Losing: A Conversation with the Parents
Martha Rosler
Losing: A Conversation with the Parents, 1977
Video, color, sound, 18 min 39 sec Performers: Peter Hackett, Susan Lewis Camera: Brian Connell Post production: John Baker
GF0001999.00.0-1999
Artwork text
In a style somewhere between a soap opera and a TV interview, the mourning parents as acted by two professional actors, are questioned about their daughter who has died of anorexia. The child was “completely normal” in every way, well brought up, “determined to please” and, like the parents themselves, fully convinced that “every success in life demands a sacrifice.” Various ways of using food as a weapon are confronted with each other: the pressure of others’ economic power internalized as anorexia, hunger strike and hunger due to poverty. In the end, the parents recall a Dutch couple in World War II who confessed remorse over having eaten the body of their dead little girl—a metaphor for the actions of these parents, figuratively cannibalizing their child for the media. (Sabine Breitwieser/Martha Rosler)