Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Martha Rosler
American; 20th-century
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum
86%
Semiotics of the Kitchen. 1975. Video
The further we get from its second-wave feminist setting in history, the more formal subtlety this piece reveals itself to have. (So long, of course, as we consider a conceptual artwork's "form" to be the various ideas and gestures and conflictual meanings that contribute, in concert, to the effect it has on us as a work of art.) At first, the piece appears to be pretty one-trick, what with its sole repeated process and Rosler's deadpan affect through all her repetitions. But then you notice the slightly different import which one type of movement performed with one particular tool might have as compared with all the other movements and tools, and so you start to see, too, that all these bizarre significances in sequence build on each other to create a context of pure asemic chaos. By the time Rosler starts stiltedly swinging her knife through the air near the end of the piece, you at once have been robbed of the mental container in which to place this simple act of "stabbing," and also somehow feel — almost as an essence — what stabbing is. And so Rosler's piece doesn't merely tell you about semiosis (which is where conceptualism of lesser value would have stopped short) but demonstrates its poetic potential. (Points lost, though, for the anonymous quality of the video — conceptual art's cross-to-bear is the difficulty of presenting it as conceptual art-proper.) (TFS, 2026)