Martha Rosler

Martha Rosler
Born	Brooklyn, NewYork
Nationality	American
Field	Video art, Installation art, Performance art
Training	Brooklyn College, University of California, San Diego
Awards	see full list below

Martha Rosler is an American artist. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she now lives. She graduated from Brooklyn College (1965) and the University of California, San Diego (1974). Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler’s work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war, as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport.

Her work and writing have been widely influential. She has lectured extensively nationally and internationally and has taught art at Rutgers University, where she was a professor for thirty years, and at the Städelschule 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 on the board of the Van Alen Institute, in New York City, and is a former board member of the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, New York.

Rosler's son is the alternative cartoonist Josh Neufeld;^[1] they have collaborated on a number of projects.

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 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 (1966–72), addressing the photographic representation of women and domesticity, and Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, addressing the imagery of the Vietnam War (1967–72; reprised in relation to the War in Iraq 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.

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 Münster 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.

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.^[2] 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 customer service, maintenance, and security.

Her solo show, “London Garage Sale,” was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in June 2005, revisiting a series of exhibitions she has held since 1973 that center on the American garage sale.

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^[3] in venues in and around art institutions, schools, and libraries.^[4] 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; 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, were organized locally in conjunction with the project.

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 essay "In, around, and Afterthoughts (on documentary photography)" (1981 but widely cited, republished, and translated) has been 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 Imágenes Públicas, Spanish translations of some essays and video scripts, was published in 2007.

Awards

Rosler was awarded the Spectrum International Prize in Photography for 2005.^[5] 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.

Bibliography (selected)

• Imágenes Públicas (Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2007)
• Passionate Signals (Cantz, 2005)
• Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Essays 1975-2001 (MIT Press, 2004)
• Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World (MIT Press, 1999)
• In the Place of the Public: Airport Series (Cantz, 1997)
• Rights of Passage (NYFA, 1995)
• If You Lived Here (Free Press, 1991)
• 3 Works (1981; republished Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2006) ISBN 0-919616-46-1

Notes

1. ^ Cheng, Scarlet (Feb. 20, 2010). "Art is the message on these billboards". Los Angeles Times. http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/20/entertainment/la-et-billboard-art20-2010feb20. Retrieved 3 October 2011. 
2. ^ Nochlin, Linda. “Less Than More,” Artforum, Vol. 62, No.1 (September 2003), p. 178 ff.
3. ^ Filipovic, Elena. “If You Read Here... Martha Rosler’s Library,” Afterall no. 15 (Summer 2007).
4. ^ Farzin, Media (Sept. 9, 2009). "Still Here: An Interview With Martha Rosler and Anton Vidokle". Art in America. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/conversations/2009-09-09/interview-with-martha-rosler-and-anton-vidokle/. Retrieved 3 October 2011. 
5. ^ Spectrum — International Prize for Photography, Foundation of Lower Saxony website.

References

• Richard Meyer, “Feminism Uncovered: On the Wack! Catalogue,” Artforum, Summer 2007. pp. 211–212, 548.
• Heather Diack, “Too Close to Home: Rethinking Representation in Martha Rosler’s Photomontages of War,” Prefix Photo (Toronto), Vol. 7, no. 2 (Nov. 2006). pp. 56–69.
• Jean-Marc Huitorel, “Martha Rosler, Sur/Sous le Pavé.” ArtPress, July/August 2006.
• Beatrice von Bismarck, “Freedom I Have None: Martha Rosler in der Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin.” Texte zur Kunst, #62, June 2006.
• Raimar Stange, “Martha Rosler: Von der notwendigke it (zitierne) der Kunst/ The Need and Necessity for Quotes and Quoting in Art,” Spike, Winter 2005
• Holland Cotter, ‘If It's Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be Disinformation,” New York Times, Art in Review section, Nov. 11 2005
• Frances Richard, “Martha Rosler,” Artforum, Feb 2005, p. 173
• Jens Hoffmann, “The Familiar Is Not Necessarily the Known,” NU: The Nordic Art Review (Stockholm), Vol. III, No. 2, 2001, pp. 58–63
• Martina Pachmanová, “Umeni bourat myty ve svete kolem nás i v nás.” Aspekt (Bratislava), 12/2000-1/2001, pp. 130–136

External links

• Official website
• Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture
• Martha Rosler in the Video Data Bank
• Martha Rosler, Mediateca Media Art space

Persondata
Name	Rosler, Martha
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Place of birth	Brooklyn, NewYork
Date of death
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