Gretchen Bender, “Perversion of the Visual”

Otto Piene, “The Proliferation of the Sun”

by David S. Rubin

Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, California

Exhibition continues through August 10, 2024

July 6, 2024

Gretchen Bender, “Dumping Core,” 1984, Four-channel video, color and sound on thirteen monitors 15:21 min.

© 2024 Estate of Gretchen Bender Courtesy Sprüth Magers. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Two concurrent exhibitions showcase historically significant installations by Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) and Otto Piene (1928-2014), both 20th-century pioneers in the field of new media art. Bender, who gained recognition in the 1980s as one of the “Pictures Generation” appropriation artists, is represented on the gallery’s ground floor with a selection of large-scale photographs, two live-feed television works, and her groundbreaking electronic theater piece, “Dumping Core” (1984). Piene, a German American who co-founded the international artist group ZER0 in the late 1950s and served from 1974-1994 as Director of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, occupies the upstairs galleries with his immersive installation “The Proliferation of the Sun” (1966-67/2014).

While both artists pushed boundaries in using technological means to create theatrical environments, the temperaments of their exhibitions are almost diametrically opposed. Whereas Piene provides an escapist fantasy world that delights and enchants, Bender confronts us with disturbing realities about America’s role in international politics and the ways our thoughts and opinions are shaped by news coverage.

Gretchen Bender “Gremlins,” 1984, four dye-sublimation prints mounted on Dibond, top right photograph by John Hoagland: “Two young girls found alongside the highway to Comalapa Airport, April,” 1980, 51 1/2 x 68 1/2”. © 2024 Estate of Gretchen Bender Courtesy Sprüth Magers. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Bender’s multi-panel photographs were produced in response to the United States’ involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War (1979-92). In two works titled after popular movies from 1984 — an auspicious time if one considers that it is the year in which George Orwell’s dystopian novel is set — Bender introduced the principal features that would define her oeuvre from the eighties: computer-generated imagery and appropriated war images shot by photojournalists.

In “Ghostbusters” (1984), a sense of unease is expressed through the juxtaposition of two faces that look like close-ups from scary movies. The upper panel features the face of fellow Pictures artist Cindy Sherman, with abstract patterns superimposed over it, while the lower section houses a digitally produced anonymous mask-like face with hollowed-out eyes. For the four-panel work “Gremlins” (1984), Bender employed computer-generated abstraction and wave patterns as symbolic signifiers of the television networks that determine what information is selectively shared with us on their daily news programs. She combined these with two highly disturbing, if not frightening images of war and destruction. One is a face with an oversized eye taken from a horror film and the other a photo of two young girls found dead on a Salvadoran roadside. The latter scene was photographed in 1980 by the American John Hoagland, who himself became a war casualty in 1984 when he was killed in an ambush with a weapon supplied by the U.S. government.

Bender reprinted Hoagland’s photographic documentation of the dead in a subsequent work, “Untitled (Hell Raiser)” (1988-89), but this time positioned it above an even more gruesome unattributed color photo of bloody, mutilated fingers. With its blatant, in-your-face anti-war messaging, the imagery is admittedly difficult to look at, yet it succeeds completely in realizing Bender’s goal of calling attention to the news media’s failure to broadcast truthful images. As the artist wrote at the time, “We know we fund death squads in El Salvador, but we never have to see the dead bodies, or we see the aestheticized versions of them through photographs. I want us to feel how disturbing it is that we flatten our politics of death through visual representation.”

Gretchen Bender, “TV Text & Image (OPEN THE DOOR),” c. 1988, Live television broadcast on a monitor, vinyl

lettering, dimensions variable. © 2024 Estate of Gretchen Bender Courtesy Sprüth Magers. Photo: David S. Rubin

The “flattening” Bender refers to is in part the computer graphics that accompany news presentations, and which are visually seductive and distracting from anything grim or gritty. In the wall-mounted photographic sculpture “Untitled (Daydream Nation)” (1989), swirling mathematically generated fractals dazzle in multiple directions, preventing us from noticing a Tangiers cityscape on one panel’s back side. Essentially, Bender is telling us that the news as it is packaged is more entertainment than substance.

Computer graphics take center stage in Bender’s “Dumping Core,” which features 13 synchronized monitors and an original electronic music soundtrack. It runs just over 15 minutes. As we sit before the spread of monitors as if in a dark amphitheater, orchestrated images of the Salvadoran Civil War flash in unison on multiple monitors in rotation with clips from TV ads, computer-generated geometric abstractions, and the corporate logos of the major television networks. Visually, the presentation is explosive and riveting, but its purpose is to critique the network news for controlling our minds and emotions with daily media overloads.   

As a quieter and more contemplative approach to the matter, Bender also created single-channel live feed works tuned 24/7 to TV news stations, with a provocative word or phrase etched on each monitor. In one example I observed, the word ‘RELAX’ appeared superimposed over Fox News’ coverage of a White House briefing on the Israeli-Gaza War. In another, “OPEN THE DOOR” was positioned directly above a CBS News caption about Iowans killed by a tornado. With the addition of minimal text, Bender prompts further reflection about the visual messages that we are seeing. 

Otto Piene, “The Proliferation of the Sun,” 1966-67/2014, Installation view, Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, May 24– August 10, 2024, Photo: David S. Rubin

We need not think too hard to get the most out of Piene’s installation, “The Proliferation of the Sun.” Originally presented as a Happening in 1966-67 during the era of Vietnam War protests, the artist used slide projectors and hand-painted slides to create an enjoyable, trippy environment of shifting colored lights. In the original incarnations, participants would lie on the floor and savor the morphing organic shapes while listening to a scripted narration by the artist, in which he recites instructions to the projectionists until the last moment, when everything is bathed in white light and he utters “white-out, white-out, white-out.”

In 2014, Piene retooled the installation, digitizing the slides for a computer presentation, and added a large inflatable sphere to the space as a more physical representation of the sun. This is the version we see here, along with a recording of Piene’s original narration and the sounds of clicking projectors.

In moving back and forth between Piene’s and Bender’s installations, we are presented with two aesthetic options, both equally valid, for coping with societal ills. We can get lost in good vibes while championing love and spirituality, or we can accept the bad with the good in contemplating solutions.

David S. Rubin is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and artist. As a curator, he has held positions at MOCA Cleveland, Phoenix Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and San Antonio Museum of Art. As a writer he has contributed to Art and Cake, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Artweek, ArtScene, Artillery, Fabrik, Glasstire, Hyperallergic, and Visual Art Source. He has published numerous exhibition catalogs, and his curatorial archives are housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. For more information: www.davidsrubin.com.