Performance artist Linda Montano invited other performance artists to consider how early events associated with sex, food, money/fame, or death/ritual resurfaced in their later work. The result is an original and compelling talking performance that documents the production of art in an important and often misunderstood community.

Among the more than 100 artists Montano interviewed from 1979 to 1989 were John Cage, Lorraine O’Grady, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Stuart Sherman, Martha Rosler, Joan Jonas, Faith Ringgold, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, Meredith Monk, Adrian Piper, Carolee Schneemann and Chris Burden. Her discussions with them focused on the relationship between art and life, history and memory, the individual and society, and the potential for individual and social change.

Most of the encounters that unfold in Martha Rosler’s works originate in seemingly ordinary everyday situations: scenes of domestic life or everyday activities such as shopping, watching the news, reading the newspaper, or traveling. The photographic series featured in this book – works from the eighties to the present—are also devoted to these themes. They are studies of the highways and byways of daily life, views of roads, subway tunnels, airports, shopping districts, parking lots, and the like. These photographic documents of Rosler’s also offer critical insights into day-to-day movements within rigidly structured relationships of power.

The Hermes Lecture is a biennial lecture about the position of the visual artist in the cultural and social field.

Martha Rosler works in video, photography, text, installation, and performance. Her work focuses on the public sphere, exploring issues from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment, especially as they affect women.

Rosler has for many years produced works on war and the national security climate, connecting life at home with the conduct of war abroad, in which her photomontage series played a critical part. She has also published several books of photographs, texts, and commentary on public space, ranging from airports and roads to housing and gentrification.

Published on the occasion of the 2017 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 24 September, 2016–2 January, 2017), The Uses of Photography examines a network of artists who were active in San Diego between the late 1960s and early 1980s and whose experiments with photography opened the medium to a profusion of new strategies and subjects. Working within the framework of conceptual art, these artists introduced urgent social issues and themes of everyday life into that seemingly neutral territory, with photographic works that took on hybrid forms, from books and postcards to video and text-and-image installations. If photography had come to occupy a new, more prominent position in the art world of the late 1960s, largely within the context of conceptual art, much of the medium’s radical potential nonetheless remained latent.

Tracing a crucial history of photoconceptual practice, The Uses of Photography focuses on an artistic community that formed in and around the University of California San Diego, founded in 1960, and its visual arts department, founded in 1967. Artists such as Eleanor Antin, Allan Kaprow, Fred Lonidier, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, and Carrie Mae Weems, to name a few, employed photography and its expanded forms as a means to dismantle modernist autonomy, to contest notions of photographic truth, and to engage in political critique. The influence of these artists is felt throughout the global contemporary art world today, yet their common roots in San Diego—a military town far removed from the art world—has rarely been acknowledged. While these artists are celebrated internationally for their individual achievements, this exhibition is the first to explore how their practices emerged at a critical time and place.