From the start of the sequence, a woman’s voice announces a work about “tyranny and exploitation.” This film presents a performance relating to a critique of social standardisation, made in 1974 at the University of San Diego. It is presented as one interview in a series in which guinea pigs parade in front of researchers, and records the measurement of a young woman’s body (played by Martha Rosler). She is transformed into a puppet, submitted to the demands of men in lab coats. The image of power and order, signified by the scientists’ uniform, intensifies the dehumanisation of the approach. The body examined is divided into sections, fragmented and compared to norms. At the end, a woman’s voiceover enumerates a list of crimes against women against a slide show of black and white photographs of measurements made in scientific books. There is clearly a system at work here that recalls the techniques of humiliation and experimentation in the concentration camps, but in comparison with the notion of the standards and norms of contemporary society. While continuing to denounce women’s role in society, Martha Rosler deals with the overall notion of the subject. “In Vital Statistics, there was the paradox that an individual person was both the representation of the dieting system and of the system of ideas about corporeal conformity – whether it be race or sex – and of how these systems produce subjects.” [1]

Patricia Maincent

[1] Martha Rosler in “Benjamin Buchloh: conversation avec Martha Rosler”