Martha Rosler Semiotics of Desire
The Jewish Museum is hosting a survey exhibition of American artist Martha Rosler (b. 1943, New York), her first New York City retrospective in 15 years. From the video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) to the photo-series “Transitions and Digressions” (1981-present), the artist discusses some of her seminal and controversial works.
In Martha Rosler Reads Vogue, a live performance devised for a public-access cable channel in New York in 1981, Rosler dissects the glamorous lifestyles evoked by fashion magazines through an unforgiving commentary on images seen in the pages of Vogue. “What is Vogue? What is fashion?”, she wonders. “It’s glamour, excitement, romance, drama, wishing, dreaming, winning, success.” Renowned for her works addressing issues of feminism and consumerism, the American artist is the protagonist of a major retrospective at the Jewish Museum in her native New York City, featuring well-known as well as rarely seen works from 1965 to the present. Curated by Darsie Alexander, “Martha Rosler: Irrespective” includes videos, photomontages, photographs and installations, retracing the most significant moments of a career devoted to the incisive critique of contemporary mythologies and mass cultural modes of representation.
L’OFFICIEL ART: Regarding your seminal work Semiotics of the Kitchen, you remarked: “When the woman speaks, she names her own oppression.” How do art and feminism intertwine in your practice? And how does your more recent work reflect the current state of affairs (in relation to the “Me Too” movement, for instance)?
MARTHA ROSLER: That quote of mine relates specifically to the video Semiotics of the Kitchen, in which the character enacts and then embodies letters of the alphabet through the medium of household utensils – she acts like a semaphoric signaler. The overloading onto women of the responsibility for domesticity remains powerful today and is often, even inadvertently, passed along to daughters by their mothers, both in the context of the home and in facing the wider world. Developing household and culinary skills is still seen in everyday life as a female necessity. The “Me Too” movement, especially in its relation to female service workers, reveals that the burden of submissiveness and compliance in the face of male employers is under contest by angry women everywhere. It is a struggle that seems never-ending.
Your work often offers a sharp critique of consumerism and contemporary society. For example, your photo-series
“Transitions and Digressions” on view at the Jewish Museum is a commentary on commodified desire.
My own tendencies toward critique notwithstanding, this group of photos is an attempt to revisit a long-standing interest on the left: exploring how desire is embodied and reflected back at us through the aesthetic arrangement of consumer goods, particularly those centered on the human form and its accouterments, in shop windows. The dressing of shop windows emerges from a heavily psychologized set of precepts in the advertising and fashion industries about how to engage consumer interest and motivate people to purchase what they see. Window dressers, however, are operating in an aesthetic and theatrical arena of their own. Thus there is a greater degree of whimsy and transgression that points to an eruption of the social unconscious in that space, as the Surrealists well knew.
The female mannequin bears on her body the passive-aggressive violence recommended to women and girls in order to remake themselves as objects of desire.
You once said: “My art is a communicative act, a form of an utterance, a way to open a conversation.” If art is a “language,” how powerful do you reckon it is nowadays, in an era of visual overload?
Art is not really a language, which is a specialized, “doubly articulated” form of communication, but a set of visual and symbolic codes. Art swims in a sea of visual and verbal communications, but it is consigned to its special niche – yet it often transcends its institutional boundaries, reaching people through the power of its apparent and carefully constructed immediacy and the economy of its “utterances.” Although jaded observers among the members of an art-educated public may wish to deny this, photography frequently proves itself resistant to attempts to debunk it as fake or otherwise inauthentic. It reaches people in that primitive and essential part of our cognitive faculties. It is there that we connect with the image of the human on the one hand (thus unleashing identification and empathy, as in the case of images of suffering, most recently the photo of the drowned body of three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, on a lonely beach in Turkey) or on the other hand, any object of desire.
“Martha Rosler: Irrespective.” Jewish Museum, New York. Through March 3, 2019.