Feminizing Film Praxis Series with Martha Rosler: Screening and Discussion
Thursday 14 June, 2012
8pm, $5
Spectacle
124 South Third Street, Brooklyn
Spectacle is proud to present an evening with Martha Rosler, featuring four of Rosler's seminal video works from the '70s and '80s as part of the 'Feminizing Film Praxis' program. Rosler works in video, performance, collage, and installation, offering a radical perspective and cultural analysis on themes ranging from the dynamics of biopower, the objectification of women, their subjection to the banality and servitude of domestic life, and the hegemonic violence inflicted by mass media.
Rosler presents her analyses of everyday social life through an insightful critique of late capitalism by manipulating the means by which the commodity form asserts its domination over social reality. Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) presents a parodic cooking show, in which a disaffected 'anti-Julia Childs' replaces the domestic uses of cooking utensils with violent and frustrated gestures. Here, word and object engage in a violent dialectic that challenges stagnant domesticity. Using common media forms, Domination and the Everyday (1978) combines a soundtrack of an intimate moment between mother and son with a news-like bulletin marquee, corporate ads, and media interference, presenting a collage of alienated domestic life, barely distracted by the U.S.-supported military coup in Chile. Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (1977) shows a static image of a woman being systematically measured and assessed by various, scrutinizing male "specialists." In Martha Rosler Reads "Vogue," originally aired live on Paper Tiger Television, Rosler examines the subliminal and violent messages contained within an issue of Vogue.
Q & A with Martha Rosler to follow screening
DOMINATION AND THE EVERYDAY
32:07 min., 1978
Color, Sound
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (eai.org)
In an inquiry into the relation between the corporation, the state and the family, Domination and the Everyday presents a fractured barrage of simultaneous sound tracks, film stills and a crawling text. Questioning the privatized existence of a woman and child, and the role of media information in daily life, this non-narrative tape is structured around the sounds of a woman feeding her small son and readying him for bed, while a radio interview with an art dealer plays in the background. Photographs of family life and corporate ads are juxtaposed with a written text that crawls across the screen, comparing life in Chile with life in the United States. Rosler refers to this layered juxtaposition of fragmented sound, images and text as an "artist-mother's This Is Your Life."
VITAL STATISTICS OF A CITIZEN, SIMPLY OBTAINED
39:20 min., 1977
Color, sound
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (eai.org)
This chilling tape, "operatically" conceived — but neither a musical nor a documentary — probes the objectification of women and others in a technological/bureaucratic society. At its core is a long, continuous shot that reveals the part-by-part measurement and evaluation of a woman by a white-coated male examiner and a chorus of three women assistants. How do we come to see ourselves as objects? How do fragmentation and comparison assist in social control? This ordeal of scrutiny thinly alludes to a monumentally protracted episode of Truth or Consequences. The final sequence presents re-framed government photos of women being measured, accompanied by a voiceover litany of "crimes against women." Rosler's distanced depiction of the systematic, institutionalized "science" of measurement and classification is meant to recall the oppressive tactics of the armed forces or concentration camps, and to underscore the internalization of standards that determine the meaning of women's being.
MARTHA ROSLER READS "VOGUE"
25:45 min., 1982
Color, sound
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (eai.org)
In this live performance for Paper Tiger Television's public-access cable program in New York, Rosler deconstructs the messages in Vogue and its advertising. Rosler looks at the institutional slants of the magazine industry and the fashion industry's reliance on sweatshops.
Rosler presents her analyses of everyday social life through an insightful critique of late capitalism by manipulating the means by which the commodity form asserts its domination over social reality. Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) presents a parodic cooking show, in which a disaffected 'anti-Julia Childs' replaces the domestic uses of cooking utensils with violent and frustrated gestures. Here, word and object engage in a violent dialectic that challenges stagnant domesticity. Using common media forms, Domination and the Everyday (1978) combines a soundtrack of an intimate moment between mother and son with a news-like bulletin marquee, corporate ads, and media interference, presenting a collage of alienated domestic life, barely distracted by the U.S.-supported military coup in Chile. Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (1977) shows a static image of a woman being systematically measured and assessed by various, scrutinizing male "specialists." In Martha Rosler Reads "Vogue," originally aired live on Paper Tiger Television, Rosler examines the subliminal and violent messages contained within an issue of Vogue.
Q & A with Martha Rosler to follow screening
DOMINATION AND THE EVERYDAY
32:07 min., 1978
Color, Sound
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (eai.org)
In an inquiry into the relation between the corporation, the state and the family, Domination and the Everyday presents a fractured barrage of simultaneous sound tracks, film stills and a crawling text. Questioning the privatized existence of a woman and child, and the role of media information in daily life, this non-narrative tape is structured around the sounds of a woman feeding her small son and readying him for bed, while a radio interview with an art dealer plays in the background. Photographs of family life and corporate ads are juxtaposed with a written text that crawls across the screen, comparing life in Chile with life in the United States. Rosler refers to this layered juxtaposition of fragmented sound, images and text as an "artist-mother's This Is Your Life."
VITAL STATISTICS OF A CITIZEN, SIMPLY OBTAINED
39:20 min., 1977
Color, sound
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (eai.org)
This chilling tape, "operatically" conceived — but neither a musical nor a documentary — probes the objectification of women and others in a technological/bureaucratic society. At its core is a long, continuous shot that reveals the part-by-part measurement and evaluation of a woman by a white-coated male examiner and a chorus of three women assistants. How do we come to see ourselves as objects? How do fragmentation and comparison assist in social control? This ordeal of scrutiny thinly alludes to a monumentally protracted episode of Truth or Consequences. The final sequence presents re-framed government photos of women being measured, accompanied by a voiceover litany of "crimes against women." Rosler's distanced depiction of the systematic, institutionalized "science" of measurement and classification is meant to recall the oppressive tactics of the armed forces or concentration camps, and to underscore the internalization of standards that determine the meaning of women's being.
MARTHA ROSLER READS "VOGUE"
25:45 min., 1982
Color, sound
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (eai.org)
In this live performance for Paper Tiger Television's public-access cable program in New York, Rosler deconstructs the messages in Vogue and its advertising. Rosler looks at the institutional slants of the magazine industry and the fashion industry's reliance on sweatshops.