This piece was very powerful and sharp. Rosler's movements are very firm and her performance communicates a sense of alienation and anger towards the space she is inhabiting and the objects she is holding. The critique is loud and strong. Those objects evoke the role given to women by the society, the confinement to the space of the house and of the locus of the kitchen. The repetition in her gestures creates a sort of melody that accompanies the piece until the end. Her work is inspiring and very effective. Also, the fact that she is standing in front of a static camera let the viewer to focus on her movements and on the objects. She builds a direct relation with and address to the audience.
~camilla
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Martha Rosler's "Semiotics of the Kitchen" is a great example of how video was originally put into use as a consumer product & creative tool. I find Rosler's piece especially interesting within the context of early public-access TV and the artists that sought to utilize that opportunity. Semiotics of the Kitchen is not anti-TV or above TV in any way; the audience must be aware of Julia Childs or cooking shows in general in order to understand the depth of Rosler's commentary. The image of Rosler in her kitchen feels more like a response, rather than an imitation of Childs. "Semiotics" is partly a response from the passive-aggressive and repressed robotic housewife that Childs has trained. Rosler's video sets the stage for how millions of people have come to use cheap audio/video technology to imitate the behavior of media personalities. I am reminded of YouTube videos made by people of all ages, sitting in their rooms and hosting televison-like shows with no apparent awareness of the way they imitate familiar behaviors and attitudes. One video includes a girl about 8 years old hosting a TRL-like show. Her voice, movements and ways of relating to the camera so naturally evoke the classic television personality that only her unintelligible dialogue reveals the gap in her transformation. There are plenty of videos like this, each performer less conscious of the models that have hijacked their personality. Fortunately, the message of "Semiotics" can also be found on YouTube as shown by videos of people who very knowingly imitate, for the purpose of commentary, the video-blog character. Similar examples include imitations of home-videos which, along with fake video-blogs, seem to assert that even our most casual uses of the video camera turn us into performers, going through the motions while struggling to keep our real-selves at bay.
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