Martha Rosier: Positions in the Life World Ikon Gallery Birmingham.

Martha Rosier: Positions in the Life World Ikon Gallery Birmingham, UK December 5 1998-January 30 1999

Institut d'Art Contemporain Lyon-Villeurbanne, France February 10-April 30 1999

Generali Foundation Vienna, Austria May 12-August 8 1999

Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona Barcelona, Spain October 19 1999-January 9 2000

just discovered Museum of Contemporary Art strange York, New York June 13-October 18 2000

Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World edited by dint of Catherine de Zegher Cambridge, MA: MIT Pres for Ikon Gallery and the Generali Foundation, 1998 302 pp/$4000 (sb)

Perhaps not many viewers who know Martha Rosler's work would be surprised according to its impressive depth, breadth and coherence when seen in quantity and arranged in chronological order. This retrospective, organized by way of Ikon Gallery and the Generali Foundation, confirms all former impressions of the work's consistently high intellectual demands, its insistent questioning and analysis and its disruption of conventionally sleek pleasurable consumption. What may not have been as evident before, however, is to what extent Rosler's work does - or does not - set up the artist's life.

A retrospective exhibition necessarily alludes to biography. In keeping with its historical part of celebrating the artist-genius, the traditional retrospective relies forward an organic model for the ordering of works, and for the linking of those works to biographical details. The conventional retrospective asks to show a smooth growth from early to middle to late periods in an artist's career, repeatedly accompanied by metaphors of pullulation blossoming and bearing fruit. A visitor to like an exhibition grasps the artist's life-trajectory on analogy to his or her have experience of change and learning.

Rather than constructing a life parallel with those of her viewers, however, Rosler's retrospective consists of impetuss shared with her viewers. For each work reconstitutes, in cooperation with its viewer, the instant of its own making. Using the "descriptive systems" - language, media or institutional frameworks - of a specific time and place, each work creates a risk of conditions under which one as well as the other she and the viewer are living, have lived or must imagine themselves living. These hypothesiss are broad and impersonal, however are clearly seen, in the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of a given work, to affect intimate relationships, attitudes and conclusions As a result, the continuity in Rosler's retrospective is markedly different from that of the traditional retrospective. individual work does not anticipate, inform or sweep along into the next, nor does the whole exhibition shed light in succession Rosler's personal sensibility. Rather this exhibition tenders biography itself as legible alone against a ground of large and network structures of meaning.

In the course of the exhibition, the work broadens geographically and conceptually, on the other hand does not retreat from its insistence forward the penetration of vast political power hypothesiss into the most personal of relationships. Nor does it abandon the strategy of demeanor the commitment to the contemporary importance In place of an "artist's story" unfolding through the whole extent of time, the exhibition offers a series of social and conceptual formations chronologically ordered sets of historically specific coordinates. The viewer assumes a series of "positions," as the title put in mind ofs The exhibition becomes as to a great degree an occasion for the viewer to recontextualize flashs of her or his hold life - memories of conflict, pain, humor and absurdity - as it is an opportunity to view more deeply into Rosler's.

The exhibition begins with large color photocollages representing several different series from the mid-1960s, still quantitatively favoring "Beauty Knows No Pain, or visible form [i]or[/i] frame Beautiful" (1966-72). The two main sources of imagery for this series, smooth and shining fashion magazine and pornographic photographs, form fixed points of orientation for viewers of varying age and sexual identity. Rosler's intercutting of the sum of two units representational conventions undermines the usual functions of the two When a leggy, smiling, partially clothed gauge suddenly appears with enlarged, graphically precise breasts and a groin taken from a different image, she doesn't quite "'work" anymore, either as upscale exclusive right or as an object of physical gratification. The incongruity of the sources collapses into an uncomfortable sameness, and in use generates a new difference between "what was familiar" (discourses separated in time) and "what I'm seeing here" (discourses experienced as simultaneous). of that kind a semiotic reshuffling may trigger a viewer's relief, remorse discomfort or laughter, depending forward where he or she has been or still is "positioned" with value to the original coordinates.

Images that date from a 30 years ago, as these do, probably read as vaguely "old" to young viewers. To a seasoned consumer of photographic pornography, perhaps they are productively irritating. To me they recall adolescence, a intellect of estrangement from those fashion magazine images, ignorance of the pornographic images and, of course, consummate obliviousness of the relationship between the pair This particular phase of Rosier's work expands up the confusion and sadness I associate with that past impulsive power of the mid-1960s, the incomprehensible boundaries, presss and misunderstandings that seemed to be appearing revealed of nowhere. Rosier offers tools to strain the thing loose from its moorings as my personal memory, present to view it sliced through, structured, held in place on forces that were, and still are, far in exces of anything personal, beyond my responsibility. The residual grief appears real enough, if it be not that is not precisely mine and is not without the potential for diffusion and resolution. Perhaps I am describing a importance of aesthetic pleasure in a work of art, on the contrary I feel on more congenial land calling it a moment of heightened historical consciousness.