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New York, 1986: artists Gretchen Bender and Cindy Sherman record a conversation. Bender had just edited the video for Megadeth’s Peace Sells and Sherman asks about videos she’s making with manipulated television footage – does she want to change TV itself? “I think of the media as a cannibalistic river,” Bender replies, describing a rapid flow that picks up, appropriates and repackages everything in its path. “There is no consciousness or mind. It’s about absorbing and converting.”
The following year Bender showed Total Recall – 24 stacked TVs and three projection screens, broadcasting choreographed video edited at a pulse-raising pace. The mash-up of ads, war footage, idents, movie clips and abstract animation is set to an intense electronic score. Total Recall broadcasts the acceleration of contemporary life, an attention-deficit TV culture of rolling news and channel surfing.
“Attention” is the arching theme of Glasgow International festival, and Total Recall its keystone. Horribly prescient of our current attention economy, Bender’s little-shown work introduces motifs of acceleration, small screens, brainwashing, self as brand, and the appropriation of subcultures.
Over at Tramway, three ambitious video commissions pick up these strands, each in its distinct style. Within a metal framework echoing the format of a sitcom set, Martine Syms’s She Mad S1:E4 updates Bender’s relentless image flow for a generation of multi-screen natives.
Syms delivers an introductory lecture on the sitcom, an artform “as American as jazz”. Tracing a line through Amos ’n’ Andy, Sanford and Son and The Cosby Show, she notes the format’s debt to Black performance traditions, the stereotypes it reinforced and the struggles it erased. Syms pitches her own sitcom – She Mad – set in Koreatown, LA. Fragments then play across multiple, Fomo-inducing screens, including an episode in a comic-grotesque “safe space” session that encourages participants to lob racially charged insults at one another. It’s smart, funny and painful.
Entered through junked aeroplane fuselage and cool boxes displaying rubber monster heads, Jenkin van Zyl’s Machines of Love is art cinema as erotic drag body-horror. Artistically, Van Zyl’s work looks to the latex-sculpted fantasies of Matthew Barney and the YouTube frenzy of Ryan Trecartin, but this sexually charged baroque dystopia centres on a fascination with the mutable body all its own.
In a subterranean chamber beneath an icy landscape, six monstrous characters are caught in a game of chance leading them through episodes of torment, romance, fantasy and reproduction. There is some unpleasantness involving cake, turf and bloody dice. “This is Vegas,” one caption tells us, “this is hades.” Foregrounding artifice (we see the flapping edges of the latex masks, the cotton pants under the fetish gear) Van Zyl explores the limits and possibilities of the body, and asks how far we’re prepared to suspend our disbelief to keep faith in fantasies.
Georgina Starr’s Quarantaine is a lullaby by comparison – albeit one that features an implausible, bravura vocal rendition of Pauline Oliveros’s electronic composition Bye Bye Butterfly by soprano Loré Lixenberg. The self-contained cosmology of Quarantaine revolves around a tarot deck painted by Starr, and her interest in conditioning, indoctrination, breath and voice.
A feminist rebel and a trainee witch land in a colour-drenched “city of ladies” where they are spanked by floating hands, climb through a giant ear and escape by chewing wads of gum and blowing pink bubbles. Starr’s magic realm is lusciously evoked, comic and haunting: the title, chosen pre-pandemic, marks 40 days in spring when supernatural entities walk the Earth.
Recalling the reviled 2013 campaign telling “illegal” immigrants to “go home or face arrest”, Alberta Whittle’s Business as Usual: Hostile Environment plays from a truck-mounted screen. Addressing the River Clyde as an artery for empire-building and migration, the film is presented, pointedly, against the skyline of Glasgow itself.
Whittle reminds us that one corollary of the accelerating novelty-hungry, forward-facing culture identified by Bender is a failure to attend to our past. Business as Usual frames the Windrush scandal as a symptom of Britain’s failure to write and teach its own colonial history.
There is a lot of (arguably too much) video work. It’s good, but after months on screens, it thrills the body to encounter sculpture full of attention to texture and movement. Ana Mazzei’s restrained spindly structures in painted wood offer theatre for the eyes, framing and distorting the space like lenses, and revealing quiet detail as you move around them.
Eva Rothschild’s perfectly balanced show at Modern Institute is a textural paradise – one sculpture bears a dripping liquid skin; a floor to ceiling stack of electrical tape turns out to be painted Jesmonite; there are licks of colour and glossy texture applied to interior surfaces, like shared secrets. This is art that needs to be physically encountered, that invites our attention. A reminder of what we’ve been missing: art as antidote to the cannibalistic river.
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