Screening Room: Martha Rosler
The eighth chapter of Screening Rooms is devoted to Pencicle of Praise (2018), one of Martha Rosler’s most recent video works, an observation of the ongoing American political drama. Her practice is built on a multiplicity of artistic languages, among which photography, photomontage, sculpture, video, performance, and writing provide tools with which to critically dissect the contemporary scene. Her viewpoint on war, gender roles, gentrification, inequality, labor, and the national security climate is rooted in a political commitment that continues to question the fundamental requirements of current societies, starting with the one in which she lives. Pencicle of Praise was first presented on the occasion of Rosler’s major survey show at The Jewish Museum, New York.
“Vice President Mike Pence eagerly plays cheerleader in chief for Donald Trump. In accepting the vice-presidential nomination in 2016, Pence proclaimed, “I'm a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican — in that order,” suggesting how we might understand his role. His failure to include “American” in his list is a startling break from the norm. This ground-breaking, earth-shaking video begins with a pomp-ridden televised press conference, accompanied by uplifting music. Held early in 2017 at the White House Rose Garden, the press conference showcased the president’s announced withdrawal from the historic Paris Climate Accord. As the video proceeds, we witness Pence and other minions enacting pious gratitude on behalf of the president. With the Vice President lurking in the shot, the video finally launches a takeoff. The renditions of the Battle Hymn of the Republic and the U.S. national anthem in this work were part of the Rose Garden broadcast, which both begins and ends the video.”
— Martha Rosler, February 2020
Playing on the digital reshaping of the words and images that recount, continuously, our physical lives, the information we grasp, the knowledge we acquire as well as the emotions we feel, Rosler’s work on her celebrated library is particularly in focus. Between 2005 and 2008 Rosler sent a large part of her library on tour, installing it temporarily in store fronts and galleries, for the public to browse, read, and even make photocopies. Since then, through the next ten years, the series Off the Shelf has taken the shape of a collection of scanned book covers and spines covering diverse categories and subject matters. Books and texts increasingly circulate digitally, a technological manifestation of the ways in which they have always transcended their material existence as objects. As both real and digital objects, they serve as a commentary and a series of indexes that supply the fundamental element to the function of education, arranging the complexity of the world and the way we think of it and make our way through it. The work acquires a particular poignant resonance during the current moment, where so much of our knowledge exchange is conducted online, while we may nevertheless quarantine ourselves with our beloved books.
Photomontage
76,2 × 259,1 cm
Prospect for Today (2008) is a photomontage that motorists might find on highway billboards in Missouri, as part of the Art the Vote campaign, a get-out-the-vote effort toward the November 2008 presidential election. On the billboard, the image also bore the text “vote: your future depends on it,” which is not visibly part of the work today and yet is powerfully present. Twelve years later, the sense of necessity in the population’s participation at large still reads strongly through all of Rosler’s work and practice.
In Prototype (God Bless America), Rosler presents a short, incisive statement about war. A mechanical toy figure dressed as an American soldier dances in place and plays "God Bless America" on a trumpet. For those old enough to remember, this was the theme song of a popular radio broadcast during the Second World War; the phrase still resonates during times of conflict and crisis. The camera pans down, revealing that the toy's camouflage-clad trouser leg has been rolled up to uncover a mechanism that looks uncannily like a prosthetic limb. In the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of the “signature” injuries of US troops was traumatic limb amputation, often the loss of a leg.