Semiotics of the Kitchen

"Semiotics of the Kitchen" is a feminist parody video and performance piece released in 1975 by Martha Rosler. The video, which runs six minutes, is considered a critique of the commodified versions of traditional women's roles in modern society.

Featuring Rosler as a generic cooking show host, the camera observes as she presents an array of kitchen hand utensils, many of them outdated or strange, and, after identifying them, demonstrates unproductive, sometimes, violent, uses for each. It uses a largely static camera and a plain set, allowing the viewer to focus more on Rosler's performance and adding a primitive quality.

Letter by letter, Rosler navigates a culinary lexicon, using a different kitchen implement for each step along the way. She begins with an apron, which she ties around her waist, and, with deapan humor, journeys through the alphabet, until the last few letters. For these, U, V, W, X,Y, and Z. the implements are dispensed with and the woman's gestures and body become a signal system themselves. The Z replicates the mark of Zorro, a filmic reference, and at the end of the entire work the artist offers a shrug, somehow defusing the negative reading of the parody. The focus on linguistics and words is important, since Rosler intended the video to challenge "the familiar system of everyday kitchen meanings -- the securely understood signs of domestic industry and food production." [cite web | title =Semiotics of the Kitchen | publisher =Electronic Arts Intermix | year =2006 | url =http://www.eai.org/eai/tape.jsp?itemID=1545 | accessdate =2006-11-14 ]

A well-known feminist, Rosler remarked about this work that "when the woman speaks, she names her own oppression." The symbolic terminology of the kitchen, she hypothesized, transformed the woman into a sign of the system of food production and harnessed subjectivity. As a foil of Julia Childs, she "replaces the domesticated meaning of kitchen tools with a lexicon of rage and frustration." The work was intended, like all early video, to be shown on a television monitor, and thus it is no accident that some of the gestures represent a tossing or throwing of the imaginary contents of certain implements "outside the box" of television programming. it is not the production of food in and of itself that is Rosler's target but the taken-for-granted role of happy housewife and selfless producer that the tape intends to spotlight. [cite web | title =Food for Thought: A Video Art Sampler | publisher =The Jewish Museum | date = 2006-10-31 | url =http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/site/pages/onlinex.php?id=152&PHPSESSID=69e501015f90f808e1a2bb69c25d5f72
accessdate =2006-11-14 ]

References

External links

* [http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?SEMIOTICSO Video Data Bank] includes a description of the video as well as a clip from it.