The Art of Cooking

In 1973–1975, in the midst of creating a body of works on food, taste, labor, women, and imperialism, Martha Rosler wrote TheArt of Cooking, a dialogue between Julia Child, the pioneer television chef bringing French cooking to American audiences, and the New York Times’s noted restaurant critic Craig Claiborne. The imaginary conversation is substantially composed of quotations from cookbooks of the era, redirected toward a discussion of the role of taste in art.

With mischievous precision, The Art of Cooking is also a crucial unpublished art historical document of a young Rosler’s politicization of the domestic sphere in the era of her landmark video work Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975). As an artwork in its own right, The Art of Cooking could easily be seen as an indispensible companion to Semiotics of the Kitchen and an integral part of her early body of work, made available to audiences for the first time only now, in 2016. A short excerpt of the book-length dialogue was published this past summer as part of e-flux journal’s SUPERCOMMUNITY, its artistic contribution to the 2015 Venice Biennale.

Written in the years just following Lucy Lippard’s proclamation of the dematerialization of the art object and Gordon Matta-Clark, Tina Girouard, and Carol Goodden’s improvisational restaurant Food, the book can be situated art historically at a moment when artistic strategies deemed conceptual began to give way to an interest in the politics of life and life processes. This was a time when grassroots or bespoke restaurants such as Chez Panisse were opening as quickly as they were gaining prestige, and conceptual art’s most radical propositions were entering the artistic establishment. In light of Rosler’s later work and writing, The Art of Cooking can be seen as charting the persistence of class politics through emerging social and artistic forms of delectation, but from the perspective of a sophisticated young feminist with an acerbic wit.