Semiotics of the Kitchen: Martha Rosler on Feminist Video Art

This extended discussion explores how marginalized artists navigate visibility and hypervisibility in their practice. Zadie Shaw discusses becoming uncomfortable with self-representation after gaining opportunities, recognizing the cannibalistic nature of art market consumption. Imran Karim addresses post-9/11 conditions where individuals from affected backgrounds experience social death—being invisible in discourse while hypervisible to state surveillance. Artists like Lynn Hershman Leeson and Mary Kelly use domestic spaces and everyday objects (dollhouses, compressed lint) as subversive tools to address invisible violence hidden behind closed curtains. This challenges the notion that domesticity is inherently transgressive, instead focusing on micro-politics—the small gestures and daily negotiations that contain feminist tactics for living passed between generations.

Feminist performance art emerges from activist traditions like FEMEN and draws inspiration from 1960s-70s feminist artists. Artists use self-portrait photography adapted from Hannah Höch's formalist approach to create ambiguous works that provoke critical thinking. The internet provides new frontiers for distribution, enabling projects like fictional feminist movements (#redwomancoming) with Wikipedia pages and hashtags that anyone can adopt. This represents a significant shift toward global participation and collaboration without physical presence.

The 1970s saw a significant evolution in feminist performance art, with artists using their own bodies as primary subject matter. Claire Ferguson began by photographing her body in relation to objects in black and white images, which evolved into live performances after meeting Jackie Apple. This period coincided with the broader women's movement and conceptual art trends, where artists sought to challenge traditional boundaries between artist and audience. Performance art became a means for women to express autonomy and create direct connections with viewers, transforming everyday spaces into sites of artistic expression.

Nando Vico's performance celebrating a fake marriage with Renato Mambor demonstrates how performance art could address themes of marriage and domesticity. Bianca Pucciarelli's 'Non uscire di casa' (Don't Go Out of the House) involved covering her entire apartment with 'desemantizzata' writing, creating an installation at the Malangone residence in Parioli, Rome. During a reenactment, she wore the same wallpaper and recited a futurist poem, recalling her adolescence when she was 'literally glued to the walls' without being invited to dance. Nicole Graviner, an Italian-French artist who worked in Milan for about 50 years, created works where she portrayed herself as the heroine of a fotoromanzo (photo novel), simulating melodramatic language to critique romanticized domestic life. Milly Gandini's project 'La mamma è uscita' (Mummy Has Gone Out) involved leaving her home for months, allowing dust to cover furniture and grease to accumulate on plates, with a friend writing feminist symbols inside the furniture. Raffaella Perna discusses the persistence of patriarchy in contemporary society, noting that despite claims that patriarchy has ended, it continues to exist as a universal system.

This section examines postmodernism's promise of leveling the playing field in the 1990s, enabling new players into artistic conversations and using normative references in innovative ways. However, when analog ideas became digital and access became less physical, holding things outside linear time created significant problems. Without histories, knowledge verification, and desire for objectivity, displaying memes without context risks becoming taste-making rather than meaning-making, potentially driving gentrification—a simpler form of colonization. The artist traces her feminist art practice from the 1980s through graduate school, examining how domestic contexts were positioned as liberating locations for women. Early work included abstract bricks called 'women' arranged triangularly (reflecting essentialist feminist thinking) set into domestic settings.

Feminist film scholars Laura Mulvey and Mary Ann Doane developed theories about how women experience cinema. Mulvey's 'male gaze' theory describes how male spectators derive pleasure from female bodies on screen while female spectators are alienated. Doane expanded this by arguing that women cannot separate their own femininity from the language of men, making it difficult for them to identify with female characters. She suggested that women must adopt male viewpoints and masculinize their gaze when watching films.

British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey introduced the term 'male gaze' in her 1975 essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.' She defined it as the representation of the world and women from a heterosexual male perspective, presenting women as sexual objects for the pleasure of heterosexual men. Mulvey described three levels of gaze: the camera's gaze, the audience's gaze, and the characters' gaze. In classical Hollywood, all three are male. She described the male gaze as operating in a world of sexual imbalance where pleasure in looking is divided between active male and passive female. The decisive male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female form, with women simultaneously becoming objects of looking and display.

Film critic Laura Mulvey proposed that visual media like films and comics are constructed from the male gaze, created by heterosexual men for heterosexual men. This results in a fundamental split between active male viewers and passive female subjects. Women in these media are simultaneously looked at and displayed, serving as objects of visual pleasure to satisfy heterosexual male desire. This objectification and sexualization of women's bodies has been a consistent feature across comics, films, and traditional art, creating distorted perceptions where women's mere existence becomes inherently sexualized.

The male gaze is a feminist film theory concept describing how women are visually positioned as objects of heterosexual male desire in cinema. Under this framework, cameras focus on women's bodies rather than faces, using extreme disembodied close-ups that reduce women to collections of sexually exciting body parts. Women are lit for beauty rather than scene-appropriate lighting, robbing female characters of agency, emotional nuance, and respect. Laura Mulvey theorized in her 1975 essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' that the male gaze comprises three interconnected looks: the camera's look, the audience's look, and the characters' look—all typically male in nature. The woman is defined by her 'to-be-looked-at-ness,' leading to either pedestal placement (idolization) or punishment (investigation of flaws), exemplified by Hitchcock's Vertigo. The male gaze extends to marketing, shallow focus techniques that disadvantage women and POC, impractical sexualized costumes, and disembodied body part depictions. The film 'Peeping Tom' personifies this gaze as a deadly force, showing how passive observation transforms into violence when viewers become complicit in objectification through the camera lens. The dominance of the male gaze stems from historical gender disparities in film industry leadership, with only 10.7% of top-grossing film directors being women by 2019.

Laura Mulvey's concept of the 'male gaze' describes how Hollywood cinema codifies sexual desire visually, manipulating the female body to generate visual pleasure for male audiences. This scopophilic pleasure involves understanding people as objects, with a controlling and dominant gaze. The male gaze represents a power imbalance in society where men look and women are looked at. When men project onto the female body, it becomes objectification, resulting in a body stylized to cause pleasure in the audience. This objectification is not limited to pornography but is a systematic practice in mainstream cinema, where generations of camera operators, directors, and lighting crews have consolidated their careers as objectifiers of women.

This section covers post-structuralism and deconstruction as the 'disorderly phase' following structuralism. In the late 1960s, critics realized that if language is arbitrary, meaning cannot be stable. Jacques Derrida became the champion of deconstruction, publishing 'Of Grammatology' and 'Writing and Difference' in 1967. He attacked logocentrism—the Western obsession with an ultimate center of truth—arguing there is nothing outside the text. Derrida's concept of 'différance' means meaning is always different and deferred. Roland Barthes' 'The Death of the Author' argued that once a text is published, the author's intentions become dead and the reader's mind becomes important.

Post-structuralism is a series of trends by thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler. While structuralism regards language as a closed system, the key post-structuralist insight is that there's an insurmountable gap between the signifier and what was referred to by Saussure as the signified. The late David Foster Wallace described post-structuralism as deconstructionists who don't want to be called deconstructionists. This represents a fundamental challenge to the structuralist view of language.

Poststructuralism, emerging from structuralist linguistics and philosophy, challenges essentialist views by asserting that language is inherently unstable and meaning is not inherent in words but emerges through differential relationships between signs; since all meaning depends on difference (as demonstrated by how 'cat' only makes sense by being different from 'bat'), texts cannot have fixed central meanings—they must be decentered and understood as products of reading processes within systems of discourse that construct reality, power relations, and identity through oppositional binaries that are mutually constitutive rather than hierarchically ordered.

Post-structuralism or deconstructionism opposes structuralist ideas by arguing that communication is inherently difficult and that exact meaning transmission is impossible. When someone says 'yellow dog,' everyone imagines a different yellow dog based on their own experiences. Language itself is described as 'uncentered'—there is no fixed center of meaning. Jacques Derrida, a key post-structuralist thinker, argued in his work 'Grammatology' that every signifier leads to another signifier in an endless chain, never reaching a final signified meaning. Using the example of the word 'lion,' one might associate it with 'king,' then 'crown,' then 'empire,' continuing indefinitely without ever arriving at a concrete concept. Derrida introduced the concept of 'aporia' (confusion), suggesting that we should embrace this state of confusion rather than seeking definitive answers.

Post-structuralism fundamentally challenges earlier theories by asserting that meaning is unstable and cannot be definitively determined. Deconstruction (Jacques Derrida) argues texts contain inherent contradictions and meaning is always deferred. Key concepts include: interplay of words used and unused, aporia (contradictions), supplement, différance (meaning is never fully present), logocentrism, phallogocentrism, and metaphysics of presence. This represents a radical departure from structuralist claims about stable meaning systems.