Red Bull Arts New York Announces Public Programming for ...redbullarts.com/newyork/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/... · Red Bull Arts New York | 220 W 18th St, New York, NY 10011 | redbullarts.com

Red Bull Arts New York | 220 W 18th St, New York, NY 10011 | redbullarts.com | @redbullarts

Red Bull Arts New York Announces Public Programming for “Gretchen Bender: So Much Deathless”

Weekly Events and Collaborations with The New York Public Library, Independent Art Fair, New York Live Arts, and ISSUE Project Room

Above: Total Recall, 1987. Eleven-channel video installation on 24 monitors and 3 projection screens, 18.2 minutes, with soundtrack by Stuart

Argabright. Installation view of Gretchen Bender: So Much Deathless at Red Bull Arts New York, 2019. Photo by Lance Brewer. All artwork © The Gretchen Bender Estate.

(NEW YORK, NY — FEBRUARY 25, 2019) — Red Bull Arts New York is pleased to announce free public programming for Gretchen Bender: So Much Deathless, the first posthumous retrospective of the life and work of the influential, multi-disciplinary artist. This series of artist talks, film screenings, live performances, and tours will run every Wednesday through Sunday from 12-7pm from March 6 through July 29, 2019, and will respond to critical themes in this ambitious exhibition. Returning the spotlight to one of contemporary art’s most prescient figures, So Much Deathless details Bender’s historic importance and lasting influence. The exhibition is anchored by daily screenings of Bender’s magnum opus Total Recall, and accompanied by public programming organized into four categories — Meet the Makers, Virtual Histories, Exhibition Tours, and Off-Site Programs. The programs welcome new artistic and institutional partnerships for Red Bull Arts New York, starting with an installation of Gretchen Bender’s work as part of Independent art fair’s Special Projects and culminating in an evening of performance and conversation co-presented by New York Live Arts.


“We’re beginning to see Bender’s previously overlooked work as a mirror that exposes our contemporary relationship to social media, advertising, and emerging technologies,” says Candice Strongwater, Curator of Public Programs at Red Bull Arts New York. “The series of public programs that accompany the exhibition serve to further unpack Bender’s views about our digital culture through collaborations with artists, musicians, media makers and theorists across generations. Total Recall Total Recall (1987), the exhibition’s pièce de résistance, and Gretchen Bender’s largest realized work of electronic theater, will be presented in a black box setting, screened every 30 minutes in closed viewings with no re-entry permitted. Tickets can be reserved ahead of time, with a portion of seats reserved for walk-ins. With Total Recall, Bender mined the familiar imagery of mainstream media and set it against an abrasive score by composer Stuart Argabright to create an experience that mimicked the immersive-yet-assaulting image-world from which she felt viewers were increasingly unable to disentangle themselves. As a tribute to Bender’s magnum opus, Argabright will revisit the Total Recall soundscape with live scoring, audio expansion, and original field samples, intimately staged within the installation of Bender’s proscenium of electronic screens. To reserve a viewing of Total Recall, visit https://win.gs/totalrecall Meet the Makers Based on a series that originated at The New York Public Library, Meet the Makers is a program of artist talks and performative lectures that brings together today’s media makers, theorists, scholars, and artists to promote visual arts literacy and explore the ways we engage with emergent media and new technologies. Originally presented at the Donnell Library Center on 53rd Street, the series invited contemporary artists, media activists, and film organizers, including Video Data Bank, Tony Oursler, Antoni Muntadas, XCHANGE TV, Paper Tiger Television, Carolee Schneemann, Shigeko Kubota, Dara Birnbaum, and Gretchen Bender to screen and discuss their work. Coinciding with her Meet the Makers talk in 1990, Bender became the first artist commissioned to present her work in the street-facing windows of the Donnell Library Center, with TV Text and Image. On the occasion of Gretchen Bender: So Much Deathless, Red Bull Arts New York is thrilled to be working with NYPL to reprise this groundbreaking platform to celebrate the Reserve Film and Video Collection’s rich history of media arts education and to connect Bender with our current community of media makers. Retaining the integrity of the original series, Meet the Makers provides a nourishing platform of exchange for the community of progressive, emergent image makers based in New York and abroad. Among the eclectic participants are cyberpunk artist Shu Lea Cheang, outsider librarian Rick Prelinger, and the enfant terribles of Net Art, Eva and Franco Mattes. “If we are going to encourage a more literate, critical thinking, civic-minded society, then we need provocateurs. We need materials that radically diverge from convention and conformity. Gretchen Bender and the Red Bull Arts network of artists do just that,” says Elena Rossi-Snook, Collection Manager of


the Reserve Film and Video Collection. “Revitalizing the Meet the Makers series is a way to mutually meet the goals of the public library using the best cultural tools available.” Meet the Makers is a collaboration with the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Visitors will be able to register for NYPL library cards during select events. Talks and presentations will be followed by communal dialogue. Virtual Histories Virtual Histories, meanwhile, is a specially curated series of film and video screenings wherein contemporary artists whose works touch upon Bender’s notion of deathlessness present their works alongside an historically influential film. The program includes multimedia artists Jacolby Satterwhite, Antoni Muntadas, and Andrew Norman Wilson, presenting films such as Olivier Assayas’ demonlover (2002), to classics such as Godard’s Alphaville (1965). Screenings take place on select Friday nights at 7pm. Exhibition Tours On select weekdays, a series of tours led by friends, artists, and contemporaries of Gretchen Bender will be joined by the exhibition curators for intimate walkthroughs of the retrospective. Guest tour guides include artist and curator Michelle Grabner, artist and co-founder of Gallery Nature Morte Peter Nagy; and Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, Representative of the Gretchen Bender Estate, among others.

Above: Bill T. Jones in the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company production of “Still/Here” during BAM Next Wave Festival in 1994. Photo by Dan Rest courtesy of BAM.


Off-Site Programs

Red Bull Arts will additionally venture off-site to collaborate with like-minded New York arts institutions on a series of ticketed programs. Programming will begin with a special project at Independent Art Fair featuring an early video work by Gretchen Bender - Wild Dead I, II, III (Danceteria Version), 1984. The recent discovery, and subsequent restoration, of this iteration cement the piece as a seminal progression in Bender’s practice, which laid the foundation for her series of electronic theater installations. Red Bull Arts New York and Brooklyn-based performance venue ISSUE Project Room will present a special evening of experimental music and audio-visual expansion dedicated to So Much Deathless, the title of Bender’s third and final electronic theater piece, left unrealized due to her untimely passing in 2004. As one of the final programs for Gretchen Bender: So Much Deathless, Red Bull Arts New York and New York Live Arts will co-present an evening of conversation and performance in response to Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s canonical work, Still/Here (1994), which featured a video score and set design by Bender, and celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. Calendar of Events March 5 | 6-9pm — Exhibition Preview, by Invitation and The Armory Show VIP Pre-Registration March 6 | 12-7pm — Public Opening March 7 | 11am-8pm — Red Bull Arts New York @ Independent Art Fair, Private Viewing March 7 | 7pm — Meet the Makers: Eva & Franco Mattes March 8-10 | Fri-Sat: 12-7pm, Sun: 12-6pm — Red Bull Arts New York @ Independent Art Fair, Public Viewing March 8 | 4:30pm — Exhibition Tour: Amber Denker March 15 | 7pm — Virtual Histories: Ode to Seekers 2012 (2016) by Andrew Norman Wilson / demonlover (dir. 2002, Olivier Assayas) March 28 | 7pm — Meet the Makers: Dr. Pamela M. Lee April 5 | 7pm — Virtual Histories: Reifying Desire 5 (2012) by Jacolby Satterwhite / The Work of Director Chris Cunningham (2003) April 11 | 7pm — Meet the Makers: Solveig Nelson April 25 | 7pm — Meet the Makers: Meriem Bennani May 3 | 7pm, 8pm, 9pm — Live Scoring of Total Recall with Stuart Argabright May 16 | 7pm — Meet the Makers: JLIN May 18 | Red Bull Arts New York @ ISSUE Project Room, Black Rain, with a video score by Philip Vanderhyden, and special guests May 23 | 7pm — Meet the Makers: DIS May 29 | 4:30pm — Exhibition Tour: Peter Nagy May 31 | 7pm — Virtual Histories: Video is Television?, Antoni Muntadas / Alphaville (1989) (dir. Jean-Luc Godard) June 14 | 7pm — Virtual Histories: Special selections from the Gretchen Bender Estate June 26 | 4:30pm — Exhibition Tour: Cay Sophie Rabinowitz June 28 | 7pm — Virtual Histories: Middle Man by Vernon Reid and Living Color (dir. Robert Longo); Peace Sells by Megadeth and Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order (dir. Longo, edited by Gretchen Bender), followed by La Jetée (1962) (dir. Chris Marker) July 18 | 7pm — Meet the Makers: Rick Prelinger July 24 | 4:30pm — Exhibition Tour: Michelle Grabner July 25 | 7PM — Meet the Makers: Shu Lea Cheang


Date TBC | A Tribute to Still/Here (1994), co-presented with New York Live Arts For ticketing and a full schedule of programs, visit redbullarts.com/newyork/. About the Exhibition Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) was a pioneering artist who worked across video, sculpture, computer graphics, photography, print and installation to interrogate the accelerated age of mass media. Moving to New York in 1978, Bender quickly fell in with the Post-Pictures Generation scene, centered around the artist-run gallery Nature Morte, as well as a milieu of artist and performers connected to The Kitchen. She befriended and collaborated with such figures as artists Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman, the choreographers Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, and musicians Stuart Argabright and Vernon Reid. Building upon techniques developed in her years running a feminist-Marxist screen-printing collective in Washington, D.C., Bender's early two-dimensional work, made in New York, abstracted and juxtaposed images appropriated from across the visual spectrum: from other artists, the news cycle, and corporate and military advertising. The effect was a disturbing barrage that spoke to the accelerating power of the image in the coming digital age. Bender’s later shift to moving-image work, first with single-channel videos, and then with her immersive “electronic theatre” projects—massive installations such as the 13-monitor, 4-channel Dumping Core (1984), and the 24-monitor, 3-projection, 8-channel Total Recall (1987)—predict the near totalizing image-saturation of the coming decades, and find the artist further infiltrating modes of cultural transmission. Bender understood society to be on the precipice of a vast change, with the technologically mediated image less a warning sign than a guide. Speaking to this complicated dialectic between critique and embrace, alongside her art practice, Bender went a step further into subverting and infiltrating mainstream media platforms through her hired commercial work, including the now-iconic intro sequence for America’s Most Wanted, and developing music videos, often in collaboration with Robert Longo, for bands like R.E.M., New Order, Megadeth, and Babes in Toyland. When Bender died in 2004, at the age of 53, the media climate that she had long anticipated was well on its way to reality—a “cannibalistic river” and seamless totality of screens, social media, smartphones, visual and data-tracking surveillance, the melding of politics and entertainment, and fake news. Gretchen Bender: So Much Deathless serves as both critique and map of the contemporary landscape, a guide to how viewers might navigate through their world. Developed in close collaboration with the Gretchen Bender Estate, and bolstered by extensive oral histories with many of her notable peers and friends, the exhibition will include examples of every major body of work in Bender’s oeuvre, from her early photographic installations to the studies and archival material surrounding her magnum opus, which was to be entitled So Much Deathless, left unrealized due to her untimely death. The exhibition will also feature Bender’s monumental work of electronic theatre entitled Total Recall (1987), and artworks and videos that have not been exhibited since the 80s or 90s, newly restored by Red Bull Arts New York. For further information and programming updates, visit redbullarts.com/newyork/.


Above: Gretchen Bender, 1986. Photo: Hans Neleman © 1986. Courtesy of Red Bull Arts New York.

About Gretchen Bender Gretchen Bender (1951- 2004) was an American artist who worked in video, sculpture, photography, print and installation. She received her BFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1973, and came to prominence in the 1980s as a post-appropriation artist in the East Village. Bender showed at Nature Morte, Metro Pictures and International with Monument in New York, and Meyer/Bloom in Los Angeles. Her work was included in the historical show Infotainment in 1985 and has circulated widely in exhibitions at the New Museum; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Whitney Museum of American Art; Hammer Museum; Tate Liverpool; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin;, among others. In 2013, Gretchen Bender: Tracking the Thrill traveled from The Poor Farm in Wisconsin to The Kitchen in New


York, effectively reintroducing Bender’s “electronic theater” piece Total Recall to the art world at large. Her work appears in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Museum of Modern Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Menil Collection. Bender was the recipient of a New Genres Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1985, a Bessie Award in 1995 for her visual concept and set design for Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Company’s Still/Here at BAM, an Anonymous Was A Woman award in 1997, and Art Matters Foundation fellowships in 1987 and 1997.

About Red Bull Arts New York Founded in 2013, Red Bull Arts New York is an experimental, non-commercial arts space dedicated to the cultivation and advancement of the arts. The organization focuses on extending the boundaries of exhibition making; supporting the production of new work by emerging and established artists; presenting historical surveys; and contributing to the ongoing dialogue around contemporary issues and thought. A selection of past exhibitions include RAMMΣLLZΣΣ: Racing for Thunder (2018); The Bell, Mannahatta, a site-specific solo presentation by artist Eric Wesley at NADA New York (2018); Sarah Meyohas: Cloud of Petals (2017) , Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno (2017); Bjarne Melgaard: The Casual Pleasure of Disappointment (2017); TOTAL PROOF: The GALA Committee 1995-1997 (2016) with Mel Chin; Scenario in the Shade (2015) with Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe; and DISown: Not for Everyone (2014). About Our Collaborators New York Live Arts Located in the heart of Chelsea in New York City, New York Live Arts is an internationally recognized destination for innovative movement-based artistry offering audiences access to art and artists notable for their conceptual rigor, formal experimentation and active engagement with the social, political and cultural currents of our times. At the center of this identity is Bill T. Jones, Artistic Director, a world-renowned choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer. New York Live Arts commissions, produces, and presents performances in their 20,000 square foot home, which includes a 184-seat theater and two 1,200 square foot studios that can be combined into one large studio. New York Live Arts serves as home base for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, provides an extensive range of participatory programs for adults and young people, and supports the continuing professional development of artists. Independent art fair Independent is an invitational art fair devised by and for gallerists, which reexamines traditional methods of presenting, viewing, and experiencing contemporary art. The selected participants represent the art world’s most creative and inspired curatorial visions from a cross section of emerging, mid-career and established programs from around the world. Now in its ninth year, Independent has a rotating participant network of over 240 galleries from 50 cities worldwide. ISSUE Project Room ISSUE plays a vital role in NYC’s cultural ecology, facilitating the commission and premiere of new works and presenting a diverse array of artists working across the disciplines of sound, dance, film, performance and literature. Programming places an emphasis on bringing recognition to creative practitioners whose important contributions to the artistic field are underrepresented, often as a result of the artists’ gender, sexuality, or geographic location. Through the cultivation of innovative new work, ISSUE performs an essential research and development function that fosters a dynamic influx of ideas into the local, national, and international creative landscape.


The Reserve Film and Video Collection at the NYPL The Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts includes more than 6,000 16mm films, 5,000 VHS video cassettes, and 1,200 DVDs. The New York Public Library began acquiring films in 1953, and established a film collection at the Donnell Library in 1958. The library began adding videos to the collection in the 1970s. Since the collection's inception, its primary focus has been independently produced works. Careful selection practices have resulted in a collection that is impressive for its scope and depth and its overall high quality. The collection's holdings provide a very broad spectrum of both subject matter and filmmaking styles and genres. It is unique among American public libraries, and is comparable to archives held within major American museums and universities. PRESS CONTACTS: André Carlos Lenox Marcella Zimmermann Account Executive, Cultural Counsel Vice President, Cultural Counsel [email protected] [email protected]

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