Interview with Martha Rosler

‘A Budding Gourmet’

Martha Rosler

in conversation with

Christopher Zimmerman

June 2012

Working primarily with images and texts, Martha Rosler’s videos, installations, and critical writings have positioned her at the forefront of feminist theory and practice since the early 1970s.  In her videos, Rosler deconstructs the ideological underpinnings of contemporary culture through social and political analyses of power, myth, and the everyday.  

Martha Rosler's A Budding Gourmet--1974

About her work, Rosler has written: "I want to make art about the commonplace, art that illumines social life. I want to enlist video to question the mythical explanations of everyday life that take shape as an optimistic rationalism and to explore the relationships between individual consciousness, family life, and the culture of monopoly capitalism. Video itself isn't 'innocent': it is a cultural commodity often celebrating the self and its inventiveness. Yet video lets me construct, using a variety of fictional narrative forms, 'decoys' engaged in a dialectic with commercial TV."

We chose and presented her video A Budding Gourmet as part of the ‘dinner’ course of Film Food—Celluloid Gastronomy presented at Images and Views of Alternative Cinema 2012 in Lefkosia, Cyprus.   Martha Rosler was very generous in giving the following interview about her video and the subject of food. 

Christopher Zimmerman:  You made ‘A Budding Gourmet’ in 1974 at a time when video was in its infancy.  There is a tendency to look back at previous work through contemporary eyes, and we often gloss over the theoretical, social, artistic, political contexts from which an earlier work emerges.  Can you place ‘A Budding Gourmet’ in the context of what was happening in the early 1970s as well as within your own history (and theoretical commitments) as an artist?  What was the motivation to make this video?

Rosler's female narrator kept in the shadows

Martha Rosler:  The video was the “realization” of the postcard novel I had done a bit earlier, part of a trilogy on women and food. It took the form of a “pseudo-autobiographical” novel with no images.  I had done a fair bit of work on food in that period: three postcard novels, an elaborate performance with several parts (but with no actual food), and an extended dialogue, a long manuscript, in which the language of food discussions is to be understood as a metaphor for art and aesthetics.  I wanted to activate the first of the postcard novels as a script, to see if it could be translated into something else. I was shooting in black and white because that was what was available to me at the time; it was the common mode of production of video. But it also provided a chance to present the protagonist as a colorless silhouetted figure and to translate colorful cookbook images into black-and-white renderings.

CZ: ‘A Budding Gourmet’ was presented at the 2012 Images and Views of Alternative Cinema in Cyprus as part of the ‘dinner’ course of ‘Film Food—Celluloid Gastronomy’—a program of experimental films and videos exploring food, eating, and the rich tapestry of gastronomical metaphor.  We chose your video because it offers a brilliant ideological critique of the idea of the ‘gourmet’ and of how food preparation is transformed into ‘cuisine’.  Can you ‘unpack’ some of the lines of power, notions of class, issues of authenticity, cultural ‘constructedness’, and particularly gender issues running through the idea of becoming a ‘gourmet’?

Martha Rosler's A Budding Gourmet--1974

Martha Rosler: Food is a ripe area (forgive the pun) for investigating the intersections of nature and culture, class, and of course gender. Food is a biological necessity embedded in social customs and rituals, taboos and proscriptions, and the more food preparation and consumption are seen as in the service of elites, and a mode of cooking becomes interpreted as a cuisine and eating as gastronomy, the more highly the customs are codified and surrounded with minute specifications and specialized utensils, all testifying to social status. In postwar US, an expanding consumer-oriented economy aimed to persuade women that they needed to go to upscale restaurants but also to cook and serve fresh and fancy foods, to add spices to otherwise ordinary fare, to discover foreign “cuisines,“ and perhaps to learn how to cook some of the exotic dishes. However, in a still fairly egalitarian society, it was the wives and housewives who were meant to be both producers and consumers, with a classic induced schizophrenia in regard to household and family maintenance: Women were at the pivot point between amateurism and wifely duties; the adoption of gourmetism, an interest in improving one’s culinary knowledge, both flattered and burdened the wife who was meant to be doing the cooking. The stereotypical suburban male might choose to cook meat at the outdoor grill and be met with familial acclaim, but for women, gourmetism, or picking up foreign food habits—unlike the farm wives and country cousins famed for their cooking and baking who might even be competing at county fairs—could easily be seen as a forced choice. As the new emphasis on food emerged, men who cooked professionally were chefs; women who might consider doing so were freaks. Television shows addressed themselves to housewives, and there were no celebrity chefs as far as the popular imagination was concerned, unless they were French chefs of previous eras, like Escoffier. Otherwise, there was Julia Child.

CZ: ‘A Budding Gourmet’ as well as ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen’ still resonate today, even though, in many respects, our relationship to food has changed as well as the fact that feminist work (theoretical and practical) has opened significant possibilities within the general culture.  What are some of the continuities between the issues that you address in these works and today?  What are some of the discontinuities?  Has the kitchen as site of domination changed over the last decades?  What do you see as today’s ‘site of domination’?

Martha Rosler: I am not so sure our relation to food has changed so much as continued to develop along consumerist lines, inflected by the post-hippie, ecological, and back-to-the-land interests in right living, organic farming and consuming organic produce and livestock raised in certain preferred conditions, and suburban yearnings.  I wouldn’t be so keen to celebrate unequivocally the translation of right living into right eating, because it is a form of niche lifestyle marketing. Nevertheless, organic farming and healthful eating habits—to put it boringly—have been concerns of mine for many years.

the other side of 'cuisine' and abundance...

CZ:  The juxtapositions that you create by inserting images of malnourished and starving children into all of the images from gourmet food magazines pierce through the irony of your narration, in a sense.  It is as if the real, in all of its tragic cruelty, breaks through at points into this constructed gourmet bubble.  In addition, you use music from Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ quartet, which contributes to this atmosphere of ‘high culture’, but which also has programmatic meaning that functions in counterpoint to the smooth veneer of this ‘bubble’.  In what relation does ‘A Budding Gourmet’ stand to death?

Martha Rosler:  If nothing else, death at an early age is endemic in countries of the periphery (what we used to call Third World countries—India and China, to take two examples) whose cuisines were popular candidates for adoption by Americans. This is a strange echo of classical imperialism in which raw materials are extracted from Third World countries with little profit accruing to them and developed into high profitable industries back in the home countries. In addition, death and vanity are often linked, especially in the Romantic view.

CZ:  If cooking is a metaphor for artistic production, what does your video tell us about art and the artworld?

Martha Rosler:  I think that question is for others to take on.

Martha Rosler's A Budding Gourmet--1974

CZ:  The processed ‘Western diet’ is taking over the world and threatening health, culinary traditions, the time that we spend with others seated around the table eating and on and on…  Global capital has tightened its control of food production, and its exploitation of nature and humans has deepened the drastic inequalities in access to food.  At the same time, counter-movements resisting corporate power have pushed food to a central cultural and political issue within mainstream discourse.   There has been an impressive amount of documentaries made in the last ten years, for example, investigating the effects of globalization on food.  Within this environment, what are the greatest challenges that we face in terms of food, and how might moving images suggest pathways out of this situation?  Where should we be focusing our efforts?

Martha Rosler:  I am not an expert here, and I can only share your implied opinions. Clearly we need to —in no particular order—continue to struggle over all the issues people are organizing over: in regard to nutritional practices and education alongside fair trade, good farming techniques, preservation of land and water resources, and support of local producers, preventing the patenting of newly discovered or newly developed seed cultures… and fighting against global warming. 

Copyright © 2012 Christopher Zimmerman and Martha Rosler