Martha Rosler

Early life and education

Born in Brooklyn, Rosler spent formative years in California, from 1968 to 1980, first in north San Diego county and then in San Francisco. She has also lived and taught in Canada. She graduated from Brooklyn College (1965) and the University of California, San Diego (1974).

Career

Her work and writing have been widely influential. She has lectured extensively nationally and internationally and has taught photography and media, as well as photo and video history and critical studies, at Rutgers University, where she was a professor for thirty years, and at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt, Germany.

She serves in an advisory capacity to the departments of education at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (all New York City). She is an Advisory Board board member of the Center for Urban Pedagogy and a Board Member of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, New York. She is a former board member of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, New York, as well as a former member of the boards of directors of the Association for Independent Video and Film and the Media Alliance. She is a regular lecturer at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.

Video Art

Among her most widely known works are the pioneering videotapes Semiotics of the Kitchen (1974/75), Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (1977), Losing: A Conversation with the Parents (1977), and, with Paper Tiger Television, Martha Rosler Reads Vogue (1982) and Born to Be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby S/M (1988).

Her work focuses on the public sphere, exploring issues from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment, especially as they affect women. Throughout these works Rosler manipulates performance based narratives and symbolized images of mass media to disrupt expectations of the viewer. Rosier says, "Video itself 'isn't innocent' : Yes video lets me construct, using a variety of fictional narrative forms, 'decoys' engaged in a dialectic with commercial TV."

These concepts are emphasized in works like Semiotics of the Kitchen in which a static camera is focused on a woman in a kitchen who interacts with kitchen utensils, naming and demonstrating their uses in off putting gestures, speaking on the expectations of women in certain spaces.

Other Works

Her photo/text work The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1974/75) is considered a seminal work in conceptual and postmodern photographic practice.

Also widely noted are her series of photomontages, Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain (c. 1965–72), addressing the photographic representation of women and domesticity, and House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, addressing the imagery of the Vietnam War (c. 1967–72; reprised in relation to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2004 and 2008).

Many of these works are concerned with the geopolitics of entitlements and dispossession. 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.

Exhibitions

Rosler has had numerous solo exhibitions. 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). She has recently been the subject of an extensive retrospective exhibition at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM), in Turin. In 2006 her work was the subject of solo exhibitions at the University of Rennes and in 2007 at the Worcester Museum of Art. Her work has been seen in the Venice Biennale of 2003; the Liverpool Biennial, the Taipei Biennial (both 2004), and the Singapore Biennale (2011); as well as many major international survey shows, including the "documenta" exhibitions in Kassel, Germany, of 1982 and 2007, the SkulpturProjekte Munster 2007, and several Whitney Biennials.

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 2009, an archive exhibition based on this project, "If You Lived Here Still," opened at e-flux's gallery in New York and then traveled (2010) to Casco Office for Art Design and Theory, in Utrecht, Netherlands, and to La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona. Following the problematic addressed by these exhibitions, Rosler together with the urbanist Miguel Robles-Duran worked on the urban installation project in Hamburg, Germany, called We Promise!(2015), which confronts the conflicted promises of urban regeneration projects in Europe.

At the Utopia Station show at the Venice Biennale of 2003, she worked with about 30 of her students from Stockholm and Copenhagen, as well as a small, far-flung internet group, 'the Fleas', to produce banners and a mini-pavilion exploring utopian schemes and communities and their political and social ramifications. She has done two tours of historical sites, one in Hamburg (1993) and one in Liverpool (2004), in conjunction with curated art projects. At the Frieze Art Fair (London) of 2005, she conducted a tour of this temporary site from its siting and construction to all aspects of its labor, including customer service, food service and toilets, publicity, maintenance, and security.

Her solo show, “Meta-Monumental Garage Sale" was held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in November 2012, revisiting a series of exhibitions she had held in 1973 and 1977 that centered on the American garage sale. The exhibit in the MoMa’s atrium was inspired by Rosler’s fascination with garage sales, as she first experienced this phenomenon when she moved from New York to Southern California. Her intrigue in these strange community events, garage sales, caused her to start collecting her own items and doing her own garage sale events. The 2008 “Meta-Monumental Garage Sale” presented over 14,000 items, from Rosler’s own collection, and even included donated items from museum employees and the public. Rosler even went as far as to price all the items herself – which included some steep prices in order to not only raise enough money for charity, but also to ensure that all the articles wouldn’t be quickly purchased and ruin the experience for the rest of the public, who were willing to pay $25 to enter her Meta-Monumental Garage Sale.

At the request of museum curators, she restaged such sales in several European art locales and in New York City starting in 1999, culminating in Fair Trade Garage Sale at the Museum of Cultural History in Basel, in conjunction with the 2010 Basel Art Fair, and then at MoMA in 2012.

E-flux sponsored "The Martha Rosler Library," in which, starting in November 2005, over 7,500 volumes from her private collection were made available as a public resource in venues in and around art institutions, schools, and libraries. The collection started at e-flux's New York gallery and then traveled to the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Germany; to Antwerp's MuHKA (Museum of Contemporary Art) in conjunction with NICC, an artist-run space; 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. At the "Martha Rosler Library," visitors could sit and read or make free photocopies. Other projects, such as reading groups and public readings, were organized locally in conjunction with the project.

Personal life

Rosler's son is the graphic novelist Josh Neufeld; they have collaborated on a number of projects.

Published works

Martha Rosler's essays have been published widely in catalogues, magazines, such as Artforum, Afterimage, Quaderns, and Grey Room, and edited collections, among them, Women Artists at the Millennium (October Books/MIT, 2006). She has produced numerous other "word works" and photo/text publications; now exploring cookery in a mock dialogue between Julia Child and Craig Claiborne, now analyzing imagery of women in Russia or exploring responses to repression, crisis, and war. Her 1981 essay, "In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on documentary photography)," has been widely cited, republished, and translated and is credited with a great role in dismantling the myths of photographic disinterestedness and in generating a discussion about the importance of institutional and discursive framing in determining photographic meaning.

Rosler has published sixteen books of photography, art, and writing. Among them are Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Essays 1975-2001 (MIT Press, 2004), the photo books Passionate Signals (Cantz, 2005), In the Place of the Public: Airport Series (Cantz, 1997), and Rights of Passage (NYFA, 1995). If You Lived Here (Free Press, 1991) discusses and supplements her Dia project on housing, homelessness, and urban life. 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 ISBN 0-919616-46-1). The collection Imagenes Publicas, Spanish translations of some essays and video scripts, was published in 2007.

Videography

Awards

Rosler was awarded the Spectrum International Prize in Photography for 2005. The prize was accompanied by a photo and video retrospective, “If Not Now, When?” at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover and NGBK in Berlin. The book Passionate Signals accompanied this exhibition. In 2006 she received the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Austria's highest fine arts award. She received an Anonymous Was A Woman Award for 2007 and was the USA Artists Nimoy Fellow in 2009. She was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Residency for 2009. In 2010 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Guggenheim Museum. Rosler was awarded a DAAD Berlin fellowship for 2011. In 2012 she was awarded a Doctorate in Fine Arts Honoris Causa by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, and the Distinguished Feminist Award by the College Art Association.