This performance, filmed in a sequence shot in 1975, presents a feminist parody of a televised cooking show. A woman, played by Martha Rosler herself, stands in her kitchen facing the camera and makes an inventory of her utensils. A well-organised housewife, she enumerates her utensils in alphabetical order, demonstrating the appropriate gesture for their utilisation. As she goes through the letters, sometimes mismatched with the tools, the precision of the gesture reveals a certain tension, even aggressiveness. While everything seems in order, there is an underlying violence that does not break out, but which increasingly makes itself felt through inappropriate angry gestures, such as the use of a fork for what appears to be an assassination. The last letters are physically mimed with a knife and fork in each hand. The avenging gesture appears with the letter Z, executed like the “Z” of Zorro. The language relates the subject: the use of each word reveals more about this housebound character, who, trapped in her condition, lets her revolt take hold of her. For Martha Rosler “When a woman speaks, she names her own oppression.” [1] Her work deals as much with the role of women as with the role of representations. The media model taken from television completes the social model of the housewife. This social cohesion of a mediatised image that perpetuates archaic models is what Martha Rosler is denouncing. The critique of representation is a central element in her work.

[1] Martha Rosler: Positions in The Life World.

Patricia Maincent