Born in 1943 in New York City, New York (US)
Lives and works in New York City, New York (US)
1975
Video, black and white, sound
Durée : 6'21''
Year of Purchase: 2003
This performance-based video, shot in black and white with a fixed camera parodies a cooking demonstration made by Martha Rosler herself. Presenting herself in the middle of a kitchen bristling with utensils, the apron’d artist addresses the camera wild-eyed. As the film progresses, with its sequence shots she makes use of different utensils, listing them in alphabetical order and subjecting them to an unnatural fate. She takes a bowl, simulates the movement of a spoon, and crushes an iron in it. Then she tosses a saucepan into a transparent dish, spins the whisk in midair, mimics a murder with a fork, and stabs the air with a knife. This totally non-productive cooking runs through the alphabet right to the end, with the artist listing and miming the letters U, V, W, X, Y and Z with suppressed violence marking the culmination of her absurd dance. The repressed rage provoked by domestic servitude thus submerges language. ‘When a woman speaks, she names her own oppression’1, as this artist and writer is wont to declare. She is also a pioneer of politicized video, producing among other works, Semiotics of the Kitchen, which is one of the first reports prior to Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, produced in 1977. This video highlights one of the recurrent problem sets of the author of the famous photomontages Bringing the War Home (1967-1972): namely that the statement of any theory (reference is made in this instance to structuralism, which was prevalent in the 1970s) consists not only in getting thinking to evolve but also in doing away with all social inequality.
Emmanuelle Lequeux
1 In Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Great Britain; Generall Foundation Vienna, Austria; MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachussets, 1998.