video
Rosler's video works investigate how socioeconomic realities and
political ideologies dominate ordinary life."
— Electronic Arts Intermix
A Budding
Gourmet
1974, 17:45 minutes
In A Budding Gourmet, Rosler explores the
ideological processes through which food preparation comes to be seen
as "cuisine," a product of national culture. Accompanied by the strains
of a violin concerto, Rosler's deadpan narrator explains her reasons for
wanting to become a gourmet. Photographs from food and travel magazines
alternate as Rosler's narrator discusses food as a key to refinement,
breeding, and, in the case of "Eastern" cuisines, spirituality. For her,
cooking is a way of accumulating and demonstrating cultural capital, whether
it is the haughty elegance of a France she's never visited, or the fiery
exoticism of a Brazil from which she's just returned and is now "hers"
to share with her friends. Rosler illuminates how the concept of the gourmet
is bound up with notions of class, as well how the kitchen, traditionally
seen as the woman's sphere of power, is used to cultivate mastery over
other cultures, just as surely as is the "male" sphere of politics. Rosler
was to continue exploring this theme in The East is Red, The West is
Bending.
— Electronic Arts Intermix online catalogue
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| play QuickTime excerpt |
Semiotics of the Kitchen
1975, 7 minutes
A milestone of feminist art, this short black-and-white
video reveals the suburban kitchen to be a war zone where routine food
preparation masks the violent frustrations felt by women at being confined
by the home. A static camera is focused on a mid-shot of a woman in a
kitchen. On a counter before her are a variety of utensils, each of which
she picks up, names and proceeds to demonstrate, but with gestures that
depart from the normal uses of the tool. In an ironic grammatology of
sound and gesture, the woman and her implements enter and transgress the
familiar system of everyday kitchen meanings.
Losing: ... A Conversation
with the Parents
1977, 19 minutes
Martha Rosler investigates that particularly "female"
disease, anorexia. A husband and wife's discussion of their daughter's
fatal illness surpasses simple answers. They sit in their luscious, magazine-styled
home obsessing on world starvation, flipping through a photo album about
their daughter, reciting horror stories from the media, supporting their
plea of innocence, repeatedly smiling and patting each other. When she
suddenly strays into issues of sexual difference ("When boys go berserk,
they take an ax or shotgun to their families; girls take it out on themselves....
An ideal woman is a thin woman..."), they become perturbed — and
she stops.
— Video Data Bank catalogue, 1986
The East is Red, the West is
Bending
1977, 20 minutes
An astute deconstruction
of the political ideology that pervades the everyday, this is a tongue-in-cheek
presentation of a booklet that accompanies a newly marketed consumer appliance,
a West Bend electric wok. In this performance-based work, Rosler reads
the booklet in a manner that recalls an amateurish local television cooking
demonstration. Demonstrating the wok at home, this "failed Mrs. Pat Boone"
delivers an absurd corporate text. A few incongruous inserts into the
booklet's language of corporate gentility suggest the imperialist attitudes
that underlie attempts to convince us to transform ourselves into connoisseurs
of exotic foreign cuisines.
— Electronic Arts Intermix online catalogue
From the PTA, the High School
and the City of Del Mar
1977
Vital Statistics of a Citizen,
Simply Obtained
1977, 39 minutes
Based on a performance presented at the University
of California, San Diego in 1974, this video is a critique of social standardization.
It presents the theme of the fragmented body with individual parts named,
measured and recorded. Women's dual consciousness is acted out. In the
primary scene, 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
— whether by the state through its police functions or, more informally,
by "common sense." The scope of the videotape expands beyond the standards
of appearance to outright social control.
Domination and the Everyday
1978, 30 minutes
The critique of production . . . in Rosler's densely-layered
work exploring events of political repression in Chile and the more subtle
oppressions of media domination in the United States is interwoven with
the more humane and intimate though no less "routine" dialogue between
the artist-mother and her son and a tedious discussion of the New York
artworld. Lest one not get the point that this work is a critique produced
by a radical feminist and not intended to be consumed easily and rapidly,
as are most products of the culture industry, the images and texts are
repeated a second time, as the mother-son (a classic domestic exchange)
dialogue continues.
— William Olander, New Voices 4: Women & the Media, New Video.
Secrets from the Street: No
Disclosure
1978, 12 minutes
The means of recording . . . is foregrounded and
forced upon the viewer's attention the whole time. . . . The single camera
is positioned inside a car as it drives through the streets of San Francisco.
. . . And in watching the [video], one is continually made aware of the
very specific situation of recording of the film/videotape . . . . There
is an acknowledgement of the act of recording, and the [video] then becomes
about the limitations of that act of recording.
— Craig Owens, Profile: Martha Rosler
Martha Rosler Reads Vogue
(with Paper Tiger Television)
1982
In this live performance for Paper Tiger Television's
public-access cable program in New York, Rosler deconstructs the messages
in Vogue and its advertising. Rosler looks at the institutional
slants of the magazine industry and the fashion industry's reliance on
sweatshops.
— Electronic Arts Intermix online catalogue
A Simple Case for Torture,
or How to Sleep at Night
1983, 60 minutes
Rosler identifies the totalitarian implications
of an argument for torture under certain circumstances, as it appears
in the editorial pages of Newsweek magazine. Her critique is formulated
through voiceover narration and an on-camera collection of print media
— articles on subjects ranging from human rights to unemployment
and global economics. Implicating the United States government and American
businesses for supporting regimes that systematically use torture, she
indicts the American press for its role as an agent of disinformation
through selective coverage, its use of language, and for implicitly legitimizing
a point of view that justifies torture.
Fascination with the (Game of
the)(Exploding)(Historical) Hollow Leg
(installation tape)
1983, 58:16 minutes, color
This tape documents a multimedia installation with
performance elements, which includes a simulated war room with altered
maps, nuclear-weapons descriptive material, recruitment posters, military
clothing, a slide show of U.S. and European protest marches and posters,
giant newspaper collages, a video loop, an audio tour of North American
Radar Air Defense, a library of books on war, and more — all topped
by two giant cargo parachutes. A forum on activism and a group reading
on World War II accompanied the installation at the University of Colorado,
Boulder.
— Electronic Arts Intermix online catalogue
If It's Too Bad to
be True, it Could be DISINFORMATION
1985, 16 minutes
... Rosler re-presents the NBC Nightly News and
other broadcast reports as a means to analyze their deceptive syntax to
capture the confusion inserted intentionally into the news script. The
artist questions the fallibility of electronic transmission by emphasizing
the distortion and malapropism which occurs as a result of technical interference.
Stressing the fact that there's never a straight story, Rosler asserts
her presence in character-generated text that isolates excerpts from her
sources, rolling over the manipulated images.
— Bob Riley, ICA Currents, part 6, December 1986
Global Taste: A Meal in
Three Courses
(three-channel installation)
1985
Born to be Sold: Martha Rosler
Reads The Strange Case of Baby S/M
(with Paper Tiger Television)
1988, 35 minutes
Watch eagle eye Martha Rosler tackle the case of
surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead as represented by the mainstream
media. This tape uncovers the class and gender bias of the media coverage
and the courts. X-tra inventive graphics and kooky dress-up illustrate
Rosler's insightful analysis of the court battle, waged within the tricky
issue of contemporary reproductive control in America. Fun for the whole
family!!!
— 13th Annual Atlanta Film Festival, 1989 AFI Video Festival
In the Place of the Public: Airport Series
1990, 4 hours
This tape documents an installation, which included color photographs and texts. The work was first displayed as an ensemble in 1990, but with photographs extending as far back as the early 1980's, and, in subsequent versions, up to 1998. Here Rosler explores the system of air travel and its associated spaces, primarily the air terminal, as the quintessential space of postmodern life, with texts circumscribing western cultures, traditional landmarks, and structures by which it has constructed physical and social space.
— Electronic Arts Intermix online catalogue
Greenpoint: The Garden Spot of the World
1993, 19:24 min, color, sound
This tape is the video element of an installation with computer animation, maps, books, photographs, and text handout. Rosler presents a tour of the history and toxic hazards in the artists' home community in Brooklyn, New York, with books suggesting how to fight polluting industries.
— Electronic Arts Intermix online catalogue
How Do We
Know What Home Looks Like? The Unité of Le Corbusier at Firminy,
France
1993, 31 minutes [partially in French]
Shot in a Le Corbusier housing project, Firminy-Vert,
in south central France, this tape traces its history through an exploration
of the way in which residents live in and with it as an architectural
entity. Called by its residents "Le Corbu," after its renowned architect,
the complex was built after his death. The wing in which the tape was
primarily shot had been closed for over ten years, thus enshrining the
decor of the late 1960s when the building was opened. The mayor of the
town, who had facilitated its development, subsequently tried to have
the complex destroyed. The tenant association president describes the
struggle — only half successful — to save the building. The
tape shows the closed wing, the signs and detritus of lives long past,
followed by interviews. The opening sequence of views and snapshots is
silent. Here is the space for an unspoken text about architecture and
the warring interpretations of Le Corbusier's idea of a human, humane,
humanizing space.
— Electronic Arts Intermix online catalogue
Seattle: Hidden Histories
1991-1995, 13 minutes
Rosler writes, "The city of Seattle is not much more than 125 years old. It was named after a prominent chief of the Duwamish tribe, which was dispossessed along with other local tribes in the settlement of the town. In 1991 I conducted video interviews with some native American residents of Seattle, on questions of history and heritage." From the recorded interviews, Rosler produced one-minute Public Service Announcements, or PSAs, under the auspices of the Seattle Arts Commission.
— Electronic Arts Intermix online catalogue
Chile on the Road
to NAFTA, Accompanied by the National Police Band
1997, 10 minutes
Chile, at the southernmost end of South America,
is on the fast track to admission into the free-trade grouping known as
the North American Free-Trade Association. At the time this tape was made,
the web page of the Chilean government consisted of a presidential speech
outlining the hopes for inclusion in the pact. In the globalizing economy,
Chile has been hailed as a miracle of economic development, but in view
of its recent history of vicious political repression, this news provokes
a certain amount of skepticism and irony.
Without lapsing into a political tract, this videotape presents, as a
kind of whirling dance or drive-by commentary, the icons and reminders
of the conjunction of U.S. corporate presence, popular musical strains,
and victims of the political terror. Salient elements of this music-video
burlesque include a gigantic upraised fist that turns out to be a Coke
ad, the Star Wars suite played by the band of the repressive National
Police, a blind street singer, folk musicians, and a cemetary memorial.
The backdrop of the work is tourism and internationalizing elites versus
the indigenous poor. For those whose historical memory needs jogging,
a short epilogue details the 1973 coup and its aftermath.
— Electronic Arts Intermix online catalogue