Gretchen Bender, an Artist Working in Film and Video
deb...@comcast.net
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: December 24, 2004
Gretchen Bender, an artist who worked in several photographic and film
mediums, died on Sunday at her Manhattan home. She was 53.
The cause was cancer, her family said.
Ms. Bender belonged to the generation of early 1980's Pictures artists,
who included Jack Goldstein, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Richard
Prince. Combining aspects of Conceptual Art and Pop Art, these artists
used the images of popular culture to dissect its powerful codes,
especially regarding gender and sexuality.
Ms. Bender was born in Seaford, Del., earned a bachelor of fine arts
from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1973 and moved
to New York in 1978. She had her first New York gallery show at the
Nature Morte Gallery in the East Village in 1983. Made of
black-on-white enamel on squares of tin in cruciform arrangements, Ms.
Bender's early work contrasted different categories of images from
abstract art, glossy advertising and new photographs. She also
appropriated from the mostly male Neo Expressionist painters of her
generation and in harsher pieces paired impersonal computerized
patterns with grisly images of massacres. Throughout her work she
contrasted the immense power of technology and corporations with the
plight of individuals.
Ms. Bender did not limit her activities to the art world. The credits
she designed for the television show "America's Most Wanted" may have
originated the rapid-fire hyperediting now pervasive in film,
television and video art. She produced, directed and edited music
videos for Babes in Toyland and Martha Wash; edited music videos for
R.E.M., New Order and Megadeth; and designed sets for the
choreographers Bill T. Jones and Molissa Fenley. Her midcareer
retrospective, organized by the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse in
1991, toured internationally, as did her multimedia theater pieces
"Total Recall" (1987) and "Dumping Core" (1984).
Ms. Bender's work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in
Manhattan, the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Menil Collection in
Houston.
Ms. Bender is survived by her partner, Mitchell Wagenberg of Manhattan;
her parents, Charles and Carolyn Bender of Charlotte, N. C.; a brother,
Jonathan Bender of Los Angeles; and two sisters, Kate Bender of
Charlotte and Valerie Godwin of Philadelphia.
Hyfler/Rosner
<deb...@comcast.net> wrote in message
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> Gretchen Bender, 53, an Artist Working in Film and Video,
> Dies
> By ROBERTA SMITH
>
> Published: December 24, 2004
Source: New York Times.
http://www.niagara.edu/cam/special/Art_of_80s/Artists/bender.html
http://www.chanterellenyc.com/menu_art2/pages/Bender.htm