Art review: God bless America

Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’ plays in the tinny soundtrack of a brief video that sets the tone for the exhibition, wherein an animated toy soldier with a trumpet turns out to be a paraplegic. Ta-dum-dum—short and sweet, the artist delivers the ironic musical message in a one-two punch. She’s American and she’s proud of it, but Martha Rosler isn’t taking anybody’s crap. 

Her exhibition at the MACBA occupies only two top-floor galleries, but they are jam-packed with Rosler’s anger, humour and intelligent criticism of the twists and turns of 20th-century US-American society and the right-wing politics of various regimes of the country. The artist and writer, born in 1943 and longtime faculty member of Rutgers, works with mixed media, but the concise presentation here focuses on videos selected from the MACBA’s permanent collection. It is also related to the 2017 LOOP video festival. 

Her ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen’ is a much-imitated (in a stop-action Barbie doll parody, for instance) seminal feminist work from 1975. Posing as a television performer, the deadpan Rosler displays to the camera various kitchen objects as illustrations for the alphabet, becoming increasingly agitated as the semiotics lesson progresses.

Whether juxtaposing beautiful fields of flowers in southern California with the oppressed and illegal Mexicans who harvest them, or exploring the politics of a notorious court case in which a surrogate mother fought for her rights to retain her baby, Rosler’s observations overflow with irony. Her tendency to layer the written word with a spoken soundtrack (or in some cases several), which are both in conflict with the rapid-fire editing of her visuals, seem intended to keep the viewer in a state of disorientation and agitation. Her ‘Martha Rosler Reads Vogue’ (1982) is an unsettling and disjointed narrative about the use of the female body as an object in a patriarchal society, coupled with her criticism of the oppressive conditions of textile workers that make high fashion possible for the privileged classes. It is all presented as a tongue-in-cheek voice-over by the artist herself, who thumbs through a copy of the slick magazine, tracing favourite shapes with her finger, as she provides an insane narrative about glamour, makeup and oral sex with Condé Nast, and finally applies too much rouge to her own cheeks.

Rosler’s work still resonates for a 21st-century audience that has not become accustomed to the injustices inflicted on us by tyrannical governmental institutions. One of her videos from 1985 (about the US spreading false information about Nicaragua) is called ‘If It’s Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION’. Now more than ever.

See here for more information about the exhibition.