A Guide to the Iconoclastic Feminist Artwork of Martha Rosler
2025-04-25T07:00:00Z
We explore the storied career of Martha Rosler, an artist whose work addresses feminism, American foreign policy, war, labour, everyday life, and much more
We explore the storied career of Martha Rosler, an artist whose work addresses feminism, American foreign policy, war, labour, everyday life, and much more
Text Tia Glista
For more than six decades, Martha Rosler has been at the forefront of multimedia artmaking – she is a pioneering video artist, an iconoclastic feminist performer, a collage artist and photographer, and critic and theorist of visual culture. Best known for her 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen, her thematic focus on the tension between the public and private has expanded audience’s understandings of the ways in which this is a false binary: in her work, nothing is pure and everything is inflected and sustained by politics.
Born in New York in 1943, Rosler studied at Brooklyn College and the University of California, San Diego, where she came up as an artist in the heady milieu of feminist performers and social practice artists who were bending genres and using art as a means of confronting systems of domination. But where many other artists of this period thought of gender as distinct from class, race, or imperialism, producing work that critiqued power in only the narrowest of terms, Rosler’s work has always cast a wide net, thinking through not only how we are impressed upon by power but also entangled in it. Consequently, her work has continuously addressed not only feminism but American foreign policy, war, food production, urbanism, gentrification, labour, and the multifaceted politics of everyday life. Ahead of a new retrospective at Galerie Lelong in New York, Truth is/is not, here’s a guide to Rosler’s most incisive and iconic works, spanning video, collage, mail art, and installation.
© Martha Rosler Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York
Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) If you have ever studied contemporary art or taken a class on feminist film, chances are you’ve seen Rosler’s iconic Semiotics of the Kitchen. In this seminal work of performance and video art, Rosler became what she called an “anti-Julia Child” figure, parodying the set-up of the cooking show in a more realistic domestic environment. Picking up the various cooking utensils laid before her, she alters and exaggerates the expected gestures and movements that accompany their use, and in so doing, unsettles the grammar of domesticity: how do we expect domestic labour to be performed? What does it look like and mean? How does it routinise consumption, inequality, or oppression? As Rosler’s gestures erupt into fury, the stable, artificial bliss of the cooking show set-up collapses. Rosler restaged the piece for the Whitechapel Gallery in 2003, creating an open call for women to join her in a rotating performance broadcast live throughout the gallery.
© Martha Rosler. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York
House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967-72, 2004, 2008) In one of her most affecting ‘photo-montage’ series, Rosler responded to the escalation of the US invasion of Vietnam, splicing together images from House Beautiful magazine with photojournalism from the conflict. The series embodies characterisations of the Vietnam War as the first ‘living room war,’ a term that described its widespread broadcasting on television; however, by placing figures in the same domestic spaces, she makes clear not just how Americans witnessed the war, but also their role as passive participants. In these images, notions of ‘here’ versus ‘there’ are collapsed – the domestic bliss of a wealthy suburban family is backdropped by soldiers, drawing attention to how promises of American prosperity are supported by imperialism and foreign policy that curtails the self-determination of the Global South. As with Semiotics of the Kitchen, Rosler returned to this project in 2004 and 2008 to reflect on the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. This new iteration saw images like runway models or people using cell phone cameras, connecting new waves of media consumption, advertising, tech, and fashion to covert Western bids for global dominance.
© Martha Rosler. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York
Service: A Trilogy on Colonisation (1976) Rosler’s experimentation with and mastery of different media is acutely on display in her somewhat lesser-known “postcard novels,” compiled in this volume that includes A Budding Gourmet, McTowers Maid, and Tijuana Maid. Across each text, she reflects on the social role of food, including food production, preparation, and consumption, and how they relate to the intersection of class and gender. In A Budding Gourmet, for instance, a housewife recounts learning to make dishes from South America, arguing that she wants to become a gourmet because it means that her taste distinguishes her from being a mere animal, and later claiming that the best part of being American is taking the best things from every era and culture to “make them our own.” Each story was originally sent through the mail, with one postcard being dispatched every five to seven days. For Rosler, the mail was an effective tool because of how it penetrates everyday routines – when retrieved, it needs to be dealt with immediately, and so the messages one receives can have a stronger impact. Further, the form of the postcard reimagines the role of art as a commodity – and an elite, expensive one at that – making it into something that travels, that gets passed along, and is small and humble in scale and form.
© Martha Rosler Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York
Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain (1966-72) In this early photomontage, Rosler underscores the commodification of women’s bodies in advertising, fusing body parts with consumer objects to emphasise their alignment in the public imagination. In one image, a bare ass is cut and pasted over a cigarette container; elsewhere, the stages of a blonde woman doing her makeup routine are played out across the ends of shipping containers being stacked and prepared for unloading. Commodification is made literal – women’s bodies are not just being portrayed like objects, but as objects, polished and packaged. By collaging these seemingly unalike scenes together, she also playfully demonstrates the artificiality of media images of beautiful women directed by the heterosexual male gaze – their bodies are dismembered for the pleasure of others, time and time again, but this same act of dismemberment (through collaging) can rearrange the scenes in new, subversive ways.
© Martha Rosler. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York
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