Martha Rosler
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Martha Rosler 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. Her work and writing have been widely influential. She has lectured extensively nationally and internationally and teaches art at Rutgers University.
She serves in an advisory capacity to the departments of education at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (all New York City).
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 has been seen in the Venice Biennale of 2003; the Liverpool Biennial and the Taipei Biennial (both 2004); as well as many major international survey shows, including the "Documenta" exhibition in Kassel, Germany, and several Whitney Biennials. She has had numerous solo exhibitions. A retrospective of her work, “Positions in the Life World” (1998-2000) was shown in five European cities and, concurrently, at the International Center of Photography and the New Museum of Contemporary Art (both in New York).
Her solo show, “London Garage Sale,” was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in June 2005, revisting a series of exhibitions she has held since 1973 that center on the American garage sale. E-flux sponsored "The Martha Rosler Liibrary", in which, starting in November 2005, over 7,500 volumes from her private collection were made available as a public resource; the collection then traveled to the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Germany.
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[edit] 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, "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).
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. 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.
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 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 customer service, maintenance, and security.
[edit] Published Works
Martha Rosler's essays have been published widely in catalogs, magazines, such as Artforum, Afterimage, Quaderns, and Grey Room, and edited collections. 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 disinterestness and in generating a discussion about the importance of institutional and discursive framing in determining photographic meaning.
Rosler has published thirteen 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" (Nova Scotia College of Art & Design).
[edit] 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 Kokoscha Prize, Austria's highest fine arts award.
