G R E T C H E N B E N D E R

November 1, 2025 - January 31, 2026

Created between 1986 and 1991, Gretchen Bender’s TV Text & Image series each consist of a television monitor, a live broadcast, and a single word or phrase rendered in matte black vinyl, affixed directly to the screen. Across over sixty iterations, politicized language operates as a means of short-circuiting the flow of televised imagery. When installed together, the monitors are tuned to different channels, producing a dense field of information.

By anticipating today’s image-saturated reality, one of chronic skepticism and waning media literacy, Bender’s works articulate a way of seeing. The series suggests that to see, even passively, is already a means of participating in systems of representation and desire. The layering of evocative texts over familiar images performs a dissonant semiotics that exposes our own susceptibility to manipulation and control.

TV Text & Image was not a commentary on television as a medium, but a proposition about the psychic infrastructure media produces: a system in which meaning and transmission are inseparable. The series remains a live model for how criticality might persist within total mediation, demonstrating how the circulation of images organizes not only belief, but the conditions of consciousness itself.

This project is realized with the support of The Estate of Gretchen Bender and Sprüth Magers.