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Losing: A Conversation With The Parents
Martha Rosler
1977, 18:50 min, color, sound
More Info
Description
Ordering & Fees
Documents
Titles by Martha Rosler
+
A Budding gourmet
A Simple Case For Torture, or How To Sleep at Night
Born to be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby $/M
Chile on the Road to NAFTA
Domination and the Everyday
Fascination with the [Game of the] Exploding [Historical] Hollow Leg
From the PTA, the High School and the City of Del Mar
How Do We Know What Home Looks Like?
If it's too bad to be true, it could be DISINFORMATION
In the Place of the Public: Airport Series
Losing: A Conversation With The Parents
Martha Rosler Reads "Vogue"
Pencicle of Praise
Prototype (God Bless America)
Seattle: Hidden Histories
Secrets From the Street: No Disclosure
Semiotics of the Kitchen
Semiotics of the Kitchen: An Audition
Super-8 Shorts
The East Is Red, The West Is Bending
The Garden Spot of the World: Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in Traffic, Transit and Flow
Travelling Garage Sale
Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained
Watchwords of the Eighties
Description
Ordering & Fees
Documents
Titles by Martha Rosler
+
A Budding gourmet
A Simple Case For Torture, or How To Sleep at Night
Born to be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby $/M
Chile on the Road to NAFTA
Domination and the Everyday
Fascination with the [Game of the] Exploding [Historical] Hollow Leg
From the PTA, the High School and the City of Del Mar
How Do We Know What Home Looks Like?
If it's too bad to be true, it could be DISINFORMATION
In the Place of the Public: Airport Series
Losing: A Conversation With The Parents
Martha Rosler Reads "Vogue"
Pencicle of Praise
Prototype (God Bless America)
Seattle: Hidden Histories
Secrets From the Street: No Disclosure
Semiotics of the Kitchen
Semiotics of the Kitchen: An Audition
Super-8 Shorts
The East Is Red, The West Is Bending
The Garden Spot of the World: Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in Traffic, Transit and Flow
Travelling Garage Sale
Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained
Watchwords of the Eighties
Losing: A Conversation With The Parents
Martha Rosler
1977, 18:50 min, color, sound
Documents
Losing: A Conversation With The Parents
Transcript
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\"long_desc\": \"This distanced narrative, which approximates a soap opera or a TV interview of bereaved relatives of a victim, confronts two means by which food is used as a weapon: the internalized oppression of self-starvation as a consequence of social learning (anorexia nervosa), and starvation because of poverty and economic domination. In a scenario that merges documentary elements and theatrical acting, an impossibly young couple is addressed by an unseen questioner. \\"Interviewed\\" in their plush living room, the parents struggle to make a connection between food and political oppression, moving from their confrontations with anorexia to starvation in Third World countries, where food is often a weapon of political subjugation. They juxtapose but never resolve these dual questions of power and powerlessness. Rosler exposes underlying social realities, from the family dynamics of lying and contradiction, to the phenomenon of dieting and starvation in the creation of an ideal female self in contemporary culture.\",
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\"short_bio\": \"In her work in video, photo-text, performance, critical writing and installation, Martha Rosler constructs incisive social and political analyses of the myths and realities of contemporary culture. Articulated with deadpan wit, her video works investigate how socioeconomic realities and political ideologies dominate ordinary life. Presenting complex critical analyses in accessible forms, Rosler's video works merge performance, narrative, documentary, and mass media images.\",
\"long_bio\": \"In her work in video, photo-text, performance, critical writing and installation, Martha Rosler constructs incisive social and political analyses of the myths and realities of contemporary culture. Articulated with deadpan wit, Rosler's video works investigate how socioeconomic realities and political ideologies dominate ordinary life. Presenting astute critical analyses in accessible forms, Rosler's inquiries range from questions of public space to issues of war, women's experiences, and media information. \r\n\r\nQuestioning the relation of the corporation, the state and the family, media information and the individual, and public and private, she exposes the internalized oppression that underlies such cultural phenomena as the objectification of women (<i>Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained,<\/i> 1977); anorexia and starvation (<i>Losing: A Conversation With The Parents,<\/i> 1977); and surrogate motherhood (<i>Born to be Sold,<\/i> 1988). \r\n\r\nDensely layered, her tapes merge performance-based narrative dramatizations, documentary elements, mass-media images and factual texts, and often employ litanies of statistics, systems of classification, and enumeration to disrupt the signs of the everyday. For example, of the classic <i>Semiotics of the Kitchen<\/i> (1975), Rosler writes that an \\"anti-Julia Child replaces the domesticated 'meaning' of kitchen tools with a lexicon of rage and frustration.\\" \r\n\r\nWriting about her work, Rosler has stated: \\"I want to make art about the commonplace, art that illumines social life. I want to enlist video to question the mythical explanations of everyday life that take shape as an optimistic rationalism and to explore the relationships between individual consciousness, family life, and the culture of monopoly capitalism. Video itself isn't 'innocent': it is a cultural commodity often celebrating the self and its inventiveness. Yet video lets me construct, using a variety of fictional narrative forms, 'decoys' engaged in a dialectic with commercial TV.\\" \r\n\r\nMartha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she lives and works. She received a B.A. from Brooklyn College and an M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego. She has taught at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Her works in several media are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Guggenheim Museum in New York; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Long Beach Museum of Art in California; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Tate and V&A in London; Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona; Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Australian National Gallery, Canberra; and hundreds of colleges, universities, and independent centers around the world. Her work has been exhibited at the 50th Venice Biennale; 2004 Taipei Biennial; documentas 7 and 12, Kassel; several Whitney Biennials, New York; SkulpturProjekte Münster 07; and many other group exhibitions. The Martha Rosler Library toured from 2005 to 2009. A career retrospective, <em>Positions in the Life World<\/em>, was exhibited at 5 European cities and at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and Institute of Contemporary Photography, New York, from 1998 to 2000.<br \/> \r\n<br \/>\r\nRosler was awarded the Spectrum International Prize in Photography for 2005 and the Oskar Kokoschka Prize in 2006. She received an Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 2007 and in 2008 was the United States Artists Nimoy Fellow. In 2009 she held a residency at Civitella Ranieri in Umbertide, Italy. She received a Guggenheim Museum Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. In 2011 she was a DAAD Artist in Residence in Berlin. In 2012, Rosler presented <em>Meta-Monumental Garage Sale<\/em>, her first solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.\",
\"bibliography\": \"Rosler, Martha. <u>Decoys and Disruptions: Writings, 1975?2001<\/u>.\r\nCambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. An October Book published in\r\nconjunction with the International Center of Photography. Selected\r\nessays.\r\n<br><br>\r\nRosler, Martha. <u>Martha Rosler: Passionate Signals<\/u>. Hatje Cantz\r\nPublishers, 2005. In conjunction with the 5th International Spectrum\r\nPrize in Photography.\r\n<br><br>\r\nRosler, Martha. <u>Rights of Passage.<\/u> Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Photographs by Rosler. Text by Anthony Vidler, Alexander Alberro. <br><br>\r\nRosler, Martha. <u>In The Place of the Public.<\/u> Ostfildern, Germany: Cantz, 1998. Photographs by Rosler. Text by Anthony Vidler, Martha Rosler. In English and German. <br><br>\r\nWallis, Brian, ed. <u>If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory and Social Activism: A Project by Martha Rosler (Discussions in Contemporary Culture, #6).<\/u> New York: New Press, 1989. Text by Martha Rosler. <br><br>\r\nZegher, Catherine de, ed. <u>Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World<\/u>. Birmingham, Vienna, and Cambridge, MA: Ikon, Generali & MIT Press, 1998. Text by Alexander Alberro, Benjamin Buchloh, Silvia Eiblmayer, Jodi Hauptmann, Annette Michelson, Martha Rosler, Catherine de Zegher.\",
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\"notes\": \"IMPORTANT: Martha has requested that the EAI logo not appear in front of any of her works, unless she grants permission. (RC, 11\/9\/11)\r\n\r\nMartha will usually waive royalties for images (or handle them directly) for scholars paying out-of-pocket. (JFB 1\/31\/24)\r\n\r\nMartha would like to have her email passed along to any curators or programmers, so that she can contact them regarding publicity material. (RC, 6\/10\/09)\",
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