‘Bake Off’, ‘Time Team’, ‘Bargain Hunt’: all harmless, safe, distracting entertainment. But American artist Gretchen Bender saw the malice in all of it, the threat of war, violence, corruption, disease. Yeah, even in ‘Bargain Hunt’.
She died in 2004, but not before leaving behind a legacy of radical video art as part of the Pictures Generation alongside Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. This show is a recreation of her ‘TV Text & Image’ series. It features row after row of TVs, each one with a single phrase pasted across its screen: ‘class, race, gender’, ‘people with Aids’, ‘living with the poor’, etc etc etc.
It’s such a simple move. By plastering short, mega-loaded phrases across live TVs, she recontextualizes every image being fed to you. It’s not long just ‘Loose Women’, it’s ‘Loose Women’ through the len of ‘body ownership’, ‘Bake Off’ through the prism of ‘lesbian and gay rights’, Bargain Hunt and ‘nuclear warheads’. It’s brutally effective, forcing you to reframe and rethink every image coming through the screen.
Upstairs, all the TV pieces are accompanied by ear-piercing hisses of white noise and abstract shapes on blank screen. It’s a visual and sonic assault of images and ideas.
The exhibition is so good because it shows how TV is never just about entertainment. It’s never harmless. It’s capitalism in action; it’s products, narratives, propaganda being sold, and we all just buy in. This is Gretchen Bender forcing you to cash out.
