Martha Rosler

"In her diverse work, be it photography, installation, performance, video, critical writing or fiction, Martha Rosler constructs incisive social political analyses of the myths and realities of a patriarchal culture. Articulated with deadpan wit, Rosler's work investigates the socioeconomic realities and political ideologies that dominate ordinary life. Presenting astute critical analyses in accessible forms, her inquiries are didactic but not hortatory."--Page 4 de la couverture.

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 comprehensive collection of writings by Martha Rosler considers the intersection of art and politics, the operation of art systems, feminist art practices, and the media.

"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.

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.

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

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.