Institute of Contemporary Arts
London Garage Sale. The installation and performance piece originally took place in 1973 in the art gallery of the University of California. This work took the form of an authentic household jumble sale where second-hand goods - clothes, books, records, toys, costume jewellery and personal letters and mementos - were displayed on racks and tables and sold off over the duration of the 'exhibition'.
London Garage Sale
For her first London solo exhibition, the highly influential and respected American
artist Martha Rosler will bring her seminal work Garage Sale to the ICA, in a
version organised especially for the venue. This now iconic installation and
performance piece originally took place in 1973 in the art gallery of the University
of California, San Diego. Advertised as a garage sale in local newspapers but also
as an art event within the arts community, this work took the form of an authentic
household jumble sale where second-hand goods - clothes, books, records, toys,
costume jewellery and personal letters and mementos - were displayed on racks and
tables and sold off over the duration of the ‘exhibition’. This was also one of the
first works in which Rosler herself featured: she adopted the persona of a
cash-strapped Southern Californian single mother, adding a narrative dimension to
the already complex multiplicity of the piece. As in the Garage sales that were the
model for this work, artist and visitors engaged in personal transactions embedded in the cash
nexus.
From the early 1970’s Rosler has utilised the apparatus of vernacular culture and
the minutiae of daily experience to investigate and comment on contemporary society.
Shopping, cooking, cleaning and even the daily commute have all been objects of her
attention. In an artistic practice that encompasses performance, installation,
video, photography and critical writing Rosler takes on such global issues as modes
of transport, housing and homelessness, war, and the role of visual appearance in
the subjugation of women – all themes as pertinent today as they were at the start
of her career.
Garage Sale, with its reference to the status of the art work, art history and art
audiences, is clearly interested in examining art as a fetishised object and
commodity and offering an institutional critique; but it is as well a representation
of a subjective history and a way of thinking and it works as a potent metaphor for
personal and social relations - especially given its genesis within the highly
politicised context of the women’s movement in the 70’s. Through her examination of
domesticity, suburbia and family and the circulation of domestic material objects,
Rosler evokes a powerful feminist discourse, which gives clear expression to the
anthem of personal as political. The arena of domestic experience becomes here the
focus for a charged artistic, social and cultural exploration, but there is a dry
humour in the way that this ‘art’ can be rummaged in, discarded, fought over or
treated with a delightful insouciance not usually found in the traditional
museum/gall
ery context.
Over the past 30 years, Rosler’s Garage Sale has traveled extensively – from the
artist-run La Mamelle Gallery, San Francisco (1977) to more recent presentations at
the Generali Foundation, Vienna (1999), the New Museum, New York (as part of
Rosler’s travelling retrospective in 2000) and the Project Arts Centre, Dublin,
Ireland (2004). Although the work accretes elements from each venue, London Garage
Sale will be specifically adapted for the ICA to reflect the particularities of
London and create a local narrative for its present reality.
Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York where she is still living today. Since
graduating with a Masters in Fine Art from the University of California in 1974,
Rosler has exhibited widely. Her recent solo exhibitions include shows at the
Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany (2005); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2002),
Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland (2000); New Museum of
Contemporary Art, New York, USA (2000); Generali Foundation, Vienna, Austria (2000);
and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain (1998). London Garage Sale at the
ICA will be Rosler’s first London solo exhibition since presenting her video works
at the ICA in 1983 and 1979.
Martha Rosler Film Programme:
To accompany Martha Rosler’s London Garage Sale, three one hour programmes of the
artist’s films as well as five Super-8 Shorts will be presented in the Upper
Galleries at the ICA.
Programme 1:
Total running time: 57.59 mins
Start times: 12.30pm, 3.30pm
Losing: A Conversation With The Parents, 1977
18.39 min, colour, sound
A TV documentary/ soap opera style interview with the bereaved parents of an
anorexic young woman who has starved herself to death, which focuses on food as a
tool of oppression – either internalized, self-induced ideals of beauty or the
externalized, unavoidable suffering of war, famine and poverty.
Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, 1977
39:20 min, colour, sound
Conceived as an ‘opera in three acts’, this film traces, through a sequence of
images in which women are physically measured, how a woman’s identity is
systematically constructed by an essentially bureaucratic and technological society.
The institutionalized systems of measurements and classification that affect a
woman’s sense of self are compared with the repressive regimes of the armed forces
and even concentration camps.
Programme 2:
Total running time: 57.73 min
Start time: 1.30pm, 4.30pm
Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975
6.09 min, b&w, sound
In this parody of the cookery demonstration, Rosler in a role that is the antithesis
of the perfect TV housewife, presents a series of kitchen utensils as tools for not
domestic bliss but rather violence and aggression, their common ‘safe’ meanings
replaced with a language of rage and frustration.
The East Is Red, The West Is Bending, 1977
19:57 min, colour, sound
In this absurd performance-based work, Rosler demonstrates in her kitchen the West
End electric wok, reading from this new must-have consumer appliance’s instruction
manual. The possibilities for introducing exotic foreign cultures into the western
home are belied by the imperialist jargon of the corporate manufacturer.
Domination and the Everyday, 1978
32:07 min, colour, sound
Described by Rosler as an ‘artist-mother’s This is Your Life’, this non-narrative
layering of images and sounds, of a woman feeding her young son, an art dealer
interviewed on the radio, family photographs, advertisements and crawling text
comparing life in Chile with that in the US, investigates the relationships between
the corporate sector, the media, the state and the family.
Programme 3:
Total running time: 60.45
Start time: 2.30pm, 5.30pm
Martha Rosler Reads ‘Vogue’, 1982
25:45 min, colour, sound
In this live performance for Paper Tiger Television’s public access cable program in
New York, Rosler investigates how magazines make meaning in contemporary society by
deconstructing the messages and advertisements of Vogue. The artist also reflects on
the harsher realities of sweatshops on which the fashion industry is dependent.
Born to be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby SM, 1988
35 min, colour, sound
Produced by Paper Tiger Television, this film reconstructs from media reports and
court transcripts the real-life case of ‘Baby M’, in which a surrogate mother
attempted to keep her child. Rosler takes on the roles of each of the participants
and considers how a woman’s body becomes the site of battles over class, gender and
wealth.
Super-8 Shorts:
Backyard Economy I, c.1974
3:20 min, colour, silent
Backyard Economy II (Diane Germain Mowing), c. 1974
6:32 min, colour, silent
In these early super-8 shorts, Rosler uses the American ‘home movie’ format to film
the daily, mundane activities of a suburban housewife such as moving the lawn,
hanging out the washing and playing with her son. Through throwing light onto these
often overlooked chores, the artist highlights the significance of the domestic
economy and the labour necessary to create a space for leisure activities.
Flower Fields, c.1975
3:40 min, colour, silent
This short film was intended to create a colour field painting based on the flower
fields that provided the living for so many, mostly undocumented, workers in the
area. When the camera closes in on the beautiful colour-striped hillside, the
laborers in the field can be seen, Later, in a run up Highway 5, we see the
immigration police at their mobile roadblock.
Mission District I, c.1979
TK, colour, silent
Mission District II, c.1979
TK, colour, silent
From a car window, Rosler films the cultural and political realities of street life
in a Latino district in San Francisco.
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall, London