Martha Rosler, in front of her most recent exhibit, Irrespective at the Jewish Museum & Yale University
Dear friends,
This is an interim blog, or a blog in progress. I am not ready to write at all adequately, even in a blog form, on the life and work of the American artist, Martha Rosler. I need to read her writing more, see more of her photography as printed in books. I’ve two good books on the way(Culture Class, and a Retrospective catalogue). But having felt so demoralized by recent events in the US public worlds, and today feeling lifted up with some hope for women with Joe Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris for his vice-presidential candidate, and listened to the various podcasts on Rosler’s exhibit online, I want no longer to wait to include in my series of woman artists at long last, someone still alive as well as right now creating art to enable women to uncover, challenge, and subvert the views of them that turn them into powerless sex objects, woman as existing only in relation to men (mother, wife, sister, daughter),and to expose war, homelessness, gender roles, commercialism, inequality, hard labor, desperately abysmal living conditions around the world. She is has been at this for fifty years. She was born and still lives in Brooklyn, taught at Brooklyn college, has been socially engaged with the communities all around. Her official website.
Her photograph and montages speak for themselves — as pictures should. From her Semiotics of the Kitchen:
Letter “K” (Knife). Still from Semiotics of the Kitchen, black-and-white video, 1975 — If you had to live here …
From House Beautiful, Bringing the War Home (1962-72); Images of women at home as of Vietnam and the US colonialist wars against the Southeast Asian people (Vietnam, Cambodia)
The Gray Drape
Men at War
The Gladiators
This is one she made of Pat Nixon, as the quintessential American householder:
First Lady, Pat Nixon — it’s hard to distinguish so much phoniness, so flat and abject , so pathetic a consciousness
How beautiful? what make for beauty? Rosler is much influenced by Luce Irigaray’s strategies of apparent aquiescence combine with harsh punishmentas the way of the world towards ordinary people. In her essays on art and the art world, she lays bare the class structures, the privileging, how museums and colleges can work to stifle individuals. Her anti-war work is sometimes wrongly interpreted as being against just one kind of war: the colonialist, far away. But she is ever doing is examining the material bases and left-overs from our daily lives. History and art must be inclusive: take in what’s found at Wall-Mart, low and vulgar as well as high and elegant art.
Here is a good explanation of what her collages and montages are made of:
And here she discusses the conditions of the art world in Lisbon at an exhibit in a museum the 1970s, her own attitudes and how they’ve changed over the years, and what are the conditions an artist who wants to show her work (and occasionally maybe sell it) have to deal with: audience taste, audience tolerance, the financing of art
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Yesterday afternoon when I heard Biden had chosen Kamala Harris I first had an anxiety attack (oh my god white and black males and some white conservative women will not like her aggressive ways) but then I thought again and tears came to my eyes as I imagined her possibly president. She resonates with me — her now well known story of herself as a little girl on a bus to a good school is me in 1964 going to Queens College by 2 buses at night (at first) where the price each term was but $25. This changed my life; I eventually went to England on a full scholarship — to Leeds University.
So although I don’t know enough (as yet) for a full blog, why and whence this bog on Martha Rosler.
I’ve not gone into the database, but I have discovered that none of my survey books, including one on photography and another on American women artists of the 2nd half of the 20th century, includes anything on the life & work of Martha Rosler. I find this telling.
Martha Rosler’s essays. She is as important for her political and social non-fiction as the strikingly memorable photos. One from the 1990s, If You Lived Here; another book, 2008, just of her essays, Culture Class. What she is trying to do is get the reader to “re-see” the physical world around us as a continual ruthless emblem of a nauseatingly shameless unequal and warlike society. IN her If you lived here, she is not the only essayist and the book is readable. I will try not to give up but I’ve a hunch the way to read Culture Class is 3 pages a day … Its cover is a woman standing on the roof of a tenement hanging up her wash. She concentrates on cities and how they are being built and the people who live in them and how. Well meaning as she is, I find her style hopelessly abstract, but say at the same time is she is as important for her political and social non-fiction as the strikingly memorable photo, and installation work.
[…] work I know)? Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld, Simone Weil, Alice Oswald. Who have pictured it? Martha Rosler. Novels and plays and memoirs: Ann Radcliffe (in her Summer Tour), Olivia Manning, Iris Origo, […]