Martha Rosler
She is a conceptual artist who works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, site-specific and performance, as well as writing about art and culture.
[4] Recurrent concerns are the media and war, as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to places of passage and systems of transport.
She also taught at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany, as well as serving as visiting professor at the University of California's San Diego and Irvine campuses, and elsewhere.
As her gestures begin to veer into an unexpected and possibly alarming direction, the character eventually dispenses with the tools and uses her body as a kind of semaphore system.
[10] Further video works include Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (1977), Losing: A Conversation with the Parents (1977), and Martha Rosler Reads Vogue (1982), with Paper Tiger Television; Domination and the Everyday (1980) and Born to Be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby $/M (1988), also with Paper Tiger Television.
Many of her video works address geopolitics and power, including Secrets From the Street: No Disclosure (1980); A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night (1983); If It's Too Bad to be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION (1985); the three-channel installation Global Taste: A Meal in Three Courses (1985); and Because This Is Britain (2014), and many others.
The series of 45 black and white prints pair photos of storefronts on the Bowery, at the time of the work's making a famous "skid row" of New York City, with photographs of mostly metaphoric groups of texts referring to drunks and drunken behavior.
The photos are displayed in a grid to accentuate the anti-expressionist nature of the work and the inherent limitation of both visual and linguistic systems to describe human experiences and social problems.
This is a series of photomontages that juxtapose aspirational scenes of middle-class homes, mostly interiors, with documentary photos from the Vietnam War.
They continue the tradition of political photomontage in the style of John Heartfield and Hannah Höch as well as pop art such as Richard Hamilton's Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?.
Rosler's art inserts domestic and private themes into the public sphere in order to make political, social, and instructional critiques.
A retrospective of her work, “Positions in the Life World” (1998–2000) was shown in five European cities (Birmingham, England; Vienna; Lyon/Villeurbanne; Barcelona; and Rotterdam) and, concurrently, at the International Center of Photography and the New Museum of Contemporary Art (both in New York).
In 1989, in lieu of a solo exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation in New York City, Rosler organized the project "If You Lived Here...", in which over 50 artists, film- and video producers, photographers, architects, planners, homeless people, squatters, activist groups, and schoolchildren addressed contested living situations, architecture, planning, and utopian visions, in three separate exhibitions, four public forums, and associated events.
Following the problematic addressed by these exhibitions, Rosler together with the urbanist Miguel Robles-Durán worked on an urban installation project in Hamburg, Germany, called We Promise!
However, the New Foundation, which had also made her the first recipient of its award to a distinguished female artist working in the field of social justice, abruptly ceased public operations after the completion of the first two shows.
At the Utopia Station exhibition at the Venice Biennale of 2003, Rosler worked with about 30 of her students from Stockholm and Copenhagen, as well as a small, far-flung internet group of former workshop participants, 'the Fleas', and her graduate students from her video seminar at Yale, to produce a mini-pavilion, newly designed and built but purposely left unfinished, as well as large banners, and a collective newspaper, as well as many projects, both individual and collective, exploring utopian schemes and communities and their political and social ramifications.
[25] The collection started at e-flux's New York gallery and then traveled to the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Germany; to Antwerp's NICC, an artist-run space, in conjunction with the MuHKA (Museum of Contemporary Art); to United Nations Plaza School in Berlin; to the Institut National de L'Histoire de L'Art in Paris; to Stills in Edinburgh; to John Moore's Art School in Liverpool; and to the Gallery at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, before being retired.
Rosler is a professor and frequently collaborates with her students, bringing forward a new generation of political art, with different backgrounds on the subject.
Martha Rosler's essays have been published widely in catalogues, magazines, such as Artforum, Afterimage, Quaderns, and Grey Room, and edited collections, including Women Artists at the Millennium (October Books/MIT, 2006) among many others.
Several books, in English and other languages, were published in 2006, including a 25-year edition of 3 Works (Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) with a new foreword by Rosler.
