Gretchen Bender Anticipated Our Banal Media Consumption

War, it must be said, is ugly. The advent of photography brought this reality home in a new way, as 19th-century conflicts such as the American Civil War (1861–65) were documented with a harrowing verisimilitude not offered by painting. This sense of immediacy intensified with the rise of television; the horrific visuals coming out of the Vietnam War (1955–75), dubbed the ‘first televised war’, famously shaped US popular opinion. In her multidisciplinary work, pictures generation artist Gretchen Bender probed mediatized violence, examining how images of power and brutality operate as they circulate in mass media. A selection of Bender’s videos and prints, along with archival material, is now on view in a new solo exhibition, ‘The Perversion of the Visual’, at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles.

The late artist was more interested in the flow of images than in their deconstruction. The gallery’s front room pairs visuals of a blown-off middle finger (Hell Raiser, 1988–91) with colourful fractals atop a Tangiers cityscape (Untitled (Daydream Nation), 1989). Nearby is a photo of a pile of dead bodies: casualties of the Salvadoran Civil War (1979–92), a Cold War proxy conflict that left 75,000 dead and 8,000 disappeared. War correspondent John Hoagland’s photograph Two young girls found alongside the highway to Comalapa Airport (1980) appears in two works by Bender: alongside the mutilated finger of Hell Raiser and the abstract computer graphics and frantic eye of Gremlins (1984).

A chaotic, New Wave-y soundtrack by Stuart Argabright, Michael Diekmann and Shin Shimokawa echoes throughout the gallery. This audio emanates from Dumping Core (1984), a four-channel video on 13 monitors that splices footage portraying carnage from El Salvador with corporate logos from companies like AT&T, CBS and NBC. The juxtaposition seems to indict the mainstream media for preferring to broadcast virtual images of its own brand than depicting the very real paramilitary death squads funded by the US government, of which its citizenry remained largely unaware. The work’s frenzied pace evokes anticipation of an imminent breakdown. (The title references the recorded state of a computer programme at a specific moment, usually when it has crashed.) Rather than stand outside of these tensions, Bender inhabits and exacerbates them, as though pushing toward some inevitable breaking point.

A side room contains archival ephemera related to ‘Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America’, a national grassroots campaign by artists and thinkers that began in New York in 1983. Printed on an orange poster in blocky all-caps, a letter addressed to then-US president Ronald Reagan demands that the administration ‘halt military and economic support to the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala, to stop the military build-up in Honduras and to cease support of the Contras in Nicaragua’, followed by three columns of signees in miniscule print (Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America, 1984). Given current political circumstances, the document reads as a precursor to the open letters that have proliferated since the escalation of the US-backed war in Gaza, which has given rise to accusations of genocide over the past nine months.

This poster-letter isn’t the only element of the exhibition that demonstrates the continuities between Bender’s moment – in this case, the 1980s – and our own. Embodying the artist’s view of media as a ‘current that absorbs everything’, as she put it in a 1987 BOMB magazine interview with Cindy Sherman, her works’ accelerated pace, jarring juxtaposition and recontextualized imagery anticipated the way in which news is often consumed today: via smartphones and social media, in a relentless visual barrage that intersperses the banal with the unbearable. For Bender, it seems, artists were both witnesses and activists, tellers of truth and seekers of change. But it is up to us to determine whether this model remains relevant, or whether the transformation of our visual landscape necessitates altogether new forms of engagement with the powers that be.

Gretchen Bender, ‘The Perversion of the Visual’, is on view at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, until 10 August

_{Main Image: Gretchen Bender, Untitled (Daydream Nation), 1989, 12 dye-sublimation prints mounted to armature,101.6 × 304.8 × 153.7 cm. Courtesy: © 2024 Estate of Gretchen Bender and Sprüth Magers; photograph: Robert Wedemeyer}