Martha Rosler (born 1943) is an American artist. She is a conceptual artist who works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, site-specific and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war, as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to places of passage and systems of transport.
Early life and education Born in Brooklyn, New York,Rosler bio, Mitchell-Innes & Nash website. Accessed Sept. 18, 2017. in 1943, Rosler spent formative years in California, from 1968 to 1980, first in north San Diego county and then in San Francisco. She has also lived and taught in Canada."Announcements: Martha Rosler," E-flux (February 2, 2014). She graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, as well as Brooklyn College (1965) and the University of California, San Diego (1974). She has lived in New York City since 1981.
Career Rosler's work and writing have been widely influential. Her media of choice have included photomontage and photo-text, as well as video, sculpture, and installation. Rosler has lectured extensively, nationally and internationally. She taught photography and media, as well as photo and video history and critical studies, at Rutgers University, in new Brunswick, New Jersey, where she was a professor for thirty years, attaining the rank of Professor II. She also taught at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany, as well as serving as visiting professor at the University of California's San Diego and Irvine campuses, and elsewhere.
Solo exhibitions of Rosler's work have been organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1977), Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (1987), Museum of Modern Art in Oxford (1990), The New Museum in collaboration with the International Center of Photography in New York, (1998–2000), Sprengel Hannover Museum (2005), Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2006), University of Rennes (2006), and Portikus in Frankfurt (2008). Her work has also been included in major group exhibitions such as Whitney Biennial (1979, 1983, 1987, and 1990), Documenta 7 and 12 (1982 and 2007), Havana Biennale (1986), Venice Biennale (2003), Liverpool Biennial (2004), Taipei Biennial (2004) and Skulptur Projekte (2007).
Rosler serves in an advisory capacity to the departments of education at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and at the Center for Urban Pedagogy (all New York City). She is a board member of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, New York and an Advisory Board board member of the Center for Urban Pedagogy. She has also served on the board of directors of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, New York, and she is a former member of the boards of directors of the Association for Independent Video and Film and the Media Alliance, and a former trustee of the Van Alen Center, all in New York City. Since the early 1980s she has been a regular lecturer at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, where she was formerly a faculty member.
Rosler is known for her writing as well as her art work in various media. She has published over 16 books of her artwork and her critical essays on art, photography, and cultural matters, some of which have appeared as well in translation. Her essays have been widely published, anthologized, and translated. She was interviewed for the film !Women Art Revolution.
Work Semiotics of the Kitchen Semiotics of the Kitchen (1974/75) is a pioneering work of feminist video art in which, parodying early television cooking shows, Rosler demonstrates some hand tools of the kitchen in alphabetical order. As her gestures begin to veer into an unexpected and possibly alarming direction, the character eventually dispenses with the tools and uses her body as a kind of semaphore system. Rosler has suggested that this darkly humorous work is meant to challenge social expectations of women in regard to food production and, more broadly, the role of language in determining these expectations. The issue the work calls up is whether the woman can be said to "speak herself."
"Even though it was obscure looking (on purpose) and inelegant (on purpose) and unedited (on purpose), it began to look like a naïf moment of production that was the best that could be done at the time. In other words, it was seen as a pioneering work because of its low quality of production". Conversation/podcast with Martha Rosler, 2018
Other video work Further video works include Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (1977), Losing: A Conversation with the Parents (1977), and Martha Rosler Reads Vogue (1982), with Paper Tiger Television; Domination and the Everyday (1980) and Born to Be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby $/M (1988), also with Paper Tiger Television. Many of her video works address geopolitics and power, including Secrets From the Street: No Disclosure (1980); A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night (1983); If It's Too Bad to be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION (1985); the three-channel installation Global Taste: A Meal in Three Courses (1985); and Because This Is Britain (2014), and many others.
Rosler employs performance-based narratives and symbolic images of mass media to disrupt viewers' expectations. Rosler says, "Video itself 'isn't innocent:' Yet video lets me construct, using a variety of fictional narrative forms, 'decoys' engaged in a dialectic with commercial TV."
These concepts are emphasized in such works as Semiotics of the Kitchen, in which a static camera is focused on a woman in a kitchen who interacts with kitchen utensils, naming and demonstrating their uses in odd gestures, speaking to the expectations of women in certain domestic spaces.
Photography and photomontage Rosler's photo/text work The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1974/75) is considered a seminal work in conceptual and postmodern photographic practice. The series of 45 black and white prints pair photos of storefronts on the Bowery, at the time of the work's making a famous "skid row" of New York City, with photographs of mostly metaphoric groups of texts referring to drunks and drunken behavior. The photos are displayed in a grid to accentuate the anti-expressionist nature of the work and the inherent limitation of both visual and linguistic systems to describe human experiences and social problems.
Some of Rosler's best-known works are collected under the title House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (c. 1967–72). This is a series of photomontages that juxtapose aspirational scenes of middle-class homes, mostly interiors, with documentary photos from the Vietnam War. These images were primarily distributed as photocopied fliers in and around antiwar marches and occasionally in "underground" newspapers. They continue the tradition of political photomontage in the style of John Heartfield and Hannah Höch as well as pop art such as Richard Hamilton's Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?. Both the war images and the domestic interiors were collected from issues of Life Magazine and similar mass-market magazines, but these works sought to reunite the two apparently separate worlds to imply connections between the industries of war and the industries of the home and their common understandings .
Rosler revisited this series in 2004 and 2008 by producing new images based on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, under the title House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series. Sensing that her original series had become accepted and aestheticized, her new series was designed to address continuities that paralleled the Vietnam War and unsettle complacent viewers. Rosler described the "rah rah" attitude of American media and politics that reminded her of the political manipulations of the past.
Also widely noted are her series of photomontages entitled Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain (c. 1965–72), addressing the photographic representation of women and domesticity. These works slightly preceded the antiwar montages and spurred their making.
Many of these works are concerned with the geopolitics of entitlements and dispossession. Her writing and photographic series on roads, the system of air transport, and urban undergrounds (subways or metros) join her other works addressing urban planning and architecture, from housing to homelessness and the built environment, and places of passage and transportation.
Much of her work also focus antiwar and feminist ideologies in the 1960s and 2000s. Rosler's art inserts domestic and private themes into the public sphere in order to make political, social, and instructional critiques.
Exhibitions Rosler has had numerous solo exhibitions. A retrospective of her work, “Positions in the Life World” (1998–2000) was shown in five European cities (Birmingham, England; Vienna; Lyon/Villeurbanne; Barcelona; and Rotterdam) and, concurrently, at the International Center of Photography and the New Museum of Contemporary Art (both in New York). She has recently been the subject of an extensive retrospective exhibition at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM), in Turin. In 2006 her work was the subject of solo exhibitions at the University of Rennes and in 2007 at the Worcester Museum of Art. Her work has been seen in the Venice Biennale of 2003; the Liverpool Biennial, the Taipei Biennial (both 2004), and the Singapore Biennale (2011), and the Thessaloniki Biènnale (2017); as well as many major international survey shows, including the "Documenta" exhibitions in Kassel, Germany, of 1982 and 2007, Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2007, and several Whitney Biennials.
In 1989, in lieu of a solo exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation in New York City, Rosler organized the project "If You Lived Here...", in which over 50 artists, film- and video producers, photographers, architects, planners, homeless people, squatters, activist groups, and schoolchildren addressed contested living situations, architecture, planning, and utopian visions, in three separate exhibitions, four public forums, and associated events. In 2009, an archive exhibition based on this project, "If You Lived Here Still," opened at e-flux's gallery in New York and then traveled (2010) to Casco Office for Art Design and Theory, in Utrecht, Netherlands, and to La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona. Following the problematic addressed by these exhibitions, Rosler together with the urbanist Miguel Robles-Durán worked on an urban installation project in Hamburg, Germany, called We Promise!(2015), which confronts the conflicting promises of urban regeneration projects in Europe via a set of public posters on the street and in public transport. Versions of the 1989 show have been mounted in many locations on several continents.