PRESENTATION:Martha Rosler-In One Way Or Another

For decades, Martha Rosler has influenced numerous contemporary artists with the radicalism of her artistic position. Rosler’s political artwork deals with issues of power, violence, social injustice, with war reporting, as well as with society’s images of women and their deconstruction. For her socially critical photomontages and videos, the artist uses a variety of media such as photography, text, and installation.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Schirn Kunsthalle Archive

The exhibition “In One Way Or Another” features a selection of major works chosen in close cooperation with Martha Rosler. These pieces provide an overview of her body of work from the 1960s onward, as well as of the current references influencing her art at the present time. The show concentrates on three thematic fields: war iconography, the significance of patriarchy in the constitution of femininity, and the changes in the artist’s own social and economic environments. One of Martha Rosler’s most famous series is “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home”, originally produced between 1967 and 1972, and later continued in 2004 and 2008. In her series Rosler creates photomontages out of pictures of the Vietnam War, literally bringing it via her work into comfortable living rooms in order to make the horrors of war visible. This piece has its roots in the flyers she made for anti-war demonstrations. Rosler’s constant observation of international military conflicts fuels much of her work. Besides the anti-war pictures, for which she deliberately chose the medium of collage, the artist uses film and photography to document activist protests and demonstrations against war and injustice. In the Schirn’s rotunda is the installation “Theater of Drones” (2013), for which Rosler researched the genesis of civil and military drones and their technology. The results of her research take the form of graphic designs and texts printed on ten posters. This piece began as a reaction to the first ban on drones in local airspace in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. The war between the southern and northern parts of Vietnam, which the United States began actively supporting in 1964, was the starting point for this work. Rosler updated it in 2004 and 2008 in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Back then, TV images landed in the living room during prime time, which is why the Vietnam War was called the first “living room war.” With Bringing the War Home, Rosler wanted to bring the war literally home, into the comfortable living room, where people generally seek peace and quiet. “It Lingers” (1993): Shortly after the US-military intervention in Iraq, Rosler created the multi-part “It Lingers” for the exhibition Krieg [War], which was shown in Graz—practically next door to the war going on in the former Yugoslavia at the time. Rosler combines press photographs and articles with graphics from the World War II era all the way to the 1990s to form a tableau of images: reports of atrocities during the US intervention in Iraq, known as Desert Storm, as well as the image of a military parade and stills from war films such as Rambo. A portrait of Adolf Hitler from an old, illustrated book found at the famous Vienna Flea Market, and a drawing of a student of Hitler’s in uniform from a street in a Brooklyn, New York, are also part of the piece, as is the iconic image of the American flag being raised on the peak of Mount Suribachi on Iwojima during World War II—and the second hoisting of the flag staged for the camera. Along the lower edge of the tableau runs a series of small maps of different places around the globe where military conflicts were prevalent at the time. War is an enduring state: “it lingers.

The installation “OOPS! (Nobody loves a hegemon)” deals with NATO’s deployment in the former Yugoslavia. A parachute carries an oil barrel painted white, which bears the title of the installation. Hanging from the ceiling is a large number of fabric napkins that resemble tiny parachutes, tied to Coke cans. An article in The New York Times reports on how the supply of electricity is being interrupted with the help of “coke-can-sized” explosives, for the purpose of cutting off the opponent’s military communications. The installation’s title refers to the bombardment of Belgrade, which caused many civilian casualties, including women and children traveling on a tour bus. On a computer from that era and in accompanying texts, Rosler documents Serbian and Albanian websites that disseminated propaganda online—considered the first cyber-campaign in history. With “Theater of Drones” Rosler presents a print dealing with modern warfare and unmanned surveillance drones (UAV, or “unmanned aerial vehicles”). Charlottesville, Virginia, was the first place in the United States to ban drones in local airspace. In front of this backdrop, Rosler’s meters long infographic presented what was at the time the current state of civilian and military drone technology and research. Both types could be used for surveillance; battle drones the size of airplanes are also deployed as bombers. Statistics on the consequences of using military drones in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia paint a gloomy picture. In addition, there are descriptions of national research and weapons programs in the United States and Great Britain. Along the bottom edge runs a visual sequence of various drones, ranging from types meant for home surveillance to the heavy equipment needed for aerial bombings. Behind names like “Predator” and “The Reaper,” given to drones armed with “Hellfire” rockets, lie serious threats. Thus, one of the banners seen here calls for protests against drone attacks. In the meantime, the American army continued its use of drones in Afghanistan, and now, in Ukraine, civilian drones that were easily retooled for spying and warfare are donated for regular  deployment in the war. For “Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain”, Rosler cut out newspaper clippings featuring images of women’s bodies and put them into a new context. Using montage, she achieved clear thematic contrasts by directly linking eroticized pictures to domestic spaces. For instance, in the photomontage “Bicillin”, or “Medical Treatment II” she combined a woman in an alluring pose with penicillin, a similar-sounding word for a medication that is often used to cure sexually transmitted diseases. Parodies of 1960s commercial aesthetics are particularly striking in some of the photomontages, such as “Cold Meat II”, or “Kitchen II”, which depicts a refrigerator with female breasts. Comedy and stereotypes also appear in Rosler’s collages. Bowl of Fruit features a kitchen with a fruit bowl on the counter. In the background, a nude woman looks back over her shoulder at the viewers. Here, Rosler alludes to the common comparison made between female body parts and fruit. A large number of Rosler’s photomontages from the time focused on traditional role models that confronted women in Western society during the twentieth century.

For “Semiotics of the Kitchen”, Rosler posed as a housewife in a kitchen, parodying the cooking shows that became popular in the 1960s. The artist assigns a letter of the alphabet to each kitchen tool, identifies each utensil by name, then makes a gesture related to the use of each object. A total of twenty objects are presented. Rosler does not assign any items to the last letters of the alphabet (U to Z), but simply mimes the letters themselves. Her reference here is to an attitude that was popular in society at the time, according to which it does not matter what a housewife says on television, but it is imperative that she submit to gendertypical codes. In “Backyard Economy I,” Rosler filmed her own backyard. The laundry flutters in the wind, becoming a billowy landscape of fabric. Here, Rosler depicts a domestic area that is often associated with housewifely domestic chores, reproductive and family labor, or with children at play. Here, she refers to the economic and political aspects of domestic labor and the way that the economic system fails to perceive and acknowledge it. “May Day, Mexico, D. F. 1981” Pictures like these from Mexico City, where the artist photographed a gigantic demonstration on the Zócalo, are of people who took to the streets to protest against poverty and starvation, and to advocate for democracy, work, human rights, and the right to participate in making decisions for the country. Here, Rosler’s photographs can be regarded as a declaration of solidarity made under the auspices of the international resistance to neoliberal economic policies and military buildups. “The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems” fluctuates between the poles of human presence and absence, between text and image. Here, Rosler photographed Bowery Street in south Manhattan, whose streetscape at the time was characterized by vagrancy and alcoholism. The twenty-four framed panels are in pairs, each one made up of a street scene and a photograph of typewritten text on a sheet of paper. The typed words are often metaphorical and full of allusions; for instance, “screwed” here refers to “drunk.” Because Rosler’s images and texts do not explain each other, there is room for associative word games in the language of the people who are absent here. Rosler also uses this space to refer to the dilemma of portraying human suffering. On the one hand, she openly criticizes the practices of contemporary documentary photography as h/umiliating, while on the other, her candid documentary format allows her to comment on the causes of homelessness and drug addiction, which she regards as rooted less in individuals and more in the social system itself. For “The Greenpoint Project”, Rosler decided upon a personal approach, shifting the focus of her observations onto the inhabitants of her own neighborhood, which had initially suffered from neglect, then later from gentrification. She photographed people in their individual work environments and added a brief biography to each portrait. This lends a personal, even emotional note to the interiors of the shops that Rosler has been photographing frequently since 1982. Thanks to both the biographies and the spaces’ connection to the people who live in them, the colorful yet impersonal storefronts turn into real, personal living spaces. In “The Restoration of High Culture in Chile”, Rosler tells a story about a visit to a musical family in Tijuana, Mexico, where the topic turns to the recent military overthrow of the elected Socialist government in Chile on September 11, 1973. The hosts, a gracious upper-middleclass family, lauded the return of musical “high culture,“ exulting over the reopening of the “best concert hall in Chile“ which for the artist contrasted with the circumstances of the US-backed coup. The work includes photos of record-album covers and pictures of a tropical fish in the comfortable living room.

Photo: Martha Rosler, “Flower Fields (Color Field Painting)”, 1974, filmstill, Color Super 8mm Film transferred to video, 3:36 Min., Courtesy: The Artist, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Info: Curator Dr. Sebastian Baden and Luise Leyer, Schirn Kunsthalle, Römerberg, Frankfurt, Germany, Duration: 6/7-24/9/2023, Days & Hours: Tue 7 Fri-Sun 10:00-19:00, Wed-Thu 10:00-22:00, www.schirn.de/