It's hard not to be charmed by Martha Rosler, a politically engaged artist who sweetens every dose of instruction with a spoonful of humor. Rosler's aim is to persuade, and if you're not inclined to agree with her, you might even call what she does propaganda. Nevertheless, as a surprisingly enjoyable retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art makes clear, some art can be fun and good for you.

There are lessons, to be sure, in the way Rosler piles nudie centerfolds into a vast landscape of flesh, or turns her camera on an assemblage of truncated mannequin limbs in a shop window. She came of age in the early 1970s and decided then that a painting hung in a gallery could seem too pure, useless and expensive to work any social change. Rosler believed that art should dirty its hands with history and so she channeled her vision through photomontage, slide shows, video, newspapers, postcards and even garage sales. (Another part of the show, opening July 29 at the International Center of Photography, focuses on her photos.) One of Rosler's favorite themes is the politics of the kitchen. "A Gourmet Experience" (1974), Rosler's exploration of the mechanics of gourmet food production and consumption, consists of a long, white-covered table, elaborately set for a banquet. As a male voice on tape intones poetic excerpts from cookbooks, a series of lush projected images from food and travel magazines offers a parade of good-looking dishes. More gorgeous grub flashes by on a videotape and Rosler provides the voiceover, marinated in her Brooklyn accent.

"A cook can't just slap things together," she says. "The best cooks are like magicians. Chefs are like orchestra conductors. Taste, mastery and magic are things that need cultivation. Art is not an accident." The installation is complex, contradictory, pointed and droll. Part of what intrigues Rosler is the way a biological necessity gets socially defined. We all have to eat, but how we do so is part of a culture that binds women to hearth and stove-or did a quarter-century ago.

The fact that food is also a metaphor for art is, Rosler thinks, a "pretty trap"-a way of making women feel powerful within the confines of their sphere.

(In the public space of the restaurant, of course, the kitchen is the province of male celebrity chefs, shown in the videotape presiding over deluxe dining rooms).

And yet, as critical as Rosler can be of the way food has tyrannized women, she obviously loves to eat and cook, and also appreciates the fluent creativity that women have always brought to the kitchen. This installation, like all her best work, is driven by a potent mix of rage and ambivalence.

"Because I'm so didactic, I can't resist arguing against myself," says Rosler, and therein lies her strength.

Ariella Budick,
Newsday,
July 21, 2000