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1.9.–14.11.26

Martha Rosler
The East Is Red, The West Is Bending

With its subversive humor, Martha Rosler’s 1977 video The East Is Red, The West Is Bending dismantles the Western appropriation of supposedly “Oriental” culinary traditions. Standing in a makeshift television kitchen, Rosler reads aloud from the instruction manual for an electric wok made by the American company West Bend—a text laden with projections and stereotypes about Asian cuisine and culture. In doing so, she links questions of food and cuisine to the pursuit of status and social distinction through consumption, as well as to the geopolitical context of the ideological rivalry between the capitalist West and the communist East. It is a form of ideological critique that plays out quite literally “at the kitchen table,” making palpable the complexity of the larger political landscape through the smaller, supposedly private sphere of domestic life.  More

Looking back at this video today, it is hard not to feel that The East Is Red, The West Is Bending was made just as the era of postmodernism, the ascendancy of (neo)liberalism, and cultural and economic globalization—an era that now seems to be drawing to a close—was beginning. It is giving way to a new phase of isolationism, geopolitical realignment, China’s rise as a global power, and a radically conservative, right-wing return to traditional values in the West, particularly around questions of gender. Yet the ideological knot—the complex intertwining of the public and the private, value production and projection, East and West, hard politics and cultural soft power, the individual and society—that Martha Rosler traced nearly fifty years ago is anything but untangled. Rather, this nearly fifty-year-old video demonstrates just how powerfully these mechanisms continue to shape the present and how the various strands are once again being woven together in new ways.