On the occasion of Gretchen Bender: So Much Deathless, Red Bull Arts New York and ISSUE co-present Image Haze: A Tribute to Gretchen Bender’s “So Much Deathless.” Held on Saturday, May 18th, the two live audio-visual performances have been organized in response to Bender’s unfinished work of media theater, which was to be entitled So Much Deathless. In writing on Bender’s earlier Total Recall (1987), the critic Jonathan Crary compared her electrifying performance to the narcotic “image haze” of 80s television, stating that Bender “outlines survival tactics for artists to maintain a mobile position at the boundaries of mass culture.” These performances follow in Bender’s footsteps, and continue to sketch survival tactics for our evolving media and cultural landscape. This co-presentation is a special event with limited seating and free tickets available for ISSUE Members.
The evening begins with a performance by Bender’s frequent collaborator Stuart Argabright and his post-industrial band Black Rain, set against a mesmerizing new video score by contemporary artist Philip Vanderhyden. The second act features an interactive performance by electronic musician Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, who presents her most recent album, Tides: Music for Meditation and Yoga, as a guided meditation. In collaboration with video artist Sean Hellfritsch, Smith’s performance is set within a newly commissioned light therapy/video installation.
Argabright and Vanderhyden were introduced in 2012 while Vanderhyden was curating the exhibition Gretchen Bender: Tracking the Thrill, which toured from The Poor Farm (Manawa, WI) to The Kitchen (New York, NY). Their collaboration began with Argabright supplying sound for Vanderhyden’s multi-channel video installations, and has since expanded to feature the work of Argabright and Soren Roi’s band Black Rain. For this performance, Vanderhyden provides intricate computer graphic visuals as a complement to the band’s atmospheric techno-futurist soundscapes.
The performance is their most ambitious collaboration to date, with Black Rain debuting new music set to an immersive installation created by Vanderhyden specifically for ISSUE’s distinctive architecture. Black Rain’s sci-fi meta-music becomes a programmed and improvised response to Vanderhyden’s videos, which draw together parallel themes of financial anxiety, developmental psychology, virtual reality and sexual gratification into a dreamy tableau.
This is followed by a performance of Smith’s atmospheric recent album, composed of field recordings and ethereal sounds made using a Buchla Music Easel synthesizer, a rare analog instrument first produced in 1973 that generates her music’s uniquely breathless swells and climaxes. Smith’s performance is accompanied by a site-specific video and light installation created by Hellfritsch, with whom she has frequently collaborated. Creating iconic, other-wordly music videos for musicians such as Björk and Grizzly Bear, the artists’ visuals become a space for contemplation and reflection.
