Alison Rowley

"Each room on both floors of the Ikon [Gallery] was filled to capacity with examples of Martha Rosler’s work from 1966 through to 1995, installed more or less chronologically with 1960s and 1970s work on the first floor, 1980s and 1990s on the second. In spaces packed with material, visual on walls, floor and hanging from the ceiling, in colour and black and white, image and text; acoustic through headphones and from video monitors it was not easy to determine where one piece ended and another began. Had the installation been planned as the latest manifestation of the Monumental Garage Sale? This is a serious idea supported by the fact that in New York Martha Rosler set up a garage sale in the public access space at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in which she mixed her own possessions with those of others. A sign in the garage sale installation reads, “What if the garage sale is a metaphor for the mind?” Martha Rosler’s practice has played a crucial part in breaking the modernist myth that art was a domain apart from society and immune to politics and power. She has always made work for circulation in galleries and museums and recently confirmed that she “has no intention of giving up on the museum and gallery audience.”[footnote omitted] At the same time, though, a commitment to reaching a wider public beyond the museum and gallery-going audience is fundamental to her practice. This has involved collaboration, with unknown participants in the mail works for instance, and in specific events involving groups of people, in particular places at particular times. The project If you Lived Here is a significant example. The display of accumulated material associated with strategic collaboration and collective action in a retrospective whose title begins with the proper name martha rosler necessarily produces it as the metaphor of a single, an individual artist’s mind ... For a feminist visitor of my generation (not quite old enough to be of Martha Rosler’s, but not young enough to be post what it stands for) displaying the material remains of activities that originally set out to reach beyond the gallery system carries a danger. It risks producing relics in the religious sense. Not the actual finger of St Martha, but holy material all the same. Imbued in these post feminist, post Marxist days with the mystique of its indexical relation to Martha Rosler’s history of feminist /Marxist informed “guerrilla” strategies planned from positions once on the margins of the art world. Was this, perhaps an effect contributing to the critical silence surrounding the exhibition at the Ikon? For to give a direct answer to the question, how did martha rosler: positions in the life world reopen public debates about the generational shifts in “feminist art” and curatorial practices? In Britain it didn’t. Feminists of my own generation involved in cultural politics failed to respond to the exhibition, with the exception of one notable review, to which I shall return." Alison Rowley, "Exhibiting 'Martha Rosler'? A feminist response to martha rosler: positions in the life world" in N.Paradoxa (no. 14 2001).