Decoys and Disruptions is the first comprehensive collection of writings by American artist and critic Martha Rosler. Best known for her videos and photography, Rosler has also been an original and influential cultural critic and theorist for over twenty-five years. The writings collected here address such key topics as documentary photography, feminist art, video, government patronage of the arts, censorship, and the future of digitally based photographic media. Taken together, these thirteen essays not only show Rosler's importance as a critic but also offer an essential resource for readers interested in the issues confronting contemporary art. The essays in this collection illustrate Rosler's ongoing investigation into means of exposing truth and provoking change, providing a retrospective of characteristic issues in her work.Mixing analysis and wit, Rosler challenges many of the fundamental precepts of contemporary art practice. Her influential essay, "In, around, and afterthoughts: on documentary photography," almost single-handedly dismantled the myth of liberal documentary photography when it appeared. Many of the essays in this volume have had a similarly wide-ranging influence; others are published here for the first time. Illustrating the essays are 81 images by Rosler and other artists and photographers.

Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001

Arts & Photography

Rosler, Martha

History & Criticism

Mit Pr

The first comprehensive collection of writings by Martha Rosler considers the intersection of art and politics, the operation of art systems, feminist art practices, and the media.
Decoys and Disruptions is the first comprehensive collection of writings by American artist and critic Martha Rosler. Best known for her videos and photography, Rosler has also been an original and influential cultural critic and theorist for over twenty-five years. The writings collected here address such key topics as documentary photography, feminist art, video, government patronage of the arts, censorship, and the future of digitally based photographic media. Taken together, these thirteen essays not only show Rosler's importance as a critic but also offer an essential resource for readers interested in the issues confronting contemporary art. The essays in this collection illustrate Rosler's ongoing investigation into means of exposing truth and provoking change, providing a retrospective of characteristic issues in her work.
Mixing analysis and wit, Rosler challenges many of the fundamental precepts of contemporary art practice. Her influential essay, "In, around, and afterthoughts: on documentary photography," almost single-handedly dismantled the myth of liberal documentary photography when it appeared. Many of the essays in this volume have had a similarly wide-ranging influence; others are published here for the first time. Illustrating the essays are 81 images by Rosler and other artists and photographers.

Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001 (October Books)

MIT Press]

The work of Martha Rosler is perennially incisive, provocative, political, and timely, exploring a range of issues from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment, especially as they affect women. Over her prolific career, Rosler has returned to themes of social justice, popular culture, food, gardens and the natural world, and the intersection of aesthetics and ethics. Martha Rosler: Irrespective is the only survey of the artist’s vital and enduring work, examining it across media including photocollage, video and film, installation, actions, and books. In addition to a rich array of artworks, this book presents texts by distinguished critics and art historians, and a candid and insightful conversation with the artist. Through her interrogations of the Vietnam War, the War on Terror, feminism, gentrification, and other timely issues, Rosler has persistently bridged art and activism. This important catalogue comes at a moment when work like Rosler’s has the power to inspire change.

Martha Rosler: Irrespective

Individual Artists

Jewish Museum

How the Vietnam War changed American art
By the late 1960s, the United States was in a pitched conflict in Vietnam, against a foreign enemy, and at home―between Americans for and against the war and the status quo. This powerful book showcases how American artists responded to the war, spanning the period from Lyndon B. Johnson’s fateful decision to deploy U.S. Marines to South Vietnam in 1965 to the fall of Saigon ten years later.
Artists Respond brings together works by many of the most visionary and provocative artists of the period, including Asco, Chris Burden, Judy Chicago, Corita Kent, Leon Golub, David Hammons, Yoko Ono, and Nancy Spero. It explores how the moral urgency of the Vietnam War galvanized American artists in unprecedented ways, challenging them to reimagine the purpose and uses of art and compelling them to become politically engaged on other fronts, such as feminism and civil rights. The book presents an era in which artists struggled to synthesize the turbulent times and participated in a process of free and open questioning inherent to American civic life.
Beautifully illustrated, Artists Respond features a broad range of art, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, performance and body art, installation, documentary cinema and photography, and conceptualism.
Published in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Exhibition Schedule Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC March 15–August 18, 2019
Minneapolis Institute of Art September 28, 2019–January 5, 2020

Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975

Nixon, Mignon

Crow, Thomas

Ho, Melissa

Levin, Erica

Markoski, Katherine

Princeton University Press

Residents of New York City's South Bronx neighborhood live amidst what is frequently described as the most severe and widespread poverty in any U.S. metropolitan area. In the South Bronx of America is a work which, through documentary photographs, counterpointed with statements by residents and by newspaper reports and statistical information, offers both an intimate view of life in this neighborhood and a context for understanding the last two decades of accelerated social decay. In the words of Penny Coleman, New York Times photographer, In the South Bronx of America, "is important because it is not cynical, because it is a sincere attempt to provide the awareness necessary for change."

In the South Bronx of America

Phillips, Barry

Rosenthal, Mel

Photography & Video

Curbstone Press

Discussions in Contemporary Culture is an award-winning series copublished with the Dia Center for the Arts in New York City. These volumes offer rich and timely discourses on a broad range of cultural issues and critical theory. The collection covers topics from urban planning to popular culture and literature, and continually attracts a wide and dedicated readership.

If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism : A Project (DISCUSSIONS IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE)

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

Bay Pr

In the early 1970s, in the midst of a body of work linking cuisine, cooking, women, labor, imperialism, and even photography, Martha Rosler wrote The Art of Cooking, a mock dialogue between Julia Child, the pioneer television chef schooling Americans in how to produce haute cuisine at home, and then New York Times restaurant critic Craig Claiborne. Here published in full for the first time, The Art of Cooking consists in large part of quotations from books on cuisine and cooking from various eras redirected toward a discussion of the role of taste in art.In its focus on the figure of the housewifely woman cooking for TV, The Art of Cooking brings to mind Rosler’s celebrated video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975). But like her 1977 video Losing: A Conversation with the Parents, this conversation is an absurdist reimagining of the confrontation between male and female discursive strategies and subject positions, centering on and departing from cultural uses of food. It is also a further chapter in her challenge to (Kantian-derived) Modernist notions of separation and her interrogation of hierarchies of taste and value, especially in relation to art—a sequence that included Monumental Garage Sale of 1973. In each case, feminism and performance are fused with conceptual art strategies and neo-avantgardist aims of bridging the boundaries between art and everyday life.Written when cooking and cuisine were first being marketed as a social good and a cultural necessity to educated housewives and well-heeled diners alike, The Art of Cooking reflects the rapid rise in sales of cookbooks lavishly illustrated with newly perfected color printing. These blockbusters touted regional and national cuisines to provide a freshly affluent middle class with an aspirational cosmopolitanism often expressed only as a kind of armchair tourism. In the current moment of renewed food fixations and fetishisms, and the widening cult of celebrity chefs, while culinary selections are threatening to displace most other aesthetic choices, The Art of Cooking provides a sideways glance at the rhetorics brought to bear on these adventures in production, consumption, and daily life.

The Art of Cooking

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Cooking Education & Reference

e-flux classics

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