Gretchen Bender

Gretchen Bender emerged alongside the Pictures Generation in New York, but turned her focus toward audiovisual production instead of print, critiquing televised media. Her video works assume the form and style of corporate-controlled broadcast television, appropriating its images to highlight the politics of mediation in the contemporary world. “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,” Bender has said. Her major 1987 work Total Recall is a 24-monitor multi-channel piece of “electronic theater.” The work barrages the viewer with clips of advertisements, Hollywood films, commercial animations, and corporate logos. Bender’s framing highlights the power endowed in these images, and in the way they assault the viewer, she suggests the violence of corporate media.