Red Striped Kitchen Summary

Rosler was raised in a Jewish family in Brooklyn. Her family’s religious background made her aware of the human rights and social justice issues and increased her sensitivity to current and social issues politics at a very young age. Because of her environment during her upbringing, the horror of the Vietnam War instigated her activism, and the influences of her feminist ideas, the series I will be looking at, shows the feminist’s commentary of the Vietnam War.

Martha Rosler uses her work to develop a critical reflection on the functioning of society and the inner tensions of the public sphere (Stephen Wright, 2000). She explores spaces between the private and public spheres and the everyday life and art world. Her work is most often considered
They are “rooting through an up-to-the-minute designer kitchen colour-coordinated in blood red” (The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, 2002). Rosler wants to show that the media can no longer censor the violence from American homes, exposing them to the reality of their surroundings.

In this work, there are gender stereotypes present in the images that Rosler chose to use in the collage work. Even though there are no women present in this work, the kitchen in American homes during the war time was often spaces meant for the women. When Rosler juxtaposes two GIs in the collage closely inspecting the kitchen, it seems to also hint that the men were also keeping a close watch on the domestic spaces. Just like how they might have been searching for hidden mines in battlefields, the two soldiers searching the kitchen also suggests the kitchen as a battlefield. The saturated red of the red utensils and fruits further reinforces the kitchen as a battlefield because of the blood colour utensils present. The quiet chaos and battles is ironically fought out within the domestic spaces of a