Joshua Blank Pioneering video artist, performance artist, photographer, art critic and non-fiction writer Martha Rosler uses her art to comment on semiotics in American Culture, as they relate too human rights and feminist issues. She regularly covers issues of our current history in visual, textual, and audible forms and claims that she is interested in literacy in a world where people read on the Internet instead of from books. As her work concerns the way we interpret the world, she is aware of the dualistic interpretations that occur in our culture in which reality and fiction are elusive and interpretation becomes a description of a perceived truth, that is always re-written by forms of media before their introduced to the public. As pop images are juxposition with images of war, out of their initial context the work becomes fictional in the contexts in which it is presented. Rosler's current Exhibition “Great Power” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery combines iconographic images that represent the American medias perception of the many Middle Eastern conflicts. She includes visual and textual references from newspapers as well as images from fashion and porn magazines. Newspaper clipping presented in individual portfolios each regard a specific theme of the tragedies of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One book is comprised of articles about Abu Ghraib prison in Bagdad and another deals with the protests that occurred in response to the war. This is important because Rosler is giving us the context for interpreting her photomontage alongside the exhibition. She wants us to understand her images using the information found in her books of newspaper clippings. It is notable that the most unpleasant elements of this exhibition are the textual ones, which present the underlying tragedy and all of their grim details. The pop esthetic of the images and the excessiveness of a giant blue motorized foot hung from the gallery ceiling comment more on media culture and codes of human perception, which Rosler is attempting to illustrate. Rosler’s recent montage series titled “Bringing Home the War; House Beautiful” 2004 is a direct response to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is Rosler's second similar protest against what she considers to be a similar situation to the war in Vietnam. Moreover, this recent body of work on the wars in Middle East serves as a sequel to her earlier work of the same title. When these real life images are juxtaposed, they become fantastic depictions realistically regarding the general Bush era, American perception of the war. Her work exposes the level and association of our semantic literacy in relation to real life events, in this electronically globalized world. She is implying that this portrayal draws contrast between depictions of ourselves and of the Arab people in American media. The artist created these photomontages as smaller handcrafted works, which are re-photographed and printed enlarged to poster size. Newspapers and magazines are the source of her inspiration but also they are the image source for this work. In her first montage series, ''Bringing the War Home” 1967-1972, Rosler uses photomontage to juxtapose images of another politically murky conflict, the Vietnam War, with posh images of idealistic American 70’s interiors and the subsequent imagined lifestyles that can accompany them. Her take on this points out the irony as these depictions were produced by the same media outlets that reported on the events in question. Moreover, Rosler’s photomontages draw attention to a crisis of greater issue; her work portrays a disconnected super power, its citizens, and how they behave in the international arena. Rosler’s Activism through art had not been limited to still images and sculptural elements installed in a gallery. Early in here career and specifically while she attended The University of California in San Diego. She achieved recognition for her video work, “Semiotics of the Kitchen”, in which she portrays her self in the image of a classic American woman, however dark and confined to a Kitchen. She redefines the uses of tools of this trade (cooking utensils) however with a violent and angry purpose. Knives are for stabbing and a baster is for beating, From A-Z she reviews some tools most use for cooking however redefines them as weapons with which to use violently and aggressively seemingly toward a sexist society. The following twenty years of her career as a conceptual artist revolved around a `hostility to this issue that she believed the mainstream American media had concocted in our culture. In the later video piece of this period titled “ A Conversation with the Parents”, Rosler comments on anorexia and the effect of magazine advertisements as well as the excessive pressure to diet imposed on women by the media. This issue is just as relevant today. It is consistent with her focus on textual displacement that is common in her work. Moreover, all her works have been responses to these issues that she addresses as timely gestures of activism. Contemporary social and political affairs require an attention to the details of each issue of social and political context. These contexts are commonly found when people relate conceptual ideas to visual symbols, which can become fantastic in their scope. This unfortunate issue is a cause of the national divide between republicans and democrats in the United States. While the republicans seem to react to semantic gestures, instead of reacting to the facts of textual information and on the other hand Democrats tend to be more responsive to textual information. Rosler is interested in this vague area of interpretation and sees it as a form of activism relevant to the globalized media-centric world that we negotiate.
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