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Born and bred in Brooklyn, New York, Rosler has been making and writing about art since the 1970s. Her work, which is overtly political and existed, until 1993, outside the commercial/gallery art world, was last year the subject of a major retrospective at New York’s New Museum and the International Center of Photography. The recipient of five NEA grants and several residencies, Rosler teaches photography, film, video, and critical theory at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of Art. Her work is held in numerous public collections, from Arts Vivant in Japan to York University in Toronto, Ontario. A collection of her writings will be published next year by MIT press.
The interview was conducted by Ilana Stanger of TheArtBiz.com.
You’ve occupied the role of artist as social critic and commentator, funded, in part, by five NEA fellowships. Do you think that, given the budget cuts to the NEA and the subsequent loss of grant money, it is harder to occupy that role?
Well, I think there’s a problem with that line of thinking. I’m going to digress a bit here. One of my students asked me, 'What is the key to your success? How did you put a career together?' Really, I told him that my attitude was always that when people said, 'You can’t do that that way, or 'That’s not interesting, no one will pay for that’ my answer was always, in effect, 'Fuck you.'
The problem between then and now was that we took for granted that we would not be rewarded by the system that we criticized. Now people see things in a very straightforward fashion: you go to school, you get a degree, you get a gallery, you make money. That applies to so few artists that it’s unrealistic. That’s like kids in a ghetto school who think that if they practice their basketball enough they’re going to become sports stars. But that’s not how it works. You have to expect to make the bulk of your money doing other things. That’s really important to understand. And no one ever lived off their NEA grants!
Have you had a particular business strategy?
I had no strategy. I think having a strategy is not a bad thing. But one of my anti-strategies was not to have a style. And most people want to see you have a style. So I think that can make things easier, if you can find out what style represents you and stick to it--even though I could never conceive of doing it. One thing, though, about the art world that I doubt will change is that if you stick with your work long enough, then people will appreciate it-- assuming you are really a serious artist, of course. So the system has a certain logic, a certain coherence or even integrity; it’s not all “strategy.”
Which is also an optimistic view...
Though it’s hard to say that to people, because you don’t want to say to a young artist, 'Oh, hang on, they’ll get to you.' But there are short-term and long-term strategies. There are things you do for awhile to make a living, and then you have to evaluate and ask, is this turning out to be too much of a drag on who I really want to be? You have to confront yourself at every point to consider, is the money-making aspect so demanding that it’s corrupting my life as an artist? For many, many people the answer too often is--obviously. Then you have to decide, can I quit? The younger you are the more you should consider quitting and trying to pursue something other than art as the main way to make a living. Something that supports you without corrupting your art.
I’m a bad person to talk to about how an artist can make a living, because I have no head for this. Having a gallery you realize that the relationship is as complex as any other relationship. It’s based on an adversarial relation, but at the same time you rise and fall together. It’s like a marriage without the sexual intimacy. They take 40 or 50% of your profit and always try to imply that they don’t really owe you anything. Some galleries are more active in finding you shows than others. Mine is pretty inactive in that regard, but I don’t look to them for that.... I don’t think that artists should be with galleries that require you to pay a fee. In that vein, I also am against putting work into festivals with high fees. In those cases the less-known artists subsidize the known, who enter, often by invitiation, and receive big prizes--that’s exploitation.
You didn’t sign with your gallery, Gorney, Bravin + Lee, until 1991. Why did you decide to join a gallery?
I had two reasons. First, I felt that I couldn’t stand the paperwork anymore. I couldn’t stand constant requests to send slides and CVs out. Consequently, I’m not in many catalogues of the shows that I was in, because I didn’t have the time to put together these bios. In many ways catalogues are more important than shows, which I was aware of but didn’t respect. The catalog remains and circulates afterward--it’s a question of publicity and public record. So, I think people should bother with that, but I couldn’t.
Second, it was the early 90s, and I felt that in the 80s the alternative system had been crushed by the market boom, which turned into a bust. The art world was in trouble in terms of organization. Dealers were looking for young artists straight out of school whom they could start small with and offer to their collectors at a low price while the work appreciated, and this is where magazines and museums were looking for work to publicize and exhibit. So I was a bit worried about getting left behind because I was a mid-career artist. But the director at Jay Gorney’s gallery had been looking at my work for years, and Jay approached me at a propitious time. I had trouble thinking about what I had to offer a gallery, because my practice is so diverse, so it was good that one came to me.
Do you sell your photos, video, and installation work through the gallery?
That’s a funny thing, because I have a host of video distributors that I’ve been with since the mid-70s. The video distributors born of that era were non-profit, artist-run or artist-friendly organizations. That world is being swamped now by the fact that video, alongside photography, is now one of the highest-end signature commodities of the current era. What that means is that sale of video is being restricted to limited editions just like photography, and through commercial dealerships rather than through non-profit distributors. So it’s moving from the film category into the fine art category, which I’m very unhappy about. In other words, one of the main hallmarks of art is to limit access --it’s the precious-object model as opposed to the communication model. I refuse to limit my video distribution through editioning and ridiculous prices, so I do not sell tapes through my gallery; sales and rental go through the nonprofit distributors, primarily the Video Data Bank and Electronic Arts Intermix.
You just had your first retrospective. What was that like?
It’s been bizarre. It changed me as a marketable artist; it was an image builder. One of my problems has been that in the photography world people assumed I was a photographer, in the video world people assumed I was a videomaker, and in the writing world people assumed I was a critic. It’s surprising how little news travels outside those circles, even when you’re an established figure. So, this created a career for me. It affected my job, too--Rutgers gave me a raise.
I realized that having an article in the Sunday Times really changes everything. All of a sudden you get calls from all around the world. Artists always want publicity, because you make your work for public consumption on some level. It’s distracting if not corrupting, but I’m not sorry I sell my work. My entering the commercial system, because of the way the art world is configured now, made many lily-livered museum people take my work seriously. They knew it before but were afraid to feature it because of its political message. I hasten to say, though, that I’ve been in between 15 and 25 group shows a year since the late 1970s and had quite a few solos, so I don’t want to overplay this--it’s a question of focus! Now curators may feel reassured because the work’s a saleable commodity--it has the imprimatur of capitalism. But if someone is willing to buy a piece about the Rosenbergs, it can’t be all bad.
Did your gallery organize the retrospective?
No. I live in fear of the day commercial galleries organize museum shows. Two female museum directors organized the show, which is very important. Elizabeth McGregor at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, and Sabine Breitwieser of the Generali Foundation in Vienna. So it was two female museum directors, not curators, in foreign countries. Women curate women. Also Catherine de Zegher, now the director of The Drawing Center, who encouraged the directors and also edited the book for the retrospective. So it was in essence three women.
What do you teach at Rutgers?
Photography, film, video, and critical theory. Photography is the only studio I teach.
Is teaching how you’ve supported yourself?
Completely so--supplemented by lecture and writing fees, video rentals and sales and of course more recently the sale of art.
How does teaching affect your art?
It gives me less time. I love students, which is a problem. We teach too much at Rutgers--3 courses a semester
You earned your MFA at the University of San Diego. Do you recommend MFA programs?
Certainly. I was out of school for seven years before I went for an MFA and I went only to get a studio. At the time, though I wouldn’t have acknowledged it, I thought I was beyond needing instruction. It was a mistake to think I didn’t need an MFA program--I needed it desperately. It gave me a cohort to hang around with, to talk about art ideas, to concentrate on my work, to meet visiting artists, and, in general, to be inculcated into the universe of discourse. You cannot get it reading art magazines. You need to have intensive periods where that is the agenda. It was wonderful for me.
School is crucial and essential. But it’s an appetizer, real education occurs afterwards. If you take with you, “this is who I am now and for all time forward,” then you’re a zombie, just part of a minion.
What advice would you give to younger artists?
I hate to sound like Polonius, but, "To thine own self be true!" You have to keep re-evaluating what you are doing, to decide whether it is taking you where you want to go in your work. I also think it’s pretty important to become friends with other artists, and writers or musicians, join reading groups, and so on, because competitiveness is built into the art scene, which is corrosive. Artists also often do a great job of organizing shows together in noncommercial spaces, or putting together magazines and publications, or setting up websites, not simply to get attention from dealers but to make their work public in a different way. As for the outside world, although personally I’ve often been an idiot, failing to check deadlines for festivals or grants, or to even think about them, it’s not a bad thing to do regularly. Also, you really need to be careful not to be robbed by people who show your work and don’t pay you. I hear about this from artists over and over again. And, though I rarely remember to do this, you should always obtain contracts. Also, make sure you keep an inventory of what people have, it’s really important to do.
This article was originally created for TheArtBiz.com. It appears on NYFA Interactive courtesy of the Abigail Rebecca Cohen Library.
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