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In the mid-1960s, Martha Rosler, interested in collage’s ability to manipulate the context
in which images are interpreted began to explore the medium of photomontage. One of her early
photomontage projects, Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain, is a series of thirty-one
pieces, created from 1967-1972, that juxtapose images of women found in Men’s magazines and
lingerie catalogues with advertisements for consumer goods.1 Rosler titled the piece Body
Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain in homage to the 1971 film by American director, Elliot
Erwitt, “Body Knows No Pain.”2 The sources of Rosler’s imagery are all taken from material
intended to sell something, thus leading the viewer towards a deeper awareness of the semiotics
Simultaneously, her photomontage series in direct dialogue with Bertolt Brecht’s notions of
distanciation. By analyzing the semiotics of advertisement Rosler aims to activate the spectator
Through the practice of photomontage Rosler picks and chooses segmented parts of the
female body reducing it to its components like an exchangeable good. The works parodically
fetishize the female form to force the viewers reconsideration of the use of depictions of
women’s bodies in advertising as signifiers of the circulation of commodities, sex, and
the representation of women and femininity commonly found in advertising. By doing this she
1Wark, Jayne. "Conceptual Art and Feminism: Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, and Martha
Wilson." in Woman's Art Journal 22, no. 1, 2001, 48.
2Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “A Conversation with Martha Rosler”, in Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life
World, ed. Catherine de Zegher, Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 1998, 47.
3arthes, Roland., and Heath, Stephen. “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image Music Text / Roland Barthes ;
Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977.
4Alberro, Alexander, “Dialectics of Everyday Life: Martha Rosler and the Strategy of the Decoy,” in
Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World, ed. Catherine de Zegher, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1998, 79
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questions the strategies used in advertising by calling the viewer to ask: What is the
advertisement seeking to do? And, how do you know this? By controlling the dialogue around
women in advertising through her choice of medium, Rosler’s work serves to negate the
subconscious influences that advertisements have on the individual, that then permeate into
society. She achieves thus by calling into question the tricks that advertising employs, and the
standard portrayals of women that they then disseminate into mass media.
In the followup of a study from 1971 titled, “A Woman’s Place: An Analysis of the Roles
Portrayed by Women in Magazine Advertisement,” it was found that in 1970 only 12% of
workers represented in advertising were female. The report also reflected on the more common
portrays of women in advertising in the 1970s noting that: “The stereotypes reflected in the ads
studied were: a woman’s place is in the home, women do not make important decisions or do
important things, women are dependent and need men’s protection, men regard women primarily
as sex objects—they are not interested in women as people.”5 Rosler is explicitly reacting to
absurdity of these tropes in her work, by making a pointed critique of the constant impalement of
torrents of advertisements depicting women as sex objects and domestic servants. Body
Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain can be categorized within a much larger discourse about the
effects of these oppressive representations of women in media. Operating from a belief that art
should engage with contemporary issues stemming from Brecht and the theory of aesthetics; the
juxtaposition of images from Playboy with ads from Home & Garden acts as a form of social
commentary aimed to challenge the reality of women being created through societal myths
In Barthes essay, “Rhetoric of the Image,” he argues that there are three messages in an
image. He insists on using the medium of advertising to illustrate this because as he states, “in
advertising the signification of the image is undoubtedly intentional”.6 Barthes understands the
5Wagner, Louis C., and Janis B. Banos. "A Woman's Place: A Follow-up Analysis of the Roles Portrayed
by Women in Magazine Advertisements." Journal of Marketing Research 10, no. 2, 1973, 213-14.
6Barthes, Roland., and Heath, Stephen. “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image Music Text / Roland Barthes ;
Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977, 152.
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relationship between an image and the text that accompanies it. A coded iconic message, which
creates associative responses from the viewer based on their own prior knowledge, and a non-
coded iconic message which essentially is the literal visual image that reveals what the product
through an encouragement to see one’s self with the services or products being advertised. As
John Berger suggests in Ways of Seeing, ads aim to make us feel dissatisfied with our own lives
be sold to them. Ads works on the basic capitalist mythology that we need to continue to buy
things to have worth in society. To maintain the facade of glamour in ads, advertisers try to play
on mythologies preset within society creating false assumptions about reality. Using semiotic
analysis of advertising it is important to identify the linguistic and iconic signs in advertisements,
while recognizing the role advertisements have in generating myths that inform social beliefs and
societal identities. As Barthes states, it can be assumed that every aspect of an advertisement is a
sign because the images were crafted to have implicit meaning. By addressing the various signs
in an advertisement, both the visual and linguistic, it is possible to understand how the signs are
recognize the social myths in which advertisers draw upon. In particular for Rosler, she is
interested in societies mythic understanding of ideal feminine beauty and the associations
between women and domesticity as connoted through common advertising practices. Through
Rosler’s practice of photomontage she is able to construct images that display the coded iconic
messages suggested by stereotypical representation of women in 1970s media, by creating
7Berger, John, Ways of Seeing : Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger. London: Penguin
Books, 1972, 142-143.
8Barthes, Roland., and Heath, Stephen. “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image Music Text / Roland Barthes ;
Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977, 160.
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images that display this through their literal, non-coded iconic messages. Rosler stated her choice
to work in the medium of photomontage was about her ability to have authority over imagery,
expressing: “It is seizing control of the discourse, the reading, and focusing attention: ‘Look here
now!’ Don’t look here in order to go somewhere else in your mind. I thought if you are going to
engage with everyday life, you have to very careful about selecting what is to be looked at.”9
Through this medium she has the ability parodically to draw attention to the advertisements
compulsion to put women in submissive positions by focusing on female sexuality and the
feminine body in relationship to men. By breaking down the signs used in advertising Rosler is
able to point out the specific signs used in advertising to indicate powerlessness of women.
Erving Goffman is recognized as one of the first scholars to systematically address the
book, Gender Advertisements. Goffman who is also concerned with a semiotic analysis of
advertisements, argues for a focus on how advertisements are constructed to understand the
meanings they wish to relay. He specifically focuses on how advertisers choose to portray social
women. In his book Goffman analyzes over five hundred images from advertisements and comes
to the conclusion that an underlying theme throughout the different ads is female subordination.
By examining the contrasting poses, clothing (or lack thereof), relative size, products being
advertised, and body positioning of men and women in advertisements, Goffman illustrates our
societies compulsion to portray women as passive and vulnerable. Common reoccurring themes
in advertising include images showing women gently caressing the product being advertised
(Fig. 1), touching their own body, laying, kneeling, or sitting, acting seductively or playfully,
acting aloof or careless, engaging in domestic activities (Fig. 2), etc. Goffman contends that
9Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “A Conversation with Martha Rosler”, in Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life
World, ed. Catherine de Zegher, Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 1998, 29.
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these are positions of powerlessness and that portrayals of gender in advertising favor men and
Hot Meat (Fig.3), one of the photomontage works from the series, depicts the profile
view of a woman’s bare chest superimposed onto the front of an oven taken from an old
magazine advertisement. By doing this Rosler acknowledges two common portrayals of women
that are regularly disseminated through mass media. By visually connecting the female body to a
kitchen appliance Rosler breaks down how the denotation of the female body has come to
suggest domesticity. She amps it up a notch by depicting not just a female body, but the bare
breast of a woman, a common sign for female sexuality, to unite the notions of sexual appeal
with domesticity. Hot Meat’s transparency in illustrating the ways in which women’s bodies have
been annexed by society, by fragmenting the female body and then transplanting it’s parts on to
domestic products, satirizes societies complacency in the portrayal of women as objects. Rosler
is specifically critical in this work of advertisements that participate in the societal myth that
presents women as domestic mechanisms. Rosler pointedly demonstrates this troublesome
narrative surrounding women by parodically reducing the female body to nothing more than a
household appliance.
Small Wonder (Fig, 4), another photomontage work from Body Beautiful, or Body Known
Men’s magazine) over her bra. Focusing first on the original lingerie advertisement chosen by
Rosler, we can read the pose of the kneeling model, leaning back on her hands to expose her
torso to the camera, as both submissive and seductive.11 Though the ad’s target audience is
women there is still an inherent underlying concern with feminine sex appeal. By transforming a
lingerie ad with sexual undertones into an overtly sexually explicit image Rosler brings attention
10Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements /Erving Goffman. 1st Harper Colophon ed. Studies in the
Anthropology of Visual Communication ; v. 3, No. 2. New York: Harper & Row, 1979, 63.
11Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements /Erving Goffman. 1st Harper Colophon ed. Studies in the
Anthropology of Visual Communication; No. 2. New York: Harper & Row, 1979, 41.
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the promotion in advertisement for women to maintain their outwardly appearance and shape
their bodies to be readily consumable at a man’s disposal. Claudia Gould comments on Rosler’s
interest the commodification of the female body for male consumption in Martha Rosler:
Irrespective saying,
“Rosler is largely concerned with external pressures, expectations, and fantasies projected
upon women and the erasure of their work or its transformation into poses…With their
fragmented materiality, the works expose the glaring commodification of women’s bodies, posed,
segmented, and packaged like products for consumption; in some, Rosler reconceives images of
women meant for male consumption as gestures of defiance and expression of liberation.”12
The satiric nature of Small Wonder acts an expression of dissent from the societal
narratives surrounding images of the female body. The cut out smile set onto of the underwear
being advertised, underlines the parodical gesture of Rosler’s use of photomontage and steeps the
work with clear comedic elements. Through the humorous aspects ingrained in the essence of
Body Beautiful, or Body Known No Pain the work feels structurally defiant as it pokes fun at the
In Cargo Cult (Fig. 4), another work from the series, the entire composition of the pieces
is organized around a loading dock. The image presents stacked shipping containers piled up in a
port, the front of shipping containers covered by images of models applying makeup products.
While Cargo Cult initially brings to mind the harsh standards of beauty women are subjected to,
a closer look at the image reveals that there are several men working at port hitching the
containers to the cranes used to transport them onto the ship. It is important to note that all of the
women shown modeling the makeup are white, and all of the men working to transport the
containers are black. Cargo Cult reflects on how the highest form of beauty in Western culture is
always determine by whiteness, and as the name implies, Rosler is concerned with the dangerous
implications of “white beauty” being exported to other countries. Calling to mind the oppressive
12 Gould, Claudia “Crossing,” Martha Rosler : Irrespective. New Haven, Connecticut : Yale University
Press: 2018, p.54
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traditions that these notions of beauty stem from, Rosler also shows concern for the perpetuation
of these standards of beauty becomingly widely disseminated through the dominant Western
culture. By underpinning gender issues with issues surrounding neoliberalism and globalization
Rosler is challenging the connotations of beauty as white as denoted within American
advertising.
media, but this time she was concerned not with representation in advertising or art, but ways in
which television represented women in the 1970s. In Semiotics of the Kitchen, Rosler takes on a
Julia Child-esque role in a performance that parodies a television cooking demonstration. She
stands in front of a fixed camera and goes through the alphabet of kitchen utensils from A
through Z, starting with the apron she is donning. Rosler moves through the alphabet of kitchen
utensils naming each one and then provides a violent demonstration for each tool (i.e. gesturing
the stabbing of the knife, motioning the pounding of a rolling pin, etc). Rosler’s presentation of
the tools both equally comical and aggressive implies her frustration and anger with the media’s
associations of women as signs for domesticity. Rosler finishes the demonstration by turning
herself into a tool, personifying the letters U, V, W, X, Y, Z by taking the shape of each letter
with her body. Through this performance, Rosler demonstrates the ways in which structures of
power and oppression are detectible within the systems of visual language and the social world
of linguistic communication. Art historian, Silvia Eiblmayr in her essay, “Martha Rosler’s
Characters,” looks into the ways that her work goes beyond of the boundaries of purely
economic, social and political realms, but instead goes beyond to acknowledge the ways in
which the systems of white, male, capitalist controlled culture in America permeate into peoples
everyday lives. Eiblmayr states, “Her striking analyses of social and economic conditions and
their class specific and gendered effects and consequences always include the text of the
unconscious that surfaces in the symptom.” 13 Rosler’s work reflects her concern for the ways in
13Eiblmayr, Silvia, “Martha Rosler’s Characters,” in Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World, ed.
Catherine de Zegher, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1998, 153
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which women’s bodies have transformed into a system of signs that represent capitalist
influenced modes of oppression of women. By equating women to food production and house
hold appliances Rosler criticizes the controlled subjectivity of women preserved through mass
media and advertising.
Rolser, well versed in Brechtian strategies of ‘distanciation,’ and working from the belief
in the importance of creating art that addresses contemporary issues, was interested in creating
art that encouraged the activation of viewer.14 Her pseudo-surrealist collection of photomontage
images, Body Beautiful, or Body Knows No Pain, is Brecht’s strategy of ‘distanciation’ applied
to advertising. Rosler within her artistic practice, is employing the Brechtian strategies of
displacing the spectator from the illusions of the fictitious world crafted in advertisements which
are rooted in oppressive systems of sexist and racist categorizations. By deconstructing the
semiotics of images used by marketing campaigns Rosler is essentially activating her viewers by
alleviating them from the illusions of advertising. Making her viewers active participants, she
prompts them to question the representations they commonly see used by ads. Rosler makes
obvious the sexist connotations imbued in advertisements directed at both men and women, and
thus undoubtably challenges the viewer to take a critical stance on how those common
connotations associated with images of women influence us subconsciously. The purpose of this
is help the viewer further their understanding of how these portrayals shape our social reality.
Art historian, Griselda Pollock, writing from a Brechtian perspective about feminist art in
the 1970s, is skeptical of the impact of feminists artist who solely create art that highlights a
positive and inclusive identification with femininity, without using their artistic practice to
challenge the deep rooted systems of patriarchy that still determine our society, “One of the
major problematics for feminist artistic practice must be working over the mechanisms which
produce and sustain a patriarchal regime of sexual difference at the level of representation and its
14Brecht, Bertolt, “On Form and Subject Matter,” in John Willet, ed. and trans., Brecht on
Theatre : The Development of an Aesthetic, 2nd ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978, 30
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that in feminist art, questions of subjectivity need to be explored through Brechtian strategies of
prioritizing political activation. Rosler similarly to Pollock surmise that feminist art should be
rooted in a concrete knowledge of the oppressive regimes that are structurally in place, and that a
feminist artist’s practice should be used as a tool to challenge and disrupt these structures of
power. Rosler’s work in the 1960s and 1970s acts as a productive political art practice because
her work operates on both theoretical and practical levels. Her analyses of gendered effects and
consequences of the current social conditions are in direct alinement with Brecht’s discernment
that it is the responsibility of art to deal issues that plague contemporary society.
larger feminist art movement, the motives of Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain become
very apparent. Rolser operating from within her own social reality exposes the inconvenient
from identifying with the mythologies of advertising, by making those myths abundantly clear.
Through her artistic practice Rosler underlines the classist, racists, sexist, and heteronormative
expectations we as a society have come to know through our exposure to mass culture,
semiotics within the feminist art movement when rooted in Brecht’s directive for political
engagement within an artistic practice. 17 Rosler’s practice in the 1960s and 1970s engaged with
Brechtian strategies acting a driving element for feminist projects like Semiotics of the Kitchen
15Pollock, Griselda. “Screening the seventies: sexuality and representation in feminist practice – a
Brechtian perspective” in Vision and Difference : Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art.
Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2003, 266-267
16Brecht, Bertolt, “On Form and Subject Matter,” in John Willet, ed. and trans., Brecht on
Theatre : The Development of an Aesthetic, 2nd ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978, 29
17Pollock, Griselda. “Screening the seventies: sexuality and representation in feminist practice – a
Brechtian perspective” in Vision and Difference : Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art.
Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2003, 223
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and Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain, and used semiotics as a tool by which she could
expose current issues facing the representations of women in media. Through photomontage
Rosler concretely breaks down the illusions woven into advertising, and argues that the
denotations of images in ad are never neutral. By overtly objectifying the female body she
exposes the ways that ads participate in the manipulation of the public into believing the
mythologies perpetuated through the dominant masculine culture. Body Beautiful, or Beauty
Knows No Pain reveals that advertisements go beyond merely objectifying female sexuality but
equate the female body to a commodity sign, and through the medium photomontage Rosler
reclaims the signs used to denote women in the media, and parodies the fetishization of women
as domestic beings.
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Fig. 5, Martha Rosler, Cargo Cult from the Fig. 6, Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975,
series “Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows Video, performance, Duration: 6 min. 09 sec.
No Pain,” c. 1966-1972, Mixed-media
collage
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Bibliography
Alberro, Alexander, “Dialectics of Everyday Life: Martha Rosler and the Strategy of the Decoy,”
in Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World, ed. Catherine de Zegher, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1998.
Alexander, Deutsche, Volpato, Nesbit, Rosler, Alexander, M. Darsie, Deutsche, Rosalyn, Volpato,
Elena, Nesbit, Molly, Rosler, Martha, and Jewish Museum , Issuing Body, Publisher,
Organizer, Host Institution. Martha Rosler : Irrespective / Introduction by Darsie
Alexander ; with Essays by Rosalyn Deutsche, Martha Rosler, and Elena Volpato and a
Conversation between Molly Nesbit and Martha Rosler. New Haven, Connecticut : Yale
University Press: 2018.
Barthes, Roland., and Heath, Stephen. “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image Music
Text / Roland Barthes ; Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath. London:
Fontana, 1977.
Berger, John., and British Broadcasting Corporation. Ways of Seeing : Based on the BBC
Television Series with John Berger. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and
Penguin Books, 1972.
Brecht, Bertolt, “On Form and Subject Matter,” in John Willet, ed. and trans., Brecht on
Theatre : The Development of an Aesthetic, 2nd ed. New York ; London: Hill and Wang:
Eyre Methuen, 1978.
Buchloh, Benjamin. “A Conversation with Martha Rosler,” in Martha Rosler: Positions in the
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Advertisements." JMR, Journal of Marketing Research (pre-1986) 8, no. 000001 (1971):
92.
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Eiblmayr, Silvia, “Martha Rosler’s Characters,” in Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World,
ed. Catherine de Zegher, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1998, 153
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of Art. Routledge Classics. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2003.
Wagner, Louis C., and Janis B. Banos. "A Woman's Place: A Follow-up Analysis of the Roles
Portrayed by Women in Magazine Advertisements." Journal of Marketing Research10,
no. 2 (1973): 213-14.
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Martha Wilson." in Woman's Art Journal 22, no. 1, 2001. 44-50.
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