Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York by Adair Rounthwaite

Author:Adair Rounthwaite [Rounthwaite, Adair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ART060000 Art / Performance, ART015110 Art / History / Contemporary (1945-)
ISBN: 9781452953878
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2017-02-20T22:00:00+00:00

Between Orders of Representation

Above, I discussed the fact that the posed photographs of Homeward Bound members behind the desk materialize an image of their uncontested presence in the gallery, even though that presence was in fact occasional and debated. Should we think about this disparity as something aesthetically or politically problematic, in which the image in effect “covers” for the inconstancy of live presence? Or do the images and the installation relate to one another in a different way? In order to think further about these questions, we need to think more carefully about what kind of relationship to the live body the installation proposed, or more specifically, about what kind of relationship between images and liveness it proposed. That question is connected in turn to the relationship between the image and the live as these coexist in Rosler’s practice. When I first spoke with Rosler about If You Lived Here . . . and about the “Homeless” segment in particular, I asked her how she thought about the representational relationship between Homeward Bound’s presence in the gallery and the images that were created of their participation. She was perplexed by the question, responding simply that of course they were completely different: one concerned the presence of live people, and the other, a photographic image.[76] This exchange bothered me for some time, particularly in terms of my own timidity about pressing beyond her initial resistance to try and fumble toward a clearer formulation of the question I wanted to ask. What I have come to realize since then is that Rosler’s response came out of the strong difference, for her, between photography, as a static, disciplinary representational apparatus, and the live experience that exceeds it.

In Rosler’s work, the body materializes always and only at its points of contact with representational systems. The body never appears on its own terms, envisioned as a corporeal or expressive entity. Instead, it emerges through a structure typical of Rosler’s oeuvre, which the artist, in a 1981 interview by Jane Weinstock, described simply as “join[ing] two things that do not go together.”[77] When we see this tactic at work in Rosler’s art, it usually operates at several different levels simultaneously, creating a blurring between what might be considered the “formal” and “semantic” layers of a work. In House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, calm, static home interiors and violent, urgent war photos converge to propose a form of audience address that rewires the relationship between the two forms of media by placing them on the same experiential plane (Figure 3.11). In the video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), the structuralist premise of the work—a naming of kitchen implements from A to Z—clashes with the deadpan humor of Rosler’s hammy demonstration of each device. Later, in the 1988 video Born to Be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby S/M, a critique of how the fertility industry functions biopolitically to reproduce class structures, a chillingly serious topic is presented in a mode of campy

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