Martha Rosler_semiotics of the Kitchen & Polaroids

7/15/2019 Martha Rosler_semiotics of the Kitchen & Polaroids

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martha rosler, semiotics of the kitchen, 1975



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zSA9Rm2PZA






READING MARTHA ROSLER READING

Essay by Thom Donovan

. . .

martha rosler, semiotics of the kitchen, 1975, video still (courtesy of

martha rosler)

In recent years, Brooklyn-based artist Martha Rosler has established a

traveling library of her books, a non-traditional exhibition that is the

culmination of an artistic career devoted to a radical reading and research

practice. In an interview with the artist this past November, Rosler

claimed as precedent for the library her visit to Donald Judd‘s library in

Marfa, Texas where the books could not be handled, let alone read. In

contrast, the books in Rosler‘s library can be read by all visitors. Throughher traveling library, Rosler emancipates her books from the privacy of



the domus and from the interiority of a private reading practice. In

libraries, we read among others. Sometimes we even read aloud with

people, though this is unfortunately rare.

What does it mean to read for or with people? How can reading withothers constitute a conatus, a social space in which subjects are co-

constitutive (or born) with one another? How can reading be for a public

good, for the sake of critique, analysis, evaluation? How can reading

become a practice involving the whole body? These are questions raised

by Rosler‘s œuvre, especially her video works beginning in the 70s, which

began to put forth a live performance practice of reading, involving both

the word and body as sites of counter-hegemonic strategy. Such practices

extend from civil disobedience in the 60s whereby, as Martin Luther King

Jr. writes, ―we had no alternative except that of preparing for directaction, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying

our case before the conscience of the local and national community‖

("Letter from Birmingham City Jail," 1963). It also extends from the

culture‘s intuitive sense of the body under threat of disappearance, harm,

and disavowal after Vietnam, Kent State, Birmingham, and any number of

other violent confrontations during the late 60s and early 70s. These

conflicts, mediated by an unprecedented dissemination of graphic

documentary images in print, on television, and in film, form the

backdrop to the emergence of certain ―live‖ art forms and participatory

intermedia performance practice of the period.

In an age of ―tactical media‖—media used to counteract the coercive

effects of mass media—Rosler‘s work offers a radical, tactical

hermeneutics for interpreting and reading. The tactical aspect of Rosler‘s

work is evident in her second video work, The Semiotics of the

Kitchen (1975) a parody of Julia-Child-style cooking programs, in which

she chooses a cooking implement for each letter of the alphabet, reciting

the name of each implement while staring deadpan into the camera. ―A‖

is for apron, ―b‖ is for bowl, ―c‖ is for chopper, etc. Rosler poses as a

pedagogue instructing her viewers about the names of things proper to

the kitchen. However, there is never a direct correspondence between

object and word because of the mediating presence of Rosler‘s person,

which with every new object makes a gesture demonstrating the object‘s

possible, if not intended, use. In some cases, the gesture corresponds to

the way the object is typically used in the kitchen, but more often than

not, Rosler‘s gestures contain a threat of violence. This is especially true

of the knife and fork, which she interprets as stabbing utensils. It is also



true of the measuring cups and spoons, which are used to cast-off

invisible ingredients, a minor act of rebellion but an act of rebellion no

less.

This performed reading is in the interest of revealing a relation betweenthe suppression of women and the domesticating force of culinary

programs, which train and prepare them for their social functions within a

division of labor. Through this reading practice, word and object produce

an excess of signification—or an ulterior signification system—through

their interaction with the subject, Rosler‘s dramatic persona. The

ulteriority of this system channels the submerged threat women pose

against phallic power situated with the domus.

In her 1977 video, Traveling Garage Sale, Rosler folds clothing andarranges items for a garage sale. Customers drift in and out of the scene,

haggling with the artist, trying on clothes, and thumbing through LPs. The

camera is positioned to assume the viewpoint of a closed-circuit camera,

typically used for the purposes of surveillance, and viewers thus inherit

that same position. In the accompanying soundtrack, Rosler recites a text

in which she reflects on the economics of garage sales: ―What is the value

of a thing?‖ ―How do things become commodities?‖ ―Why do we fetishize

things so much?‖ ―If it‘s about divestiture, why not give it away?‖ Turning

over a set of questions, Rosler articulates the ideologies and mythologies

that might dictate one‘s decision to hold a garage sale as well as larger

concerns regarding the psychology of salesmanship and consumership,

which the garage sale initiates.

Once again, in Traveling Garage Sale, the presence of Rosler‘s person is

important as a body charged with excessive signification. Her dramatic

persona-cum-subject calmly performs the tasks of holding a garage sale,

just as anyone would. As such, her subject-performer is interpellated by

the garage sale, i.e. the garage sale calls the subject into being and

surveils the adequacy of its performance within a habitus, a place of

cultural disposition where certain cultural values are presupposed.

martha rosler, losing: a conversation with the parents, 1977, video still



Rosler‘s hermeneutic (or interpretative) technique is two-fold in this

video. On the one hand, it involves the ocular participation of a viewer

who watches the scene of the garage sale from the position of the

camera. The viewers, however, do not hear what is happening during the

sale; they only are allowed to see. The withdrawal of diegetic sound isimportant not only because it foregrounds the voiceover, but also because

it enhances that viewer's sense that he or she is watching the scene from

the super-subjective/objective position of the video camera. In the voice-

over, we hear one of Rosler‘s first experiments in her signature modality

of reading, the meditation. This modality is both anaphoric (it has a

repetitious syntax), and interrogative, proceeding through questions, both

recurrent (looping, re-turning) and digressive. The form of this voice-over

resembles prayer and, as Rosler has speculated with me in conversation,

very likely derives from her yeshiva education in Brooklyn. Prayer as amode of teaching, prayer as a mode of inquiry, prayer as counter-

hegemonic strategy, prayer as a form for aesthetic politics.

In Losing: A Conversation with the Parents (1977), Rosler assumes a

didactic-ironic mode of address. The parents of a young woman who has

died of an eating disorder sit on a couch together, processing the causes

of their daughter‘s illness. Performing an expected role of a liberal, white,

middle-class, heterosexual couple in the 1970s, the couple draw out the

aporias of female body-image/eating disorders, which they relate to

global disparities of wealth and power. The camera moves from a full-

body shot of the couple sitting on a living-room couch to one of a family

photo album, and then to a shot in which we only see the couple‘s laps

and the album opened to a picture of their daughter. In the absence of

the face—the seat of signification—we see the laps and hands of the

parents as extra-signifying, i.e. as gesturing body parts isolated from

speech formed in the mouth. Whereas in Traveling Garage Sale, Rosler

removed the diegetic sound to the foreground, in the surveillance format

of her video Losing: A Conversation With the Parents, Rosler negates her

chosen format—the documentary-style interview—in order to desynch

voice, body, and face as three distinct realms of signification. Through

this technique of desynching, the viewer moves among readings—

valences of reading which appear in the voice and the voice‘s absence,

the body taken as a whole and the body as a series of discrete signifying

surfaces/organs.



martha rosler, with paper tiger television, martha rosler reads vogue,

1982, video still

The development of Rosler‘s video practice was dependent upon the

emergence of video technologies in the 70s, and in 80s public-access

stations such as Paper Tiger Television, with whom Rosler made the

video Martha Rosler Reads Vogue, another performance in which she

compels viewers to actively engage in her radical hermeneutic through a

reading practice that is neither passive nor interiorizing. Using the

December 1st, 1982 issue of Vogue as material, Rosler repeats a series of

questions that directly question the magazine as a source of cultural

meaning, specifically patriarchal-disciplinary power exerted over thepublication‘s predominantly female readership. Rosler incants: ―What

is Vogue? Vogue is fashion, it is glamour, it is sex….‖ ―It‘s threat and the

whiff of decadence.‖ ―It is the allure of narcissism‖ ―It is the new face

over the old face.‖ ―It is the weak face covered over by the strong face.‖

By reciting a series of questions, she again acts through a form of

meditation. Turning over her central question, ―What is Vogue?‖ she

arrives at a number of responses, both in the form of quotations from the

magazine and from a text she has scripted in advance of the

performance.

martha rosler, with paper tiger television, martha rosler reads vogue,

1982, video still

Rosler places quotations from the magazine, such as a Visa ad quotingRobert Louis Stevenson, ―To be what we are and to become what we are

capable of becoming is the only end to life,‖ and an article about Conde

Nast, the ―cunt crazy‖ publisher of Vogue side-by-side with her own text.

Through this parataxis, Rosler underlines what is operative in Vogue‘s

text, ironically drawing out the magazine‘s ideological significance.

Besides these two texts—Vogue magazine and Rosler‘s critical recitation—

there is a third site of signification: Rosler‘s fingers. Throughout the

video, one sees her digits turning the pages of the magazine, stroking

them both as an expression of desire and, in some cases, as an



aggressive act of covering, as though to refuse the siren‘s song of the

magazine‘s content. Her fingers point from one image to another, calling

attention to resemblances and sometimes drawing the contours of bodies

and faces, as if to show some latent significance of these figures arranged

pictorially within the magazine spread. Pointing is an essential bodilygesture, significant for Jean-François Lyotard as a ―phrase of discourse.‖

It is also an essential pedagogical gesture: teachers point at chalkboards

or projection screens to guide students‘ eyes through lessons. And

pointing is used to limit what one looks at, to construct a vision. Pointing,

in other words, tends to have a disciplinary function.

In Martha Rosler Reads Vogue, a series of slide projections form a fourth

realm of signification. These projections play off Rosler‘s meditation,

providing visual illustrations for her demythologization of Vogue. Whenthe slideshow has ceased, Rosler shows her audience footage of

sweatshops in New York City and provides statistics on the earnings of

fashion models versus those of average sweatshop workers. A reggae-

flavored New Wave song plays in the background, possibly demonstrating

a related pattern of exploitation in New Wave‘s appropriation and

reconfiguration of West Indian music, which functions as a counterpoint to

the images. Rosler appears only in the final scene of the video. We have

seen her at different times throughout the video, sitting in a chair with

the issue of Vogue in her lap, but now she faces the camera as if to use it

as a mirror, through which we see her seeing, theorizing, and applying

lipstick and blush. At this moment, her body is presented as a site of

subjection of a disciplinary practice enacted on women. The body is both

what is reflected, and what we, as Rosler‘s audience, are forced to reflect

upon as a series of signs.

martha rosler, if it's too bad to be true, it could be disinformation, 1985,

video still

In three videos from the late 70s and early 80s—Domination and the

Everyday (1978), A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night,

and If It‘s Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION (1985)—

Rosler elaborates her reading practice as a means of encountering theUnited States‘ geopolitical involvement with Latin America. These works



pose questions about how one reads video intertextually, how the

medium can be used as a vehicle for counter-hegemonic strategy,

analysis, and critical reflection, and perhaps most importantly, how to

read the United States‘ unofficial wars and conflicts. Given the strategies

of blackout, disinformation, and distraction enacted by popular mediaoutlets, how is it possible to redirect a viewer‘s reading process and

critically navigate a terrain of signs intended to draw attention away from

the culpability of the state? How is this a matter of ―bringing the war

home‖—a popular slogan from the 60s which Rosler borrows for her

mash-up collage works treating the Vietnam and Iraq wars?

Rosler‘s video, If It‘s Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION,

uses a partially demagnetized videotape to engage problems of reading

popular news media. This video presents news coverage of US conflicts inLatin America during the early 80s. Much of the language of this footage

derives from Reagan‘s Cold War rhetoric, which equated ―Communism‖

and ―terrorism,‖ and framed death squads as ―freedom fighters.‖ While

many of the popular media‘s charges against Latin American guerrillas

and political leaders were only thinly substantiated, various media

techniques were used for vilification. For instance, Fidel Castro was

elliptically linked by the news to the US drug financier, Robert Vesco, by

juxtaposing his picture with that of Vesco, with whom he bears a facial

resemblance. By using such techniques, popular media obscures fact with

allegation, propagating an illusion of truth.


video still

Reading the piece depends precisely on its illegibility. The erasure of the

tape‘s content makes one hear the news coverage as though for the first

time. It also playfully allegorizes the effects of the mass media, which

deliberately occludes truth content via disinformation, distraction, and

over-saturation. Much of the irony of If It‘s Too Bad to Be True, It Could

Be DISINFORMATION derives from the original footage. Following news

reportage of Regan speaking before Congress is a commercial for a Canon

camera, the inclusion of which foregrounds the American obsession withphotography, the dominant perceptual regime of the twentieth century.



Rosler contrasts it with the crisis of representation embodied by popular

news media. While camera commercials promise an endless reach of our

perceptive capabilities, they cannot promise that we will understand what

we shoot; only context—captions, news anchors, etc.— can tell us what

we see. But what happens when the image is itself withdrawn from us?The ultimate ironic gesture of If It‘s Too Bad To Be True, it Could Be

DISINFORMATION occurs near the end of the video as another speech by

Reagan to the Congress cuts to an Army recruiting ad. Through an

aleatory process of selection and editing, Rosler points out the complicity

of the mass media with the military industrial complex. The ―news‖

appears as an extension of the commercial ―breaks.‖


video still

Although much of the soundtrack is audible in If It‘s Too Bad To Be True,

it Could Be DISINFORMATION, Rosler provides intertitles so that viewers

can read what they hear on the screen. It is crucial that the words are not

subtitled, and instead appear superimposed over the visual content. As

such, the image is doubly withdrawn. It is first withdrawn by the

demagnetization, and then again, by the intertitles, which force viewers

to negotiate image, spoken language, and transcription simultaneously. It

is not unlike the problem of reading presented by Martha Rosler Reads

Vogue, in which one‘s eyes listen to Rosler‘s meditation while watching

her hands scan the pages of the magazine.

Rosler‘s reading practice is perhaps most intense in A Simple Case for

Torture, or How to Sleep at Night, in which the viewer is bombarded by a

palimpsestuous and hypercitational text. In A Simple Case for Torture, or

How to Sleep at Night, Rosler states her case against torture, taking aim

at Michael Levin, a City University of New York professor whose article, ―A

Simple Case for Torture,‖ appeared in the June 7th, 1982 issue of

Newsweek. Rosler‘s video deconstructs the logic of Levin‘s article, which

attempts to make the case for why the US government and its allies must

resort to torture in order to preserve national security in the face of

nuclear proliferation, arguments that are familiar to a contemporaryaudience from the rhetoric of Rove, Bush, Cheney, and Ashcroft. Levin‘s



editorial capitalizes upon the fear-mongering question of whether you

could sleep at night knowing that you had allowed a terrorist to

perpetrate mass murder because you had not been able to bring yourself

to support torture.

martha rosler, a simple case for torture, or how to sleep at night, 1983,

video still

While a man‘s voice reads the article in the soundtrack, Rosler‘s fingers

scan the article. Intertitles appear, in which key phrases from Levin‘s

article are underlined and often reposed as questions. As in Martha Rosler

Reads Vogue, the artist‘s fingers move between Levin‘s Newsweek

editorial and an ad on the opposite page, pointing out the irony of this

spread, which features a man rolled over on his side in bed, apparently

panicked about the state of his finances. The advertisement is for a bank

and reads, ―How safe are your savings?‖ Once again, the artist ironically

points to a relationship between advertising and the content of the

popular media. The fear provoked by the bank advertisement is obviously

related to the fear Levin wishes to provoke in his editorial.

Following from Rosler‘s presentation of Levin‘s ―case,‖ is a barrage of

press clippings and other media, all of which present the United States‘

uses of torture abroad, and especially in Latin America—a principle region

of Cold War conflict in the late 70s and 80s. Rosler‘s counter-case

provides us with the truth content of Levin‘s rhetoric, which abstracts the

citizen from the state, one‘s private decision to commit an unthinkable act

of violence from acts of torture sanctioned by the state in the interest of

affirming US sovereignty in Latin America.

As in her many other videos, Rosler‘s person is present. One sees Rosler

in a car, her eyes framed in the rear-view mirror, again as a source of

theoretical reflection, a mediating agent. In other scenes, she sits with

her books opened, the camera tracking their spines to reveal their titles

and authors. Rosler rolls a tank over the books, playfully relating a war of

information and intertextuality with actual geopolitical conflicts.



martha rosler, domination and the everyday, 1978, video still

Rosler‘s oeuvre seems to ask a series of questions: How does one bring

the war home? What is the relationship between home and wars abroad?

How does a United States citizen relate to the total war that this state has

enacted against much of the rest of the world? Private/Public,

Domus/Polis, interior/exterior, citizen/state, form a powerful dialectic in

Rosler‘s work, and by which her own person is consistently framed as a

contested site. Rosler‘s art, in other words, concerns ―Domination and the

Everyday,‖ the title of her 1978 video regarding her domestic life in

relation to the US-backed 1973 military coup in Chile. Throughout the

video, Rosler incants, ―it is in the marketplace alone that we are

replaceable.‖ Relating the dictatorship in Chile with US economic

interests—the need for ―development‖ versus the establishment of lasting

foreign democracies in Latin America—Rosler and her son appear

throughout the video among a series of slides depicting middle-class

Americans and their children and through a soundtrack in which the

viewer hears Rosler at home with her son. In contrast to this intimate

domestic scene, in which we hear Rosler and her son eating and talking

together, the viewer is repeatedly presented with a pictogram of Pinochet

and his guard, icons of what Rosler calls ―naked force.‖ The contrast of

Pinochet‘s image with Rosler‘s domestic space stands as a reminder that

the specter of United States sovereignty haunts the most private

moments of our life. The war is always home, whether or not we care to

admit it.

*

This piece is commenting on the roles of women in the 1960s and not

focusing on racial issues! that is just simply not the point. It is boring and

tedious to reflect the lives that housewives were expected to live. A

woman's role did not involve thought or further examination of her life.

Rosler is throwing this in our faces! Its so sarcastic and apparent, really

its funny that you wouldn't understand.

*



Martha Rosler's Semiotics of the Kitchen is a 6-minute video that projects a strong feminist

message. The anger and violence with which she introduces, in alphabetical order, various

kitchen supplies mirror the frustration of women who were bound by the confines of their

kitchens and domestic roles in the mid to late 20th Century. In the creation of her piece,

Rosler used a Sony Portapak, a fairly recent technology of the time, to shoot herself fromone perspective.

The update of this piece involved not only a reworking of the media with which it was

created, but also the subject matter it presented. In an age when women hold successful

careers outside of their homes, the kitchen no longer exists as a restriction on the lives of all

women. Yet in our consumer culture, women preoccupy themselves with products and tools

in order to fulfill the role of being beautiful; the task of "being beautiful" acts as a

replacement for "being a good housewife." Thus, the bathroom grows to constrict women,

rather than the kitchen. Though anti-aging creams and mascara substitute for aprons andmeasuring implements, the underlying frustration and pain of women who are restricted by

the roles imposed upon them by society still remain.

The updated film was shot with a camera phone in 30-second increments (the longest video

length such a phone would allow) and uploaded onto a computer using Bluetooth

technology. The video clips were then posted on Utterz, a mobile blogging site on which

people post text, pictures, and videos from cell phones.

*

―I was concerned with something like the notion of ‗language speaking

the subject,‘ and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign

in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system

of harnessed subjectivity.‖ – Martha Rosler











Polaroids… old skool <3 » polaroid0321

*

Mikael Kennedy began shooting Polaroids in 1999 and since then has

embarked on a documentation of his life and travels that is now on its

second decade. In 2006 Kennedy started a blog called Passport toTrespass, regularly publishing his Polaroids as he wandered.

http://justyel.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/polaroids-old-skool-3/





9 Volumes of artist books have been published over the years creating a

physcial record of this work. In 2010 Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art, NY began

representing Kennedy's Polaroid work and a selection 500 of the Polaroids

were shown at the Historic Chelsea Hotel in an exhibit titled 'Shoot theMoon'. Kennedy was subsuquently asked to participate in the

International Polaroid Symposium in Cardiff, Wales as an exhibitor and

guest lecturer. Kennedy's Polaroids have been published and exhibited

internationally and are part of the permanent collection at the Museum of

Fine Art in Houston, TX and private collections world wide.























http://www.chasejarvis.com/index.php#mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=0&p=10&a=0&at=0








Girls on bikes (from Sarf Coasting) by Elaine Constantine, July 1997



http://www.elaineconstantine.co.uk/

Fog

by Carl Sandburg

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.



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Martha Rosler_semiotics of the Kitchen & Polaroids