Martha Rosler
Prototype (God Bless America)
Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
Until 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."
Alongside women and domesticity, another recurrent theme in
Rosler's work is that of war, and she frequently contrasts the two,
as in her series of photomontages,Bringing the War Home: House
Beautiful(1967-72), which uses imagery of the Vietnam War overlaid
on images of domestic bliss (a project she then repeated between
2004-8 in response to the War in Iraq).
For her current one-work exhibition at Pippy Houldsworth
Gallery, Rosler is displaying a tiny one-minute long video, shown
on a loop, in the gallery's unique microproject space, known as The
Box. At 40cm3, the white cube space really does
create an extra gallery within a gallery, and Rosler is proud to be
the sixth contributor to a programme of specially commissioned
miniature works, following the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei.
She suggests that the minute scale of this work offers an
interesting alternative angle from which to frame a subject she has
already worked with on numerous occasions.
Set to the soundtrack of Irving Berlin'sGod Bless America, a
song made popular on a nightly radio show during the Second World
War, and, since then, commonly used as the opener at sporting
events, a soldier doll bobs up and down, parading solemnly, as he
appears to play the tune on his trumpet. The camera then pans
downwards to reveal the doll's left leg, exposed beneath a rolled
up trouser leg, and we see a mechanical structure much in the ilk
of a prosthetic limb. That limb amputations, as the result of
roadside bombs, are one of the two most common injuries to soldiers
in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is not a point to be missed.
Neither is the fact that the filming took place, alongside a
miniature tea set and miniature television, in Rosler's own kitchen
- once again juxtaposing the domestic with the typically heroic,
patriotic and masculine world of war. Whose lot, however, is shown
to be the hardest to bear, is an unspoken question which resonates
in the background, and the scale of human tragedy evoked is by no
means diminished as a result of the work's size. If anything, the
intimacy that the setting requires - with the viewer approaching
the screen in a small cocoon big enough for him or her alone -
emphasises the impact of these seemingly distant global affairs on
the individual at home.
http://www.houldsworth.co.uk/
Anna McNay
https://sites.google.com/site/annamcnay/
http://art-corpus.blogspot.co.uk/
twitter: @annamcnay
Image credit: Still from Prototype (God Bless America),
copyright Martha Rosler, courtesy Galerie Nagel
