MARTHA ROSLER
"I want to make art about the commonplace, art that illumines social life. I want to enlist art to question the mythical explanations of everyday life that take shape as an optimistic rationalism and to explore the relationships between individual consciousness, family life, and the culture of monopoly capitalism.' -Martha Rosler
Since the 1960s, Martha Rosler has created an incisive, engaged work body of work using a variety of media, including photography, collage, installation, video and performance. Her considerable critical writings include countless essays, photo/texts, and publications that are inseparable from her artistic and activist practice, all committed to engaging a public beyond the confines of the art world. Her work is nearly always political in nature, exploring how socioeconomic realities, sexual politics and ideologies dictate our everyday life.
Her controversial early work, Bringing the War Home (1967-1972) is a series of 20 photomontages that use Dada collage techniques to take images cut from Life magazine of Vietnam War victims and juxtapose them with the kitchen ads and sophisticated modernist interiors also featured in the magazine. An elegantly dressed Pat Nixon or a smart apartment was set against bleeding babies, legless women, tanks and shanty towns. Emphasizing the forgotten connections between the war in Vietnam and the tranquil living rooms in America, Rosler's ferociously political collages produced during the peak of U.S. military engagement in Vietnam was an extension of her own involvement with anti-war activities.
Homelessness, the struggle for housing and the political system that perpetuate these injustices are the subject of a number of her works and writings, including If You Lived Here... (1989-92), which was a cycle of exhibitions, public forums, publication, and associated activities that Rosier organized. Central to the mutating project was several exhibitions which showed Rosler's own work but also that of other artists, homeless people, and activists alongside a reconstructed kitchen or a shelter, situating each individual exhibition somewhere between an activist reading room and an installation object that questions the role of the documentary in contemporary art. Combining her larger engagement with history and the everyday, the project is a three dimensional, sensorial archive lined with the fruits of research and records of planning, action and injustice. Still and moving images are combined and an abundance of texts, sound pieces, and documents that offer the possibility of participation and engagement on multiple levels. And with it, as with most all of her work, Rosler refuses to separate art from the political or the experience of art from the effort needed to be an engaged citizen.
http://home.earthlink.net/navva/
http://www.the-artists.org/ArtistView.cfm?id=53695761-4BOE-4FB0-9A034AF690F32E20
http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$artistdetail?ROSLERM
http://www.photography-now.com/artists/K08006.html
http://www.newmuseum.org/more_exh_m_rosler.php
http://www.cc.ncu.edu.tw/-sctseng/photo_text_interaction/
Born Brooklyn, United States
Lives and works in Brooklyn, United States
Mad Housers, Hut ,1987
Wood Construction
Wood Construction
If You Lived Here... , 1987-89
Documentation of the exhibitions If You Lived Here..
Dimension Variable
Courtesy the artist
Collection of the artist
Documentation of the exhibitions If You Lived Here..
Dimension Variable
Courtesy the artist
Collection of the artist
"I want to make art about the commonplace, art that illumines social life. I want to enlist art to question the mythical explanations of everyday life that take shape as an optimistic rationalism and to explore the relationships between individual consciousness, family life, and the culture of monopoly capitalism.' -Martha Rosler
Since the 1960s, Martha Rosler has created an incisive, engaged work body of work using a variety of media, including photography, collage, installation, video and performance. Her considerable critical writings include countless essays, photo/texts, and publications that are inseparable from her artistic and activist practice, all committed to engaging a public beyond the confines of the art world. Her work is nearly always political in nature, exploring how socioeconomic realities, sexual politics and ideologies dictate our everyday life.
Her controversial early work, Bringing the War Home (1967-1972) is a series of 20 photomontages that use Dada collage techniques to take images cut from Life magazine of Vietnam War victims and juxtapose them with the kitchen ads and sophisticated modernist interiors also featured in the magazine. An elegantly dressed Pat Nixon or a smart apartment was set against bleeding babies, legless women, tanks and shanty towns. Emphasizing the forgotten connections between the war in Vietnam and the tranquil living rooms in America, Rosler's ferociously political collages produced during the peak of U.S. military engagement in Vietnam was an extension of her own involvement with anti-war activities.
Homelessness, the struggle for housing and the political system that perpetuate these injustices are the subject of a number of her works and writings, including If You Lived Here... (1989-92), which was a cycle of exhibitions, public forums, publication, and associated activities that Rosier organized. Central to the mutating project was several exhibitions which showed Rosler's own work but also that of other artists, homeless people, and activists alongside a reconstructed kitchen or a shelter, situating each individual exhibition somewhere between an activist reading room and an installation object that questions the role of the documentary in contemporary art. Combining her larger engagement with history and the everyday, the project is a three dimensional, sensorial archive lined with the fruits of research and records of planning, action and injustice. Still and moving images are combined and an abundance of texts, sound pieces, and documents that offer the possibility of participation and engagement on multiple levels. And with it, as with most all of her work, Rosler refuses to separate art from the political or the experience of art from the effort needed to be an engaged citizen.
http://home.earthlink.net/navva/
http://www.the-artists.org/ArtistView.cfm?id=53695761-4BOE-4FB0-9A034AF690F32E20
http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$artistdetail?ROSLERM
http://www.photography-now.com/artists/K08006.html
http://www.newmuseum.org/more_exh_m_rosler.php
http://www.cc.ncu.edu.tw/-sctseng/photo_text_interaction/