Martha Rosler's Garage Sale: not radical

From Martha Rosler's Meta-Monumental Garage Sale at MoMA

When is radical art not radical? When it’s a Meta-Monumental Garage Sale at MoMA. No one, including me, wants to get on Martha Rosler’s case, because her intentions are so good. She’s a feminist who’s against war and into exposing the falsities of the gallery/museum system—nothing I wouldn’t whole-heartedly agree with. Except, instead of satisfying an “enduring taste for subversion” (see the New Yorker article), Rosler’s MoMA venture (November 17-30) was just another case of bullshit masquerading as art. “Subversion” would be if I got a cart and attempted to sell used T-shirts on the sidewalk in front of MoMA or, God forbid, in the lobby—an event that would immediately reveal just how tolerant the museum really is of purveyors of second-hand shit on their premises. The only reason Rosler gets to sell stuff at MoMA and Joe Schmo doesn’t, is because she knows how to navigate the museum system—and by doing so blatantly exposes herself as a player in the exclusive milieu she’s made a career of railing against.

“The Garage Sale [says the MoMA press release]…implicates visitors in face-to-face transactions within a secondary, informal cash economy—just like [my italics] garage sales held outside a museum setting.” You gotta be kidding. Rosler’s Garage Sale was as much like a real garage sale as Lindsay Lohan is like Elizabeth Taylor. First of all, it was stylized and artificial – from the giant American flag on the wall to the tags, cutesy signs, and arrangements of goods that were clearly the work of an artist pretending to have a garage sale (for instance if someone bought something that was tacked to the wall, they had to wait until the event was over to collect it, so as not to disturb the display). Further, it was in a museum and the visitors who paid $25 to experience it did not look like people who would normally consider incorporating second-hand items into their lives – in other words, they were slumming.

I get pissed off when the art world plays at – and therefore mocks – the lives of others, especially “suburbia” and the now mythical “middle class.”  If I see one more arty photograph of a supposedly anonymous ranch house I’ll scream. 

However buying and selling second hand-items—i.e. “junk” – is what some people do for a living. They know where to find the stuff, how to price and sell it. It’s how they get by.

Others are forced to sell their belongings in order to raise cash to pay the mortgage or next month’s rent. As for the buyers, there are people out there who wear second-hand clothing not for a lark, but because it’s only way they can afford to cover their backs.

But garage sales as the iconic activity of the suburban not-desperate are about excess, accumulations of stuff that have to be regularly purged.

Therefore, to invite members of the elite to paw through over-priced discarded items seemed remarkably insensitive, not the least because of its timing—immediately following Hurricane Sandy, when the belongings of so many were reduced to just such piles, only logged with water.

But, it was pointed out to me, this exhibition was planned years ago. So what? It’s conceptual art. If Warner Brothers can remake scenes from a multimillion-dollar film in the wake of a theater shooting, why can’t art, especially conceptual art, respond to the times? As I suggested below, Rosler could have donated everything and left the atrium empty, as the hurricane left so many homes empty.

Again, I’m really tired of accumulations of detritus in all its forms pretending to be art, like Karen Kilimnik or Song Dong, the Chinese artist who laid out his mother’s possessions at MoMA in 2009 and recently at London’s Barbicon. Could we please just make something for a change? Or at the very least, attempt to transform it, as Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt does so beautifully in his work, now at MoMA/PS1.

There's nothing about "institutional critique" that a great work of art doesn't do better.    Toward that end, Olafur Eliasson's swinging fan in MoMA's atrium said it all.

Olafur Eliasson, Ventilator, 1997: Photo by C-Monster