Martha Rosler's Library

Martha Rosler Library
1 August – 9 November 2008
Stills Edinburgh, 23 Cockburn Street, Edinburgh

The book collection of the American artist Martha Rosler is perhaps the perfect embodiment of her radical vision - and an archive of the marginalised American left. It has travelled the world -here's its  journey.

 

 

 

 

e-flux, New York, 2005-2006, Frankfurter Kunstverien, 2006, Museum for Contermporary Art, Antwerp, 2006, unitednationsplaza, Berlin, 2007, Institut national d'histoire d'art, Paris, 2007-2008, Stills, Edinburgh, 2008, Gallery at the University of Massachussets, Amherst, 2009 eflux describe how the library came to be mobile

Martha Rosler's Library holds books on economy, political theory, war, colonialism, poetry, feminism, science fiction, art history, of children’s books, dictionaries, maps and travel literature as well as photo albums, posters, postcards and newspaper clippings . On exhibition they could be studied at will.
Martha states in thsi video that

"the practice of an artist is based on ideas and criticism and thinking and philosophy and science"

three cheers for that
                                      

 

 

Now back at rest the library is in the process of being catalogued and can be searched here. There are over 7600 books in the Martha Rosler Library; they can be viewed  by their title, author, or at their original location on Martha Rosler's shelves. A keyword search for Feminism finds 555 titles.

 Rosler’s website here describes her work thus '(She) works in video, phototography, text, installation, and performance. Her work deals with the separation of the public and private sphere, exploring issues from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment'.
She has published 17 books of photography, art, and writing, in several languages. Her essay book Decoys and Disruptions, was published by MIT Press in 2004. Publication of her three-part series, “Culture Class; Art, Creativity, Urbanism,” based on the Third biennial Hermes lecture that she gave in Den Bosch, the Netherlands, in 2010, was recently completed in the e-flux Journal, followed by “From Gentrification to Occupation: The Artistic Mode of Revolution.”