Decoys and documents.

Martha Rosier: Positions in the Life World Ikon Gallery Birmingham, UK December 5, 1998-January 30, 1999

Institut d'Art Contemporain Lyon-Villeurbanne, France February 10-April 30, 1999

Generali Foundation Vienna, Austria May 12-August 8, 1999

Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona Barcelona, Spain October 19, 1999-January 9, 2000

New Museum of Contemporary Art New York, New York June 13-October 18, 2000

Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World edited by Catherine de Zegher Cambridge, MA: MIT Press for Ikon Gallery and the Generali Foundation, 1998 302 pp./$40.00 (sb)

Perhaps few viewers who know Martha Rosler's work would be surprised by its impressive depth, breadth and coherence when seen in quantity and arranged in chronological order. This retrospective, organized by Ikon Gallery and the Generali Foundation, confirms all former impressions of the work's consistently high intellectual demands, its insistent questioning and analysis and its disruption of conventionally smooth, pleasurable consumption. What may not have been as evident before, however, is how Rosler's work does - or does not - construct the artist's life.

A retrospective exhibition necessarily alludes to biography. In keeping with its historical role of celebrating the artist-genius, the traditional retrospective relies on an organic model for the ordering of works, and for the linking of those works to biographical details. The conventional retrospective seeks to show a smooth development from early to middle to late periods in an artist's career, often accompanied by metaphors of growth, blossoming and bearing fruit. A visitor to such an exhibition grasps the artist's life-trajectory by analogy to his or her own experience of change and learning.

Rather than constructing a life parallel with those of her viewers, however, Rosler's retrospective consists of moments shared with her viewers. For each work reconstitutes, in cooperation with its viewer, the moment of its own making. Using the "descriptive systems" - language, media or institutional frameworks - of a specific time and place, each work creates a set of conditions under which both she and the viewer are living, have lived or must imagine themselves living. These systems are broad and impersonal, but are clearly seen, in the context of a given work, to affect intimate relationships, attitudes and events. As a result, the continuity in Rosler's retrospective is markedly different from that of the traditional retrospective. One work does not anticipate, inform or flow into the next, nor does the whole exhibition shed light on Rosler's personal sensibility. Rather this exhibition proposes biography itself as legible only against a ground of large and complex structures of meaning.

In the course of the exhibition, the work broadens geographically and conceptually, but does not retreat from its insistence on the penetration of vast political power systems into the most personal of relationships. Nor does it abandon the strategy of presence, the commitment to the contemporary moment. In place of an "artist's story" unfolding over time, the exhibition offers a series of social and conceptual structures, chronologically ordered sets of historically specific coordinates. The viewer assumes a series of "positions," as the title suggests. The exhibition becomes as much an occasion for the viewer to recontextualize moments of her or his own life - memories of conflict, pain, humor and absurdity - as it is an opportunity to see more deeply into Rosler's.

The exhibition begins with large color photocollages representing several different series from the mid-1960s, but quantitatively favoring "Beauty Knows No Pain, or Body Beautiful" (1966-72). The two main sources of imagery for this series, glossy, fashion magazine and pornographic photographs, form fixed points of orientation for viewers of varying age and sexual identity. Rosler's intercutting of the two representational conventions undermines the usual functions of both. When a leggy, smiling, partially clothed model suddenly appears with enlarged, graphically precise breasts and a groin taken from a different image, she doesn't quite "'work" anymore, either as upscale property or as an object of physical gratification. The incongruity of the sources collapses into an uncomfortable sameness, and in turn generates a new difference between "what was familiar" (discourses separated in time) and "what I'm seeing here" (discourses experienced as simultaneous). Such a semiotic reshuffling may trigger a viewer's relief, regret, discomfort or laughter, depending on where he or she has been or still is "positioned" with respect to the original coordinates.

Images that date from some 30 years ago, as these do, probably read as vaguely "old" to young viewers. To a seasoned consumer of photographic pornography, perhaps they are productively irritating. To me, they recall adolescence, a sense of estrangement from those fashion magazine images, ignorance of the pornographic images and, of course, perfect obliviousness of the relationship between the two. This particular phase of Rosier's work opens up the confusion and sadness I associate with that past moment of the mid-1960s, the incomprehensible boundaries, pressures and misunderstandings that seemed to be appearing out of nowhere. Rosier offers tools to wrest the thing loose from its moorings as my personal memory, show it sliced through, structured, held in place by forces that were, and still are, far in excess of anything personal, beyond my responsibility. The residual grief appears real enough, but is not precisely mine and is not without the potential for diffusion and resolution. Perhaps I am describing a moment of aesthetic pleasure in a work of art, but I feel on more congenial ground calling it a moment of heightened historical consciousness.

In a later work, Rosier appears to come close to a direct rendering of her own personal experience. She Sees in Herself a New Woman Every Day (1977) is a photographic and audio installation structured around a closet full of shoes that prompt an imagined conversation between a daughter and her parents In her own voice, deliberately flat and monotone, Rosier relates a series of banal discussions that forefront certain phrases that the parents habitually repeat, things that puzzle and anger the daughter. Some of the shoes - the really splendid, dancing shoes - seem never to have been worn, never to have had any "reality" in the family's life. It is as if the mother had simply "closed the door" on that segment of her past and all the sensual enjoyment apparently attached to it, and gone on to espouse the virtues of sturdy, sensible shoes. The shoes are not fashionable, but not beyond recognition as having come from the 1960s. Also mentioned is an occasion when the mother caught the daughter smoking and, intending to kick the cigarette out of her mouth, instead caught her ear. The violence, even the speech, is casual and unexceptional On reflection, it isn't necessarily Rosler's story. It could be anyone's. It could be - and probably is - wholly invented. But there is no need to decide which it is. The text is particular enough to be plausible and general enough for a viewer to superimpose his or her own stories. He or she may vicariously savor the moment of the child's revenge of the parents, the moment in the gallery when it all "goes public," when the silencing, restraining functions of the "personal" come into focus.

Rosler's work from the 1960s and much of her work from the 1970s does not take on one form or medium. This early work tends rather to read as a serial assault on the characteristic pleasures of middle-class American women: eating, cooking, entertaining, dressing up, flopping down on the sofa to watch television, hosting or attending the occasional garage sale. Rosier has multiple strategies for locating these pleasures, positioning them socially and conceptually. In the process, the presumed marginality, harmlessness and the actual pleasure of these activities become dubious. In the well-known video and performance piece Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Rosier herself, playing a TV cooking show hostess, gradually turns from demure housewife into angry, knife-wielding virago. A particularly wrenching piece, Losing: A Conversation with the Parents (1976), presents a fictionalized discussion with the parents of a young woman who has just died of anorexia nervosa (although the term was not in general circulation at the time and does not appear in the text). The conversation turns to world starvation, foregrounding the contradictory, yet related, issues. In the installation and slide show presentation A budding gourmet (1974), Rosier assumes the role of the upwardly mobile middle-class housewife. Eager to know exotic ingredients and arcane culinary techniques, she also learns about global food production and the structures, costs and dynamics underpinning food-as-status.

Such works are not linked by any organic personal development of Rosier's, but by an expanding geographical range and a sharp rise in the stakes. Consumers of food who previously considered their consumption as a sign, marking status, commitment, indulgence, compliance, etc., suddenly confront food as an unequivocal physical need. Turning in another direction, food emerges as the object of power structures that pit producers against consumers on a global scale. In retrospect, Rosler's early work seems to begin by looking seriously at the presumed "pleasures" of middle-class women and to conclude with a short list of fundamental requirements of human life: food, clothing, shelter. Each of these has appeared as the focus of Rosler's collages, installations and performances in which intimate circumstances are cut through with anonymous, impassive systems of control.

At the Ikon Gallery, the division between two gallery levels coincided with an apparent shift in Rosler's position with respect to her audience. In the earlier work in the lower galleries (e.g., Semiotics of the Kitchen), Rosier often performed a role in which she literally came face-to-face with her viewer. In the later work in the upstairs galleries, Rosier has not so much retreated as moved around to join the viewer, to take up the same position. The two series of large color photographs "Rights of Passage" (1995-98) and "In the Place of the Public: Airport Series" (1990) reconstruct single, precise locations in space and time, on the road and at the airport, respectively. These are banal, unexalted moments, places through which almost anyone might pass on an average day. In designating, framing or detaching them from the flow of lived time, in "publishing" them for viewers, Rosier is not so much addressing an existing public as starting to form the audience into one.

Organized as a retrospective, Rosler's work shows more clearly than ever its distance from the more conventional and well-entrenched conceptions of art, particularly art as self expression. In turn, it shows its value as a kind of history, as a careful description of specific conditions that many people have shared over time. In attempting to grasp Rosler's work as a whole, in fact, it is helpful to momentarily consider it as history rather than as art. Rosler's work is demanding. It is often not pleasing to the senses - a tactical impossibility when it is exactly the construction of sensual pleasure that is so often at issue. There is a lot of text in small print, a lot of disparate, cheap materials arid awkwardly crafted, improvised construction. There is a lot of bad news. These are all things that are invariably held against an artist, and that have been held against Rosier. But few, if any, would be held against an historian. As historical evidence, Rosler's extensive documentation would perhaps seem appropriate, adequate rather than overwhelming. Rather than becoming impatient with the demands on their time, which are relatively high for a gallery context, viewers might well note the clarity and accessibility of her presentation, the relevance, in the present, of everything she includes. Above all, this is a framework in which one notices an earnest, intelligent and creative grappling with the problem of historical objectivity. Rosler's solution lies in reaching beyond the mesh of written or published texts. She uses the gallery rather than pages of text to "publish" a scene, site or set of physical conditions. In these scenes, the historical subject, the presumed possessor of "objectivity," becomes the matter under consideration. This body of work represents a way of doing history rather than exclusively writing it. It effectively directs a reconsideration of the past from the standpoint of the present, acknowledges a given subject as historically conditioned, yet does not rely completely on print as the form of mediation.

Inasmuch as Rosler's work can be said to be history, it tends to expose the rigidity of the category history as it is usually constituted, namely as dogged allegiance to language, pages and written documents. Such a reading of Rosler's work further illuminates the potential of such a subtle expansion in the admissible forms of history. It amounts to a possible repositioning of disciplines, social relationships, institutional structures and subjects - a reconfiguration of the life world.

NANCY ROTH teaches art history and theory at the Falmouth College of Art, Cornwall, UK.