Martha Rosler - Semiotics of the kitchen

Since the early 1970s, Martha Rosler has used photography, performance, writing, and video to deconstruct cultural reality. Describing her work, Rosler states, <<The subject is the commonplace; I am trying to use video to question the mythical explanations of everyday life. We accept the clash of public and private as natural, yet their separation is historical. The antagonism of the two spheres, which have in fact developed in tandem, is an ideological fiction: a potent one. I want to explore the relationships between individual consciousness, family life, and culture under capitalism.>> Avoiding a pedantic stance, Rosler characteristically lays out visual and verbal material in a manner that allows the contradictions to gradually emerge, so that the audience can discern these disjunctions for themselves. By making her ideas accessible, Rosler invites her audience to re-examine the dynamics and demands of ideology, urging critical consciousness of the individual compromises exacted by society, and opening the door to a radical re-thinking of how cultural "reality" is constructed for the economic and political benefit of a select group.

In Semiotics of the Kitchen, from A to Z, Rosler "shows and tells" the ingredients of the housewife's day, giving us a tour that names and mimics the ordinary with movements more samurai-like than suburban. Rosler's slashing gesture as she forms the letters of the alphabet with a fork and knife in the air, is a rebel gesture, punching through the "system of harnessed subjectivity" from the inside out. <<I was concerned with something like the notion of language speaking the subject, and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.>>

Quicktime Movie

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