Martha Rosler Wants to Know Why We Still Aren’t Outraged

But, Rosler said later, “the problem with portraying me as an angry person is [that] it is to diminish me.” As we settled across from each other on a suite of black leather furniture in the gallery’s private viewing room, she brought to mind — with her shock of wheat-colored hair, deliberately unassuming black clothes and slightly slouchy black calf-high boots — a battle-weary but charismatic resistance leader in a “Star Wars” movie. (A fan of science fiction since childhood, she keeps a figurine of Jabba the Hutt, the bloated embodiment of criminal greed, in a bathroom at her home in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood.) “A great deal depends on humor,” she clarified, pronouncing the last word with an old New York accent: “you-mor.” Indeed, wisecracking is almost as central to her practice as outrage; both are age-old responses to oppression, and the former helps humanize the latter in her work. Take her 25-minute-long 1982 video “Martha Rosler Reads Vogue: Wishing, Dreaming, Winning, Spending,” in which she sends up the magazine’s aspirational consumerism by paging through it in a parody of breathless wonder (“Clothes! Fur! Perfume! Liquor! Men! Expensive men, expensive perfumes!”). Rosler is also funny in person. She punctuated our conversation at the gallery with dry asides (“There’s only one type of genius that matters, and it always comes with a penis”), fretted about the possibility of an itchy nose becoming a nosebleed midinterview (“It’s a winter thing”) and skewered herself repeatedly for “nattering on.” What some people don’t realize, she said, “is that I’m like Fran Lebowitz. It’s all shtick.”

She was also perfectly attuned to the irony of being profiled by a publication that prints the kinds of glossy images she’s spent over half a century critiquing. Behind us on the wall were two dozen of the 31 photomontages that make up “Body Beautiful.” Like many of her projects, the series originated when the embers of what Rosler calls her “burning disquiet” about a social inequity were suddenly fanned into furious flames — sparked, in this instance, by the sight of lingerie advertisements depicting women in baby-doll dresses opposite stories about war and politics. She began collecting particularly egregious images from newsmagazines and men’s magazines, sometimes cutting and pasting lips, butts and crotches from one setting onto another. In one work, a pair of exposed breasts are awkwardly collaged above the cups of a bra in an advertisement with the vaguely threatening tagline “When you look after your figure this way, so will everybody else.” Mitchell-Innes & Nash included the photomontages in a show of Rosler’s feminist works from the 1960s, ’70s and present day that opened late last year, just months after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. “Body Beautiful” — which Rosler finished around the time of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1973 — has aged depressingly well. The fragmented bodies still suggest, with undimmed power, the violence and absurdity of treating women as less than human. Rosler, as it happens, found many of the ads for the series in The New York Times’s other weekend magazine — and she expressed, both jokingly and not, her discomfort with being profiled by this one several times. Neither of us, it seemed, was certain if I was a member of the resistance or a minion of the evil empire.

SEVERAL DAYS AFTER our first interview, which had been arranged via a director from Mitchell-Innes & Nash and a publicist, Rosler herself emailed me. Her message, in a way that I was coming to appreciate as pure Martha Rosler, was both direct and puzzling. She was friendly and apologetic (“Sorry for going on and on, which seems to be my M.O.”) but also seemed anxious: “What is [the story’s] focus supposed to be?” She was concerned that she’d spent too long talking about her early years (later, she said to me, “It’s the work that matters, not the persona”). She has criticized in the past the typically male-centric narrative of “the artist as a romantic hero,” as she called the trope in a 1983 lecture published in her 2004 book, “Decoys and Disruptions.” But I was interested in her life — as well as her practice. If the second-wave feminism of the late 1960s and ’70s taught future generations anything, it’s that the personal is political. And perhaps no artist has made such a doggedly political body of work as Rosler or interrogated the politics of art making itself as astutely. What was it like to live with such unrelenting clarity?