Gretchen Bender’s “Total Recall,” 1987, and the Feminist Return to Television Art will examine Bender’s procedures of appropriation in her video works, especially Total Recall. Bender exhibited her work widely throughout the 1980s-90s, positioning it within a feminist turn to “television art.” This article claims that because of the friction between television art and video art, it is through Bender’s work that a nuanced view of early video’s legacy can be reconsidered.
Solveig Nelson is a Mellon COSI Curatorial Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago; last year she was a fellow in the Department of Photographs at the Met. She writes about early video art in the U.S., and is interested in tracing a pre-history of video art by considering the relation between the televisual, the formal innovations of nonviolent direct action, and shifting modes of performance during the 1940s-1970s. She writes regularly for Artforum, and collaborated with the artist Sadie Benning on the split-screen video installation “Play Pause.”