'Great Power,' by Martha Rosler -- New York Magazine Art Review

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THE ART REVIEW

Welcome to the Sixties, Yet Again

Martha Rosler, like too many artists, cant move beyond the easy arguments of her youth.
By Jerry Saltz

Published Oct 5, 2008

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n the late sixties, Martha Rosler became known for a

so-so series of collages titled Bringing the War Home:

House Beautiful. She juxtaposed images of models, home

dcor, and the Vietnam War: A Vietnamese woman carried
a bleeding baby in an unsullied American home,
housewives dutifully cleaned battlefields, and so on.
Although on a formal level Rosler simply mixed the
harshness of John Heartfields thirties photomontages of
the Third Reich with the pop-surreal sensibility of Richard
Hamiltons famous 1956 collage of a muscleman and a
pinup girl in a contemporary living room, she did spice it
with something newan ironic, media-savvy attitude that
changed the look of much art.
Four decades later, Rosler turns out not to have changed
the look of her own work at all. In Great Power, her
current skin-deep effort at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Rosler
Rosler's The Gray Drape (2008), at

tries to turn back the clock to her glory days, essentially

Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

remaking the Vietnam series. Only now shes inserting

(Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash)

images of models into pictures of the Iraq War. Clearly,

there are parallels between the two wars, and activist art is

valid. But Rosler lapses into simplistic nostalgia and undermines her older work while basically making
pretty war porn. The only thing her work says is that fashion designers and women who like to shop
caused two wars.
Rosler also includes news clippings about Iraq. Most of the articles are from reliably liberal sources (The
Village Voice, The Nation, The New Yorker, etc.), so Rosler is merely filtering the already filtered.
Worse, theres an air of self-serving, pedantic preaching. She basically asserts that, while you may be
concerned with current events, shes so concerned she clipped these items and put them in binders. She
turns President Bushs Go shopping into Start clipping. To gain entry to Great Power, visitors must
drop a quarter into a turnstile. The shows press release states that this forces us to make conscious
decisions about how to engage with the work. This is critique art putting a gun to its own temple. A sign
at the door assures us that Rosler will donate all the quarters to antiwar groups. Anyone who thinks any
of this is good art, effective activism, or even slightly radical needs to get a grip.
Roslers show is simply mediocre. What it points to, however, is far worse and more widespread. Too
many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a
deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease. A generation is caught in a
Freudian death spiral and seems unable to escape the ridiculous idea that in order for art to be political
it has to hark back to the talismanic hippie erathat it must create a revolution. It is sophistry to think
that everything relates to Europe and America in 1968. The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus
wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators
valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years ago still write about them in the same
ways, often for the same magazines. Their students and imitators are doing the samewriting about
artists, sometimes the same ones, in the same ways their teachers did. Often for the same magazines.
Its a trap set by a previous generation in order to preserve its legacy a little longer, or at least until its
members relinquish their positions in academe, museums, and media. Many things happened in the
sixties, but the period is no more significant, better, or more political than today. Its time to turn the
page.
Great Power
Martha Rosler

2/5/2013 7:35 AM

'Great Power,' by Martha Rosler -- New York Magazine Art Review

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http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/50974/

Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Through October 11.

E-mail: jerry_saltz@newyorkmag.com.

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