Rosler is best known for hard-line artworks, including feminist videos in which she is the central performer, and collages with antiwar content.
Semiotics of the Kitchen
(1975) is one of her cult classics. Rosler was a single mother who had only recently obtained her MFA from University of California, San Diego, when she made this black-and-white, six-minute video. In it, she offers a deadpan satire of cooking shows by going through an alphabetized range of kitchen utensils, transforming each one into an instrument of violence. To demonstrate the proper use of a fork, she holds it in her fist and stabs the air. When she “uses”
the ladle, she scoops imaginary soup and then throws the contents out of frame. The work’s adoption of a television format and its parody of domesticity (at a time when feminist issues were considered by many to be frivolous) were so outside the artistic conventions of the day that one critic, writing in
Artforum
, suggested it was evidence that Rosler was not a “serious” artist. “That cracked me up,” says Rosler with glee. “I learned that there is a minimum ten-year gap between the things that I do and their art-world appreciation.” Now dozens of videos on YouTube pay homage to the work, including
Semiotics of the Kitchen Barbie
, in which the blonde Mattel doll tackles life-size eggbeaters and knives in a word-for-word reenactment of the original script.
Another Rosler landmark is
Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained
(1977), a complex thirty-nine-minute video that the artist describes as “a kind of opera in about three acts.” The most striking segment reveals two men systematically measuring various parts of Rosler’s body as she undresses. At one point, they assess her standing with her arms outstretched, marking her dimensions on a large sheet of white paper pinned to the wall. The resulting sketch suggests an abstract, imperfect version of Leonardo da Vinci’s geometrically ideal
Vitruvian Man
. At another point, her bun is undone and her long, wavy, golden hair tumbles down her back, momentarily evoking Botticelli’s Venus or a Pre-Raphaelite beauty. The dissimilar histories of the representation of men and women come into play as the two quasi-scientific men humiliate their subject, objectifying her inch by inch. The artist uses a voiceover to make sure that no one misses the work’s political implications. “For an institution to be brutal, it doesn’t have to be run by Hitler,” she announces. “Her mind learns to think of her body as something other than herself,” she says later. Overall, the video is a powerful invocation of the routine ways in which people’s, particularly women’s, human rights are violated. When rewatching the work, I wondered whether Ai Weiwei had ever seen it. I think he’d admire this activist, fighting another system at another time.
Rosler’s living room looks like a charity shop hit by a bomb. With my back to a Victorian bay window lined with plants, I look out onto a 55-foot stretch of strewn boxes, stacked books, clunky old television sets,
VCRs, paintings acquired at thrift shops, and women’s crafts such as lace doilies, beadwork pieces, handmade dolls, and pottery. Her downstairs workspace looks even more chaotic, with toppled stacks of paper and barricades of unsealed cardboard boxes. Indeed, in order to get to the kitchen, visitors are forced to step over a box which the artist refers to as “last year’s taxes.” I turn to my host and search for the right words. This space is . . . um . . . rich, I say. You’ve certainly got a . . . maximal aesthetic. Rosler smiles. “So it seems,” she says with a laugh.
Most of the stuff is destined for her
Meta-Monumental Garage Sale
, which will take place in the atrium of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Since 1973, Rosler has been intermittently conducting “participatory installations” that take the form of yard sales in public institutions in which the art is rarely overtly for sale. The events offer museum visitors a chance to haggle over a used teapot or a T-shirt that says “Rock me, sexy Jesus.” The sales also comment on the fine line between trash and treasures, the relation between culture and commerce, and the divergent pastimes of different social classes. Curators love these festive critiques of their institutions, but Rosler has mixed feelings because, as she puts it, “nobody knows how much work is involved.”
Given the untidy state of Rosler’s studio-home, it is amusing to note that one of her most widely reproduced series is titled “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home.” The artist made these collages in two batches, first between 1967 and 1972, protesting the Vietnam War, then again between 2004 and 2008, commenting on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In these, Rosler takes images of war, including photos of injured women and children, from magazines and juxtaposes them with advertisements depicting glamorous models and plush households. In
Cleaning the Drapes
, for example, a thin, stylish 1960s’ housewife uses a new and no doubt improved vacuum cleaner to dust her gold-flocked curtains. She is oblivious to the American soldiers with rifles who await the next attack outside her window.
The “House Beautiful” works are confrontational, and some critics dismiss them as “didactic”—glib art-world code for work with a political message. “When I was doing the antiwar montages in the late 1960s, I knew people would say ‘This is propaganda,’” says Rosler. “I had this
discussion with myself and decided that my position was, ‘Fine. It’s necessary. It’s urgent. Call it what you want.’” A selection of the early collages was shown at the Istanbul Biennial last September. Some forty years on, they have accrued ambiguity. “Looking back, I think they were pretty weak propaganda,” says Rosler.
I venture that weak propaganda can sometimes make for powerful art, whereas strong propaganda might lead to lame art.
“No,” says Rosler, who doesn’t suffer fools. “I am saying that these categories—‘art’ and ‘propaganda’—are ephemeral and have different definitions depending on their era and place.” The artist glowers at me, inviting a retort. She taught art at university level full-time for thirty years and wrote many academic essays. She retired in December 2010, so she is perhaps starved for an argument. “The rule for the acceptance of political art is either long ago or far away,” she adds. Indeed, art that may have felt specific, instructional, and/or threatening when it was made can appear puzzling, open-ended, and fashionably vintage a couple of decades later.
Rosler mulls over the word “didacticism.” “As an artist, I am a teacher. That applies to everything that I do,” she says. “My teaching is both in the work and outside it, in my writing and lecturing.” She rearranges a couple of embroidered cushions to make herself more comfortable, then reiterates, “I don’t have any problem with saying something explicitly political and I don’t care whether it’s considered art.”
It’s not important to you that your work is labeled “art”? I ask, a little surprised.
“I’m an avid gardener and I’ve taken pictures of flowers for many years,” replies Rosler. “One of my assistants once dreamed that I showed my nature photos in a gallery. I told him, ‘Not in my lifetime or yours!’” Eventually, however, Rosler did exhibit them. “But it came from curatorial insistence, not because I thought Martha would gain credibility by revealing her gardener side!” she says. “They address questions of the environment and growth,” she adds and, by these means, makes the photos relevant to her public identity as a political artist.
Rosler doesn’t believe that an artwork can be completely apolitical.
“All human utterances have either micro or macro political implications,” she explains. “Everyone who lives in a totalitarian system knows that all utterances are supervised for their political content even when they’re only analogies.” Rosler folds her arms across her chest. “Even ‘no politics’ has a meta-politics.”
Nowadays, many artists attempt to make apolitical art, which Rosler sees as “a market-driven phenomenon.” She uses the term “neoliberalism” to describe the laissez-faire economic philosophies that have accompanied financial deregulation and affect people’s perception of their personal responsibilities. “Neoliberal art is hard to identify because neoliberalism is not necessarily visible on the surface,” explains Rosler. “Neoliberal art is art that appeals to neoliberals. It’s art that asserts pure individualism and doesn’t try to hide that it’s about flash.” Rosler considers Andy Warhol to be an important artist, but the “rank and file kids” doing Warholian art today, fifty years after the master, could be considered neoliberal artists.
What about Jeff Koons? I prompt.
“He was a stockbroker. He fits in,” she says. “I don’t really follow his work. It looks like bling on the biggest scale or décor—shiny, over-the-top, Miami Beach-style decor.” Vacuum cleaners are not a common trope in contemporary art, so it is interesting to note how Koons’s series “The New” removes and isolates the domestic appliance from its sociopolitical context, whereas Rosler’s “House Beautiful” work implicates the lowly Hoover in a military-industrial complex in which “cleaning up” is often an alibi for continued warfare. While Koons depoliticizes his readymades as a matter of course, Rosler infuses hers with references to power relations.
At the beginning of her career, Rosler’s artworks were never for sale, but in the 1980s, a dealer convinced her to take on gallery representation by saying, “You see this table. That is the art world. You’re not on it!” Rosler realized that if she wanted broader exposure, she needed a gallery to act on her behalf. “Not just because I was sick and tired of duplicating my own slides and sending out copies of my CV,” she explains, “but because it was affecting my relevance.” Rosler observes that political
artists are increasingly “jumping into the market” because it is “their best opportunity for broadcasting their message.”
One aspect of the art market that amuses Rosler is the prevailing attitude toward artists’ ages. “When I was studying art, everything made by an artist under forty was considered ‘juvenilia.’ When was the last time you heard that term?” she exclaims. “Now everyone wants to buy work while it’s hot.” Indeed, speculators are keen to acquire the coveted “early work” while it is still cheap. “The valuation of art has been inverted by the idea that youth matters, just like in celebrity culture. No one ever used to ask, what’s your date of birth?” Rosler considers the question to be pernicious. “What happens, particularly with women, is that they receive attention when they are young, then they disappear when they are middle-aged and, if they survive past that, then all of a sudden they are discovered. Louise Bourgeois! Grandma Moses!” she says, with mock astonishment.
*
While art with feminist content once lacked a market, Rosler now sees it as “something of an easier sell than other kinds of politics.” The shift came in the 1980s. “It was rather wonderful,” she explains. “The most important young artists were three women who had conceptual training and were clearly feminist: Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer.”
Rosler once said, “Women cook, but men are chefs.’” Do you still believe this? I inquire.
“It hasn’t changed very much,” she replies. “Women’s art is still ‘women’s art’ while men’s art is ‘art.’”
What is an artist? I ask abruptly.
“How the
hell
would I know?” she says bluntly, with an exaggerated grimace worthy of a comedian. “Somebody whose sensibility puts a twist on the utterance in such a way that you recognize both its meaning and its composition,” she offers up with a shrug. I look at her expectantly, keen to hear more. Even artists as lucid and articulate as Rosler have trouble with this one. Thankfully, she doesn’t mind thinking aloud. She points to a table next to the fireplace. “See that sandstone
sculpture. It’s by a classic outsider artist named Lonnie Holley, an African American from Alabama.” It takes me a moment to pick out the work from the dizzying visual stimulus. About a foot high, it depicts several half-faces carved out of the soft rock. “Some people think that artistic expression should bypass the rational self,” she says. “The idea is a hangover from Romanticism and is now associated with the art of mad people and non-white folk artists—so-called outsiders—who are perceived as being untutored, ‘natural’ artists.” I’ve always liked the sociological transparency of the term “outsider artist”; it brings home the fact that the artists who have received the endorsement of art-world professionals are basically “insider artists.”
Our conversation flows into a discussion about “real artists,” a phrase often used unself-consciously by artists of all kinds about their peers. “It’s a subjective judgment masquerading as objectivity,” explains Rosler, who thinks that being a “real artist” is about being “serious,” which relates to having “internal standards” in a world where the external benchmarks of quality are almost random. It is also about the ability, as the artist puts it, “to persuade others that there is something in your work that will linger after the initial encounter.” Indeed, she has often told her students: “Just convince me.”
Rosler warns, however, that the meaning of seriousness “swivels.” It used to be that certain subject matters (like women’s issues) weren’t considered significant enough to inspire artwork, but nowadays heftier themes may be perceived as too grave for art. “Today, art is supposed to be ambiguous or playful,” she says, so when a work deals with something like war or homelessness, “it can step outside the bounds of what is considered art.” Whatever the case, being serious should not be confused with humorlessness. Rosler often deploys humor to “bypass people’s defences when they see criticality coming at them.”
Rosler tells me that she has to go into Manhattan for a production meeting about a three-minute video that she is making for the UK’s Channel 4 television. It is a condensation of a twenty-minute speech by Prime Minister David Cameron, which excerpts phrases such as “broken society, “twisted moral code,” and “communities without control.” By abstracting the words from their original context, she shifts the
prime minister’s criticism away from the young and the unemployed, letting it linger ambiguously until it starts to attach itself to others, such as bankers and upper-class Etonians like Cameron himself.