http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/50974/
Martha Rosler, like too many artists, can't move beyond the easy
arguments of her youth.
By Jerry Saltz
Published Oct 5, 2008
In the late sixties, Martha Rosler became known for a so-so series of
collages titled "Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful." She
juxtaposed images of models, home décor, and the Vietnam War: A
Vietnamese woman carried a bleeding baby in an unsullied American
home, housewives dutifully cleaned battlefields, and so on. Although
on a formal level Rosler simply mixed the harshness of John
Heartfield's thirties photomontages of the Third Reich with the
pop-surreal sensibility of Richard Hamilton's famous 1956 collage of
a muscleman and a pinup girl in a contemporary living room, she did
spice it with something newan ironic, media-savvy attitude that
changed the look of much art.
Four decades later, Rosler turns out not to have changed the look of
her own work at all. In "Great Power," her current skin-deep effort
at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Rosler tries to turn back the clock to her
glory days, essentially remaking the Vietnam series. Only now she's
inserting images of models into pictures of the Iraq War. Clearly,
there are parallels between the two wars, and activist art is valid.
But Rosler lapses into simplistic nostalgia and undermines her older
work while basically making pretty war porn. The only thing her work
says is that fashion designers and women who like to shop caused two wars.
Rosler also includes news clippings about Iraq. Most of the articles
are from reliably liberal sources (The Village Voice, The Nation, The
New Yorker, etc.), so Rosler is merely filtering the already
filtered. Worse, there's an air of self-serving, pedantic preaching.
She basically asserts that, while you may be concerned with current
events, she's so concerned she clipped these items and put them in
binders. She turns President Bush's "Go shopping" into "Start
clipping." To gain entry to "Great Power," visitors must drop a
quarter into a turnstile. The show's press release states that this
forces us to make "conscious decisions about how to engage with the
work." This is critique art putting a gun to its own temple. A sign
at the door assures us that Rosler will donate all the quarters to
antiwar groups. Anyone who thinks any of this is good art, effective
activism, or even slightly radical needs to get a grip.
Rosler's show is simply mediocre. What it points to, however, is far
worse and more widespread. Too many younger artists, critics, and
curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a
deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling
disease. A generation is caught in a Freudian death spiral and seems
unable to escape the ridiculous idea that in order for art to be
political it has to hark back to the talismanic hippie erathat it
must create a revolution. It is sophistry to think that everything
relates to Europe and America in 1968. The very paradigm of
revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with
no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators
valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years
ago still write about them in the same ways, often for the same
magazines. Their students and imitators are doing the samewriting
about artists, sometimes the same ones, in the same ways their
teachers did. Often for the same magazines.
It's a trap set by a previous generation in order to preserve its
legacy a little longer, or at least until its members relinquish
their positions in academe, museums, and media. Many things happened
in the sixties, but the period is no more significant, better, or
more "political" than today. It's time to turn the page.
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