21/08/12
Martha Rosler: Prototype (God Bless America)
Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
5 July – 1 September 2012
Martha Rosler (born Brooklyn, 1943) is a politically motivated artist, whose preferred media span video, photo-text, collage, and performance. She is perhaps best known for her engagement with the feminist art movement of the 1970s, and for her pioneering video work, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1974-5), in which, clad in apron, she stands behind a work surface and proceeds to deliver a parodic cookery demonstration, bringing forth various kitchen utensils, naming then, and exemplifying potential, if not typical, uses, such as banging and clattering to release pent up frustration and anger at the imprisoned role of women at the time. Describing this piece, Rosler has since said: “When the woman speaks, she names her own oppression.”
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Image:
Martha Rosler
Still from Prototype (God Bless America)
2006
© the artist
Courtesy Galerie Nagel