1967-72. We were fighting—and killing millions of people—over divergent economic conceits.
Her writing and photographic series on roads, the system of air transport, and urban undergrounds (subways or metros) join her other works addressing urban planning and architecture, from housing to homelessness and the built environment, and places of passage and transportation. Despite the repetition of American folly, Rosler still believes in protest. American capitalism—and its glorification of all the domestic goods, appliances, and finery that money could buy—contributed to our grave fear of Communism. Her essays have been widely published, anthologized, and translated. In the course of over 35 years, Rosler has produced works about the trauma following the Vietnam War, the destitution of her native New York City streets, feminism, social justice, and the separation of public and private life and their respective architectural spaces. Biography “My art is a communicative act,” Martha Rosler says, “a form of an utterance, a way to open a conversation.” Rosler’s video, photography, installations, and performances are infamous for their political and social critique as well as their tongue-in-cheek humor.
Working with her Seattle curator Yoko Ott, and Starting in November 2005, e-flux sponsored the "Martha Rosler Library," a reading room in which over 7,500 volumes from her private collection were made available as a public resourceAfter Rosler's solo exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts, one of the few critiques on the show was that it did little to actually lessen the homelessness problem in America. Entitled “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home” (1967–72), they juxtapose “She decodes how images work by taking them apart,” said Darsie Alexander, who’s curating an upcoming retrospective of Rosler’s work at New York’s “I saw the clear reference to the home itself as being central to our ideology of why we were fighting people abroad,” Rosler said.
In fact, it’s become a familiar media tactic (ironically, since artists such as Hirschhorn and Rosler target the very media that’s adopted their style). Martha Rosler, Isn’t it Nice..., or Baby Dolls, from the series Body Beautiful, ... Over the past 10 years, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the International Center of Photography, and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts have all exhibited them. She works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Her series “Body Beautiful” (1966–72) unites pictures of female bodies with those of appliances (Rosler decided to apply the formal concepts and techniques she’d developed in that series to one with an antiwar undercurrent.
When asked the difference between making activist work as an artist, and being an activist Rosler said, "To be an activist you probably have to be working intensively with a specific community and a specific issue or set of issues, specific outcomes...I am an artist. Yet Rosler was ahead of her time when she reconceived the printed matter distributed at marches and protests. Her media of choice have included photomontage and photo-text, as well as video, sculpture, and installation. Martha Rosler works in video, photography, text, installation, and performance.
Difficult to pin down, the artist’s work addresses a wide array of social and political issues, including gender politics, racism, and social inequality. She has published over 16 books of her artwork and her critical essays on art, photography, and cultural matters, some of which have appeared as well in translation. All rights reserved.National Endowment for the Arts Artists’ Fellowship, Conceptual ArtNational Endowment for the Arts Critic’s FellowshipNational Endowment for the Arts Artist’s Fellowship in VideoNational Endowment for the Arts Artist’s Fellowship in VideoNew York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in VideoNational Endowment for the Arts Artist’s Fellowship in PhotographyNew York Foundation for the Arts Catalogue Grant in PhotographySpectrum Prize: The International Prize for Photography of the Foundation of Lower Saxony (Germany)Currently teaches at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, NJ “If You Read Here... Martha Rosler’s Library,” Her work covers topics from video, photography, feminist art, government support of the arts, the social uses of food, homelessness, censorship, and more. Apr 2, 2016 - Explore zoegreenfingers's board "Martha Rosler" on Pinterest.