Martha Rosler

Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York. She took her B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1965 and her M.F.A. from University of California, San Diego in 1974.

Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, and writes criticism. She has lectured extensively nationally and internationally. Her work in the public sphere ranges from everyday life — often with an eye to women's experience — and the media to architecture and the built environment.

She has published several books of photographs, texts, and commentary on public space, ranging from airports and roads to housing and homelessness. Her work has been seen in the "Documenta" exhibition in Kassel, Germany; several Whitney biennials; the Institute of Contemporary Art in London; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Dia Center for the Arts in New York; and many other international venues.

A retrospective of her work has been shown in five European cities and in New York at the New Museum and the International Center of Photography (2000). An accompanying book has been published by MIT Press. Her writing has been published widely in catalogs and magazines, such asArtforum, Afterimage, and NU Magazine.

Rosler has ten published books. She has produced numerous other "Word Works" and photo/text publications — now exploring cookery in a mock dialogue between Julia Child and Craig Claiborne, now analyzing imagery of women in Russia or exploring responses to repression, crisis, and war.

She is also known for her writing and her lectures and has toured her lectures internationally in addition to publishing 15 books and textbooks on the role of photography and art, public spaces and expressing an interest in airports, roads, transportation and public housing/homelessness. Smaller examples of her writing have been published in magazines like Artforum, Afterimage, Grey Room, Quaderns and NU Magazine.
Her book collection (7,500+) also went on international tour in 2007 as the "The Martha Rosler Library" and has thus far toured New York, Frankfurt, Berlin, Antwerp and Paris.
Her 1981 essay on documentary photography "In, around, and Afterthoughts" has been widely republished & translated, is about myths of photographic disinterestedness and how people determine meaning from photographs.
Martha Rosler teaches at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and the Städelschule in Frankfurt

Though she has an opinion on everything from the assassination of Osama bin Laden to the utility of Facebook, what concerns Rosler most about the current state of affairs is the conflation of consumer choice with political agency. “There’s very little distinction between an objective social process and a subjective feeling. What you get is this heavy insistence that women are different, blacks are different, Asians are different, because they occupy a different stance in relation to objects and social life, but absolutely no explanation of their different relationship to social power. Everything becomes a lifestyle choice.” She has written extensively about the birth of the creative class, and how in late capitalism, artists and hipsters have become the shock troops of real-estate revaluation, putting them in the awkward position of being unwitting accomplices of capital and the bankers on Wall Street. Rosler’s work seeks to restore the role of the artist to that of a worker and a citizen; her work is a palpable form of dissent. “Shopping is not the solution to all of life’s discontent. If you think it is, what is it that you’re not seeing? What is the role of agency that you really perceive for yourself? According to her, the Occupy Wall Street movement—forged in part in the discussion precincts of artists—is one of the most hopeful things to happen in the Untied States since the world-changing grass-roots movements of the 1960s. It is clear that social engagement and political agency are not just strategies of her art, but the lifeblood of her practice, and both her art and writing help us to see.

http://www.joansdigest.com/issue-1/article-8

I like Martha Roslers work as it confronts things that are going on in the world today with things that we do in our everyday life, combining the two often gives a comical result but these images do have a very serious point. I feel many can relate to her work and that she brings real issues into the world we inhabit everyday without a thought of what maybe happening outside are own lives.