the Caves of nected with other downtown artists, many of whom were part of Lascaux; and PUBLIC MEMORY plays over an ad for Subaru. what Douglas Crimp termed the “Pictures Generation,” and began The work will continue to prophesize insofar as we dare to let our experimenting with the limits of appropriation tactics she recognized politics become entertainment. Considering the trajectory of the in work by artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine. Soon she visionary artist, it becomes clear that she was tapped into media was reproducing Chanel ads, war journalism, and appropriating from ahead of her time. Did she know that in 2019, YouTube algorithms successful male artists like Lichtenstein, LeWitt and Salle, reducing would tend towards increasingly extreme content? It’s disturbing to them to their most emblematic forms on tin tiles which she arranged see how prescient it remains. In her work Wild Dead I, II , III, pirated in the shape of crosses. An arresting image of Bender from Longo's logos by GE and the AT&T “Death Star” are edited together along- “Men in the Cities” series fell into the same visual world as Jack side drawings by Keith Haring, engineered chromatic sequences, Henry Abbott, the convict and best-selling author whom Norman cartoons and a razor slicing into the Videodrome film title. For Mailer helped get out of prison in 1981, only to murder a waiter six Bender, reality was already sci-fi; the only way to change the time weeks later. These and others all became equally flattened assets she was in was to engage the collective psyche on a deeper level. incorporated into her burgeoning visual lexicon. She met Woody (Her video for New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” and the title se- Vasulka, co-founder of the Kitchen, who was interested in image- quence she edited for America’s Most Wanted still play on laptops making that didn’t require a camera, and taught herself how to edit and iPhones everywhere.) One imagines that Red Bull’s decision while helping Longo with a music video for the Golden Palominos. to update, conserve, and digitize Bender’s work and archive is in She was establishing parameters for what she was capable of, but keeping with the artist’s own desires to be at the helm of technol- grew less interested in the gallery scene, and more interested in, ogy, and shows an undeniable commitment to preserving the legacy as she says, “making art with media that’s alive,” shaking the audi- of the artist—an otherwise expensive undertaking unavailable to ence out of passivity. When Bender met Amy Denker, an artist and most non-commercial institutions. Yet, it would be remiss to ignore computer graphics animator in the CG Lab at the New York Institute the phantom presence of “branded content” that lingers over the of Technology (NYIT) who began sneaking her in after hours to use exhibition. It's not clear if the brand’s production of the exhibition the new state-of-the-art computer graphic equipment, she discov- underscores Bender’s vision for the work or co-opts it. Perhaps ered how to use media against itself, and began to make “electronic this is what she meant when she described media as a “cannibal- theater.” She was “tracking the thrill” of the electrifying new media istic river... a current that absorbs everything.” Volatile Memory, a expanding the visual field in the ‘80s by any means necessary. William Gibson-inspired short film written and directed by Bender Produced by brand-turned-non-commercial-art-space Red Bull Arts and Sandy Tait in 1988, is a cyborgian sci-fi thriller in which Cindy New York and co-organized by the artist’s estate (she died in 2004), Sherman plays the female protagonist running from the bad guys, “Gretchen Bender: So Much Deathless” is structured around a series played by Michel Auder and Robert Longo. With a plot that takes of recorded oral histories from contemporaries whose stories illus- place in the “near present,” the film emphasizes an obsession with trate a comprehensive mounting of her oeuvre. This rich oral history the “deathless” quality of technology. It also demonstrates that not recounts the staging of her magnum opus, Total Recall (1987), when only did Bender want to intervene in the very flow of media that it premiered in the legendary club Danceteria, set to the pulsing was simultaneously entering into popular culture, she recognized tracks of Stuart Argabright, and in an actual theater where visitors its unsettling corporeal qualities and wanted to become one with would have to purchase a ticket before experiencing this vertiginous it. I’d like to think that “So Much Deathless” is also set in the “near world of immersive media. Other accounts detail the making of Still/ present,” and that she is very much, still here. K THE FIRST POSTHUMOUS RETROSPECTIVE OF THE WORK OF AMERICAN MULTI-DISCIPLINARY ARTIST GRETCHEN BENDER (1951–2004) IS ON VIEW THROUGH 28 JULY 2019 AT RED BULL ARTS, NEW YORK. © ESTATE OF GRETCHEN BENDER. IMAGE COURTESY OF RED BULL ARTS NEW YORK 56 57