Skip to main content

Martha Rosler Reads Vogue, With Paper Tiger Television

Martha Rosler

1983 00:25:22 United StatesEnglishColorMono4:3Video
Tags:
Media Analysis

Description

A live performance on a public-access cable program in New York deconstructing the messages in Vogue and its advertising. The work looks at the institutional slants of the magazine industry and the fashion industry’s reliance on sweatshops.

Paper Tiger Television, here in its infancy, was begun by filmmaker and activist Dee Dee Halleck to engage in media critique under the slogan “Smashing the Myths of the Information Industry". The foundational concept of cheap media as a strategy of engagement, shared by Rosler and Paper Tiger, is exemplified by this work, with its makeshift sets, no rehearsals, and matter-of-fact camerawork.

This title is also available on martha rosler: crossings.

About Martha Rosler

Since the early 1970s, Martha Rosler has used photography, performance, writing, and video to deconstruct cultural reality. Describing her work, Rosler says, “The subject is the commonplace — I am trying to use video to question the mythical explanations of everyday life. We accept the clash of public and private as natural, yet their separation is historical. The antagonism of the two spheres, which have in fact developed in tandem, is an ideological fiction — a potent one. I want to explore the relationships between individual consciousness, family life, and culture under capitalism.” 

Avoiding a pedantic stance, Rosler characteristically lays out visual and verbal material in a manner that allows the contradictions to gradually emerge, so that the audience can discern these disjunctions for themselves. By making her ideas accessible, Rosler invites her audience to re-examine the dynamics and demands of ideology, urging critical consciousness of the individual compromises exacted by society, and opening the door to a radical re-thinking of how cultural “reality” is constructed for the economic and political benefit of a select group.

Also see:
Martha Rosler: An Interview