Martha Rosler

Decoys and Disruptions is the first comprehensive collection of writings by American artist and critic Martha Rosler. Best known for her videos and photography, Rosler has also been an original and influential cultural critic and theorist for over twenty-five years. The writings collected here address such key topics as documentary photography, feminist art, video, government patronage of the arts, censorship, and the future of digitally based photographic media. Taken together, these thirteen essays not only show Rosler's importance as a critic but also offer an essential resource for readers interested in the issues confronting contemporary art. The essays in this collection illustrate Rosler's ongoing investigation into means of exposing truth and provoking change, providing a retrospective of characteristic issues in her work. Mixing analysis and wit, Rosler challenges many of the fundamental precepts of contemporary art practice. Her influential essay "In, around, and afterthoughts: on documentary photography" almost single-handedly dismantled the myth of liberal documentary photography when it appeared. Many of the essays in this volume have had a similarly wide-ranging influence; others are published here for the first time. Illustrating the essays are 81 images by Rosler and other artists and photographers.

"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." Since the late 1960s, American artist Martha Rosler has produced seminal works in the fields of photography, performance, video, installation, critical writing, and theory. Committed to an art that engages a public beyond the confines of the art world, Rosler investigates how socioeconomic realities and political ideologies dominate ordinary life. Her astute critical analyses are often cloaked in deadpan wit. This book, which accompanies the first retrospective exhibition of Rosler's work, contains seven color photo essays by Rosler; an excerpt from the curatorial project "If You Lived Here"; essays by Alexander Alberro, Catherine de Zegher, Sylvia Eiblmayr, Jodi Hauptman, and Annette Michelson; a conversation between Rosler and Benjamin Buchloh; and a biography/bibliography along with a complete list of art works. EXHIBITION SCHEDULE: Ikon Gallery Birmingham, UK December 1998 - January 1999 Nouveau Musee Villeurbanne, France January 1999 - February 1999 Generali Foundation Vienna, Austria May 1999 - August 1999 MACBA Barcelona, Spain Fall 1999 The New Museum New York City Spring 2000

The politically engaged work of Martha Rosler is fascinating and provocative; this wide-ranging survey brings timely insights at a moment of resurgence for political activism and feminism.

The first sustained critical examination of a work by Martha Rosler that bridged the concerns of conceptual art with those of political documentary. In The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1974–1975) Martha Rosler bridged the concerns of conceptual art with those of political documentary. The work, a series of twenty-one black-and-white photographs, twenty-four text panels and three blank panels, embraces the codes of the photo-text experiments of the late 1960s and applies them to the social reality of New York's Lower East Side. The prevailing critical view of The Bowery focuses on its implicit rejection, or critique, of established modes of documentary. In this illustrated, extended essay on the work by Rosler, Steve Edwards argues that although the critical attitude towards documentary is an important dimension of the piece, it does not exhaust the meaning of the project. Edwards situates the work in relation to debates and practices of the period, especially conceptual art and the emergence of the photo-text paradigm exemplified by the work of Robert Smithson, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Hans Haacke, Victor Burgin, and the Women and Work group. In particular, he contextualizes Rosler's work of this period within the politicized San Diego group (which included, in addition to Rosler, Allan Sekula, Fred Lonidier, and Philip Steinmetz). Comparing The Bowery to Rosler's later video vital statistics of a citizen, simply obtained (1977) and the films of the Dziga-Vertov Group (formed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin), Edwards shows how the work engages with conceptual art and the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s.

With contributions by: Christine Benglia Bevington Marie Annick Brown Andrew Byard Cen�n The Chinatown History Project Clinton Coalition of Concern Rosalyn Deutsche Dan Graham and Robin Hurst Alexander Kluge The Mad Housers Tony Masso The Nation Richard Plunz William Price Yvonne Rainer Mel Rosenthal Allan Sekula Camilo Jos� Vergara Dan Wiley Discussions in Contemporary Culture is an award-winning series co-published with the Dia Center for the Arts in New York City. These volumes offer rich and timely discourses on a broad range of cultural issues and critical theory. The collection covers topics from urban planning to popular culture and literature, and continually attracts a wide and dedicated readership.

In this collection of essays Martha Rosler embarks on a broad inquiry into the economic and historical precedents for today's soft ideology of creativity, with special focus on its elaborate retooling of class distinctions. In the creative city, the neutralization or incorporation of subcultural movements, the organic translation of the gritty into the quaint, and the professionalization of the artist combine with armies of eager freelancers and interns to constitute the friendly user interface of a new social sphere in which, for those who have been granted a place within it, an elaborate retooling of traditional markers of difference has allowed class distinctions to be either utterly dissolved or willfully suppressed. The result is a handful of cities selected for revitalization rather than desertion, where artists in search of cheap rent become the avant-garde pioneers of gentrification, and one no longer asks where all of this came from and how. And it may be for this reason that, for Rosler, it becomes all the more necessary to locate the functioning of power within this new urban paradigm, to find a position from which to make it accountable to something other than its own logic. e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

American Martha Rosler is one of the most politically motivated artists of her generation. Through her art she interrogates moral and political ideology and encourages social activism. Most of the encounters that unfold in Rosler's works originate in seemingly ordinary everday scenes of domestic life, such as shopping, watching the news, reading the newspaper, travelling. Her photographs shed light on the many ways in which these routines are governed by social norms. Many of the pieces are working agit-prop never intended for the museum but circulated through left wing papers, magazines, anti-war journals and poster campaigns. The 'best means to communicate the message' being the preference. Rosler also produces hilarious anti-TV video productions that satirise and denounce capitalism and all its effects.

This book explores how feminist artists continued to engage with kitchen culture and food practices in their work as women’s art moved from the margins to the mainstream. In particular, this book examines the use of food in the art practices of six women artists and collectives working in Southern California—a hotbed of feminist art in the 1970s—in conjunction with the Women’s Art Movement and broader feminist groups during the era of the Second Wave. Focused around particular articulations of food in culture, this book considers how feminist artists engage with issues of gender, labor, class, consumption, (re)production, domesticity, and sexuality in order to advocate for equality and social change. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, food studies, and gender and women’s studies.

This text presents about 7,800 publications from the personal library of the artist Martha Rosler on extended loan to e-flux.

divRevolutionizing the history of street photography, Unfamiliar Streets demonstrates an expanded understanding of the genre through the work of a fashion photographer, a photojournalist, a conceptual artist, and a contemporary artist. /DIV

"This volume documents the present crisis in American urban housing policies and portrays how artists ... within the context of neighborhood organizations, have fought against government neglect, shortsighted housing policies and unfettered real estate speculation. Through essays, photographs, symposiums, architectural plans and the reproduction of works from the series of exhibitions organized by [Martha] Rosler, the book serves a number of functions: it's a practical manual for community organizing; a history of housing and homelessness in New York City and around the country; and an outline of what a human housing policy might encompass for the American city"--Back cover.

"Usable Pasts addresses projects dating to two periods in the United States that saw increased financial support from the state for socially engaged culture. By analysing artworks dating to the 1990s by Suzanne Lacy, Rick Lowe and Martha Rosler in relation to experimental theatre, modern dance, and photography produced within the leftist Cultural Front of the 1930s, this book unpicks the mythic and material afterlives of the New Deal in American cultural politics in order to write a new history of social practice art in the United States. From teenage mothers organising exhibitions that challenged welfare reform, to communist dance troupes choreographing their struggles as domestic workers, Usable Pasts addresses the aesthetics and politics of these attempts to transform society through art in relation to questions of state formation"--

The rise of proxy wars, the Space Race, and cybernetics during the Cold War marked science and technology as vital sites of social and political power. Women artists, historically excluded from these domains, responded critically, while simultaneously redeploying the products of "Technological Society" into works that promoted ideals of progress and alternative concepts of human community. In this innovative book, author Christine Filippone offers the first focused examination of the conceptual use of science and technology by women artists during and just after the women?s movement. She argues that artists Alice Aycock, Agnes Denes, Martha Rosler and Carolee Schneemann used science and technology to mount a critique on Cold War American society as they saw it?conservative and constricting. Motivated by the contemporary American Women?s Movement, these artists transformed science and technology into new modes of artmaking that transgressed modernist, heroic, painterly styles and subverted the traditional economic structures of the gallery, the museum and the dealer. At the same time, the artists also embraced these domains of knowledge and practice as expressions of hope for a better future. Many found inspiration in the scientific theory of open systems, which investigated "problems of wholeness, dynamic interaction and organization", enabling consideration of the porous boundaries between human bodies and their social, political and nonhuman environments. Filippone also establishes that the theory of open systems not only informed feminist art, but also continued to influence women artists? practice of reclamation and ecological art through the twenty-first century.

Photographs by Martha Rosler. Text by Alexander Alberro, Anthony Vidler.