In recent years, Brooklyn-based artist Martha Rosler has established a traveling library of her books, a non-traditional exhibition that is the culmination of an artistic career devoted to a radical reading and research practice. In an interview with the artist this past November, Rosler claimed as precedent for the library her visit to Donald Judd’s library in Marfa, Texas where the books could not be handled, let alone read. In contrast, the books in Rosler’s library can be read by all visitors. Through her traveling library, Rosler emancipates her books from the privacy of the domus and from the interiority of a private reading practice. In libraries, we read among others. Sometimes we even read aloud with people, though this is unfortunately rare.
 
What does it mean to read for or with people? How can reading with others constitute a conatus, a social space in which subjects are co-constitutive (or born) with one another? How can reading be for a public good, for the sake of critique, analysis, evaluation? How can reading become a practice involving the whole body? These are questions raised by Rosler’s œuvre, especially her video works beginning in the 70s, which began to put forth a live performance practice of reading, involving both the word and body as sites of counter-hegemonic strategy. Such practices extend from civil disobedience in the 60s whereby, as Martin Luther King Jr. writes, “we had no alternative except that of preparing for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and national community” ("Letter from Birmingham City Jail," 1963). It also extends from the culture’s intuitive sense of the body under threat of disappearance, harm, and disavowal after Vietnam, Kent State, Birmingham, and any number of other violent confrontations during the late 60s and early 70s. These conflicts, mediated by an unprecedented dissemination of graphic documentary images in print, on television, and in film, form the backdrop to the emergence of certain “live” art forms and participatory intermedia performance practice of the period.  
 
In an age of “tactical media”—media used to counteract the coercive effects of mass media—Rosler’s work offers a radical, tactical hermeneutics for interpreting and reading. The tactical aspect of Rosler’s work is evident in her second video work, The Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) a parody of Julia-Child-style cooking programs, in which she chooses a cooking implement for each letter of the alphabet, reciting the name of each implement while staring deadpan into the camera. “A” is for apron, “b” is for bowl, “c” is for chopper, etc. Rosler poses as a pedagogue instructing her viewers about the names of things proper to the kitchen.  However, there is never a direct correspondence between object and word because of the mediating presence of Rosler’s person, which with every new object makes a gesture demonstrating the object’s possible, if not intended, use. In some cases, the gesture corresponds to the way the object is typically used in the kitchen, but more often than not, Rosler’s gestures contain a threat of violence. This is especially true of the knife and fork, which she interprets as stabbing utensils. It is also true of the measuring cups and spoons, which are used to cast-off invisible ingredients, a minor act of rebellion but an act of rebellion no less.
 
This performed reading is in the interest of revealing a relation between the suppression of women and the domesticating force of culinary programs, which train and prepare them for their social functions within a division of labor. Through this reading practice, word and object produce an excess of signification—or an ulterior signification system—through their interaction with the subject, Rosler’s dramatic persona. The ulteriority of this system channels the submerged threat women pose against phallic power situated with the domus.
 
In her 1977 video, Traveling Garage Sale, Rosler folds clothing and arranges items for a garage sale. Customers drift in and out of the scene, haggling with the artist, trying on clothes, and thumbing through LPs. The camera is positioned to assume the viewpoint of a closed-circuit camera, typically used for the purposes of surveillance, and viewers thus inherit that same position. In the accompanying soundtrack, Rosler recites a text in which she reflects on the economics of garage sales: “What is the value of a thing?” “How do things become commodities?” “Why do we fetishize things so much?” “If it’s about divestiture, why not give it away?” Turning over a set of questions, Rosler articulates the ideologies and mythologies that might dictate one’s decision to hold a garage sale as well as larger concerns regarding the psychology of salesmanship and consumership, which the garage sale initiates.
 
Once again, in Traveling Garage Sale, the presence of Rosler’s person is important as a body charged with excessive signification. Her dramatic persona-cum-subject calmly performs the tasks of holding a garage sale, just as anyone would. As such, her subject-performer is interpellated by the garage sale, i.e. the garage sale calls the subject into being and surveils the adequacy of its performance within a habitus, a place of cultural disposition where certain cultural values are presupposed.
 
Rosler’s hermeneutic (or interpretative) technique is two-fold in this video. On the one hand, it involves the ocular participation of a viewer who watches the scene of the garage sale from the position of the camera. The viewers, however, do not hear what is happening during the sale; they only are allowed to see. The withdrawal of diegetic sound is important not only because it foregrounds the voiceover, but also because it enhances that viewer's sense that he or she is watching the scene from the super-subjective/objective position of the video camera. In the voice-over, we hear one of Rosler’s first experiments in her signature modality of reading, the meditation. This modality is both anaphoric (it has a repetitious syntax), and interrogative, proceeding through questions, both recurrent (looping, re-turning) and digressive. The form of this voice-over resembles prayer and, as Rosler has speculated with me in conversation, very likely derives from her yeshiva education in Brooklyn. Prayer as a mode of teaching, prayer as a mode of inquiry, prayer as counter-hegemonic strategy, prayer as a form for aesthetic politics.

In Losing: A Conversation with the Parents (1977), Rosler assumes a didactic-ironic mode of address. The parents of a young woman who has died of an eating disorder sit on a couch together, processing the causes of their daughter’s illness. Performing an expected role of a liberal, white, middle-class, heterosexual couple in the 1970s, the couple draw out the aporias of female body-image/eating disorders, which they relate to global disparities of wealth and power. The camera moves from a full-body shot of the couple sitting on a living-room couch to one of a family photo album, and then to a shot in which we only see the couple’s laps and the album opened to a picture of their daughter. In the absence of the face—the seat of signification—we see the laps and hands of the parents as extra-signifying, i.e. as gesturing body parts isolated from speech formed in the mouth. Whereas in Traveling Garage Sale, Rosler removed the diegetic sound to the foreground, in the surveillance format of her video Losing: A Conversation With the Parents, Rosler negates her chosen format—the documentary-style interview—in order to desynch voice, body, and face as three distinct realms of signification. Through this technique of desynching, the viewer moves among readings—valences of reading which appear in the voice and the voice’s absence, the body taken as a whole and the body as a series of discrete signifying surfaces/organs.
 
The development of Rosler’s video practice was dependent upon the emergence of video technologies in the 70s, and in 80s public-access stations such as Paper Tiger Television, with whom Rosler made the video Martha Rosler Reads Vogue, another performance in which she compels viewers to actively engage in her radical hermeneutic through a reading practice that is neither passive nor interiorizing. Using the December 1st, 1982 issue of Vogue as material, Rosler repeats a series of questions that directly question the magazine as a source of cultural meaning, specifically patriarchal-disciplinary power exerted over the publication’s predominantly female readership. Rosler incants: “What is Vogue? Vogue is fashion, it is glamour, it is sex….” “It’s threat and the whiff of decadence.” “It is the allure of narcissism” “It is the new face over the old face.” “It is the weak face covered over by the strong face.” By reciting a series of questions, she again acts through a form of meditation. Turning over her central question, “What is Vogue?” she arrives at a number of responses, both in the form of quotations from the magazine and from a text she has scripted in advance of the performance.
 
Rosler places quotations from the magazine, such as a Visa ad quoting Robert Louis Stevenson, “To be what we are and to become what we are capable of becoming is the only end to life,” and an article about Conde Nast, the “cunt crazy” publisher of Vogue side-by-side with her own text. Through this parataxis, Rosler underlines what is operative in Vogue’s text, ironically drawing out the magazine’s ideological significance. Besides these two texts—Vogue magazine and Rosler’s critical recitation—there is a third site of signification: Rosler’s fingers. Throughout the video, one sees her digits turning the pages of the magazine, stroking them both as an expression of desire and, in some cases, as an aggressive act of covering, as though to refuse the siren’s song of the magazine’s content. Her fingers point from one image to another, calling attention to resemblances and sometimes drawing the contours of bodies and faces, as if to show some latent significance of these figures arranged pictorially within the magazine spread.  Pointing is an essential bodily gesture, significant for Jean-François Lyotard as a “phrase of discourse.” It is also an essential pedagogical gesture: teachers point at chalkboards or projection screens to guide students’ eyes through lessons.  And pointing is used to limit what one looks at, to construct a vision. Pointing, in other words, tends to have a disciplinary function.
 
In Martha Rosler Reads Vogue, a series of slide projections form a fourth realm of signification. These projections play off Rosler’s meditation, providing visual illustrations for her demythologization of Vogue. When the slideshow has ceased, Rosler shows her audience footage of sweatshops in New York City and provides statistics on the earnings of fashion models versus those of average sweatshop workers. A reggae-flavored New Wave song plays in the background, possibly demonstrating a related pattern of exploitation in New Wave’s appropriation and reconfiguration of West Indian music, which functions as a counterpoint to the images. Rosler appears only in the final scene of the video. We have seen her at different times throughout the video, sitting in a chair with the issue of Vogue in her lap, but now she faces the camera as if to use it as a mirror, through which we see her seeing, theorizing, and applying lipstick and blush. At this moment, her body is presented as a site of subjection of a disciplinary practice enacted on women. The body is both what is reflected, and what we, as Rosler’s audience, are forced to reflect upon as a series of signs.
 
In three videos from the late 70s and early 80s—Domination and the Everyday (1978), A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night, and If It’s Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION (1985)—Rosler elaborates her reading practice as a means of encountering the United States’ geopolitical involvement with Latin America. These works pose questions about how one reads video intertextually, how the medium can be used as a vehicle for counter-hegemonic strategy, analysis, and critical reflection, and perhaps most importantly, how to read the United States’ unofficial wars and conflicts. Given the strategies of blackout, disinformation, and distraction enacted by popular media outlets, how is it possible to redirect a viewer’s reading process and critically navigate a terrain of signs intended to draw attention away from the culpability of the state? How is this a matter of “bringing the war home”—a popular slogan from the 60s which Rosler borrows for her mash-up collage works treating the Vietnam and Iraq wars?
 
Rosler’s video, If It’s Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION, uses a partially demagnetized videotape to engage problems of reading popular news media. This video presents news coverage of US conflicts in Latin America during the early 80s. Much of the language of this footage derives from Reagan’s Cold War rhetoric, which equated “Communism” and “terrorism,” and framed death squads as “freedom fighters.” While many of the popular media’s charges against Latin American guerrillas and political leaders were only thinly substantiated, various media techniques were used for vilification. For instance, Fidel Castro was elliptically linked by the news to the US drug financier, Robert Vesco, by juxtaposing his picture with that of Vesco, with whom he bears a facial resemblance. By using such techniques, popular media obscures fact with allegation, propagating an illusion of truth.
 
Reading the piece depends precisely on its illegibility. The erasure of the tape’s content makes one hear the news coverage as though for the first time. It also playfully allegorizes the effects of the mass media, which deliberately occludes truth content via disinformation, distraction, and over-saturation. Much of the irony of If It’s Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION derives from the original footage. Following news reportage of Regan speaking before Congress is a commercial for a Canon camera, the inclusion of which foregrounds the American obsession with photography, the dominant perceptual regime of the twentieth century.  Rosler contrasts it with the crisis of representation embodied by popular news media. While camera commercials promise an endless reach of our perceptive capabilities, they cannot promise that we will understand what we shoot; only context—captions, news anchors, etc.— can tell us what we see.  But what happens when the image is itself withdrawn from us? The ultimate ironic gesture of If It’s Too Bad To Be True, it Could Be DISINFORMATION occurs near the end of the video as another speech by Reagan to the Congress cuts to an Army recruiting ad. Through an aleatory process of selection and editing, Rosler points out the complicity of the mass media with the military industrial complex. The “news” appears as an extension of the commercial “breaks.”
 
Although much of the soundtrack is audible in  If It’s Too Bad To Be True, it Could Be DISINFORMATION, Rosler provides intertitles so that viewers can read what they hear on the screen. It is crucial that the words are not subtitled, and instead appear superimposed over the visual content. As such, the image is doubly withdrawn. It is first withdrawn by the demagnetization, and then again, by the intertitles, which force viewers to negotiate image, spoken language, and transcription simultaneously. It is not unlike the problem of reading presented by Martha Rosler Reads Vogue, in which one’s eyes listen to Rosler’s meditation while watching her hands scan the pages of the magazine.

Rosler’s reading practice is perhaps most intense in A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night, in which the viewer is bombarded by a palimpsestuous and hypercitational text. In A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night, Rosler states her case against torture, taking aim at Michael Levin, a City University of New York professor whose article, “A Simple Case for Torture,” appeared in the June 7th, 1982 issue of Newsweek. Rosler’s video deconstructs the logic of Levin’s article, which attempts to make the case for why the US government and its allies must resort to torture in order to preserve national security in the face of nuclear proliferation, arguments that are familiar to a contemporary audience from the rhetoric of Rove, Bush, Cheney, and Ashcroft. Levin’s editorial capitalizes upon the fear-mongering question of whether you could sleep at night knowing that you had allowed a terrorist to perpetrate mass murder because you had not been able to bring yourself to support torture.
 
While a man’s voice reads the article in the soundtrack, Rosler’s fingers scan the article. Intertitles appear, in which key phrases from Levin’s article are underlined and often reposed as questions. As in Martha Rosler Reads Vogue, the artist’s fingers move between Levin’s Newsweek editorial and an ad on the opposite page, pointing out the irony of this spread, which features a man rolled over on his side in bed, apparently panicked about the state of his finances. The advertisement is for a bank and reads, “How safe are your savings?” Once again, the artist ironically points to a relationship between advertising and the content of the popular media. The fear provoked by the bank advertisement is obviously related to the fear Levin wishes to provoke in his editorial.
 
Following from Rosler’s presentation of Levin’s “case,” is a barrage of press clippings and other media, all of which present the United States’ uses of torture abroad, and especially in Latin America—a principle region of Cold War conflict in the late 70s and 80s. Rosler’s counter-case provides us with the truth content of Levin’s rhetoric, which abstracts the citizen from the state, one’s private decision to commit an unthinkable act of violence from acts of torture sanctioned by the state in the interest of affirming US sovereignty in Latin America.
 
As in her many other videos, Rosler’s person is present. One sees Rosler in a car, her eyes framed in the rear-view mirror, again as a source of theoretical reflection, a mediating agent. In other scenes, she sits with her books opened, the camera tracking their spines to reveal their titles and authors. Rosler rolls a tank over the books, playfully relating a war of information and intertextuality with actual geopolitical conflicts.
 
Rosler’s oeuvre seems to ask a series of questions: How does one bring the war home? What is the relationship between home and wars abroad? How does a United States citizen relate to the total war that this state has enacted against much of the rest of the world? Private/Public, Domus/Polis, interior/exterior, citizen/state, form a powerful dialectic in Rosler’s work, and by which her own person is consistently framed as a contested site. Rosler’s art, in other words, concerns “Domination and the Everyday,” the title of her 1978 video regarding her domestic life in relation to the US-backed 1973 military coup in Chile. Throughout the video, Rosler incants, “it is in the marketplace alone that we are replaceable.” Relating the dictatorship in Chile with US economic interests—the need for “development” versus the establishment of lasting foreign democracies in Latin America—Rosler and her son appear throughout the video among a series of slides depicting middle-class Americans and their children and through a soundtrack in which the viewer hears Rosler at home with her son. In contrast to this intimate domestic scene, in which we hear Rosler and her son eating and talking together, the viewer is repeatedly presented with a pictogram of Pinochet and his guard, icons of what Rosler calls “naked force.” The contrast of Pinochet’s image with Rosler’s domestic space stands as a reminder that the specter of United States sovereignty haunts the most private moments of our life. The war is always home, whether or not we care to admit it.