GRETCHEN BENDER

1984 marked a transition in Bender’s career; the focus of her critique shifted fromrecontextualizing images by her art-world peers to targeting broader cultural issues and thecorporatized media landscape. As she once remarked, ‘I’m trying to examine what it is we’rereally promoting to ourselves—the cultural lies, the cultural anxieties, the cultural truths.’ Sheadopted cutting-edge technologies, moving from silkscreens and photographs to video,broadcast media and computer graphics, ensuring her work was never a step behind. Thisallowed her to subvert the culture as it was developing. Her early use of video quickly evolvedinto a multi-screen approach: the initial two-monitor work Unprotected developed into the fourmonitor Wild Dead and soon after that into the thirteen-monitor Dumping Core (all 1984), thefirst of her two career-defining ‘electronic theatre’ works.

Titled in reference to the documented memory retained after a hard drive crashes and alsoalluding to nuclear fears from the then-recent Three Mile Island accident, Dumping Corecombines computer animations created with Amber Denker, corporate logo graphics pulledfrom broadcast TV, and images of the El Salvadoran Civil War with an original soundtrack byStuart Argabright, Michael Diekmann, and Shin Shimokawa. As Jonathan Crary noted during thepremier staged at The Kitchen in New York: ‘Bender is not simply celebrating some idea ofimage chaos and overload. She seems quite aware that while any image can be absorbed intoan undifferentiated flux, it can also conjoin with rigid structures of hierarchy and control.’

Through her obsessive sampling of broadcast television, Bender became aware of thepsychological implications of corporate logos and branding (GE, AT&T, CBS, and NBC). Thesecorporations were using the most advanced technologies to not only claim authority over thecontent being presented but also seduce the viewer into a passive state: ‘I think that corporatecomputer graphics take these abstract, idealistic, deathless images and use them in a way thatmakes us feel enthralled when we watch them on TV. Somehow, they’re outside of us and they’re bigger, more powerful, more eternal than we are, even though these logos representcorporations that are made up of human beings. In some ways, these logos can depictsurrogates for our psyches, abstractions that make death more surreal and less real in ourimaginations.’

Her early investigations into these state-of-the-art graphics can be seen in Ghostbusters (1984),where she has combined a computer-generated head with Cindy Sherman’s character fromBender & Sandy Tait’s film Volatile Memory. In Untitled (Daydream Nation) (1989), Benderassembles a group of computer-generated fractal images facing forward in a psychedeliclandscape, only revealing on the backside a photograph of a Tangiers cityscape.

Also in 1984, as Dumping Core was developing, Bender encountered the photographs compiledby Susan Meiselas in the book El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers, which depicted thehorrific violence of the US-backed Salvadoran Civil War. The undeniable horrors in thephotographs by Meiselas and her peers, like John Hoagland, have an urgency and viciousnessthat are impossible to ignore. For Bender, the images laid bare the real-life tragedies thatpopular television and media was trying to diminish.

Bender initially combined Hoagland’s photograph from the El Salvador publication in her workGremlins, which was included in 1984’s multi-venue project Artists Call Against US Interventionin Central America. Later, in 1988, in her exhibition at Metro Pictures Gallery, she includedimages by Meiselas in her works Relax and Open the Door. For the exhibition, she licensedphotographs from the library of Magnum Photos, though without a clearly defined purpose. Itwas an anomaly for Bender to seek any type of permission; perhaps it was the severity of thecontext that made this an exception. By then, it was known that many of the photographers inMeiselas’s book were included on “death lists” by Salvadoran paramilitary groups.

Her attempted deference to protocol stopped as soon as she had access to the images, andoutside of Magnum’s and Meiselas’s expectations, Bender blew the images up and showedthem alongside broadcast television sets and computer-generated graphics. By combining thecorporate-funded graphics with images of US Government-funded violence, Bender was, like inher video work, confronting the numbed viewer with an undeniable reminder of the real worldwhile also implicating the sources of the deception. As her friend and collaborator Denkernoted: ‘By taking the sexy graphics of whirling international corporate logos and interjectingthem with images of the consequences of policies that were tooled for such corporations’ gainand profit, she questioned what America was about.’

In Bender’s works Hell Raiser (1988–91) and Gremlins (1984), the use of John Hoagland’sphotograph Two young girls found alongside the highway to Comalapa Airport (1980) is nowshown with the permission of his family. Hoagland was killed in 1984 during an ambush in ElSalvador by a bullet from a large caliber M-60 weapon, as supplied by the US Government tothe El Salvadoran Army.

Another image from the El Salvador civil war, by an as-of-yet unknown photographer, ispresented in the work Untitled (Landscape, Computer Graphics, Death Squad) (1987). As theartist herself puts it, ‘The work is about how we allow ourselves to see and, simultaneously, notto see the socio-political landscape we’ve created for ourselves. We know we fund deathsquads in El Salvador, but we never have to see the dead bodies, or we see the aestheticizedversions of them through photographs. I want us to feel how disturbing it is that we flatten ourpolitics of death through visual representation’