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Retail Drugs Black Tie ‘There’s a particular brand of madness that occurs when an artist gets bored of their own tricks. Jake Brooks didn’t experience some dark night of the soul; he just got sick of guitar and ran out of cassette tapes. Sometimes the most radical artistic shifts have the most mundane origins, and Factory Reset, Retail Drugs’ third full-length record in fifteen months, is what happens when rage gets funnelled through a laptop instead of a four-track: the sound of someone taking an industrial drill to a server room mid-breakdown.’— Hayley Scott
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Moor Mother, Wooden Elephant, Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, Dirk Kaftan Don’t Die ‘For around a decade, Philadelphia’s Camae Ayewa has been constructing sonically experimental and thematically radical works of art. As Moor Mother, the musician and poet’s art often offers searing takedowns of structures of oppression and on the imperialism, colonialism and brutality that has resulted in generations of Black trauma. She delves deep into this on her 2019 album Analog Fluids Of Sonic Black Holes, the sense of widespread socio-political discontent illustrated by the record’s brutal, auditory chaos. Now, in her latest release, Moor Mother reissues that same album as a brand new orchestrated edition, featuring the string quintet Wooden Elephant and The Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, conducted by Dirk Kaftan, once again blurring the boundaries between genre and art to present something viscerally powerful.’— Arusa Qureshi
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G Lucas Crane Vortex Technique ‘G Lucas warps, mashes, unspools, hacks, grinds and morphs his archive of cassettes and manipulated field recordings into a tapestry of lovecraftian horror-audio, where ghosts speak in machine language, crypto grannies cross state lines, petty jewels are heisted, dogs are licked, tubs are thumped, wizards are thrown from their carts, caves exude their swampy ichor, and a quivering host of live performances and radio remixes are finger-painted together like an adorable sound centipede.’— Artsy
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Die Spitz I Hate When Girls Die ‘Ava Schrobilgen, Chloe De St. Aubin, Ellie Livingston, and Kate Halter are part of a generation that came of age in the shadows of endless consumption. Their songs gnash their teeth at that reality, the band trading instruments and vocals with abandon and a refusal to be contained in a singular genre box that mirrors the album’s restless themes. What emerges is a somewhat slippery and kaleidoscopic sound, chewing from punk, doom, grunge and shoegaze, but not sitting comfortably inside any of them. Their sound shifts tones, colours, and levels of intensity without losing momentum and it’s underpinned by cohesion as well as the sense that each track is part of a larger, unruly organism.’— Diana Revell
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Jung An Tagen Revenge of the Speaker People ‘Stefan Juster aka Jung An Tagen is known for conceptual works and has a large back catalogue of intriguing ideas and sounds. Revenge of the Speaker People is another adventurous release, one which takes the Otoacoustic discoveries of David T. Kemp and applies them to a techno framework. OAEs are fragile and can collapse quickly when combined with other elements. Jung An Tagen’s success in combining OAEs with beats is therefore quite an achievement, without precedent.’— Editions Mego
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Abhorrent Expanse Enter the Misanthropocene ‘Arriving from the Midwest by way of R’lyeh, Abhorrent Expanse‘s journey began with 2022’s Gateways to Resplendence, a stunning hybrid of extreme metal and avant-garde improvised music. The title track opens the album with requisite madness. For a few seconds, dissonant death metal seems the order of the day. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that these guys are operating at a different level of madness than most. Where Imperial Triumphant are twisting their riffs into insane jazz configurations, Abhorrent Expanse are foregoing riffs altogether. Instead, they create horrifying atmospheres with pure improvisation. Blasting drums complement the stream-of-conscious guitar work the way free jazz is supposed to, only this time it’s drenched in metal.’— Todd Manning
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Eric Wetherell: Sky (1975) ‘An eerie, unsettling benchmark for wyrd television in the 1970s, Sky was created by Doctor Who writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin. The series is widely acknowledged as one of several outstanding children’s dramas produced by HTV alongside Children Of The Stones, King Of The Castle and Into The Labyrinth. A brooding atmosphere is sustained across Sky‘s seven episodes, aided by Eric Wetherell’s stark score. Featuring harpsichord, glockenspiel, timpani, cello and primitive electronics, the music is tense and atonal, verging on experimental.’— Buried Treasure
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Authentically Plastic Baksimba Simulacrum ‘Authentically Plastic’s sophomore album is a dense mass of oozing rhythms and viscous harmonies that surges in all directions at once. Its predecessor, 2022’s critically acclaimed ‘Raw Space’, had prioritized a level of intensity that Authentically Plastic dubbed “sonic flatness”, developed in response to Western art’s obsession with depth of field. ‘Rococo Ruine’ doesn’t go back to the drawing board, but refines and widens the concept even further – without deepening it. The potent, austere rhythms that grounded ‘Raw Space’ have been stabilized and shredded, pasted into more consistent repetitions that act as an anchor for Authentically Plastic’s surprising melodic hallucinations.’— HAKUNA KULALA
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Patriarchy Good Boy ‘A lifelong Los Angeleno, Actually Huixzenga embodies both the hypersexualised spectacle of Hollywood and its seedy underbelly. Actually’s dad is Dr. Robert Huizenga, the doctor for O.J. Simpson during his murder trial and later Charlie Sheen’s physician. Her grandfather helped build the first atomic bomb, and her mom was a Playboy Playmate. Explains a lot.’— Effective-Part-9419
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The Bug vs Ghost Dubs Down ‘Structured in a versus format with each artist trading blows, the album has a tension that makes its otherwise stone-faced music thrilling. If Machine was intended to make audiences physically uncomfortable, Martin’s tracks on Implosion use the same sonic devices for more introspective ends. Each of his contributions is named after a venue or nightclub, and these desolate tracks can feel like they’re reverberating through long-abandoned, decaying spaces. The music is lumbering, even by his standards, with basslines so belligerent they might trigger the lunk alarm.’— Andrew Ryce
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Rip Van Winkle Prose Kaiser ‘Pollard leans harder into indie art territory here, with scratchy textures, jagged guitar lines, and smaller arrangements. The album thrives on spontaneity and grit—each track sounds like it was captured mid-thought, but with a clear melodic backbone. The instrumentation is rough-edged but never lazy, with snappy transitions and that unmistakable Pollard vocal swagger holding it all together.’— The Fire Note
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purity olympics strange earnest noise music ‘aly eleanor is a minneapolis-based musician, editor, journalist, poet, zinemaker, theatre artist, and writer. her criticism, essays, and interviews have been featured in numerous publications. she makes music as purity olympics.’— a.e.
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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, At its best, early MTV could be a total gateway to art and video artists and filmmakers. That was a boon. ** Carsten, Hey. I wouldn’t call Hitchcock’s films square or stale. But I do think he did something with Dali. As did Disney. The Disney/Dali stuff, which I don’t think was released officially but is out there on the tubes, is pretty terrific. It would be great to see you. My schedule will be dependent on when I’m traveling with ‘RT’, and I’m not sure about that yet, but chances are I will be around at least once in a while. We can check in about the timing later. Actually, back in the 60s when nudist colonies were a thing in the US, they were actually pretty non-sexual. Not that I ever went to one to verify that. There was one in the hills right behind my junior high school, and sometimes you could hear them chanting and going ‘Ommmm’ and stuff. ** Lucas, She was great. Really under-appreciated when she was alive. I used to go see her work in galleries, and people would say, ‘She’s Robert Longo’s girlfriend’, which I guess she was for a while, like that was the only reason her work was being shown. Even though her work is infinitely more interesting than Longo’s. Everyone, New poem by Lucas here. Cool, I’ll read it later. Indeed about Myles. Congrats on the smokeless day. Hang in there. Right, stress can = canker sores. That makes sense. ** Hugo, Can one be too addicted to the uncanny? What’s the fallout? I do remember about your friend who’d been sex-trafficked. Crazy story. Well, true story. Thick as hell. My coffee is cold now, but it still works. ** HaRpEr //, Most people start with ‘Anti-Oedipus’, and it’s certainly great. As ‘Difference and Repetition’. But, yeah, you could find a topic of his that you’re into and start there. He covered a lot of bases. His writing on film is great, for one. That is complete nonsense that you have to be gay to really get my work. I think that’s total bullshit. If you’re gay, you have a different slant or focus point maybe, that’s all. A lot of the most exciting responses to my work have been from people who don’t identify as gay, whatever that means. Agreed about the term queer. I feel infinitely more comfortable under that rubric. ** kenley, Perfecting the application: I remember that phase not fondly. Only a day or two’s work, amazing. That waiting a week is probably a really good idea. Maybe not too much longer than that so you don’t lose your obsession. I edit in such a weird, complicated way, it’s hard to even describe in my head. For me, concision, tightness, removing anything that doesn’t absolutely need to be there or is beautiful/inventive enough to be important. Kinda like how I describe filmmaking, yes. Sounds very familiar. Interesting about how you located your singing voice. I had a friend who sang in a Screamo band, and he just went for broke and didn’t take any caution, and now he talks like a how old chainsmokers talk in movies. Cool. Your singing voice is more than sufficiently powerful and intense, in that video at least. ** Uday, Excellent timing: snowstorm. You’re in that class that Zac and I are Zoom visiting? Whoa. I won’t ask you to hold up a sign like at an airport that says Uday. Unless that strikes your fancy. Wild! ** jeestun, Very beautifully put. I have a very hard time imagining non-readers’ life trajectories too, even though I do have a fair number of friends who haven’t opened a book since high school. Sauna, nice. I like them, but after about ten minutes in one I get antsy. Relaxing is not one of my specialties. But the nakedness is nice. Or others’ nakedness at least. Blahblah, enjoy what the swirling water occasions to the max. ** Okay. Today I made you one of my gig posts starring some tracks I’ve been finding interesting of late. See if that occasions any mind melds, and I’ll see you tomorrow.
‘Gretchen Bender moved to New York in 1978 and had her first solo show there in 1983, when she was thirty-two. She fast became a fixture of an East Village art scene centered on the Nature Morte gallery and the tireless publishing and curating efforts of Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo, a milieu that featured artists such as Sarah Charlesworth, Jessica Diamond, Kevin Larmon, Peter Nagy, Steven Parrino, David Robbins, and Julia Wachtel. Perhaps not all of those names ring a bell, and it’s likely Bender’s wouldn’t have, either, only a few years ago. Which raises the question, Why was she almost lost? And why has she now been suddenly rediscovered?
‘As her posthumous retrospective at Red Bull Arts New York testifies, Bender pioneered new ways of using information management as an artistic medium. Starting out in Washington, DC, as a member of a Marxist-feminist printmaking collective, she quickly expanded her arsenal to include electronic as well as other types of screens. She worked hard to locate her art on the cutting edge of video technology, hanging around the labs at the New York Institute of Technology and researching the latest in vector graphics and computer animation. In her electronic works, she graduated quickly from single-channel, single-monitor video, as in Reality Fever, 1983, to pieces that deploy several channels across any number of screens. Bender’s most elaborate version of what she dubbed “electronic theater,” the eighteen-minute long Total Recall, 1987, not only spreads eight channels across twenty-four monitors but also includes projections onto three large screens.
‘The Red Bull show is split roughly between static wall works and Bender’s progressively more expansive video pieces. Half the galleries are filled with laminated color photographs mounted on Masonite or tin and arranged in different groupings. Bender’s stark juxtapositions pit sci-fi movie stills against grisly war-correspondent photos and shots of advertising spokespeople next to notable artworks of the time (by the likes of Jonathan Borofsky, A. R. Penck, or David Salle). Most of the other rooms resemble televisual Laundromats, each lined with a phalanx of TV monitors on which tumble talking heads, narrative fragments, sales pitches, live news segments, athletic matches, ecstatic game-show revelations, and twirling computer graphics.
‘A riddle characterizes all of Bender’s output. If TV’s deluge of information flattens distinctions and evacuates meaning, folding everything from the most banal to the most urgent into its undifferentiated flow, how is it that this only strengthens, rather than diminishes, its relation to power? Bender was careful to temper desensitizing excess with regular injections of artificial exhilaration. Stupor is countered by hyperbole, courtesy of regularly unleashed attention-grabbing techniques: swooping and exploding visuals, music that alternates between the solemn and the frenetic. We see journalists comb battle sites and families celebrate their new breakfast cereal while animated corporate logos repeatedly perform flyovers. Everything is clichéd, yet—like the vitrine-style refrigerators, replete with Red Bull energy drinks, that dot the exhibition space—also seems geared to accelerate breathing and pulse rates.
‘Does Bender’s work overwhelm and incapacitate or does it spark critical consciousness? In an unsatisfying way, both. Viewers are definitely made hyperaware of just how underequipped they are in the face of torrential corporate-sponsored information. In Aggressive Witness—Active Participant, 1990, eight TV sets are lined up on the wall, each tuned to a different live broadcast. On the glass of each set, a phrase appears in vinyl lettering: DEATH SQUAD BUDGET, PEOPLE WITH AIDS, NO CRITICISM. The unmoving, all-caps seriousness of the phrases literally defies the nonstop parade of pedestrian programming underneath. But that’s the problem: While there are chance moments when the two seem to syntactically relate, mostly what the viewer confronts is a yawning disconnect between issues of monumental importance and the distraction induced by information’s tireless temporal undertow.
‘Which makes Bender’s oeuvre less about television per se than about being constantly targeted by multiple information sources at once. Sound familiar? Right now on my computer screen, there are several windows stacked one atop the other—Word documents, a couple of open folders, available tabs arrayed on my internet browser, some PDFs, my email. I pride myself on being a manager of information, and at the same time feel trapped in a permanent management crisis. In our attention economy of endless scanning and scrolling, information suspends subjects between vigilant attentiveness and numbing exhaustion, evoking the experience not so much of television as of a later invention: entertainment systems that combine game controllers with interactive video or computer displays.
‘In the end, this helps explain why Bender could have fallen off the art-world radar in the middle of the 1990s, only to resurface today. As her aesthetic became more high-tech, the art world moved instead toward the lower depths of abjection, scatter art, and slackerdom. Moreover, Bender’s view of corporate culture as a homogenizing onslaught was at odds with the premillennial interest in the cultural politics of difference as well as with the consensus view that VCRs, cable TV, and the internet equaled a dawning era of consumer empowerment. Today, of course, information culture is no longer greeted with such across-the-board optimism. Hence the renewed interest in Bender’s more blatantly corporate, dystopian vision.
‘Interesting, then, that it’s a corporate sponsor, Red Bull, that has enthusiastically stepped up to not only assemble Bender’s body of work but also make the substantial dollar investment in digitally restoring such a complex, multivideo Gesamtkunstwerk as Total Recall. (Credit for originally unearthing Bender goes not to Red Bull but to the artist Philip Vanderhyden, who in 2012 curated a survey of Bender’s all-but-lost video pieces that traveled from the Poor Farm in Little Wolf, Wisconsin, to the Kitchen in New York the following year.) Bender herself was not against working with corporate clients—quite the opposite: She directed music videos for bands like Babes in Toyland and also came up with the original opening credits for the Fox TV show America’s Most Wanted. “I’m glad if I get corporate support,” she told her friend Cindy Sherman in a 1987 Bomb magazine interview. “I’m trying to infiltrate and mimic the mainstream media.” That Red Bull in turn has been so welcoming of Bender’s infiltration perhaps reflects poorly on her work’s critical aspirations. More likely, though, it’s a testament to the corporate strategy of embracing critique as a way to accrue cultural capital and “edge.”
‘Sadly, Bender fell victim to cancer the same year that Google made its initial public offering and a year before TheFacebook became facebook.com. What’s most prescient about her art is the way it intuited how representation was coming under siege; how the time needed to reflect on the spatial and metaphoric relationship between the manifest signifier and its latent, hermeneutically obtained signified was being paved over by communication’s more lateral and metonymic temporality: the fast-paced attention and reaction to its unspooling ticker tape of information. Since then, pragmatics has seemingly overtaken semantics. Beyond readers and viewers, the subjects of culture today are media users. Media now constitutes a logistical system as well as a meaning system, allowing for not just the circulation of content but the organization and management of everyday activities: desktops, contacts, calendars, carts, bookmarks, playlists, wish lists, folders, filters, friends. Not just representing our world back to us, corporate media now seemingly license our actions within it. What one would give to see Bender parse such a state of affairs.’ — Lane Relyea, Artforum
Panel Discussion of “Gretchen Bender: Tracking the Thrill”
_____ Interviewed by Cindy Sherman from BOMB
Cindy Sherman It seems as if your critical target is Corporate America because your work isolates and diffuses corporate logos and television advertising. How do you feel about a corporation buying one of your works?
Gretchen Bender I’d feel fine about it. I think it’s to their great credit that one corporation has bought my work. Didn’t Reagan say the corporate sector ought to support the arts? I’m trying to infiltrate and mimic the mainstream media. I’m glad if I get corporate support.
CS Do you think the work will enlighten them?
GB I think that maybe some of the people who work in the corporation might actually be surprised. But I am not that optimistic. I think, basically that by the time a corporation has decided to buy my work, that it is a carcass. The effectiveness of the work has already left it and only the structure remains. It’s already been neutralized. In general, I assume corporations buy work once it is politically neutralized.
CS How does it become neutralized? Time?
GB Time—like after ten minutes! I think that the time limit to media-oriented artwork is an element that many media involved artists are unwilling to confront: art as I practice it or develop my ideas or aesthetics, has to do with a temporal limit to its meaningfulness in the culture—and that’s real tough. It’s hard to make art through the use of guerrilla tactics, where 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. You have to make some kind of break or glitch in the media somewhere else with a different style and shove your content into it there. It’s constantly having to accept the fact that your work will lose its strength. You just go on, learning to vary strategies; to recognize when to go underground and when to emerge.
CS Second guessing.
GB Accepting the fact that your work is going to become neutralized—faster than you ever dreamed. It’s a really weird feeling but it’s a given, for me, at this point, so I’m just going with the given in that situation and trying to think on my feet.
CS I remember seeing the piece you did with all the movie titles on it.
GB None of the films had been released.
CS At the time, none of the titles made any sense to me. Later I saw the piece and it was, “Oh, yeah, I know every one of those movies!” At first viewing the titles sounded unbelievable, ridiculous.
GB There was a built in obsolescence to that work, a definite time limit. When I showed it afterthe films came out the reaction was already, “Did I see that movie? What is that title? Do I remember that?” Another level that sculpture was working on was the anticipatory quality—you’re going to learn something, or this movie is going to mean something … you want to know you have a desire—and the piece promotes these anticipations.
CS Just through the titles?
GB Yes, and I put special effect sparkles on it to heighten the anticipatory quality. The film industry has ad campaigns and gossip column items, to give you that anticipatory quality which I made more visually concise with the sparkles.
CS Did you randomly choose titles?
GB No, I got a list from Hollywood Reporter or Variety—the release dates for the next six months of all the films from the major film companies. We recognize the film industry as a very important part of our culture economically and aesthetically and I think it’s a whole area that should be provoked more. Film and its invocations are much more powerful instruments economically and politically in our lives than we seem aware of. We say we’re aware of it, but in a glib way.
CS Especially since most of the corporations who own movie companies also own TV stations and radio stations … and oil.
GB Own the world—the mechanisms that make the world run.
CS Do you choose the visual images for your work, for instance the strips from the TV printer that you used. Is that also arbitrary?
GB It’s not quite as arbitrary as is looks. I tend to want to depict all the computer graphics that are on the television because I think the next area of visual expansion and psychological repression is there. Also, Return of the Living Dead was a piece I did that included a video printout of the evening news the day Reagan visited Bitburg in 1985. The TV graphics on the newscast depicted stun gun torture by the police; child abuse by daycare center workers; Vietnam Memorial services and of course Reagan laying a wreath on the gravesite of German SS dead.
CS A storyboard.
GB Yes, it gave me pause.
CS When the space ship blew up about a year ago you were taping everything on television. Did you ever use that?
GB That happened when I had a TV piece up at Metro Pictures. There were 12 monitors on the wall, each tuned to a different channel and each stenciled with the name of an artist in the show. When the space shuttle blew up, the piece became a macabre choreography of each network’s depiction of the space shuttle disaster.
CS What timing.
GB Brought to you by all of the artists in the show.
CS In that piece you were running regular television. I thought you were taping …
GB I started taping when the bombing of Libya happened. It was after the show and I had all the TV’s in my studio and a couple of VCR’s. I was working in the studio one afternoon and all of a sudden Libya was happening on all the different networks. I started taping that—NBC came on first with the scoop—it was a weird sense of …
CS Being right there.
GB Weird.
CS Did you first start working with video out of dissatisfaction with the static works? Did they evolve together?
GB It was a natural evolution going from the magazines and photos of the news. It seemed obvious to me that the next area was television which is an incredible goldmine for the flow of the pulse, the permutations that happen daily, in the culture.
CS You were using it anyway, taking photographs off the screen.
GB Yes, I started taking stills, incorporating film positives of popular art over images from broadcasting. I thought in the early ’80s you guys [Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Sarah Charlesworth, Richard Prince etc.] had done such important work on the print media—the photograph. And it seemed like the next area to similarly deconstruct was television. I quickly got caught up in the way in which TV moves, the current. The movement, not even the sequence, but the movement that flattened content. From that equivalent flow I tried to force some kind of consciousness of underlying patterns of social control.
CS It’s so strange being on this side of the interview.
GB I know, I feel I should start asking what you think.
CS Maybe you’ve already answered this but would you want to see the media affected by your work?
GB I don’t think the media is something that listens in the way that we’re talking about. I think of the media as a cannibalistic river. A flow or current that absorbs everything. It’s not “about.” There is no consciousness or mind. It’s about absorbing and converting.
CS What if your video tapes were on TV, say PBS, would that be defeating your purpose?
GB There are some very fine video artists who work effectively on public television. I’m taking a different tact. I’m trying to create an overview of an environment and at this point I’m not able to do it on one channel so I create a theatrical exposition of it with multiple channels. In the past three years, I’ve surrounded myself and the audience with an environment and then turned up the voltage—to create a criticality. 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.
___ Show
Total Recall (1987) Evocative of the effects of a highly coordinated, techno-military image industry, Total Recall takes the form of a kind of electronic theater, one using familiar icons and effects culled from mass culture. Bender borrowed the title for the work after reading in Variety magazine that a film was being made based on the Philip K. Dick short story. Viewers see appropriated clips from Oliver Stone’s film Salvador (1986), Olympic athletes, military fighter jets, and corporate logos from American companies like GE and CBS, among other things. The onslaught of images enacted through Bender’s pioneering use of quick editing—carried along by a soundscape composed by Stuart Argabright—gestures to deep structural patterns and belief systems that govern the image stream. Bender coined the term sense-around to describe the heightened responsiveness that she aimed to engender through her media installations. Like many of her peers in the 1980s, Bender was concerned with the media landscape, but rather than extract and distill, she chose to multiply and amplify.
People in Pain (1988) For the original work (which was unfortunately destroyed after Bender’s death), the artist began with a list of every Hollywood movie that was in production for a six-month period between 1987 and 1988. Bender then printed the titles in a uniform font onto hardened black vinyl that resembled the crumpled, glistening appearance of a trash bag. Some of the movies—Dirty Dancing, Fatal Attraction, Full Metal Jacket, and Predator, for instance—are remembered today. Most are forgotten. Others, such as Word of Honor and Cry Moon, were never released at all. The work comments on the non-stop flow of often mindless entertainment media that inundates American culture every year. The titles are flattened out in presentation so that no single film is privileged over another: they’re all just part of a metaphorical trash flow.
Untitled (the pleasure is back I) (1982)
Reality Fever (1983) An early, single-channel version of Bender’s video collages, one with found, created, and manipulated imagery, including a Folgers coffee commercial, a children’s superhero cartoon, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Wild Dead I, II, III (Danceteria Version) (1984) An early stab at two-channel video shown in the exhibition, Wild Dead I, II, III (Danceteria Version), was produced in 1984, the same year AT&T was forced to start divesting its holdings after an antitrust lawsuit begun in the 1970s, and includes splices from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) with images of AT&T’s new Earth-shaped logo. In Cronenberg’s dystopian horror, TV viewers are unwittingly brainwashed by their sets, consuming seemingly banal broadcasts that later induce violent hallucinations and desires. Bender’s mashup presents Cronenberg’s fiction as reality, as scenes from the film are punctuated by menacing flashes of the AT&T globe—an indication of the company’s vast ambition and a symbol Bender derided as the “Death Star.” The ensemble, set to a frenetic, pulsating score by postpunk musicians Michael Diekmann and Stuart Argabright, comments on the outsize power of telecommunications companies over the American public—a power that is arguably greater today, in light of antitrust’s unraveling in the ’90s and new forms of Web monopoly.
TV, Text, and Image (Metro Pictures Version) (1990) Live television broadcast on nine monitors, vinyl lettering, and shelves.
Megadeth Peace Sells But Who’s Buying? (1986) In Megadeth’s ‘Peace Sells But Who’s Buying?’ (1986), Bender’s breakneck, potentially epilepsy-inducing editing technique complements Dave Mustaine’s high-strung thrashing. Images of the band on stage playing to a mass of head-banging burnouts are incessantly intercut and overlaid with close-ups of Mustaine’s sneering mouth, licking flames, rapidly pulsating images and logos (a dollar sign, a peace sign, Jesus, and so on) and news images recognizable to anyone who lived through the 1980s: bombed-out refugee camps, Ronald Reagan good-naturedly disregarding reporters’ questions at a press conference, hungry-eyed children in Africa. These only let up midway through, when we suddenly zoom out to an irate father, grabbing the remote control and haranguing his long-haired teenage son, who’s watching the video on TV, ‘What is this garbage? I want to watch the news!’ at which point the boy flips back the channel to Megadeth, scoffing: ‘This is the news!’
New Order Bizarre Love Triangle (1986) This overloaded nowness was present in another video on display, New Order’s rather more cool-to-the-touch but, in its way, no less unrelenting ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ (1986), which, like ‘Peace Sells’, was edited by Bender and directed by Longo. Alternating rapidly between images of the band and stock-media footage – flowers undergoing an accelerated blooming, commuters marching to work, exploding fireworks and babies’ faces, alongside Longo’s signature freefalling businessmen and some abstracted, pixilated frames – Bender’s editing can be described as almost sculptural, certainly textural. Even though these images create a single cosmology – simultaneously Utopian and apocalyptic – they still palpably chafe against each other as they are reshuffled in line with the music’s inexorable beat.
America’s Most Wanted (Opening Credits) (1988) Bender designed the credits for the TV show America’s Most Wanted, which Roberta Smith of the New York Times suggested “may have originated the rapid-fire hyperediting now pervasive in film, television and video art.”
Untitled (“Nostalgia”) (1989) Bender’s art was infused with Marxist-Feminist theory (Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Vilém Flusser) and she didn’t care if her barbed politics in her works kept the viewer at arm’s length. Indeed, she seemed to want the takeaway to be a heightened awareness of the conflicts and mediations they embodied.
Gremlins (1984) Four parts; laminated colour photographs, support: 660 x 838 mm, each panel displayed: 1321 x 1676 mm.
Artificial Treatment (1988) From the Tellus audio cassette magazine, “Audio By Visual Artists” TELLUS 21
Untitled (“Daydream Nation”) (1989) Photographs on Masonite mounted on wooden armature.
Dumping Core (1984) Gretchen Bender’s Dumping Core (1984) is a rapid-fire, multi-channel video installation that plays out over 13 monitors arrayed throughout a black box gallery. The improbability of the existence of one of Bender’s major works was already next-level. MoMA apparently helped restore or recover the work, which had only been exhibited as an abbreviated documentation video as recently as 2013.
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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, ‘TSoL’ is one of his big books, so why not. I tend to recommend that people start with his fiction for whatever reason. His novel ‘Death Sentence’ is my all-time favorite novel, for instance. At my first my eyes saw ‘A Prayer Before Dying’, which I did know, but not ‘… Dawn’. I’ll look for it. Thanks. ** Carsten, My guess is that you might get paired with another new poet/author or someone local to help pull in a crowd, but I’m not sure. I’m not even sure that Wilkie represents an oppressor in that film. The reference is very opaque and playful. Thanks for the fill-in about the nude beaches. That sounds so German, as wrongful as that is to say. ** kenley, Hi! No big. Anyway writing always takes priority over basically anything as far as I’m concerned. Where are you in the visa application thing? Are you applied or is the headache more about acing your approach? I’m always completely immersed in whatever I’m working on. It becomes everything. I always feel I have to max myself out in my work. With fiction, it’s total. With the films it’s different because it’s such a long process. First you’re immersed in the writing and then the casting/preproduction, then the shooting, then the editing, with gaps in between them. So it’s full commitment then having to take a break and then committing completely to it again, whereas with a novel, say, it’s a set period with nothing to pull you away or distract you, if that makes sense? How is writing versus making music to you in that way? Awesome about the March studio thing. Yeah, how do you keep your voice from fraying? Or do you just go for broke and whatever happens happens? ** Lucas, Yep, totally. Blanchot is my dude. As usual, you so nail what’s great about Blanchot. I wish I had your brain like a bird on my shoulder. Oh, god, canker sores. I used to get them constantly as a kid, but then hardly ever after I went vegetarian, although it might have just been aging and chilling out a bit instead of the diet. Ouch. ** Steve, I’ve always ignored jury duty summons, but one time years ago they called me, and I just said, ‘I’m an anarchist’, and that was enough. I think just the term scares them off. I’ll ask Zac about Kan when I talk to him today. ** Laura, Blanchot is my dude/god/whatever of language. Discovering him was equivalent to when I discovered Bresson. It reinvented me as a writer. In recent years I’ve gotten very into Deleuze, but the effect isn’t as thorough because I think I’m already invented. Yes, but saying you don’t exist and are saying nothing is saying something. Proof that anything can be said or attempted at least. Amazing idea about the exhibition/performance. I can’t imagine it, which is of course nothing but a lure. ‘Glad in Eindhoven’: that’s so lovely. I’ll watch the whole thing later. What a cheerful, sweet bunch. You should probably go do something else for a day, no? I don’t know what. ** HaRpEr //, Hey. Not the same thing, but I realised ages ago that my being gay was going to factor into every response to what I make, and that I had to stop thinking about it, and I did. But I still dream of a neutral reader, and I still think that, logically, they exist. Excellent description of Blanchot’s effect and the genius of that effect. On me, at least. I don’t think I’ve seen ‘Brand Upon the Brain!’ Or, hm, maybe. I’m happy you cracked his work. When he’s on top of things, which he often is, there’s nothing else like it. ** Uday, Auster was one of his translators. The great Lydia Davis did the best Blanchot translations. I always thought Auster was blah. Kind of brainy middlebrow. Shit, broken toe. And I do think of you as a walker and hiker, so, urgh, pain killers? Or numbing gel? I don’t know. Sorry, pal. ** Right. These days when people even know who Gretchen Bender is it’s usually cause of the music videos she directed for New Order and Megadeth and others, but her own video and installation work was really pioneering and exciting, and I’m a huge fan, so naturally I gave her a show in my galerie. See you tomorrow.
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