Martha Rosler. Meta-Monumental Garage Sale

For her first solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Brooklyn-based artist Martha Rosler presented her work Meta-Monumental Garage Sale, a large-scale version of the classic American garage sale, in which Museum visitors can browse and buy second-hand goods organized, displayed, and sold by the artist. The installation filled MoMA’s Marron Atrium with strange and everyday objects donated by the artist, MoMA staff, and the general public, creating a lively space for exchange between Rosler and her customers as they haggle over prices. The project also included a newspaper and an active website.

Martha Rosler is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of her generation, one whose artistic practice, teaching, and writing continue to influence succeeding generations. Rosler makes “art about the commonplace, art that illuminates social life,” examining the everyday by means of photography, performance, video, and installation.

The Meta-Monumental Garage Sale at MoMA was a successor to a work originally held (as Monumental Garage Sale) in the art gallery of the University of California at San Diego in 1973. The work was advertised simultaneously as a garage sale in local newspapers and as an art event within the local art scene. A chalkboard on site bore the legend, “Maybe the Garage Sale is a metaphor for the mind,” and a slide show of a seemingly typical local white family, bought at a local estate sale, played continuously, Nearby, an audiotape loop offered a meditation on the fetishism of commodities in modern life.

The Garage Sale, which has also been held at the Generali Foundation, Vienna (1999); the Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona (1999); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2004); and The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2005), implicates visitors in face-to-face transactions within a secondary, informal cash economy—just like garage sales held outside a museum setting. As a traveling project, the Garage Sale accumulates elements from each succeeding event. These range from components of the first project, such as the slide show and audio track, to “merchandise” from previous iterations and photographs of people holding up objects that they wanted to buy or bought, and that form part of the installation.