Martha Rosler
1943–
The catalyst for The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, Martha Rosler recalled, was a walk in the area of lower Manhattan named in the work’s title. A keen investigator of the uses and abuses of documentary photography, Rosler thought of the ubiquitous genre of photographs that captured the downtrodden neighborhood’s homeless and alcoholic denizens, and was struck, she said, by “how inadequate the photos were to convey anything about the life there or, even more important, the social position of the men on that street and the circumstances that put them there.” To dramatize this deficiency, Rosler paired two kinds of representation, or “descriptive systems,” in this work: photography, in the form of black-and-white pictures of unpeopled Bowery storefronts, and language, in images of cards typewritten with assorted synonyms for drunkenness. That neither a photograph of a vacant doorway nor a word such as “sloshed” can comprehensively communicate lived experience is Rosler’s point, and their juxtaposition serves to expose the limits and fault lines in representative modes that are often assumed to be authoritative and transparent. In her words, Rosler intended to “look at the setting and leave the viewer to reimagine the people within.”
The plight of the disenfranchised has remained an abiding concern for Rosler, a multidisciplinary artist whose other recurrent themes include the portrayal of women, the culture of public space, and the ideology of modern warfare. Her photographs, videos, installations, performances, and writings are united by their rigorous consideration of the politics of representation: how, and by whom, are contemporary images produced, received, disseminated, and interpreted?
Introduction
Martha Rosler (born 1943) is an American artist. She is a conceptual artist who works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, site-specific and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war, as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to places of passage and systems of transport.
Wikidata identifier
Q1903090
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 24, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, art critic, collagist, critic, installation artist, performance artist, photographer, video artist
ULAN identifier
500097623
Names
Martha Rosler
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 24, 2025.
