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In the mid-1960s, Martha Rosler began creating photomontages exploring the material and psychological subjugation of women, manipulating popular advertisements from news, fashion and home magazines to reveal their criminal ideological operations. Rosler made this body of work, A Beautiful Body, or Beauty Knows No Pain (1966–72) alongside painting, sculpture, photography, video and performance, combining a fluid array of conceptual art practices attuned to feminist politics. This set of critical tools informs “Martha Rosler: Changing the Subject…in the Company of Others,” a survey of the artist’s work currently on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York through January 21, 2023.
WOMEN ARTISTS, like actresses, reinvent themselves when they are no longer fair Women but old women– for so many reasons, some worthy, some less so. This can make going back in time especially busy. In the case of the current exhibition, however, I feel that the current need to re-present the feminist critiques and demands of my previous work is valid and timely. Some themes persist for decades – and anyway, I’m one of those artists who’s always trying to revisit things they’ve put aside. This applies to my housing work and much more. In 2004 I decided, during the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, to restart the anti-war photomontages from about 1967 to 1972 – primarily to make it absolutely clear that on our side, nothing had changed. We can apply the same argument to representations of women, which have actually become even more degrading, albeit more complex, and with a new assertion that “This is what women want, who want to be.” Let us by all means listen to women. But be careful about relying on what social subjects identify as what they want and why—what appears to be freely chosen is often prompted by underlying motives traceable to the context in which the desire is produced.
Collage seems to have been adopted by many women, in part because it is a tabletop form of production. I see my photomontages as coming off the collaged corkboards of school classrooms and no doubt from earlier, pre-war artists. The collages of past eras have been fetishized as developing a mode of aesthetic production rather than a method of deaestheticization—the practice has effectively been smoothed over. I try to keep the tears and tears visible. In the upcoming show, a display case displays several of the original boarded-up windows. I am adamant that pasted fragments are not work. But in the end it seemed rather silly to mystify the process by not showing these paper structures. As a craftsman, it meant a lot to me to see the designs of John Hartfield and Max Ernst in shop windows.
I was making feminist sculpture at about the same time as photo montages. She sees herself as a new woman every day, 1976, which is in the show, is a grid of colorful photographs arranged on the floor of mostly banal or outdated shoes, shot from above. Usually when you see photos of shoes, they are facing you because the person wearing the shoes did not take the photo. But mine were shot by the wearer. The photo grid is accompanied by audio of a scathing criticism directed at the speaker’s mother, who nags about standing on one’s own two feet, even if it impedes that possibility. Women teach their daughters not to be independent.
When I made these works, I didn’t dwell on whether they were sculptures, photographs, performances, videos, or anything else, although I certainly made format and formal choices. These are conceptual works, even when the affective element is strong. Indeed, this current show focuses on works from a particular moment in time, as well as more recent works informed by feminist insights and perspectives.
During the feminist revival of the mid-1960s, I still identified as “one of the boys” – stemming from my interest in science and photography and, of course, as a young artist and vanguard of abstract expressionism and someone active against the war. After moving to California and stumbling upon the women’s liberation movement, I realized—especially as a single person with a baby! – the meaning of the phrase “Sisterhood is powerful.” I saw the intertwining rather than the separation of the private and public worlds. The consciousness-raising sessions—where you sit and talk to each other—were a powerful communal form of solidarity in deprogramming us from the gaslighting and ideological imperatives directed at us. In the 1980s, competitive neoliberalism restored the attitude that every problem you have is Yours problem and you are fighting it alone. Feminism entered my work when I understood the fundamental importance of community of experience and struggle. As with unions, when people can report the same experiences and the same results, and the same responses from those in power, you must unite. You need movement.
“As told to Blake Yotting.”
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