{"title":"Gretchen Bender","description":"\u003cp\u003eGretchen Bender (1951–2004) was an American artist whose work engaged directly with the saturation of television, advertising and mass media in contemporary life, using appropriated footage, multilayered video projection and printed imagery to expose the mechanics of spectacle and information overload. A key figure in the Pictures Generation and the East Village art scene of the 1980s, she exhibited at Metro Pictures and produced large-scale media installations that anticipated subsequent debates around screen culture. Her work has been the subject of renewed critical attention and retrospective exhibitions at institutions including the Contemporary Art Museum Houston.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"gretchen-bender-political-entertainment-spruth-magers-berlin-2025","title":"Gretchen Bender — Political Entertainment, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 2025","description":"\u003cp\u003eOriginal exhibition poster. Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 2025. 44 × 59 cm. Offset-printed on paper. Folded as issued.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCondition: very good; folded as issued, with light handling wear and minor surface softness. Clean overall, with strong image and text.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePoster for Gretchen Bender’s solo exhibition \u003cem\u003ePolitical Entertainment\u003c\/em\u003e, held at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 14 November 2025 – 4 April 2026. The exhibition presented Bender’s \u003cem\u003eTop Ten Grossing Films of 1988\u003c\/em\u003e, shown for the first time since its 1989 debut: ten black, crumpled heat-set vinyl works, backlit with neon and carrying the titles of that year’s highest-grossing films.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBender’s work sits at the sharp edge of 1980s image culture. Close to the Pictures Generation, but moving more aggressively into television, video, corporate graphics and mass entertainment, she treated media not as background noise but as the structure through which politics was delivered. Her “electronic theater” installations mixed video, sound and performance to confront the power of corporate imagery over collective consciousness.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis poster carries that logic back into print. Hollywood titles become surface, list, commodity and cultural index: Big, Die Hard, Coming to America, Beetlejuice, Good Morning Vietnam. The entertainment industry appears here not through actors or images, but through names already processed by box office ranking, public memory and commercial repetition.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA current exhibition poster, but already functioning as a secondary support for a work about circulation. Film title into sculpture. Sculpture into exhibition. Exhibition into poster. A sheet of paper recording the return of a 1989 media work into a 2025 gallery context.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The New Rare","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53966494957906,"sku":"BENDER-SPRUTH-POST-2025","price":110.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Bender_Gretchen._Show_poster_-_Political_Entertainment._2025_76f97ad6-e0ef-4ded-9cf8-1de0f0c977e5.jpg?v=1783629664"},{"product_id":"julia-ballerini-sequence-consequence-aperture-bard-college-1989","title":"JULIA BALLERINI, ed., Sequence (con)Sequence: (sub)versions of photography in the 80s, Aperture, 1989","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEdited by Julia Ballerini\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSequence (con)Sequence: (sub)versions of photography in the 80s\u003cbr\u003eAperture \/ Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Bard College, New York, 1989\u003cbr\u003eSoftcover\u003cbr\u003e16.5 × 22 cm · 115 pp.\u003cbr\u003eIllustrated throughout in colour\u003cbr\u003eEnglish language\u003cbr\u003eISBN 0-89381-358-3\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePublished in conjunction with the 1989 exhibition at the Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Bard College, \u003cem\u003eSequence (con)Sequence\u003c\/em\u003e catches photography at the end of a decade in which the single, authoritative image had become increasingly difficult to believe in.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eInstead, Julia Ballerini assembled nineteen artists working through multiples, repetitions, montage, appropriation and interrupted narrative: Dennis Adams, Mac Adams, Vikky Alexander, John Baldessari, Gretchen Bender, Jean-Charles Blanc, Dorit Cypis, Nancy Goldring, William Larson, John Maggiotto, Lorie Novak, Robert Rauschenberg, Hope Sandrow, John Schlesinger, Klaus Schnitzer, Robert Sennhauser, Eve Sonneman, Silvia Taccani and Brian Wood. The accompanying essays are by Ballerini, William S. Wilson and Lori Zippay.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe exhibition ran at Bard from February to April 1989, and the catalogue feels very precisely positioned at that point: after a decade of Pictures Generation strategies, appropriation, television, advertising and increasingly accelerated image circulation, but before the internet gave that condition a permanent technological form.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBallerini’s proposition is not simply that these photographers made sequences. It is that sequence itself had changed. The photographic series no longer necessarily built toward a stable story. Images could contradict one another, repeat, break apart, behave like television channels, magazine pages or fragments of memory. Her own description of the work stresses its refusal of traditional linear narrative and its response to the visual overload of contemporary information culture.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat makes the book particularly interesting now. What reads in 1989 as a subversion of photographic narrative — fragmentation, repetition, rapid shifts between unrelated images, the collision of private and mass-media imagery — looks remarkably close to the ordinary conditions under which images circulate today.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe title is excellent too: sequence \/ consequence \/ con sequence. A small linguistic disruption that describes what is happening to the photographs inside. One image follows another, but cause and effect are no longer guaranteed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe artist list places canonical figures such as Baldessari and Rauschenberg beside artists more closely associated with media critique and constructed photography, including Gretchen Bender and Vikky Alexander. Rather than presenting a neat survey of “1980s photography,” the catalogue records a moment when photography was actively contaminating itself with advertising, television, installation, text and other images.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe cover makes the argument visually: a dense grid of tiny photographs functioning simultaneously as individual pictures and as raw information — less a window onto the world than a screen of competing signals.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA very good period document of postmodern photography while postmodernism was still present tense, rather than something being reconstructed retrospectively.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003chr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCondition:\u003c\/strong\u003e Very good vintage condition. Light rubbing and edge wear to covers, with minor handling and surface marks consistent with age. Interior clean. Please refer to photographs.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/blogs\/journal\/the-new-rare-at-glue-book-fair-2026\"\u003eRead our journal: The New Rare at GLUE Book Fair 2026 →\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Aperture","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54708806091090,"sku":null,"price":55.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Ballerini_Julia.Sequence_con_sequence._sub_versionsofphotographyinthe80s.1989.jpg?v=1789289587"}],"url":"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/collections\/gretchen-bender.oembed","provider":"The New Rare","version":"1.0","type":"link"}