Gretchen Bender, People in Pain, 1988

Phil Vanderhyden: Hi, I'm Phil Vanderhyden.

Narrator: For this year’s Biennial, Vanderhyden has recreated People in Pain, a 1988 installation by Gretchen Bender, an artist who passed away in 2004. 

Phil Vanderhyden: When this piece originally appeared in 1988, most of the titles for the movies were soon to be released titles or they were titles that were currently in theaters, or they were titles that had recently left movie theaters.

The idea—Gretchen's idea—was that as the piece moves through the world, the movie titles will gradually leave theaters, and what began as a piece that indexed your anticipation would be a piece that would index the trash heap of Hollywood production.

One of the things that I think interests Gretchen, if I can speak for her as well as me, is kind of a conversation that happens through time and how a piece's meaning changes and unfolds through time.  

Her brother, for example, said that she was always worried about the fact that as she made a piece, that it was getting old already even as she was making it. She tried to make work that worked with that aging process. I as an artist work from a similar perspective, I guess. Maybe I reach backwards in time, whereas I think she tried to reach forward in time to work on how something made contact with the world.