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Performed absence and a pre-formed audience: Martha Rosler's postcard novels and their implications for feminist art practice from the seventies to today

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Performed absence and a pre-formed audience: Martha Rosler's postcard novels and their implications for feminist art practice from the seventies to today

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PERFORMED ABSENCE AND A PRE-FORMED AUDIENCE:
MARTHA ROSLER’S POSTCARD NOVELS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR
FEMINIST ART PRACTICE FROM THE SEVENTIES TO TODAY

by

Adrienne M. White

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

May 2012

Copyright 2012 Adrienne M. White
ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This thesis would not have been possible without the guidance of several individuals.
John Tain, your passion for work of the nature and period covered here is infectious, and
your painstaking efforts with my early drafts helped shepherd me in the right direction.
Thank you to Rhea Anastas, for guiding me not just in this project, but in my overall
development as a writer. Your encouragement and early interest in my ideas spurned me
on when the going got toughest. Kate Flint, thank you for your engaged and explorative
feedback, and your generous provision of a perspective from a different but closely
aligned program. I’d also like to thank Noura Wedell, whose kindness and generosity as a
professor are unparalleled. Your fostering of a collaborative writing environment will be
forever appreciated and remembered by myself and my colleagues. A special thanks is
also due to Ruth Wallach, for her assistance in obtaining some elusive texts during the
development of this thesis.
In addition, I’d like to thank the members of my family: my parents, Bob and Mary
White, for encouraging and also inspiring me throughout my education, my first career,
and my re-education; and my brother, Louis White, for being an inspiration to me in
ways not measureable by degrees and data-points. I’d also like to thank Christopher
Orlando—the best copy-editor I could’ve asked for—for his unwavering support.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures iv
Abstract v
Introduction: The Postcard Novels Then and Now 1
Chapter One: Setting Up the Seventies 9
Chapter Two: Long Novels and Slow Ones 28
Chapter Three: Mailing Addresses and Modes of Address 39
Chapter Four: Reception and Secondary Exhibition 45
Conclusion 55
Bibliography 61

iv

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Martha Rosler, Postcard from Tijuana Maid (1975-76) 3
Figure 2: Page from Martha Rosler’s “Tijuana Maid” in Service: A
Trilogy on Colonization (1978) 7

Figure 3: Martha Rosler, “Damp Meat” from Body Beautiful or Beauty Knows
No Pain series (1966-1972) 11

Figure 4: Martha Rosler, “First Lady (Pat Nixon)” from Bringing the War
Home series (1967-1972) 11

Figure 5: Dan Graham, Homes for America (1966-67) 12
Figure 6: Eleanor Antin, “100 Boots At the Bank” (1971-73) 16
Figure 7: Installation of Projects: 100 Boots by Eleanor Antin at MoMA (May
30, 1973 – July 8, 1973) 16

Figure 8: Vito Acconci, “RE” (1967) 26
Figure 9: Ray Johnson, Postcard (c. 1973) 27
Figure 10: Adrian Piper, “Village Voice Ad No. 1” from the Mythic Being
series (1973) 51

v

ABSTRACT
This study addresses Martha Rosler’s trilogy of postcard novels and her mode of
distributing them between 1974 and 1976 as a conscious decision by a woman artist to
build a particular audience for her practice. The analysis centers not only on the postcards
themselves, but also on the week-long gaps between them—the precise aspect of the
project which cannot be reconstituted in any traditional art-viewing context. Serialization,
or a play between absence and presence, ensures an engaged audience and proves to be a
particularly potent strategy for women artists. To that end, this thesis involves a
considered reading of the project, including the factors that led up to it: influences of
performance, Fluxus, and early conceptual practices in New York in the 1960s; Martha
Rosler’s move to San Diego in 1968; and her resulting proximity to the West Coast
women’s movement. A close reading of the novels is further informed by a discussion of
their primary, secondary, and tertiary modes of distribution—the mail, alternative
publications, and a published book, respectively. Finally, a discussion of the critical
reception and exhibition history for the novels leads to a greater understanding of their
significance for Rosler’s diverse oeuvre, and for the practices of artists working today.

1

INTRODUCTION: THE POSTCARD NOVELS THEN AND NOW
In 1968, Martha Rosler, a young artist from Brooklyn, moved to Southern California.
Several years later, she began a project which, to this day, refuses alignment with existing
art historical categories and defies exhibition in an institutional context. The project
consists of three narratives—A budding gourmet, McTowersMaid, and Tijuana Maid—
which Rosler printed and distributed on postcards. Literature and language were far from
unfamiliar territory for Rosler, who in the late 1960s transitioned away from abstract
expressionistic painting towards more interdisciplinary practices, and studied English and
Linguistics in addition to Fine Art. She distributed her novels, however, in a channel
foreign to literature and the visual arts alike: the U.S. mail. Each postcard novel consists
of roughly twelve serial installments, distributed at a rate of one card per week to several
hundred recipients—both individuals and institutions. The first novel, A budding
gourmet, was sent out over a twelve-week period from January to April of 1974, and the
second and third novels followed similar schedules.
This study addresses Martha Rosler’s trilogy of postcard novels, focusing not only on
the postcards themselves, but also on the week-long gaps between them—the precise
aspect of the project which cannot be reconstituted in any traditional art-viewing context.
Serialization, or a play between absence and presence, proves to be a particularly potent
strategy for a young woman artist looking to ensure an engaged audience. This study
identifies serialization as an extension of one of Rosler’s key narrative devices—the
decoy. The novels, as a result, become a culminating moment in Rosler’s practice,
whereby form and content are directed toward the same end: the creation of an audience
2

that is alternative (in terms of both demographics and engagement) to the prototypical art
audience. This analysis is informed by several factors: some biographical data, including
the art practices and spaces that helped shape the young artist; a close reading of the
novels themselves and their distribution model(s); and, finally, a selection of critical and
curatorial responses to the work.
In the early 2000s, Rosler identified a ten-year lag between her work and any form of
positive or serious critical reception.
1
This lag-time, while unfortunate, is reflective of the
postcard novels and their cheeky, now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t operations on an
audience. Now that the art world has come around to Rosler’s work, it has come around
in a big way. New projects by the mid-career artist tend to be larger, even global, in scope
and few stones are left unturned in terms of critical responses.
2
It seems pertinent, now
that we think we know Martha Rosler, to look back on this very early practice, executed
right around the time that she received her MFA degree, and reflect on the strategies that
make it both emblematic of women’s art in the 1970s and, to this day, always and already
out-of-reach.
The distribution model for Service: A Trilogy on Colonization (as the novels would
later be known) involved the U.S. mail system. At first glance, it seems to be a direct

1
Christy Lange, “Bringin’ it All Back Home,” Frieze 95 (November – December 2005),
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/bringin_it_all_back_home.
2
Since the 1990s, Rosler’s work has been shown on the Times Square spectacolor signboard in New York;
at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati; at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels; at the Museo de
Arte Contemporáneo in Santiago, Chile; at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; on Paper Tiger
Television in New York; at the Generali Foundation in Vienna; and at various other institutions both large
and small. She has been included in the Venice Biennale (in 2003) and the Taipei Biennnial (in 2004),
among others.
3

result of Martha Rosler’s move to Southern California—her distance from the art scene
she knew and which, in turn, would later get to know her. Her turn towards mail art also
may have been related to early exposure to proto-conceptual art and Fluxus. Rosler has
downplayed Fluxus as a direct model for her work, perhaps because its members
primarily sent each other small packages and projects, creating a closed, if alternative,
system of production and reception characteristic of the avant-garde.
3
The two sets of
practices, however, share key aesthetic and strategic traits, even if they are employed to
different ends. Rosler sent A budding gourmet and her other novels to friends and
colleagues, but also to relative strangers. They were printed on postcards—a public
medium relative to sealed letters and brown paper packages—and bore the markings of
the system and hands they passed through, including postage stamps, dirt, and smudges.
Martha Rosler is often referred to as a New York-based artist and a video artist.
Semiotics of the Kitchen, a seven-minute video from 1975, is widely-recognized as a

3
On Fluxus, Rosler said it “I knew of their work . . . but wasn’t that deeply into it.” Quoted in Benjamin
Buchloh, “Conversation with Martha Rosler”, in Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World, edited by
Catherine de Zegher (Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 1998): 29.
Figure 1: Martha Rosler, Postcard from
Tijuana Maid. Serial postcard novel in
12 parts. Mailed October 1975–February
1976.
4

milestone of feminist practice. This analysis is focused on different practices in a
different medium, and executed from a very different geographic and socio-political
location than the ones Rosler would later be most associated with. Shortly after A
budding gourmet was distributed, Rosler made an eighteen-minute video based on it. This
may have contributed to the sparse critical response to the postcard version—the
tendency to treat it, along with her other early text-based works, as mere precursors to her
performances, videos, and films. This critical treatment, of course, ignores the fact that
Rosler continued producing text-based, narrative works after she started making videos.
4

The novels reward an investigation that takes them as more than stepping stones, and
their unique distribution model makes them, in reception, extremely distinct from video.
The three postcard novels pivot around three very different female narrators. The first
novel, A budding gourmet, is narrated by a housewife—that representative beacon of the
1960s U.S. upper-middle class. She is effusive and narcissistic—embodying stereotypes
of women in general, not just those of the home-maker variety—but also remains
unnamed and underdeveloped, aspects designed to cut reader self-identification short. On
the very first postcard (the first installment of the novel), the housewife sets out to better
herself and garner cultural capital through cooking. “I wish to become a gourmet,” she

4
In “The Dialectics of Everyday Life” Alexander Alberro writes that “Scripts such as ‘The Art of Cooking:
A Mock Dialogue Between Julia Child and Craig Claiborne’ (1973), or magazine pieces . . . and postcard
novels such as A budding gourmet, Tijuana Maid, or McTowersMaid, lead to performances (A Gourmet
Experience, 1974) and videotapes (A budding gourmet, 1974 . . . )” just as “Photo/text projects such as The
Bowery and In the Place of the Public (1983-98) lead to full-fledged essays.” If anything, Rosler’s
continued use of text-based works attests to the importance of those forms and to the idea that she did not
simply graduate up to video. She did this with A budding gourmet (postcard novel and video, 1974) and
again with Losing: A Conversation with the Parents (magazine piece 1976, video 1977). Alexander
Alberro, “The Dialectics of Everyday Life: Martha Rosler and the Strategy of the Decoy,” in Martha
Rosler: Positions in the Life World (Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 1998) 72-112.
5

says, because “it will enhance me as a human being.”
5
Her particular use of the term
gourmet, rather than “cook” or even “good cook,” hints at one of the profound insights of
the postcard novels. Pivoting as they do around the same central theme, the three novels
nevertheless pinpoint distinct relationships to food, cooking, and the kitchen that gender,
ethnicity, and other social factors tend to predetermine.
The housewife’s culinary advancement becomes a lesson in more than the preparation
and presentation of dishes. It teases out the politics at play in every middle-class kitchen,
whereby entire cultures are summarized and mastered in the form of dishes independently
deemed to be their most emblematic. Rosler’s gourmet starts with some Brazilian fare,
having recently returned from a trip there. She assures the reader that South American
dishes are more exotic and less “commercial” than European ones, and she goes on to
make the recipes her own in some subtle, but appalling, ways. On cooking Brazilian
black beans, for example, she writes, “In Brazil they cook the meats together with the
beans but then they turn an unattractive purple color so we cook everything separately
and throw away the pork and beef needed for the beans.”
6
By the end of the novel, with
her confidence up, she graduates to more “impressive” French recipes, including
Escoffier’s sweetbreads. Her closing comments, on her hopes of broadening her
children’s horizons through her cooking, sum up the theme of domination at play
throughout the novel—executed with spoons and saucepans rather than more familiar
weaponry. “After all,” she says, “I am thankful we can afford to give them the advantages

5
Martha Rosler, “A budding gourmet,” in Service: A Trilogy on Colonization (New York: Printed Matter,
1978): 1.
6
Ibid., 7.
6

of living in America . . . . We can take the best of all times and all places and make them
our own.”
7

Rosler’s second postcard novel, McTowersMaid, was first distributed between
September and December of 1974. It addresses the same central theme (food, and the
potential for empowerment arrived at through cooking) but does so from within a very
different socio-economic context. The housewife’s story of empowerment is a thinly-
veiled farce. She cooks only for others—to impress her husband and guests—and never
for herself. The narrator of McTowersMaid works at a McDonald’s-style burger
restaurant in Southern California, first as an unwrapper (of the chain’s frozen, meat-like
patties), and then as a cook. Shortly after her promotion she begins asking questions
about the food, wondering what the real ingredients are and where they come from.
Unenthused about the answers, she experiments in the McTowers kitchen, adding spices
and fresh vegetable to the recipes. She quickly moves on to more extreme secret
ingredients, spiking her infamous “flyburgers” with grass and mushrooms and serving
them to knowing customers with a wink and a smile. This grey market activity attracts
the attention of her co-workers, and together they organize themselves and other
McTowers employees. The novel ends abruptly, in the midst of what in normal narrative
structure would be the build-up to a climax. The cook and her comrades have kidnapped
their manager, and are in the midst of efforts to re-educate him and “liberate
McTowers.”
8

7
Rosler, “A budding gourmet,” 12.
8
Martha Rosler, “McTowersMaid,” in Service: A Trilogy on Colonization (New York: Printed Matter,
1978): 14.
7

The third and final novel in Rosler’s Service trilogy, Tijuana Maid, was printed in
Spanish and mailed between October 1975 and February 1976. The narrator, an illegal
immigrant from Mexico, recounts the trauma of her first border crossing, her various jobs
as a cleaning woman and live-in maid in Southern California, and her first (but not last)
experience being assaulted by one of her white, male employers. The middle-class
families she works for are eerily similar to one another. Her first employer is a wealthy
business executive and the next, a (potentially more enlightened) university professor,
pays her even less. The ladies of both households own copies of the cleverly-titled Home
Maid Spanish Cook Book, which reads: “Our aim is not to teach the Mexican or Spanish
speaking maid how to make her own native dishes. She can do that to perfection and
without our help. We want to have her help Y O U in the kitchen. To do things Y O U R
way.”
9
The recipes inside are for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, hot dogs, martinis,

9
Martha Rosler, “Tijuana Maid,” in Service: A Trilogy on Colonization (New York: Printed Matter, 1978):
3.
Figure 2: Page from
Martha Rosler’s “Tijuana
Maid” in Service: A
Trilogy on Colonization
(New York: Printed
Matter, 1978)
8

burgers, and old fashioneds. With each novel, the semblance of a familiar narrative
structure is further broken down. The first arrives at a questionable resolution (the
housewife learns French cooking after protesting against it), the second ends prematurely
(before the climactic or cathartic moment), and the third is simply a series of unresolved,
traumatic cycles which leave no room for the more pleasurable aspects of reading.
9

CHAPTER ONE: SETTING UP THE SEVENTIES
Photomontages, Race Rentals, and New York Artists in Southern California

An analysis of the postcard novels necessarily starts with several personal and
professional factors that led up to their production: namely, Martha Rosler’s exposure to
performance, Fluxus, and early conceptual practices in New York in the 1960s; her move
to San Diego in 1968; and her resulting proximity to the West Coast women’s movement.
In 1967, Martha Rosler’s first and only child, a son, was born. A year later, she left the
dominant context for American art and poetry, New York City, and moved to California,
where she would live on and off from 1968 to 1980. In the mid-1960s, she began two of
her most well-known artistic projects: the Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain
(1966-72) and Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967-72) series of
photomontages. These two lengthy series continued after Rosler’s move to Southern
California. They represent the beginning of her cultivation of a unique space for the
reception of art, and her turn toward building her own audience. The Body Beautiful, or
Beauty Knows No Pain series juxtaposed bits and pieces of women’s bodies—culled
from Playboy—with commercial products that symbolized their oppression, including
ovens, refrigerators, vacuums, and other domestic appliances. An example of proto-
feminism, the series was essentially a group of photo-essays about the representation of
the feminine in both art and advertising. With the Bringing the War Home series, Rosler
successfully linked the comforts and excesses of capitalist consumerism (using images
from House Beautiful) with the bloody, imperialist initiative that was the Vietnam War
(photos from Life). Rather than creating brand new representations of the war, Rosler
10

combined imagery from two mundane and populist U.S.-based publications—allowing
the direct contradictions of the country’s everyday realities to speak for themselves.
In spite of the overt socio-political aims of Rosler’s photomontages, their aesthetic
was borrowed from Pop art. Examples from both series belie, for example, a shared
visual lexicon with James Rosenquist’s monumental canvases. An alignment with Pop
may seem like a stretch for a young woman artist who would soon be known for her
sharp-tongued feminist practice. The photomontages were selected, however, for 2010’s
Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968.
10
Seductive Subversion was a
revisionist exhibition organized around the following thesis: that some women artists
were actually repressed by feminism because of their aesthetic ties to Pop, an infamously
misogynistic movement. Rosler herself hinted at a relationship between Pop and
feminism in “The Figure of the Artist, The Figure of the Woman.”
11
Pop art, she
explained in the text, exposed the social and economic construction of the supposedly
private self, an important action in feminist art as well. Pop’s problem, according to
Rosler, was that it shifted too easily back into being a consumer good. Displayed in the
familiar art-viewing context of galleries and museums, Pop relied too heavily on knowing
viewers capable of discerning the social critique behind the fun and sex it also sold.

10
Seductive Subversion ran at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia from January 22-March 15, 2010
before traveling to cities in Nebraska, New York, and Massachusetts. Kalliopi Minioudaki and Sid Sachs,
editors, Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968, exhibition catalog (Philadelphia: The
University of the Arts, 2010).
11
Martha Rosler, “The Figure of the Artist, The Figure of the Woman,” in Decoys and Disruptions:
Selected Writings, 1975 – 2001 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004): 89-112.
11

Rosler’s photomontages, though they looked like Pop, resisted easy consumption in
two ways. Their highly fragmented aesthetic, where the lines between different worlds
were retained rather than reconciled, helped keep things in perspective (see Figure 4).
Rosler also placed the series in explicit contexts, ones where their critiques could not be
misunderstood or, worse yet, ignored altogether. She eschewed the traditional artist-
dealer relationship and took her work’s distribution into her own hands, handing Xeroxed
copies of the photomontages out at street protests and other community gatherings.
Besides privileging mass-production techniques over the auratic art object, these
photocopied pages created a direct line of communication between an artist and a
carefully-selected audience. Rosler also printed her photomontages in various magazines

Figure 3: Martha Rosler, “Damp
Meat” from Body Beautiful or Beauty
Knows No Pain series (1966-1972).
Figure 4: Martha Rosler, “First Lady (Pat
Nixon)” from Bringing the War Home series
(1967-1972).

12

and underground newspapers, specifically feminist and anti-war ones such as Goodbye to
All That—Newspaper for San Diego Women.
12

The dual-distribution model for the Body Beautiful and Bringing the War Home series,
which eschewed the gallery-dominated system for art reception, shows influences from
Fluxus and early conceptual art. In 1966, Dan Graham launched a related project which
has since been canonized as a seminal example of conceptualism. Entitled Homes for
America, the project took the form of a mock photo-essay on mass-produced, suburban
tract housing.
13
It was, like Rosler’s photomontages, distributed in its original form
outside of the commercial gallery system, a system Graham knew all too well. Prior to
embarking on his own artistic practice, he ran the John Daniels Gallery from 1964 to

12
See Goodbye To All That—Newspaper for San Diego Women issues 3 (October 13, 1970) and 10 (March
9, 1970).
13
For more on Homes for America and Graham’s other work, see Dan Graham: Beyond, catalog for an
exhibition organized by Bennett Simpson and Chrissie Iles at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary
Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).
Figure 5: Dan Graham, Homes for
America (1966-67). Page layout for Arts
Magazine.
13

1965. His experience at the gallery, including its premature closing, taught him about the
role of the magazine or journal in reifying works of art. This motivated him to look at the
complex commercial system linking artists to audiences, and isolate the art magazine’s
complicity therein with Homes for America. He published the piece in magazines and
other publications, with its first run in the December 1966 issue of Arts Magazine.
Graham printed Homes for America in an arts publication, and hence targeted the existing
art audience with his work, albeit from a different perspective. Rosler, in contrast, sought
out different publics for her photomontages, ones defined by dedication to certain social
and political issues, rather than insider status in the art world. The primary mode of
distribution, for her, was by hand and the runs in publications were “sort of an
afterthought.”
14

Rosler’s photomontages were produced before and after her move to Southern
California. She settled in San Diego, enrolling in the University of California, San
Diego’s MFA program in 1971. Over a hundred miles from Los Angeles, the city was
arguably twice-removed from the established art scene. San Diego, in reality, was host to
a growing contingency of cultural expatriates, many of them coming from New York.
One such group coalesced around the home of David and Eleanor Antin. The Antins,
Rosler’s “second family,” also made the move from New York to San Diego in 1968.
15

David was a poet, critic, and writer, and took a position as professor of Critical Studies at
San Diego’s relatively new, more radical UC campus. He and Rosler ran in avant-garde

14
Martha Rosler, email communication with author, January – February 2012.
15
Rosler refers to them as such in Benjamin Buchloh, “A Conversation with Martha Rosler,” Martha
Rosler: Positions in the Life World, edited by Catherine de Zegher (Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 1998): 25.
14

poetry circles back in New York. Eleanor was an artist of the generation just before
Rosler’s. In 2011, Rosler outlined the acquaintances and influences she and Eleanor left
behind when they moved across the country:
We were well aware of performance and radical theater/anti-theater traditions and
knew, for example, Kaprow, Carolee Schneeman, Yvonne Rainer, Fluxus
members, and Vito Acconci—who was then still a poet—though my immersion in
the New York avant-garde was more marginal than Antin’s, as I was somewhat
younger.
16

UCSD attracted left-wing intellectuals from all over the world—Herbert Marcuse,
Fredric Jameson, and Jean-François Lyotard among them—and also brought in artists
like Allan Kaprow and Allan Sekula to fill out its faculty and student body.
For these various outsiders, the move to San Diego—the site of numerous active
military bases during the Vietnam War—involved a sometimes comical clash of
expectations with realities. In an interview from 2009, Eleanor Antin shared an anecdote
about when she and David first arrived, immediately after Robert Kennedy was
assassinated in Los Angeles:
When we drove into town, we saw lots of “Race rental” signs all over the place.
This was Solana Beach, race rentals, oh, my God. We kept saying, “What are we
doing here?” This is horrifying. We were so scared. David was like weirded out
all together and I was in total paranoia. We found out later that race rentals meant
rooms for rent for the racetrack crowd . . . in the next town, Del Mar.
17

The Antins settled into a home by the water, and implemented an open-door policy with
their friends and colleagues from the East Coast. This group included radical feminist

16
Martha Rosler, “The Second Time as Farce,” Idiom, February 21, 2011,
http://idiommag.com/2011/02/the-second-time-as-farce/.
17
Eleanor Antin, interviewed by Judith Olch Richards, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Oral History Interviews (May 8-9, 2009), online transcript at
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-eleanor-antin-15792.
15

writer Kathy Acker, Martha Rosler, and avant-garde composer Peter Gordon, among
others. Rosler and her young son lived, for part of their time in San Diego, in a communal
household, where chores were shared between women and men according to a card
system.
18
The hilly northern region of San Diego, where Rosler and the Antins lived, was
home to a sprawling and eclectic mix of hippy surfers, stars-and-stripes brandishing
military men, and, for a time, Charles Manson and his followers.
In this context, where fundamentalist-fearing paranoia was partially mitigated by salt
air and freshly-squeezed orange juice, both Antin and Rosler began postcard projects.
Their turn to postcards seems related to their move: potentially allowing them, from San
Diego, to continue to engage with audiences in New York and elsewhere. Only Antin’s
project seems to have involved this overt strategy, however, as will be visible both in
terms of the make-up of her mailing list and the eventual installation of her project at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Eleanor Antin’s postcard project, 100 Boots (1971-73), was a serial project consisting
of 51 photo-postcards. For almost two and a half years, Antin sent the cards to a list of
about 1,000 recipients, at rates varying between a few days and five or more weeks. Each
postcard contained a photograph of “the boots”, a brigade of 50 pairs of men’s rubber
boots Antin purchased at an Army-Navy surplus store. Each photograph and
corresponding caption depicted the boots at a certain point in their travels throughout
California and, eventually, across the country to New York City. The boots start out with

18
Martha Rosler, interviewed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, !Women Art Revolution (May 12, 2006),
transcript available through Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources at
https://lib.stanford.edu/files/Martha_Rosler-Updated_2011_03_22.pdf, 11.
16

more mundane, middle-class activities: “100 Boots At the Bank,” “100 Boots In the
Market,” “100 Boots on the Way to Church.” After committing their first crime (“100
Boots Trespass”), they go on a series of misadventures and end up, displayed in both boot
and postcard form, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973.
19

Martha Rosler began distributing her postcard project in 1974. While 100 Boots was
most certainly a model, she made some important changes in her own version. Her
mailing list was much smaller, consisting of about 300 people and entities. She began
locally, with friends, colleagues, and organizations in San Diego and Los Angeles—Los
Angeles Magazine’s Art Department, for example. She had access to Antin’s 1,000-

19
Projects: 100 Boots by Eleanor Antin was on view at MoMA between May 30 through July 8, 1973. In
addition to the postcards, displayed in their entirety, an entire gallery was set aside for the articulation of
the boots’ New York “crash pad” (Figure 7), complete with mattresses, sleeping bags, and a radio. See
MoMA Press Release, no. 41 (May 30, 1973). The project parallels the compelling divergent spaces of
production and reception that have defined Antin’s career. She continues to live and work in San Diego, but
is represented by Ronald Feldman Gallery, in Soho.
Figure 6: Eleanor Antin, “100 Boots
At the Bank” from 100 Boots (1971-
1973).

Figure 7: Installation of
Projects: 100 Boots by
Eleanor Antin at MoMA,
May 30, 1973 – July 8,
1973.
17

strong list, but chose to limit her borrowings from it to a few curators at non-commercial
galleries and institutions, such as Diane Waldman at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum. In a nod to the photomontages, she also included some non-art audience
members: “After the first set was sent, the Village Voice wrote about it, and people on a
‘recipe network’ wrote to me and asked to be included.”
20
The development of Rosler’s
mailing list had less to do with reaching an audience back in New York, and more to do
with the construction of a new, alternative audience for her practice.
Both Antin’s and Rosler’s projects were serialized, and unfolded over time. This
allowed them, in keeping with their exposure to new types of performance via the New
York avant-garde, to engage with their audience members on a level not unlike that of
performance. Rosler’s postcards arrived once a week for roughly twelve weeks, and
Antin’s fluctuated more freely over their two-year window. They both responded, during
these windows, to feedback: Rosler added the recipe group, and Antin acquiesced to
people who asked to be added or removed from her list.
21
Rosler’s trilogy was also,
aesthetically, related to early conceptual practices. The bare-bones, black-and-white
typed card was a familiar trope in conceptualism by the early 1970s. Its legacy stretched
from Robert Morris’ Card File, from 1962, through to the exhibition catalog for Lucy
Lippard’s 1973 women conceptual artists’ exhibition. The former consisted of 44 index
cards, which essentially documented their own making and compilation. The latter, the

20
Martha Rosler, email communication with author, January – February 2012.
21
Eleanor Antin, interviewed by Judith Olch Richards.
18

catalog for c. 7,500, was a loose collection of 30 index cards, including one double-sided
card for each of the artists.
The distinctions between A budding gourmet, McTowersMaid, and Tijuana Maid and
Antin’s 100 Boots go beyond those of address and aesthetics. Antin’s project, though it
has been recognized as conceptual, retained an essence of the auratic art object. The
photo-cards functioned on the level of indexes for the actual boots, which were then
installed in an institutional space in New York. “We built a crash pad for the boots,”
Antin said of the installation, and “you could only see them through a chain locked door
so they remained romantic figures.”
22
Antin’s series was also more easily consumable
than Rosler’s, with each postcard representing a succinct chapter of the boots’ journey.
For the Service trilogy, Rosler presented language without images. She broke her
postcard novels up abruptly, so that no single installment stood on its own. The serialized
distribution took on a more tangible role in the articulation of the project—tangible in the
sense that it likely stimulated audience anticipation and engagement.
“That Was L.A.”
23
: The West Coast Women’s Movement
From the center and periphery, respectively, of the increasingly performance-driven
New York avant-garde, Eleanor Antin and Martha Rosler came to California just as
another movement was beginning to define itself in terms of performance: the West
Coast women’s movement. This movement was arguably more concentrated than its East
Coast counterpart and was born, in part, out of the Feminist Art Program, founded at the

22
Ibid.
23
Martha Rosler, interviewed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, 4.
19

California Institute of the Arts in 1971 by Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago. Schapiro
and Chicago parted ways not long after the program’s founding, and Chicago went on to
form, with art historian Arlene Raven and graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville,
the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman’s Building. This renovated building in Los
Angeles formed the locus of the women’s art movement throughout the following
decade.
The women’s movement in the 1970s was made up of various strains or subsets that
often get neutralized in art historical treatments. The particular program at the Woman’s
Building has been consistently aligned with cultural feminism, as it was by Rosler herself
in “The Private and the Public: Feminist Art in California.”
24
Early cultural feminist
theory centered around Schapiro and Chicago, who shared a mutual epiphany about their
painting styles in the late 1960s. Both artists identified an organic, vaginal imagery in
their otherwise geometric, finish-fetishistic paintings, and claimed to have channeled
such feminine imagery “unconsciously.”
25
Their subsequent writings and teachings came
to be known as the “central vaginal imagery”—or “female imagery”—thesis. This thesis,
while generally associated with the West Coast, was also briefly adopted by the decidedly
East Coast critic and curator, Lucy Lippard.
During its formative years, projects at the Woman’s Building became increasingly
performance-oriented. Some of these performances were expressive in nature and

24
Martha Rosler, “The Private and the Public: Feminist Art in Southern California,” Artforum 16, no. 1
(September 1977): 68.
25
Simon Taylor and Natalie Ng, Personal and Political: The Women’s Art Movement, 1969-1975 (New
York: Guild Hall Museum, 2002): 16.
20

dominated by primitive and psychobiological rituals—the performance equivalents, in
Rosler’s assessment, of the “female imagery” thesis. Others, however, took a different
tack and addressed the social construction of gender, subjectivities, and communities.
Eleanor Antin, who did her first performance in front of an audience at the Woman’s
Building in 1974, became focused on one-woman shows that involved multiple
personae—various selves that were just as legitimate as her “real” self. Suzanne Lacy
was an artist of Rosler’s generation who was very much involved at the Woman’s
Building. Her performances with animal organs, like Maps from 1971, often involved
linking (physically and metaphorically) her body and the bodies of audience members
with the organs, creating flesh-based networks that referred to both the connection and
entrapment potentials of community.
Martha Rosler’s relationship to the Woman’s Building and, by extension, the feminist
art movement was complex. She participated in several programs at the Building,
including two group shows in 1977 entitled Performance Transformations and What Is
Feminist Art? She also had close professional and personal relationships with some of its
artists, including Nancy Buchanan and Suzanne Lacy. She took issue, however, with
several aspects of its program. These included gender determinism, which extended well
beyond imagery and performance personas to the social scaffolding linking the
Building’s artists to their audience. Its model “stressed the development of alternative
institutions rather than a struggle for control of existing ones,” and this is where Rosler’s
critique came in.
26
The facility became a parody of corporate models, complete with

26
Rosler, “The Private and the Public: Feminist Art in Southern California,” 58.
21

galleries, the Sisterhood Bookstore, Dorothy Baker’s Coffee Shop and Photo Gallery, the
Women’s Graphic Center, and Estilita Grimaldo’s Womantours Travel Agency. Besides
populating itself entirely with women, it reinstated the “selectivity of the art world” in
being overwhelmingly bourgeois and Caucasian. Teachers and students collaborated on
projects and then provided built-in art world audiences for those same projects, creating a
closed system of producers and receivers. Outsiders seldom joined the audience, and only
a few critics brought the practices to a larger audience in arts publications. This insular
scope of address is the best explanation for Rosler’s relative distance from the program.
The Woman’s Building was feminism’s equivalent of the Biodome—a valuable
experiment that was both defined and debilitated by its lack of exchange with the outside
environment.
Rosler existed on the fringes of the women’s movement not just in physical terms,
living and working in San Diego, but in theoretical ones as well. Her early work,
including the photomontages and postcard novels, exhibits a consciousness that extends
beyond an immediate, feminist art context, and beyond any contexts familiar to the art
establishment. Her work challenged more than patriarchy, and privileged social issues
relating to class and ethnicity over feminine imagery or personal expression. The artist’s
most active engagement with feminism in the early 1970s was separate not only from the
Woman’s Building, but from the art world in general, and focused in San Diego. She
joined a local, women’s student group and began speaking to members of the
community—high school students and others—about feminism and its anti-war aspects.
27

27
Martha Rosler, interviewed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, 4.
22

The group’s goals did not involve wresting power in corporate sectors (or obtaining equal
art-world representation, for that matter), but empowering women in their everyday
lives—securing reproductive rights and opportunities arrived at through communal
models for daycare and housework.
In contrast to the performance models pioneered at the Woman’s Building, Rosler’s
performances involved an expanded range of activities and new approaches to social
space. With the postcard novels, for example, she redefined the space of reception for art.
Art was and is typically encountered in white-walled, separatist structures—either the
commerce-driven gallery, the “public” museum, or the alternative space.
28
The postcard
novels, in contrast, were encountered in personal spaces not necessarily defined by a
relationship to the art world, namely people’s homes and offices. The activity created
through their distribution was a new and unmediated mode of address between an artist
and multiple publics.
If I moved to California as a semi-lapsed painter but also a maker of photographs,
photomontages, and a bit of sculpture, I soon became a performance artist on the
understanding that performance could be taken to include a spectrum of actions
stretching from guerilla hit-and-run activities to temporary or even long-term
installation.
29
(emphasis added)

The everyday cultural forms, objects and actions Rosler began engaging with looked
familiar, but essentially masked powerful, political content. This move can be read as part
of her response to the theoretical positioning of Herbert Marcuse, whom she has

28
Rosler outlines the unofficial exclusivity of museums in “Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, and Makers:
Thoughts On Audience,” in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975 – 2001 (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2004): 12.
29
Rosler, “Second Time as Farce.”
23

described as the éminence grise of the UCSD campus.
30
Marcuse still idealistically saw
the separatism of the white cube as an opportunity for art to present alternatives to
present realities. Rosler, in contrast, turned to postmodern ideas of blurred or at least
imprecise boundaries between art and life. The everyday forms she began engaging with
included Xeroxes, postcards, cooking shows, and even garage sales. In 1973, she staged
her Monumental Garage Sale in the UCSD gallery, selling off a variety of second-hand
goods and personal mementos over the duration of the installation and performance. She
advertised it as a performance within the arts community, and as a garage sale in local
newspapers.
Besides carving out new spaces for the reception of art, Rosler consistently evoked a
certain type of space with her cultural forms of choice: the domestic interior. She often
put domestic frames around her content, preferring to screen Semiotics of the Kitchen, for
example, on a small monitor rather than projecting it (as a film, rather than a video) on a
gallery wall. The monitor became, for her, “a little box” and a reference to television as
experienced in viewer’s homes rather than as a projection.
31
The diversity of Rosler’s
practice—her refusal to commit to any one medium—may be one reason that her early
production tended to outpace critical reception.
32
Her commitment to domestic contours,
however, was extremely consistent across her early work in video, performance,

30
Martha Rosler, interviewed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, 7.
31
Martha Rosler, interviewed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, 5.
32
In an interview with Christy Lange, Rosler acknowledged a “a ten-year gap between the time when I
make the work and the time when I start receiving positive critical reactions.” Quoted in Christy Lange,
“Bringin’ it All Back Home,” Frieze 95 (November – December 2005),
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/bringin_it_all_back_home.
24

photography, and text. This is not to say, of course, that the work deals with private
concerns—rather that it exposes the very public motivations and repercussions lying
behind decisions made in our private lives. “It is about a kind of framing,” she said of the
Semiotics of the Kitchen monitor, “of women as the creature in the kitchen. And so the
box serves that function of the frame, or the cage, again.”
33

Fluxus and Durational Structures
In her postcard novels, Rosler also used the kitchen as a cage, limiting her characters
to that space almost exclusively. She employed another limiting device, a durational
structure, in the project’s distribution. These two important actions will be examined in
the ensuing chapters: a close reading of the novels and an analysis of their distribution
model. Durational structures and expanded notions of performance, however, should first
be set in relation to Rosler’s early exposure to Fluxus. Fluxus developed in New York
around 1960, and consisted of performances driven by short, instruction-like texts and,
over time, just those texts themselves. George Maciunas named the movement and
attempted to unite it, focusing primarily on the systematic production of George Brecht.
With Brecht, as with Vito Acconci, the line between words on a page and performance
was aggressively blurred. Brecht began mailing his event scores directly to his peers,
removing the need for a formal performance of the pieces.
In Words to be Looked At, Liz Kotz pushes against critical readings (including Lucy
Lippard’s) of language-centric, conceptual practice as the “dematerialization” of the art
object. She identifies, for example, Brecht’s use of language as “a different kind of

33
Martha Rosler, interviewed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, 5.
25

materiality, one structured from the outset by repetition, temporality, and delay.”
34
She
also associates Fluxus, and the experimental music which preceded it, with the use of
durational structures—externally or arbitrarily determined brackets of time. The overt
durational structure in Brecht’s Candle Piece for Radios (1959), for example, is a burning
candle that dictates volume adjustments and other corresponding actions. The primary
example, of course, is John Cage’s silent music composition, 4’33”, which instructs the
performer (of any instrument) to remain silent for three chance-determined movements of
four minutes and thirty-three seconds.
Kotz’s work is useful in its acknowledgment of the materiality of time, specifically
time as defined by absence—of visual stimuli, of sounds, of anything an audience would
come to a performance expecting. The work could consist entirely of absence, in line
with Cage’s 4’33”, or it could play with absences and voids in terms of both their effect
on the rest of the work and their effect on the audience. In “RE” (1967), Vito Acconci
deployed parenthetical pauses of varying lengths, allowing him to play with the actual,
physical space of the page and create an “installation” of words (see Figure 8). More
important in relation to Rosler’s postcard novels, is the notion that “RE” attempts to
direct the audience in time—to control, to an extent, the act of reading. His emptying out
of certain spaces puts a heightened, hyper-emphasis on those words that do appear on the
page.

34
Liz Kotz, Words to be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007): 98.
26

Rosler was exposed to Fluxus through the Antins.
35
David, for example, published
Brecht’s event scores in some/thing, a poetry magazine he co-edited with Jerome
Rothenberg. In the early 1970s, Rosler came into contact with another Fluxus artist, Ray
Johnson. Johnson’s legacy was the development of an extensive mail art network, the
New York Correspondence School.
36
The network, while continuously expanding, was a
closed circuit of producers and receivers not unlike that found at the Woman’s Building.
Rosler and Johnson exchanged postcards around 1973, making her not only aware of but
a part of this network of cultural producers (see Figure 9).

35
Buchloh, “A Conversation with Martha Rosler,” 29.
36
The name for the New York Correspondence School actually came from Ed Plunkett in 1962.
Figure 8: Vito Acconci, “RE” (1967)
27

Ray Johnson was an artist who understood the power of absence with regards to
artistic reception. He eventually removed himself from the New York art scene (a tactic
used by several artists throughout history for distinct ideological, and even aesthetic,
reasons). In the 1960s, prior to his self-imposed exile, he staged a series of Nothings—a
direct counter to Kaprow’s Happenings—at a New York venue. He also developed a
habit of removing all or most of his belongings on the occasion of a planned visit from a
friend or colleague. For such visits to his New York apartment, for example, he moved
everything to a neighbor’s apartment. Later, in his more isolated Locust Valley home, he
moved everything to the second floor. These actions, best defined as subtle maneuvers
against expectations, are testaments to the aesthetic potential of nothing. The divergent
practices of Johnson, Acconci, and Brecht all contain an under-articulated element of
postwar art, whereby absence—of words, images, sound, or the performer’s body—
becomes a sign like any other, reproducible and key in the iteration of the relationship
between artist and audience. Fluxus and related practices, with their blanks, absences, and
ellipses, encourage a considered and corresponding reading of the “blanks” in Martha
Rosler’s postcard novels.
Figure 9: Ray Johnson. Postcard, front and back (c. 1973)
28

CHAPTER TWO: LONG NOVELS AND SLOW ONES
A Close Reading of the Postcard Novels

In any analysis of A budding gourmet, McTowersMaid, and Tijuana Maid, issues of
audience and distribution are key, as their semi-forced reception by a particular audience
is one of their most innovative features. The novels are, in essence, proto-public art
projects. They solicited and engaged with viewers in a context exterior to the white walls
and quiet rooms of museum and gallery space, especially given the relatively public
medium of the postcard.
The Writing Process
Parsing out the actual act and process of writing—as distinct from the project’s printed
form or distribution model—suggests private rather than public space. The legacy of the
Romantic cultural producer is long-standing, having survived the contra-individual
efforts of postmodern theory. This producer is expected to be distant from and even
oblivious of his or her audience, and essentially out-of-touch with everyday concerns.
37

The model has particularly potent implications for female producers, as reflected in a
series of lectures author Virginia Woolf gave at women’s colleges in October of 1928.
Woolf complicated the model for women writers and stressed the difficulty, as the lady of
a house, in finding the space for creative production. “A woman must have money and a
room of her own if she is to write fiction,” she said.
38
On producing her 1960s
photomontages, Rosler said, “I was just compulsively doing these things when my son

37
Martha Rosler discusses the “proscription against a clear-eyed interest in the audience” in “Lookers,
Buyers, Dealers, and Makers: Thoughts On Audience,” Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975 –
2001, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004): 25.
38
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Mariner Books, 1989.
29

went to sleep . . . . Having a child meant that you were not a serious person. It meant that
you were willing to give up studio time for nappy time.”
39
For many women artists,
motherhood also means that the home doubles as the studio.
The 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of artistic production models designed to break
down the image of the isolated and elevated producer. Pop artists and minimalists alike,
Andy Warhol and Donald Judd among them, famously outsourced the production of their
art. Kaprow’s Happenings similarly employed innumerable others in their articulation.
Women artists, especially those on the West Coast and at the Woman’s Building,
collectivized and conceived of performances that were communally-authored. In spite of
the democratic aims of this new production model, reception, criticism, and even artist
self-positioning remained geared towards a single author-artist, as exhibited in the
problematic case of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974-79).
40

Martha Rosler, highly aware of but consciously working outside of the feminist art
program at the Woman’s Building, proceeded differently. In writing a series of novels,
she moved away from ideals of communal authorship, maintaining instead a
straightforward position of autonomous production. She did involve others in the
distribution of the novels, but in a manner that essentially gave them no choice in the
matter, noting that mail, “whether welcome or unwelcome . . . thrusts itself upon you . . .

39
Quoted in “’Seductive Subversion’ at Tufts,” The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research. Posted
April 7, 2011 at http://gregcookland.com/journal/2011/04/07/seductive-subversion-at-tufts/.
40
While Chicago insisted that the Dinner Party was not a collective project, artist and critic Maureen
Mullarkey was quick to point out that “the actual cost, estimated into the millions, of this $250,000-step
into Eden was absorbed by volunteer feminine labor.” See Maureen Mullarkey, "The Dinner Party is a
Church Supper: Judy Chicago at the Brooklyn Museum," originally printed in Commonweal in 1981, now
available at http://www.maureenmullarkey.com/essays/dinnerparty.html.
30

. and must be dealt with in the context of your own life.”
41
She used the postal system to
actively build an audience for her work, and each member of that audience had the
uncanny experience of receiving the work on a one-to-one basis, a model usually
reserved for wealthy collectors and other art world elites and mediated by a dealer.
Reception took place, again, in interior and isolated space—the reader’s home or office.
The audience-building aspect of the Service trilogy had less to do with Rosler’s
professional aspirations (she would resist even joining a gallery until later in her career),
and more to do with securing space and attention for social critique.
42

Written Content
The conflated context for women’s production (attested to by Rosler and summed up
in the term house-work) is explicitly reflected in the written content for A budding
gourmet, McTowersMaid, and Tijuana Maid. In one of the most striking similarities
between the three novels, each narrator is confined, more or less exclusively, to her place
of work, which also happens to be a kitchen. The housewife and the maid populate
middle-class kitchens, while the cook works within the mock-domestic space of a fast-
food restaurant, which pumps out products designed to mimic (however artificially)
home-cooked meals.
The housewife narrating A budding gourmet never leaves her kitchen. She recounts
trips to South America and elsewhere, but always in the past tense and in reduced

41
Martha Rosler, “A Note on One Aspect of Form,” in Service: A Trilogy on Colonization (New York:
Printed Matter, 1978).
42
Rosler did not join a commercial gallery until 1991, when she agreed to show the photomontages at the
Simon Watson Gallery in Soho. The show was entitled Bringing the War Home; Photomontages from the
Vietnam War Era.
31

terms—of how the foods she ate and things she bought could increase the value and
appeal of her own home. Her kitchen is the site of multiple acts and levels of domination.
At the top of the hierarchy is her husband, Len, who expects her to cook, clean, entertain
guests, and care for their children (and who asks her to start cooking more exotic dishes
in the first place). The housewife can and does, however, delegate many of her
responsibilities: “I have a girl come in to help me keep the place up of course because as
Len says I have better things to do with my time.”
43

A budding gourmet’s housewife and Tijuana Maid’s maid are unnamed, allowing for
stock versions of each one to appear in the other’s story. This is the case with the
housewife’s “girl” and with the maid’s ever-expanding list of “patronas”, who speak to
her in unintelligible Spanish and ask her to cook authentic Mexican dishes. “All these
gringos,” the maid laments, “want to eat the food of the poor.”
44
The housewife’s
personal, private version of Western imperialism is carried out twice: in the form of her
(probably Mexican) servant, and in the form of the various cultures she butchers in the
kitchen. All this is aligned with her conviction that living and cooking in “America”
means taking the “best of all times and all places and [making] them our own.”
45
She
means to say, of course, North America, but geographical details are not as important to
her as new imported cheeses at the gourmet market.

43
Rosler, “A budding gourmet,” 4.
44
Rosler, “Tijuana Maid,” 7.
45
Rosler, “A budding gourmet,” 12.
32

The other two novels are equally kitchen-centric. The cook, who presumably has a life
outside of McTowers, never discusses it—the kitchen is the logical battleground for her
small-scale, gastro-revolution. The maid, admittedly, does change sites often, but the
series of bourgeois homes she inhabits remain hauntingly consistent (as in the repeated
appearances of the Home Maid Spanish Cookbook). Food, and the labor involved in its
preparation, are clearly the links between A budding gourmet and the other novels. Both
the housewife and the cook begin experimenting in the kitchen, taking pride in the
results. When Len suggests that the housewife make South American dishes, her response
is two-fold: “I thought ‘the nerve . . .. I don’t even know what’s in it and think of the
time!’ But I was also flattered and thought ‘why not be creative?’”
46
The cook, bored
with peeling apart unrecognizable patties of meat-like mush says, “I began to think—why
not be a little creative?”
47
The maid, in contrast, has no time for creativity. On being
prompted to make tamales, she says, “I’d pretend I didn’t understand.” “I didn’t want to
make tamales for them . . . so I made tacos.”
48
These subtle, culinary connections,
holding the three novels together like a chain of sausage links, present the three women
as products of the same system. Their distinct idioms—Mexican Spanish, proper English
and more slang-infused English—generally serve to distinguish them from one another.
At key, unmistakable moments, however, their discourses overlap, as in the “why not be
creative” example.

46
Ibid., 3.
47
Rosler, “McTowersMaid,” 7
48
Rosler, “Tijuana Maid,” 5.
33

Rosler’s point in highlighting these overlapping moments is not, in contradistinction
with the larger women’s movement, that the three women are essentially the same and
should band together in shared resistance to patriarchy. Rather, her goal in touching on
commonalities is to show their complicity in one another’s struggles, most explicitly the
housewife’s complicity in the maid’s struggle. In the catalog for Lucy Lippard’s 1980
Issue show, Rosler provides the following critical positioning for the postcard novels:
I use everyday cultural forms (stories, postcards, photos, banquets, garage sales)
and more restricted forms (video, audio, film) in fairly simple ways, often
parodying their commercial use, trying to provoke an understanding of how
particular situations—being an illegal immigrant working as a maid, an idealistic
fast-food handler, or a middle-class teenager who starves herself to death—are not
the result of mere idiosyncrasy but are tightly linked to the workings of an
advanced capitalist system, the jobs it needs fulfilled the attitudes and patterns of
behavior it brings about.
49

The three postcard novels were originally distributed separately, but in 1978 Rosler
collaborated with Printed Matter and published them together, under the title Service: A
Trilogy on Colonization. The term service seems most applicable for the maid, who
slaves away in other people’s homes for as little as thirty dollars a week. For the
McTowers cook, it invokes the familiar phrase “service with a smile.” “When a customer
walks in or drives up,” she says, “you step up, look ‘em right in the eye, and smile—
you’re supposed to smile.”
50
For the gourmet, service more readily refers to some
elaborate table setting, a silver tea service she might set out for special guests. It also,
however, brings up the unpaid labor she does at Len’s request. Finally, service refers, in

49
Martha Rosler, “Martha Rosler” in Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists, catalog –for an exhibition
organized by Lucy Lippard (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1980): n.p.
50
Rosler, “McTowersMaid,” 4.
34

animal breeding, to a male animal copulating with a female one. This connotation is
unexpectedly raised when the maid’s first patrona goes out of town:
I was reading in my room one night when the patron knocked on the door. I told
him to wait because I had to get dressed but he came in anyway and leaned over
me. I tried to escape, he grabbed me and we struggled. He was trying to kiss me
and shove me onto the bed. He ripped my underwear.
51

The maid resists him, locking herself in the bathroom until he leaves. “Since that
incident,” she says, “I have met four women who were raped by their bosses, one of them
was made pregnant.” Colonization, in the novels, takes place in both ethnic and sexual
terms, and the two are conflated in this disturbing example.
Decoys and Distantiation
Rosler’s narratives are not designed to make her audience feel good about themselves,
or secure in their values. “I reject the idea,” she says, “of moral uplift as art’s social
use.”
52
Instead, she employs narratives as convenient vessels for delivering her social
critique. A key player in this delivery is the decoy, a term borrowed from hunting but
present in Rosler’s work as a literary device. The decoy refers to her signature character,
rendered regardless of medium to the level of a cardboard cutout. Her decoy always
betrays itself to the audience, forestalling the reader’s emotional identification with the
character as a result. “In written texts,” Rosler writes, “I . . . use humor and satire, and I

51
Rosler, “Tijuana Maid,” 6.
52
Rosler in Issue, n.p.
35

may move a character through impossible development, or have her display contradictory
thoughts and behavior or, conversely, an unlikely transcendent clarity.”
53

In video pieces, Semiotics of the Kitchen, for example, the decoy is articulated through
deadpan, humorous delivery and flattened affect. In the six-minute video, a housewife
(Rosler) is presented as a mock cooking show host. Focused on words and the space
between signs and signifieds, she matches various kitchen tools to each letter in the
alphabet (A is for “Apron”). She acts out the use of each tool, gesturing violently and in a
manners counter to their intended use. When she makes rapid, jabbing gestures with a
fork, for example, she looks straight ahead, at the camera and audience, implying anger
and aggression towards the implements of women’s oppression. Her housewife is an
intimidating combination of Julia Child and a Catholic school nun—the latter of which
ironically often did use supplies as inoffensive as rulers as tools of discipline and control.
Her violent movements, paired with an absent demeanor, immediately register as off and
keep the viewer emotionally at bay as well.
Similar tactics can be traced out in A budding gourmet, where the same type of decoy
is deployed. The housewife is unnamed, underdeveloped, and, like many of Rosler’s
decoys, humorous. Her minimal use of punctuation reads as breathless and flighty, and
her enthusiasm would be laughable if its implications weren’t so unsettling. On choosing
to take a Brazilian, rather than French, cooking class, she explains that “everybody goes
to Europe these days, and things there seem so . . . commercial.”
54
In almost the same

53
Martha Rosler, “For an Art Against the Mythology of Everyday Life,” in Decoys and Disruptions:
Selected Writings, 1975 – 2001, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004): 89-112.

54
Rosler, “A budding gourmet,” 5.
36

breath (on the same postcard), she directly contradicts herself and admits the following:
“Of course, we didn’t bring back as many things from [South America] as we did from
Europe. Fine china from France—what could compare?”
55
The McTowers cook provides
some comic relief as well. She jumps unexpectedly from spiking burgers to kidnapping
her manager, but all the while remains narrow-mindedly focused on her immediate
context—the McTowers franchise—rather than addressing larger issues such as labor
rights and global food production.
Rosler’s decoys conceal a wealth of information: including theory and research into
the social issues being raised. The resources that informed the three Service novels
ranged from actual people to advertisements. For A budding gourmet, Rosler’s sources
included The Art of French Cooking, Gourmet’s Basic French Cookbook, Great Dinners
from Life, and “hundreds of publications on gourmetism, conversations—and ads.”
56
For
McTowersMaid, a major contributor was Virginia, the manager of a McTowers.
57
Tijuana
Maid had the most sources and attributions, including talks with “Josefina Foulks, Laurie
Becklund, Cecilia Duarte, Iris Blanco and others on both sides of the mistress-servant
relationship.”
58
In a 1975 piece for the LAICA Journal, entitled “Immigrating”, Rosler
reflected on several of the places in California that she called home throughout the years.
One was in a largely Mexican neighborhood in Leucadia, where her son befriended a
Mexican boy and she in turn got close to his mother, Maria. “Maria, she writes, “was

55
Ibid., 5.
56
Ibid., 13.
57
Rosler, “McTowersMaid,” 15.
58
Rosler, “Tijuana Maid,” 12.
37

learning English from the TV.”
59
This quotidian context for language-learning may have
driven Rosler to print Tijuana Maid in Spanish, forcing her (presumably) non-Spanish
speaking audience to struggle in kind.
The particular ethnic and political issues informing the Service trilogy relate back to
Rosler’s move to California. The 1970s were a particularly potent time for Mexico-to-
U.S. immigration. In the decades just prior, from 1942 to 1964, the Bracero Program had
brought legal guest-workers to the United States every year. When that program was
abandoned, with no federal replacement, illegal border crossings increased in kind. Near
the end of Tijuana Maid, the maid begins attending meetings with other immigrants. She
reveals that even the legal maids, cooks and gardeners make less than $2 an hour. Illegal
immigrants, she learns, are being increasingly accepted as cheap components of
California’s rapidly expanding economy. The inspectors, she says, “no longer pay $50 for
information about illegals. . . . some of them have illegal maids themselves.”
60

Drawing upon the resources discussed above, Rosler inhabited three very different
lives with Service, even taking on the potentially flawed position of a white, middle-class
woman standing in as a Mexican immigrant. Her use of the decoy and of distantiation
(another self-ascribed term) allowed her to inhabit such a problematic position. “In my
own work I use a strategy of distantiation,” she writes, “to cut against passivity; to
forestall empathic closure, much of my work uses an antinaturalist contradiction-ridden

59
Martha Rosler, “Immigrating,” Journal of the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art No. 4, February
1975.
60
Rosler, “Tijuana Maid,” 10.
38

narrative form.”
61
Alexander Alberro, writing on this aspect of her practice, aligns it with
Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect, “which aims to prevent
spectatorial identification (and thus catharsis) through a variety of methods of acting,
staging, and narrative.”
62

The decoy, with its connotations of two-facedness, aptly summarizes Rosler’s
tendency to camouflage the distinct theoretical discourses informing her work—
Marxism, deconstruction/post-structuralism, and socialist feminism—within highly-
personal, quotidian language and situations alike. Like crudely-formed wooden ducks,
designed to lure birds of the opposite sex into a hunter’s range, Rosler’s decoys function
as distractions for audiences who may not otherwise consume politically-minded content.
For the postcard novels, this includes those members culled from Antin’s mailing list
who represent an art world public. It also serves non-art audiences, for whom overt
references to theory and other academic particularities would quickly lead to complete
alienation (rather than the partial alienation delicately maintained through strategies of
distantiation). There is a level of violence, and certainly deception, involved in the
decoy’s implementation. It also allows Rosler to animate different tropes of womankind,
like Cindy Sherman’s photographic series years later, and refer to the constructed-ness, in
general, of the feminine subject.

61
Rosler in Issue, n.p.
62
Alberro, “The Dialectics of Everyday Life,” 76.
39

CHAPTER THREE: MAILING ADDRESSES AND MODES OF ADDRESS
Distribution of the Postcard Novels

The above close reading of the postcard novels is further informed by a discussion of
their primary, secondary, and tertiary modes of distribution—mail, alternative
publications, and a published book, respectively. With the Body Beautiful and Bringing
the War Home series, Rosler turned her back on the art world, circumventing it entirely
by distributing her work in other contexts. With the postcard novels, she continued to
build up an alternate network, but also toyed with members of the art establishment
(albeit only members of non-commercial entities). She approached them on her terms and
caught them off-guard at their homes and places of work, as opposed to the more
familiar, institutional settings for engagement with art. The Woman’s Building, several
hundred miles north, was a model with a built-in audience. Its members collectively built
and also collectively consumed women’s culture, with students and teachers making up
the bulk of the attendees at performances and openings. Rosler’s postcard novels also had
a built-in audience, but it was one that extended beyond their immediate, academic and/or
feminist context.
The serialization of the postcard novels was one of their most important aspects.
Measured on words alone they are brief, more like novellas than novels. Rosler measured
them, however, based on the length of time they took to arrive as a set, acknowledging
time as a material aspect of the project. Had A budding gourmet been mailed out in
singular form, instead of broken into 12 separate parts, each sentence (each word even)
would not have commanded the same level of attention. By providing just one piece at a
time, over time, she turned her written text into a performance of sorts:
40

A serial communication can hook you, engaging your long-term interest
(intermittently, at least). There was a lot of time—and mental space—around each
installment of these novels, time in which the communication could unfold and
reverberate. So they are long novels, and slow ones.
63

Like the decoy, serialization is a means of putting some distance between the work and
its audience. It represents an act of deception—the conscious and coy withholding of
information in an effort to increase desire and direct attention. Rosler established a
relationship between her audience and the work through the serial form, and each week’s
installment became an opportunity to manage and challenge the expectations involved in
that relationship. Once the series began, the absence of a card, the project’s “blanks,” was
felt as much as its presence.
While the serial mailings will always constitute the original work, Rosler also
distributed it in a few additional forms. Tijuana Maid was republished in the first issue of
Heresies, a feminist magazine, in 1977.
64
McTowersMaid, for its part, was republished in
Socialist Review in 1981.
65
In these representations, Rosler took steps to ensure that the
new audience was aware of the original distribution model. In Heresies, for example,
Tijuana Maid was printed four blocks (or “cards”) to a page, maintaining a sense of its
original, fragmented form. The Spanish version appeared first, followed by a translation.
She chose to print Tijuana Maid, not A budding gourmet, in a feminist magazine, driving

63
Rosler, “A Note on One Aspect of Form.”
64
Heresies—A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics no. 1, January 1977. The collective behind the first
issue consisted of Patsy Beckert, Joan Braderman, Mary Beth Edelson, Harmony Hammond, Elizabeth
Hess, Joyce Kozloff, Arlene Ladden, Lucy Lippard, Mary Miss, Marty Pottenger, Miriam Schapiro, Joan
Snyder, Elke Solomon, Pat Steir, May Stevens, Michelle Stuart, Susana Torre, Elizabeth Weatherford,
Sally Webster, and Nina Yankowitz.
65
Published in Socialist Review no. 58, 1981.
41

home her point that feminist discourse needed to make more room for non-white, non-
middle-class perspectives.
In the first issue of Heresies, Rosler’s work appeared alongside a text with unexpected
resonance with her postcard novels. In “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,”
Adrienne Rich traces society’s different expectations, in terms of honesty, for women and
men. Male honor, she writes, is tied to “a man’s ‘word’”—pledged to other men and
without need of a guarantee.
66
“Women’s honor,” she writes, is “something altogether
else: virginity, chastity, fidelity to a husband.”
Honesty in women has not been considered important. We have been depicted as
generically whimsical, deceitful, subtle, vacillating. And we have been rewarded
for lying.
67

In this model, a woman is expected to be honorable with her body, not with her words.
The Woman’s Building, in part, was formed in resistance to this model, and the
professional distrust among women it harbored. Hence, its programs were centered on
collective effort, openness and sharing. Similarly, Rich calls for the development of “a
truly womanly idea of honor”. She employs and reiterates a binary—of truth and lies—
from modernist thought. Rosler, this study affirms, refused to aspire to such ideals of
truth and purity in her early practice. She embraced an openly inauthentic, deceptive
mode of address (the decoy) just as she embraced interdisciplinary practices and varied
mediums. In this sense, she belongs with a selection of feminist artists informed by
postmodernism, linguistics, and psychoanalysis.

66
Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” in Heresies no. 1 (January 1977): 23.
67
Rich, “Women and Honor,” 23.
42

One of Rosler’s major contributions to the women’s movement is her dedication to
the articulation of class-based problems, not solely sexual ones. In her Service trilogy,
food (more specifically, late capitalism’s effects on human relationships to food) is the
center around which all the protagonists pivot. The housewife’s relationship to food is
forced and unnatural, related entirely to appearances rather than sustenance. “Len,” she
writes, “likes me to make a good appearance for company.”
68
She cooks primarily to
impress her husband and guests, distorting recipes like that for Brazilian black beans in
the process. In Heresies, Tijuana Maid appeared alongside various essays on female
prison inmates and their writing (imprisonment being one way for women to obtain “a
room of one’s own”). In one text, from France’s Group of Five, a female inmate stresses
the importance of magazines—magazines like the ones that helped encourage and shape
Rosler’s gourmet:
About these magazines—we bought them for the recipes that were in them. Often
there were pictures with the recipe, so we would tear them from the magazine and
eat them. For example, if you liked salad, you would eat pictures of salad. We
also ate pictures of chicken, cakes, or things like that.
69

Rosler’s housewife, with all her comforts, may seem miles away from the tragic
absurdity of eating pictures. Yet she treats recipes in strictly visual terms: the colors, the
presentation at a table, etc. She hardly ever describes meals in terms of flavor or nutrition
content. McTowers represents another set of unnatural, food-related idiosyncrasies born
out of late capitalism. The chain’s meat comes from cows raised on antibiotics and
hormones, and its buns are saturated with “a chemical [the cooks] called essence of

68
Rosler, “A budding gourmet,” 4.
69
Groupe de Cinq, “La Roquette, Women’s Prison,” Heresies no. 1 (January 1977): 36-41.
43

bread”.
70
Rosler does not just demand recognition for marginalized groups and the lower
classes with her work (the cook and maid in this case), but also addresses distinctly
middle-class issues. The McTowers customers, some of whom are regulars, signal
obesity: the dark side of convenience, excess, and cost-efficiency.
71
Rosler’s narratives,
like her photomontages, pretend to simply represent the everyday, but then jar the reader
or viewer with the violent introduction of the absurdities and inequalities of that
everyday.
Rosler also distributed the postcard novels in the form of a book, entitled Service: A
Trilogy on Colonization. Publishing the postcards together, where they can be read in one
convenient sitting, seems counter to the motivations behind the original distribution
model. In fact, Rosler took key steps (again) to remind readers of the original documents.
Each page in Service corresponds to one postcard. The novels are broken back up, in
other words, into the installments they were originally mailed in. The backs of pages
remain blank—perhaps referring to the gaps between installments and certainly reflecting
the aesthetics of the original cards. At the end of each individual novel, Rosler inserted
information about the project’s making: title, costs (of postcards and printing), research
sources, and attributions. The book is the approximate size and shape of a postcard, and a
photograph of one of the originals constitutes its back cover. Essentially, the book allows
the postcards to reach a larger potential audience while constantly reminding that

70
Rosler, “McTowersMaid,” 7.
71
In a video from the 1977, Losing: … A Conversation with the Parents, Rosler addresses a disease at the
opposite end of the bourgeois spectrum: anorexia.
44

audience, through a still fragmented form, that they are not encountering the original
work.
The Service trilogy was not, at least in terms of medium, representative of Rosler’s
production as a whole in the 1970s. She did produce other postcard projects, including A
New-Found Career, a serial postcard novel mailed between November 1976 and April
1977. Her other text-based work, however, did not necessarily follow the serial model.
Many pieces were photo and text-based, appearing for the first time in magazines much
like her photomontages. Examples include “She Sees in Herself a New Woman Every
Day,” first published in Heresies in 1977, and the “Know Your Servant Series, No. 1:
North American Waitress, Coffee-Shop Variety,” a photo and text spread published in the
first issue of Entropy in Los Angeles. Of course, Rosler also produced some of her best-
known video projects in the 1970s, including but not limited to A Budding Gourmet
(1974), Losing: … A Conversation with the Parents (1977), and The East is Red, the West
is Bending (1977).
The aspect of Rosler’s practice that persists across these varied mediums is, of course,
the decoy—that representative icon of her strategies of distantiation. As the decoy creates
distance between the art work and the audience, this analysis reads the serial structure of
the postcard novels as an extension of that same strategy. The serial structure enforces
distance in the form of delayed consumption, a play between presence and absence. In
this sense, the postcard novels become not just emblematic but represent a reconciliation
of content with form in Rosler’s early practice.

45

CHAPTER FOUR: RECEPTION AND SECONDARY EXHIBITION
A discussion of the critical reception and exhibition history for the novels—then and
now—leads to a greater understanding of their role in Rosler’s diverse oeuvre. In an
interview from 2005, Rosler acknowledged an ongoing ten-year gap between the
production of her art works and any sort of positive or serious critical reaction.
72
One of
the first “reviews” of her work was written by Artforum’s West Coast contributor, Peter
Plagens, for its March 1975 issue. Plagens, an abstract painter, wrote a positive, self-
described “gushy” review of Billy Al Bengston’s most recent paintings in the same
issue.
73
His review of Martha Rosler’s postcard novels is embedded within a scathing
review of eight different artists whose practices could alternatively be described as
postmodern, conceptual, and feminist. Titled “Indecent Exposure,” the review takes the
form of eight “case histories,” a reference to the personal and psychoanalytic sensibilities
at play in the work. Plagens sarcastically celebrates the new practices for fulfilling
“semiotic yearnings” and bridging the “mythic gap between Art and Life”.
74
He argues
that it all comes at a high price, including potential relegation to institutions, conflating
art institutions with psychiatric ones. Essentially, Plagens criticizes the work for its
indecent exposure of the personal and/or pubic, which he takes as a new type of career
advancement. One target, for example, is Lynda Benglis’ already infamous Artforum ad:
CASE HISTORY NO. 2, “Exposing the Body,” or “Who’s Got the Maja”: Lynda
B________, a former eurhythmics addict, flitted impulsively from coast to coast

72
Lange, “Bringin’ It All Back Home,” http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/bringin_it_all_back_home.
73
Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New York: Soho Press, 2000): 425.
74
Peter Plagens, “Indecent Exposure,” Artforum 13, no. 7 (March 1975): 56.
46

unable to decide on a permanent airline or hair color. Clutching a tattered
Getaway Card, Ms. B_________ took a leap of faith: flaunting her backside on a
flyer. Healing rapidly, she then appeared in polaroid photographs, the published
one showing her with bare _________s, oiled and glistening, clutching a huge
plastic ________ to her ________. Ms. B________ now lives by the shore, the
mother of a healthy baby controversy.
75

Several aspects of Plagen’s “review” are hard to stomach. It parodies, in a rare case of
equal representation for the Artforum of the 1970s, more women artists than men. The
male artists targeted are close to the women’s movement. For example, he lambasts Chris
Burden for a performance in which he arranged to have himself shot in the arm,
diagnosing the artist’s drive as Careerus Sensationalis. Other victim-patients include
Vito Acconci and Rosler’s good friend, Eleanor Antin. Plagens himself is guilty of the
kind of sensationalism and show-boating he attacks. It’s evident in his sly but also violent
eradication of artists’ names (as he meanwhile provides plenty of information for art
world insiders to quickly get in on the joke). Each “case history” is matched with a
photographic parody, starring Plagens and shot by his wife. He dresses up, for example,
in a wig and apron to spoof Rosler’s housewife, even though the quote he culls is from
McTowersMaid.
CASE HISTORY NO. 1, “Exposing the Mind,” or Swann’s Syndrome: Anxiety,
like virus strains, grows immune to the usual panaceas. Grating esthetic worry
pursued Martha R________ from post-graduate sinecure near L___________,
California to the Big Apple. Up against the dialectical wall, she quickly converted
an affection for gourmand food to Beuystown politics:
The other cooks noticed and started to grumble. But why would they care?
I’d see them whispering and catch their dirty looks. Finally a cook spoke
to me in the john. The others thought it was wrong, she said, to act on my
own.

75
Ibid., 56.
47

Further stanzas from White Tower’s Stella Dallas are as equally wrenching, but
structuring whole days around dropping postcards into mailboxes has proved
distracting enough. Ms. R________ is doing her own dishes again.
76

Plagens’ particular brand of rodeo clown criticism can be easily dismissed, but his
general gripe that women’s art (and men’s art like it) is too personal and expository was
not unusual in the 1970s and early1980s. Feminism’s subject-centered inquiries made it
difficult to align not just with the last-ditch efforts of abstract expressionism, but also
with the new set of practices garnering art world attention: conceptual art. Artists like
Rosler, art historian Jayne Wark warns, were indeed engaging with conceptualism, but
were forced to twist its rigid premises in keeping with their growing alignment with the
civil rights and feminist movements.
77
Female conceptual artists, in Wark’s reading, are
not an oxymoron, but rather provide harsh (and needed) criticism of conceptualism’s
apolitical, ahistorical, and gender-neutral self-presentation.
This dual action of engaging in but also rejecting conceptualism was certainly not
limited to women artists, but extended to any artists interested in injecting political and
social issues directly into their work. During her graduate study in San Diego, Rosler
regularly met with a group of producers, mostly photographers who fell into this
category. They included Allan Sekula, Fred Lonidier, Phil Steinmetz, and Brian Connell,
and as a group they often had informal debates with David Antin, and Herbert Marcuse.
78

These producers, like Rosler, combined their political sensibilities with conceptual

76
Ibid., 56.
77
Jayne Wark, “Conceptual Art and Feminism: Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, and Martha
Wilson,” Woman’s Art Journal 22, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 2001): 44-50.
78
Buchloh, “A Conversation with Martha Rosler,” 32.
48

models. Fred Lonidier’s Twenty-nine Arrests (1972), for example, was a direct response
(or parody) of Ed Ruscha’s conceptual photo-books, including Thirty-four Parking Lots
(1967). Lonidier, like Rosler, sought out a new audience for his work, showing in public
buildings and union halls in addition to arts venues.
79

In light of criticism’s difficulty in aligning conceptual art with feminism and
“political” art, Martha Rosler penned her own critical and theoretical texts. These texts
helped to situate her work as, over time, the art world came around to it. In the 1970s and
1980s, Rosler wrote essays for Plagens’ own Artforum, for the LAICA Journal, for
Artweek, The Fox, Afterimage, and wedge.
80
This is the context where the theoretical and
academic veins informing her work—names like Brecht, Jameson, McLuhan, Kaprow
and Acconci and terms like Marxism, capitalism, postmodernism and post-
structuralism—are directly discussed, sans decoy. She has published numerous books
including Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings: 1975-2001. “I chose to speak for
myself,” she has said, “I wrote about my own work and that of others”.
81

Secondary Exhibitions
Rosler set out to manage her own critical reception and, with the postcard novels, also
set out to construct her own audience (a task historically outsourced to dealers and
curators). The postcard novels, in the sense that their distribution constituted an essential

79
More information on Lonidier’s work can be found in Benjamin Buchloh, Art & Ideology exhibition
catalog (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984).
80
For a selection of her writing, see "The Private and the Public: Feminist Art in California," in Artforum,
September 1977; “For an Art Against the Mythology of Everyday Life," in LAICA Journal, June-July
1979; and "Notes on Quotes," in wedge, no. 2, Fall 1982.
81
Jane Weinstock, “Interview with Martha Rosler,” October 17 (Summer 1981): 77-98.
49

and material part of the project, embodied their own exhibition context. Rosler refers to
them as activities carried out in time, rather than a set of inanimate art objects. “When
they are shown,” she says, “in art world institutions, they are representing themselves as
mail works.”
82

The exhibitions Rosler was and was not included in in the 1970s reveal the difficulty,
again, critics and curators had in situating her work according to new categories for
American art, categories like feminism, conceptualism, and so on. The tendency seems to
have been to plug her into shows organized around medium (mail art shows and video
exhibitions) rather than placing her according to these critical categories. Between 1975
and 1977, for example, she was included in the following group shows: Artists' Video
Tapes, Southland Video Anthology, Seven Evenings of Women's Video, Televised Video
Art, Artists' Postcards and Books, First New York City Postcard Show, and the Last
International Exhibition of Mail Art '75.
83

A quick review of the cultural production of Lucy Lippard, one of the few critics
and curators who dedicated herself to feminist practice, reveals an exhibition where the
social implications of Rosler’s early practice were successfully rendered explicit. In
1971, Lippard curated Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists at the Aldrich Museum
in Connecticut.
84
Her curatorial process for the show, simply stated, involved selecting

82
Buchloh, “A Conversation with Martha Rosler,” 45.
83
Held, respectively, at Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; Los
Angeles Women's Video Center; La Mamelle/CATV Channel 8, San Francisco; Other Books & So Gallery,
Amsterdam; Contemporary Arts Gallery, New York University; and Arte Nuevo Gallery, Buenos Aires.
84
The artists included were: Cecile Abish, Alice Aycock, Cynthia Carlson, Sue Ann Childress, Glorianna
Davenport, Susan Hall, Mary Heilmann, Audrey Hemenway, Laurace James, Mablen Jones, Carol Kinne,
Christine Kozlov, Sylvia Mangold, Brenda Miller, Mary Miss, Dona Nelson, Louise Parks, Shirley
50

women artists who had not yet had a solo show. In the exhibition catalog, Lippard treated
women’s art as its own style: “As a framework within which to exhibit good art,” she
writes, “it is no more restrictive than, say, exhibitions of German, Cubist, black and
white, soft, young, or new art.”
85
By 1980, Lippard replaced the ambiguity of Twenty Six
Contemporary Women Artists with Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists at the ICA
in London.
86
“In the early days of the feminist art movement,” Lippard wrote in the
catalog, “we were looking for shared images.”
87
Actively revising her own art historical
production, she contrasts this myopic vision with the stated goals of Issue:
Issue scrutinizes that branch which is ‘moving out’ into the world, placing so-
called women’s issues in a broader perspective and/or utilizing mass production
techniques to convey its messages about global traumas such as racism,
imperialism, nuclear war, starvation and inflation to a broader audience.
88

Lippard’s criticism evolved, over a decade-long period, from identifying all women
artists as “sisters” in a common struggle, to calling not just common imagery but
common experiences into question (“so-called women’s issues”). With this questioning,
she came more in line with Martha Rosler’s criticism, which traced the unique

Pettibone, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, Reeva Potoff, Paula Tavins, Merrill Wagner, Grace Bakst
Wapner, Jacqueline Winsor, and Barbara Zucker.
85
Lucy Lippard, “Prefaces to Catalogues of Women’s Exhibitions (three parts),” in From the Center:
Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (Dutton, 1976): 38.
86
The artists in Issue included: Ariadne: A Social Network (Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz), Nicole
Croiset and Nil Yalter, Fenix: A Cooperative Travelling Installation (Sue Richardson, Monica Ross, Kate
Walker), Margaret Harrison, Candace Hill-Montgomery, Jenny Holzer, Alexis Hunter, Maria Karras, Mary
Kelly, Margua Kramer, Loraine Leeson, Beverly Naidus, Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, Miriam Sharon,
Bonnie Sherk, Nancy Spero, May Stevens, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Marie Yates.
87
Lucy Lippard, “Issue and Tabu”, in Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists, exhibition catalog
(London: institute of Contemporary Arts, 1980): n.p.
88
Ibid., n.p.
51

experiences and self-articulations of individuals back to large-scale, even global
inequalities born out of capitalism and ongoing Western imperialism.
Rosler was not included in Lucy Lippard’s 1973 show on women conceptual artists, c.
7,500.
89
The postcard novels, with their overtly conceptual aesthetic of the typed card,
had not yet been produced, and Rosler was still a student at the time. The novels,
however, deserve comparison to work by two artists who were in the exhibition, Eleanor
Antin and Adrian Piper.
90
What stands out immediately, in looking at the three practices,
is the preponderance of the highly postmodern development of multiple personae. In
Eleanor Antin’s work from the 1970s, we encounter Eleanora Antinova, the King of
Solana Beach, the Black Movie Star and the Nurse. In 1973, Adrian Piper began strolling

89
Held at the California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, CA.
90
For a discussion of the three artists, focused in terms of Rosler on the photomontages, see Jayne Wark’s
“Conceptual Art and Feminism: Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, and Martha Wilson.”
Figure 10: Adrian Piper, “Village
Voice Ad No. 1” from the Mythic
Being series. Published September 27,
1973 as part of a series of 17 monthly
ads

52

the streets as her alter ego, the Mythic Being. As the Being, Piper—a mixed-race woman
with light skin—donned an afro, moustache, and behavior that registered as masculine.
The work persists only as documentation of her public performances, and as a selection
of Village Voice ads and Photostat posters. Both depict the Mythic being with thought
bubbles, containing what could be read as his own thoughts along with some quotes from
Piper’s journal. For Antin and Piper, these characters and self-characterizations persisted
in their work across mediums, through performance and documentation, just as Rosler’s
housewife from A budding gourmet persists throughout performances and video.
More compelling in the discussion of these women conceptual artists is their use of
absence or, to reverse a phrase from Jayne Wark, their joint recognition and manipulation
of the real and powerful presence of absence. They seem to have utilized absence
specifically with their most politically-charged pieces. Piper, for example, experienced
something of a professional crisis in the Spring of 1970. Having just experienced the first
signs of success as an artist, she watched a series of unholy events unfold, including the
bombing of Cambodia and police brutality against Kent and Jackson State protestors.
91

Her response was to rework an existing submission for the New York Cultural Center’s
Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects show, presenting a statement in place of an art
object:
The work originally intended for this space has been withdrawn. The decision to
withdraw has been taken as a protective measure against the increasingly
pervasive conditions of fear. Rather than submit the work to the deadly and
poisoning influence of these conditions, I submit its absence as evidence of the

91
Adrian Piper, Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object (Bari, Italy: Marilena
Bonomo, 1975): 38-39.
53

inability of art expression to have meaningful existence under conditions other
than those of peace, equality, truth, trust and freedom.
92
(emphasis added)

In an impotent voiding out of her self-inscribed absence, Piper’s statement was left out of
the Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects catalogue. In Eleanor Antin’s work, absence
took the form of props and puppets. This tactic is clear in her later performances, as in
Before the Revolution, wherein she staged an entire play starring herself and a set of life-
size puppets.
93
It also comes up, however, in 100 Boots and other earlier projects, where
commodities often stand in for individuals. For California Lives, a series Antin produced
after moving to San Diego, various “portraits” of both real and fictional women were
rendered in the form of objects—all consumer goods ordered out of the Sears catalogue.
94

Absence, in Rosler’s work, is rendered in both content and distribution. It is involved
in her use of the decoy, which (like one of Antin’s puppets) indexes both presence and
absence and thereby cuts short the audience’s tendency to self-identify in spite of the
narrative form. With the postcard novels, absence also played a part in distribution,
setting up expectations with a consistent serialization—a durational structure, of sorts.
Displayed after the fact, on museum or gallery walls, the postcards appear without their
durational scaffolding. Without it, they become difficult to take in, as art-viewing spaces
are not usually conducive to reading.

92
Quoted in Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997): 168.
93
Performed in 1979 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
94
Eleanor Antin, interviewed by Judith Olch Richards. California Lives showed at Gain Ground in New
York in 1969.
54

Recent exhibitions focused on the novels’ role in both feminist and conceptualist veins
of California art production emphasize that (while they resisted uncomplicated
consumption in their original distribution) they refuse consumption in a traditional,
institutional art-viewing context even more stubbornly. In State of Mind: New California
Art Circa 1970, a small selection of postcards was displayed in a vitrine, some with their
text-side up, and others flipped over to display their recipients and addresses. In
Greetings from L.A. Artists and Publics, 1950-1980, at the Getty Research Institute, they
were pinned to the wall like butterflies, text sides only. The latter exhibition surrounded
them with other works never really intended for an institutional setting—flyers, notes and
other ephemera from alternative California art spaces—recognizing that their
challenging, aloof institutional presence was not an accident.

55

CONCLUSION
Frances Stark is a young woman artist working today, whose practice owes something
to Martha Rosler’s enigmatic postcard novels, specifically in terms of an awareness of the
power and presence of absence. Her practice, even more than Rosler’s, is dominated by
language. While Rosler maintained a strict distinction between her text-based art works
and her critical and theoretical writing, those lines are sumptuously blurred in Stark’s
cultural production. For Structures that Fit my Opening and Other Parts Considered in
Relation to Their Whole, a solo show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 2006,
Stark staged a self-removal. She commanded her own opening in absentia, sending in a
25-minute, self-run PowerPoint presentation in her place. The presentation’s slides
consisted of mostly blank, white screens with short phrases rendered in stout, black font.
It was divided into ten sections, with each title referring to fragmentation or parts:
“private part,” “my parts, or rather, my pieces,” “one part never feels full,” and so on.
95

The undertone of control, in PowerPoint, is more explicit than in a conventional
written text, associated as it is with corporate business-building and slick information-
shuttling. In Stark’s presentation each slide hung in the air for several seconds, imparting
its text with increased drama, intensity, or humor. Blank slides played an important role
as well, not unlike the gaps in circulation with Martha Rosler’s postcard novels.

95
Mary Leclere, “For Some Perverts the Sentence Is A Body: On the Work of Frances Stark,” “Structures
the Fit My Opening” and Other Parts Considered in Relation to Their Whole, exhibition catalog (Houston:
The Glassel School of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, 2007): 8.
56

Well it’s sad really. / I mean there’s nothing more persistently agonizing / than
the desire to appear beautiful / --nothing worse, really, than trying to become
who you aren’t. / (BLANK).
96

Frances Stark’s PowerPoints, like Rosler’s postcard novels, propose to make the personal
public, engaging that familiar phrase from feminist criticism. Throughout her cultural
production, Stark’s writing is profuse and highly-personal, even narcissistic. Texts on
other artists inevitably pivot back to a focus on herself: on her experiences as an artist, a
woman, and a woman artist. The issues she cycles back to again and again involve
motherhood, the conflated space of production for women artists (wherein home equals
studio), and the systematic production of artists in university MFA programs. Her style of
writing is distantly reminiscent of Peter Plagens, who made his review of eight
conceptual artists into a work of his own in 1975. Plagens reflected, much later in his
career, on his particular brand of criticism:
I once wrote a negative thing about Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word, and called
him a “milk and cookies Hunter Thompson.” But I regarded myself fearfully, in
the darkest hours of the night, as a milk and cookies Hunter Thompson. Namely a
gonzo guy. . . . gonzo journalism meant you wrote about your reaction to writing
about something as much as you wrote about it.
97

Plagens’ confession brings to mind Stark’s “Always the Same, Always Different,” a
review of Ed Ruscha’s new paintings for the 51
st
Venice Biennale. In the text, Stark
recounts her failure to keep mum about the new works, “secretly” spilling the beans to
several friends. She also shows Ruscha’s The Old Tool and Die Building (2004) to the
owners of the Great Wall bookstore, attempting to get a translation of the painting’s

96
Frances Stark, Frances Stark: Collected Works (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig,
2007): 138.
97
Newman, Challenging Art, 378.
57

Chinese characters. If gonzo journalism entails writing about the act of writing, Frances
Stark’s work can be described as gonzo art-making, consisting as it does of texts and
quasi-performances about the act of making and, at times, not-making art.
The seemingly frank, autobiographical content of Stark’s work could serve to
distinguish her from Rosler. Stark, however, proves to be just as strategic and self-aware
in her positioning. Her engagement with the personal, like Rosler’s, proves to be a
highly-crafted vehicle for socio-political and theoretical arguments, whose consumption
by an audience is controlled through the use of precise durational structures. Stark uses
herself as a kind of decoy in her writing, as observed by Susan Kandel, her editor at
art/text, who eloquently outed her in 2001:
Frances, you’re two-faced, but don’t worry—I mean that in a good way. First
things first, and what’s first, in your writing as well as your artwork, is fragility.
Talk about meandering, false starts, back-tracking, second- and third-guessing,
laments about what you don’t know and can’t do . . . But this lightness is only one
side of everything you make and say. The other is sly and utter control. I’ve
figured out why your column comes in dead last every issue. Your wonderfully
self-deprecating excuses aside, you don’t want me to have time to fuck around
with your words. Passive-aggressive comes to mind here, and it’s been highly
underrated as an aesthetic/textual strategy.
98
(emphasis added)

In this specific example, of Stark submitting work late, time is used as a means of control
just as it is in the postcard novels—to deny or at least delay a sense of ownership on the
recipient’s part. It is a power centered on a removal or a withholding of information. In
her artistic practice (again, almost indistinguishable from her writing) Stark often
removes herself from situations, creating quasi-performances in the process.

98
Frances Stark, “All Things to All People,” in Frances Stark, Collected Writing: 1993-2003 (London:
Book Works, 2003): 16-22.
58

In 1997, Stark jotted a quote from Lee Lozano, another woman conceptual artist from
a generation before Rosler’s, down on a telephone bill: “’twas beauty that killed the beast
and ‘tis beauty that’ll save the plan-it (the Plan-It Earth).”
99
Lozano, like Martha Rosler,
began as an abstract expressionist painter, but she is arguably best known for her General
Strike Piece. Begun in 1969 and carried out until her death in 1999, it involved her slow
and staged withdrawal from the art world. Concomitant with the strike was her “boycott
women” project, which began with the following entry in her notebook:
1ST WEEK AUGUST, 71: DECIDE TO BOYCOTT WOMEN. THROW LUCY
LIPPARD’S 2ND LETTER ON DEFUNCT PILE, UNANSWERED. DO NOT
GREET ROCHELLE BASS IN STORE. 2ND WK AUGUST, 71: PAULA
RAVINS CALLS AUG 11. TELL HER I AM BOYCOTTING WOMEN AS AN
EXPERIMENT THRU ABT SEPT. & THAT AFTER THAT
“COMMUNICATION WILL BE BETTER THAN EVER.”
100

Intended as a month-long experiment, Lozano’s boycott continued to varying degrees of
severity for the rest of her career. Her notes, which persist as the only documentation of
her conceptual projects, look not unlike the event scores and Fluxus performance
instructions examined in such depth by Liz Kotz.
In the spring of 2007, Stark staged her own withdrawal from a symposium in Utrecht.
The symposium was part of “If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to be Part of Your
Revolution … Feminist Legacies and Potentials in Contemporary Art Practice”, curated
by Frederique Bergholtz and Annie Fletcher. It was made up of presentations by critics
and artists, including Jan Verwoert and the Otolith Group, and a series of films
programmed by Yvonne Rainer. Stark, for her part, phoned her presentation in from Los

99
Frances Stark, Collected Works, 70.
100
Lee Lozano, Notebooks 1967-70 (New York: Primary Information, 2010): n.p.
59

Angeles. Reading from a pre-formed text, she led the audience through a private
dilemma: the decision of whether or not to attend the symposium. She labored over how
it might affect her work, and her young son. She cleverly turned her non-presence into a
discussion of the implications of motherhood for women artists. Her son, for his part,
could be heard in the background—making the whole performance reminiscent of a
Martha Rosler video from 1978, Domination and the Everyday.
101
In Rosler’s video,
images and written text exploring political oppression in Chile were juxtaposed with two
things: North American advertisements (more images), and an audio track of quotidian
conversation between Rosler, the artist-mother, and her young son. William Olander,
writing on the video, said “Lest one not get the point that this work is a critique produced
by a radical feminist and not intended to be consumed easily and rapidly, as are most
products of the culture industry, the images and texts are repeated a second time, as the
mother-son (a classic domestic exchange) dialogue continues.”
102
In Stark’s telephone
performance, the juxtaposition is between a highly personal text and a very deliberate
withholding of the physical self.
An awareness of the power and presence of absence, identified in this study as an
important aspect of women’s conceptual work, spans across decades. Stark’s texts,
admittedly, have more to do with the socio-economic specificities of being a woman
artist in a capitalist society, than with the larger inequalities addressed by Rosler. She also

101
Domination and the Everyday (1978), 30-minute video.
102
William Olander, Women & the Media, New Video, exhibition catalog (Oberlin: Allen Memorial Art
Museum, 1984). Reprinted in Olander, William. “Women and the Media: A Decade of New Video.”
Resolution: A Critique of Video Art, edited by Patti Podesta (Los Angeles: Los Angeles
ContemporaryExhibitions, 1986).
60

questions the art world from within, showing in galleries, museums, and international
biennials, something Rosler has begun to do only in the latter part of her career. Most
feminist artists understood, even by the mid-1970s, the limitations and oppressive
qualities in visual representations of the feminine—particularly female anatomy. Martha
Rosler’s expanded feminism, like Frances Stark’s, also involves an understanding of both
the limitations and opportunities in language. This thesis presents Rosler’s postcard
novels, particularly their serialization and control of the reader’s consumption, as a
cautious implementation of language based on this brand of feminism. Rosler’s joint use
of strategies of distantiation, durational structures, and alternate modes of address
(exterior to the formal, less accessible spaces our culture provides for art) mitigated the
threat of misunderstanding and misuse—of engagement with the postcards as pleasurable
objects rather than profound measures of social ills and everyday realities.

61

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alberro, Alexander. “The Dialectics of Everyday Life: Martha Rosler and the Strategy of
the Decoy.” In Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World, edited by Catherine de
Zegher, 72-112. Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 1998.

Antin, Eleanor. Interviewed by Judith Olch Richards. Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution Oral History Interviews. May 8-9, 2009. Online transcript
at http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-eleanor-
antin-15792.

Buchloh, Benjamin. “A Conversation with Martha Rosler.” In Martha Rosler: Positions
in the Life World, edited by Catherine de Zegher, 23-55. Birmingham: Ikon
Gallery, 1998.

Groupe de Cinq. “La Roquette, Women’s Prison.” Heresies no. 1 (January 1977): 36-41.

Kotz, Liz. Words to be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.

Lange, Christy. “Bringin’ it All Back Home.” Frieze 95 (November – December 2005).
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/bringin_it_all_back_home.

Leclere, Mary. “For Some Perverts the Sentence Is A Body: On the Work of Frances
Stark.” “Structures the Fit My Opening” and Other Parts Considered in Relation
to Their Whole, exhibition catalog. Houston: The Glassel School of Art, The
Museum of Fine Arts, 2007.

Lippard, Lucy, editor. Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists, exhibition catalog.
London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1980.

Lippard, Lucy. “Prefaces to Catalogues of Women’s Exhibitions (three parts).” in From
the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art. Dutton, 1976.

Lippard, Lucy. Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.

Lozano, Lee. Notebooks 1967-70. New York: Primary Information, 2010.

Minioudaki, Kalliopi and Sid Sachs, editors. Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists,
1958-1968, exhibition catalog. Philadelphia: The University of the Arts, 2010.

Newman, Amy. Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974. New York: Soho Press, 2000.

62

Ng, Natalie and Simon Taylor. Personal and Political: The Women’s Art Movement,
1969-1975. New York: Guild Hall Museum, 2002.

Olander, William. Women & the Media, New Video, exhibition catalog. Oberlin: Allen
Memorial Art Museum, 1984.

Piper, Adrian. Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object. Bari,
Italy: Marilena Bonomo, 1975.

Plagens, Peter. “Indecent Exposure.” Artforum 13, no. 7 (March 1975): 56-57.

Rich, Adrienne. “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying.” In Heresies no. 1 (January
1977): 23-26.

Rosler, Martha. “The Figure of the Artist, The Figure of the Woman.” Decoys and
Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975 – 2001. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004: 89-
112.

Rosler, Martha. “For an Art Against the Mythology of Everyday Life,” in Decoys and
Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975 – 2001. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004: 3-8.

Rosler, Martha. “Immigrating,” Journal of the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art
no. 4 (February 1975).

Rosler, Martha. Interviewed by Lynn Hershman Leeson for !Women Art Revolution. May
12, 2006. Transcript available through Stanford University Libraries and
Academic Information Resources at https://lib.stanford.edu/files/Martha_Rosler-
Updated_2011_03_22.pdf.

Rosler, Martha. “Lookers, Buyers, Dealers, and Makers: Thoughts On Audience.”
Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975 – 2001. Cambridge: MIT Press,
2004: 9-52.

Rosler, Martha. “The Private and the Public: Feminist Art in Southern California.”
Artforum 16, no. 1 (September 1977): 66-74.

Rosler, Martha. “The Second Time as Farce.” Idiom (February 21, 2011).
http://idiommag.com/2011/02/the-second-time-as-farce/.

Rosler, Martha. Service: A Trilogy on Colonization. New York: Printed Matter, 1978.

Stark, Frances. Frances Stark: Collected Works. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung
Walther Konig, 2007.

63

Stark, Frances. Frances Stark, Collected Writing: 1993-2003. London: Book Works,
2003.

Wark, Jayne. “Conceptual Art and Feminism: Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, Eleanor
Antin, and Martha Wilson.” Woman’s Art Journal 22, no. 1 (Spring-Summer
2001): 44-50.

Weinstock, Jane. “Interview with Martha Rosler.” October 17, (Summer 1981): 77-98.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This study addresses Martha Rosler’s trilogy of postcard novels and her mode of distributing them between 1974 and 1976 as a conscious decision by a woman artist to build a particular audience for her practice. The analysis centers not only on the postcards themselves, but also on the week-long gaps between them—the precise aspect of the project which cannot be reconstituted in any traditional art-viewing context. Serialization, or a play between absence and presence, ensures an engaged audience and proves to be a particularly potent strategy for women artists. To that end, this thesis involves a considered reading of the project, including the factors that led up to it: influences of performance, Fluxus, and early conceptual practices in New York in the 1960s

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Asset Metadata

Creator White, Adrienne M. (author)

Core Title Performed absence and a pre-formed audience: Martha Rosler's postcard novels and their implications for feminist art practice from the seventies to today

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 05/08/2012

Defense Date 05/30/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag conceptual art,feminism,Fine Arts,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Tain, John (committee chair), Anastas, Rhea (committee member), Flint, Kate (committee member)

Creator Email amarie.white@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-35391

Unique identifier UC11289468

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Legacy Identifier etd-WhiteAdrie-793.pdf

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Rights White, Adrienne M.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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