The Langhans Gallery Prague

A survey exhibition of the work of M.Rosler, a legend of American gender and political art, from the 1970s to the present, curated by Zdenek Felix, and with a catalogue published by Langhans Gallery.

Martha Rosler, Passionate Signals / Photographic Works 1965-2008

3 September – 9 November 2008

Langhans Gallery Prague is presenting for the first time in the Czech Republic the photographic works of Martha Rosler. This American painter, photographer, activist, essayist, and teacher, is generally considered one of the most influential figures of political and feminist-oriented art in America and Europe.

The presentation of works by Rosler in the Czech Republic is a contribution by Langhans Gallery Prague to the debate about the role of art in society. In the redefined context of the social space, the exhibition reinterprets questions of inequality, whether social, gender-based or in relation to power. It also touches upon topics of current political events and the reshaping of their images by the information media.

Rosler is not concerned only with photography. Rather, she works with a whole range of media, including film and video, slide projection, installation, performance, and political events. She is respected as an author of critical writing on feminism, art, and the role of culture in everyday life.

The breaking of stereotypes and norms, a permanent revolt against the limiting of individual and collective liberty, the demolishing of personal or social myths, these are the foundation stones of the life and work of Martha Rosler, and she has never turned away from them in the four decades of her active career as an artist.

The exhibition ‘Passionate Signals’, as is evident from the subtitle, concentrates on Rosler’s photographic works of the last four decades. The exhibited photomontages and photographic series represent Rosler’s key pieces.

       The name of the exhibition comes from the title of one of Rosler’s series, and points to her unflagging interest in current social and political events, social mechanisms, power relations, both explicit and implied – as signals – and it also ‘plays’ with the feminist aspect of her work.

       A cross-section of Rosler’s art, this exhibition at the Langhans Gallery Prague comprises nine photographic series: Beauty Knows No Pain, or Body Beautiful (1965–72); Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967–72); The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974–75); Transitions and Digressions (begun 1981); Passionate Signals (begun 1986); In the Place of the Public, Airport Series (begun 1985); Ventures Underground (begun 1990), Kassel series (2007), and Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful: New Series (2004).

The curator of the exhibition is Zdenek Felix, a Czech-born philosopher and art historian, who has lived in Switzerland and Germany since 1968. Formerly in charge of other important art museums, Felix has been in Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, since 1991. He has worked as a curator on a number of exhibitions, including exhibitions with the late Harald Szeemann.

Photomontage is the technique of the early series Beauty Knows No Pain, or Body Beautiful (1965-72), in which Rosler took up the leitmotiv of the radical feminist art of this period, proclaiming: ‘the personal is political’. With photographs of attractive, provocative, mysterious blondes, raven-haired beauties, mulattos, and Asian women, cut out of men’s magazines and arranged as a throng of naked bodies, Rosler points to women’s degradation to passive sexual objects for men’s pleasure, and to the things which women are willing to submit themselves to make themselves attractive to men and approach supposed female perfection. With the Beauty Knows No Pain series she took up the leitmotiv of the radical feminist art of this period, proclaiming: ‘the personal is political’.

       The relationship between the private and the political, moreover, which is related to hegemonic power over uncivilized, dangerous ‘otherness’, is expressed by Rosler perhaps most emphatically, and also most provocatively, in the photomontage series Bringing the War Home (1967–72), in which she reacts to the war in Vietnam. In this series she has soldiers with arms and ammunition, wounded or dying civilians, and tanks enter comfortable, often luxurious American homes. The clash of two disparate worlds, ‘sullying’ the American ideal of home comfort, cleanliness, and security, the ideal promoted by a number of magazines like House Beautiful, came as a shock. For Rosler, Bringing the War Home was the definitive break with the fading Modernist tradition, but also with apolitical conceptual art, which was just taking off in the United States at that time.

       The confrontation of visual image and text is a topic of an important work by Rosler from 1974–75, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, done in a combination of black-and-white photography made in the legendary New York City street of homeless alcoholics and down-and-outers. The series of photos of dilapidated shop windows, boarded-up stores, piles of rubbish, and empty bottles constitutes a kind of urban archaeology. In this series Rosler reveals the hidden strata of the city and the dismal traces of the deprived. Although the photographs of this series do not contain a single figure, the human body has not disappeared from Rosler’s work. She began to be concerned with space, not at the abstract level, but in connection with the way the space in which we live imprints itself upon our subjectivity, behaviour, and bodies. Rosler juxtaposes two different possible descriptions of reality: photography and slang expressions for drunkenness, which are also a form of sub-culture. The reality of the Bowery remains ambiguous, and does not correspond to either of the two possibilities.

       During the last two decades Rosler’s work has expanded with a number of photographic series in which she explores the social space, aspects of deprivation, and the control mechanisms that permeate society today. In the Transitions and Digressions series, begun in 1981, Rosler is concerned with topics that often escape our attention. ‘They are studies of trips, views of the highway, passages in the subway, airports, shopping centres, and parks. They are evidence of an obsession with photography, and also analyze the structure of power relations established by these usual traffic routes. A surprising part of this production comprises the photographs of flowers, in which Rosler carries on a many-layered discourse not only about the domestication of nature, but also about the phenomenon of beauty as a subject of art.’

       The distance from the cut-out ‘pin-up girls’, with which Rosler was concerned forty years ago, to the public happenings and subtle, though cogent, photographs of public spaces is perhaps not as great as it seems at first sight. In all Rosler’s works there is a need to reveal the fabric of social relations based on close and, primarily, critical investigation of everyday reality. And that reality includes of course not only magazines for men but also subways, parks, gardens, makeshift shelters for the homeless, abundantly filled shop windows, motorways, airports and rushing travellers, flashing neon lights and advertisements, dust bins, and military bases. (Rosler returned to the topic of war three years ago in Bringing the War Home: New Series, in which she considers the war in Iraq.) Only against the background of this sort of world – and it is the world of all of us who live in privileged Western civilization, even in its ‘Eastern’ regions – can Rosler’s work reveal life in all its complexity and contradictions.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Langhans Galerie Praha is publishing a catalogue in Czech and English, with an introduction by Zdenek Felix, the curator of the exhibition, and an essay by Martina Pachmanová.

An independent supplement to the catalogue comprises two key Rosler texts, published here for the first time in Czech: ‘In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography) (1981) and ‘Post-Documentary, Post-Photography?’ (1999). The essays were selected by Martina Pachmanová for the Rosler exhibition at Langhans Gallery Prague.

The two selected essays focus on documentary photography, which throughout her career Rosler has devoted herself to most. The essays were written more than fifteen years apart from each other: the first was published in 1981, the second in late 1996 and early 1997. Even so, they remain remarkably consistent with each other regarding the nature and mission of documentary photography.

       Rosler considers the crisis that documentary photography has undergone during the last thirty years owing to the sensationalism and voyeurism of the mass media, and, true to her engagé attitude, she highlights the social, indeed activist, importance of ‘real’ documentary photograph – namely, to interfere with the established order of power.

       Considering how little the meaning of documentary photography is discussed in the Czech Republic and how obviously even sporadic reflections of this genre avoid the question of social criticism and political involvement, these two essays may well raise new questions for people who wish to consider photography in this country.

Compiled in part from the essays by Martina Pachmanová and Zdenek Felix in the catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition.

The exhibition was organized in collaboration with Galerie Christian Nagel Köln/Berlin./ The exhibition was preapred in cooperation with

For their loans of works for exhibition we thank the Galerie Christian Nagel Köln/Berlin, the Sammlung Falckenberg Hamburg, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, and the Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

The project is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.