Semiotics of the Kitchen

Martha Rosler demonstrates the function of multiple kitchen implements (sometimes in rather violent ways) like an anti-Julia Child in her darkly humorous 1975 video, Semiotics of the Kitchen.

” … First of all, it took on television and that’s why it’s preferentially shown in a monitor, a little box. And it is about a kind of framing of women as the creature in the kitchen. And so the box serves that function of the frame, or the cage, again. And it is. I purposely went for only hand tools, because I wanted it very much to be the idea of the tool as the extension of the person. So it was the woman’s hand, and then it becomes the woman’s body in a number of gestures.”
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