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Martha Rosler
Beauty Rest
Gladiators
Hot Meat
Jumping Janes
Introduction
This paper is about Martha Rosler, a contemporary American artist whose work is characterized by the expression of social comment. I will start with a small, but necessary biography of the artist. Next, I will describe some of her most important works and I will provide a small critique of my favourite piece. Finally, I will relate Marthas work to my personal artistic experience.
Brief biography Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother was a school teacher and her father had a law office. She had a Jewish institute education, which she credits with her strong sensitivity to the public and the political. She studied her B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1965 and her M.F.A. from University of California, San Diego in 1974. (Neufeld)
Rosler works in photomontage, photo-text, video, installation and performance, and writes criticism. She pioneered using different media and combining them.
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Her broad range of work involves bringing a critical eye to public struggles, in unexpected ways and with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns in her art are the mass media, politics, war, homelessness and architectural structures. Her work has been seen in the "Documenta" exhibition in Kassel, Germany; several Whitney biennials; the Institute of Contemporary Art in London; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Dia Center for the Arts in New York; and many other international venues. Rosler has won different awards and recognitions throughout her artistic career. The most recently ones are the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Guggenheim Museum in 2010 and a DAAD Berlin fellowship in 2011. At the present time, she teaches at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey (Wikipedia). Art I found her work fascinating because is timeless. I can relate with her early and recent pieces in almost the same way because our societys problems are still the same. We still have wars, the media continuous to impose serotypes on women, and politics around the world remain to be a complete race for power. She captures reality in an original and wit way, as you will see in all the following pieces.
Video Semiotics of the Kitchen, a 1975 video, is one of the earliest and most widely known of her works. This short black-and-white video features Rosler as a generic cooking show host. She presents a variety of kitchen utensils and demonstrates unproductive, sometimes violent, uses for each. Considered a milestone of feminist art, this video criticizes the traditional womens roles imposed by society (Moffat). I enjoyed this video because is emotionally exahusting in a paused way, I could feel the fustration trough the screen.
In another early video, Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (1977), the artist presents a critique of social standardization. In the video a woman's body is measured in a clinical setting and compared with standard measurement. Voiceovers, symbolic scenes, and photographs suggest the implications of enforcing social standards of measurement (Neufeld). "This is a work about how to think about you," Rosler says in one of the voiceovers. I believe most women, especially in her teenage years, have experience the unpleasant feeling of not fitting with societys standards of beauty.
In recent years, Rosler has taken her cameras to airports, producing stunning shots of architectural details in empty terminals, and housing projects.
Photo-Text Her photo-text work The Bowery: In Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (197475) is considered a seminal work in conceptual photographic practice. Rosler put together a sequence of black-and-white photographs taken in the Bowery, a Manhattan slum neighbourhood, with words and phrases used to describe alcoholics, drunkenness, and alcoholism. Something remarkable about this piece is that instead of photographing the familiar "Bowery Bums," the alcoholics and drug addicts who could be found lying in the streets, Rosler took shots of disintegrating storefronts, empty bottles and empty street corners of buildings, void of people but representing the life that was lived in the community (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).
This work explores the relation between images and our associate perceptions of them. I believe its a very powerful work because it shows how alcohol can destroy human lives without showing an actual human being in the pictures.
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Photo Montage "Bringing the War Home," 1967-1972, is a series of photomontages that places images of Vietnam War victims in the middle of peaceful suburban American interiors cut from the pages of Life magazine. The prosper America is integrated with images of girls with missing members, mothers holding their dead children and wounded soldiers. These pieces are a response to the artist's "frustration with the images we saw in television and print media, even with anti-war flyers and posters. The images we saw were always very far away, in a place we couldn't imagine."
In 2004 she created Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, New Series in relation to the war in Iraq:
"I wanted to even at the loss of some self-pride to go back to something that I had done many years before in exactly in the same way, or as close a way as I could, to say you know this work of mine now for those who did, I must return to exactly the same form because we have sunk back to that same level, of a kind of indifferent relationship to what our country is doing. I wanted specifically to evoke a mood and invoke a way of working, to say, "Tout la change, tout la mme chose (All the changes, all the same thing)."
The new photomontages showed advertisements and pop culture icons surrounded by scattered corpses and imploding buildings (Darrow).
Small Critique Saddams Palace, part of the 2004 New Series, combines footage of the devastated palace of Saddam Hussein with stills from a Febreze commercial, showing a young housewife refreshing her couch curtains.
I feel attracted to this piece because of the strong social comment that contains. I found beauty in the way the artist puts together two contrasting realities and makes the viewer think about the connections between them. I appreciate this type of art because its challenging and enlightening. Personally it made me question: How can I worry about cleaning products when there are innocent people being killed at this precise moment? Its the use of an odour eliminator a kind of metaphor for how the United States government try to superficially hide their mistakes?
Conclusion Im not an artist, I dont create things, but I love art and I would like Martha Roslers work to influence my final project in this course. I would like to produce a piece with a critical point of view of our society. I feel especially attracted to the influence of the mass media in our lives and the manipulation of information by the people in power. I found Martha Roslers work tremendously inspirational and brave, and I think I would enjoy following her steps.
References: Darrow, Susannah. Burnaway. 15 October 2008. 10 October 2011 <http://www.burnaway.org/2008/10/martha-rosler-bringing-the-war-homeat-emory-visual-arts-gallery/>. Moffat, Charles Alexander. The Art History Archive. 2011. 16 October 2011 <http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/feminist/MarthaRosler.html>. Neufeld, Josh. Martha Rosler. 10 May 2006. 10 October 2011
<http://www.martharosler.net/>. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. SFMOMA. 2011. 16 October 2011 <http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/15418>. Wikipedia. 2011. 16 October 2011
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Rosler>.