The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems
Martha Rosler
The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, 1974/75
Photo installation 45 black-and-white photographs, baryta paper (prints 1999), 21 images and 24 photographed typescript texts, mostly in pairs dry-mounted on 24 black cardboards, 20.2 x 25.3 cm each, framed in 24 frames 26.8 x 57.3 cm each Edition 4/5 + A. P.
GF0002055.00.0-1999
Artwork text
Martha Rosler is considered one of the most political voices in international art. Her attention is directed not only toward themes of political engagement but to criticism itself—in other words, the mechanisms and ideologies underpinning, consciously or unconsciously, socially critical attitudes. In this respect, the photo and text installation The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems is an icon: Based on the example of her experience with the Bowery in New York, Rosler questions the conventions of socially critical documentary photography. The Bowery is a legendary street with an eventful history, located in southern Manhattan in New York. Once a boulevard of fashion shops and theaters, in the twentieth century it became a place of poverty, a sanctuary for so-called losers and outsiders. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Bowery was repeatedly the subject of social documentary films and photographs questioning the seedier side of modernity, capitalism, and the city. Portraits were taken of the people living there, stylized as victims of society and tragic heroes—portraits spanning moral indignation and voyeurism. Rosler’s work, produced in the mid-1970s, is, as she puts it, an “act of refusal” and an “act of criticism” against documentary photography. In a series of dual sets of photos, consisting of black-and-white photos and photographs of typewritten text, she creates a dialogue. The photos depict empty alcohol bottles and other traces left by homeless alcoholics outside closed shop fronts; the people themselves are absent, but because of this, as a memory, they are all the more present. In the photos, Rosler intentionally cites the style of Sociocritical Realism; in contrast to this, however, she portrays neither victims nor tragic heroes. The texts, poetic cascades of words, are also quotes. Rosler collects a variety of existing terms for alcohol intoxication and assembles them into a narrative: a “poetry of drunkenness” leading from numbness and intoxication to addiction and self-destruction. From Rosler’s perspective, both systems—photography and language—are ultimately insufficient for dealing with the reality. (Jürgen Tabor)