Martha Rosler
Martha Rosler's work has entered the canon of contemporary art through a process of steady, stealthy infiltration. Lacking commercial gallery representation until 1993, her endeavours as a prolific essayist, lecturer and political agitator nonetheless enabled her agenda to trickle down critical channels and into the bloodstream. With the 1970s boom in the semiological method, her work was free to course through the (as yet undifferentiated) text books and syllabuses of a fetal conceptual art. The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 1974, possibly her most familiar piece, begs automatic inclusion in any diatribe on text art or photography and the word. Its "poetry of drunkenness" curries favour with enough linguistic and representational potential to make academics go weak at the knees. Rosler's issues art seems to have been imparted by "ambient" means, with work first realized in magazines, on billboards or as casual flyers only now emerging within a gallery environment.

This, her first retrospective, often grants the curious parallax of looking back at work which, until now, has not existed as art at all. Replete with swathes of text, photography, supplementary documents, transcriptions and typewriter missives all cladding the walls in a pin board logic, the Ikon cuts a formidable survey.

The re-presentation of a work originally executed at a different site unavoidably raises questions as to what its title actually refers to - the collection of objects or an abstract, transferable proposal. Fascination with the (Game of the) Exploding (Historical) Hollow Leg provides such a conundrum as a collection of maps, "war room" television sets and data pertaining to the North American Radar Air Defense program of the 1980s adapt themselves to a new space. Rosler turns the paranoia of surveillance and the atomic button full circle, as we are privy to a host of data on its military installation ensconced in the mountains. Typical of Rosler's data-rich, public-access posture, her crusade against avoidable ignorance delights in displays of facts and diagrams with a blunt born-and-raised-in-Brooklyn frankness.

The sequences of Chile on the Road to NAFTA from 1997, a 12-minute piece in the style of a home movie, roll by like unused rushes from a wildlife documentary. Like the three hour daytrip videos of Fischli and Weiss the atmosphere is one of skeptical banality. Armed and armored police skulk under the trees of a Santiago park, whilst the colony's coast is patrolled by navy frigates. The video features the police band playing in the Plaza de Carmas, and their rendition of the theme from Star Wars. Both a reminder of the rhetoric of Reaganomic techno-war and a pandering to the currency of American celluloid exports, the soundtrack floats over the new memorial to the victims of the fascist coup: corpses which The Road to NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement — paves over. As in Rosler's In the Place of the Public: Airport Series, 1983-1994, it is difficult to tell if we're looking at snippets from the habitual monitoring of a cultural and political safari, or if the work of this type is predetermined.

For Rosler, "documentation" is a term that was cooked up by dealers to capitalize on the dematerialized art of "remote" conceptual practices. The objects with which we are presented often appear as leftovers from events, Oldenburg-style props, plucked as trophies from the wake of events. Rosler's politics scrapes back the layers of power which marginalia communities of the ideologically dispossessed. By the same token her art, which has never had any regard for creating illusions of monetary value, dismantles the art world's will-to-price by deliberately using impoverished media.

Bringing the War Home is a series of "rephotographs" made from 1967-72. Images of Vietnam atrocities are edited into sets of American dream interiors. A figure cradles a baby-corpse across shag-pile carpet, Pat Nixon resplendent in her frock beams — a gilt framed gunned woman on the White House wall behind her. These are no cutting room combos. Where Rauschenberg and his silkscreen re-administer both banal and horrific iconography into one auto-expressive more frenzy, Rosler and her scalpel surgically edit the two intact. The grafting process of such propaganda recalls its ancestry in the cut and paste of Berlin dada photomontage.

Entering Rosler's life world is like stumbling upon a terrorist's workshop as we scope its a bum of past triumphs and mischievous racketeering. Current projects plot the downfall of global phallocentrism whilst images of Nixon, Reagan and other demagogues appear like cuttings on dart boards — targets for the kitchen implements of the housewife's oppression. The works in this retrospective make the installation of an education room at the Ikon something of a misnomer; its all already one packed learning resource for lessons in Rosler fundamentalism.

Max Andrews,
PostMedia magazine