DURING BOTH OF my interviews with Rosler, she took my photograph matter-of-factly with her smartphone. Among her ongoing projects is a series of off-the-cuff portraits of the journalists and students who come to speak with her, most of whom are younger women. While she has lamented the fact that typically only women curate her work — suggesting that female artists, while they’ve secured admittance to the gallery and museum world, are often still siloed — she has written that “the interview business has, instead, made me happy. It suggests that young women continue to look to older women as still having something to say, something they want to hear.” When I went to meet Rosler for the second time, at her home, a peeling Victorian house tucked behind a London plane tree on a busy street, the visit did indeed have a pilgrimage-like feel. Sitting in her long, dark living room beside four towering potted trees — a mango, a grapefruit and two avocados — she observed that our interviews had centered on her early work, before acknowledging, with a mock growl, “But if you were to ask me what I’m working on now, I’d snarl and say ‘shows’!” Our conversation did keep returning, naturally, to the past. Rosler, whether she likes it or not, has become a memory keeper of sorts, a maternal conscience with which younger artists and citizens must reckon and attempt to measure up. The role is one demanded less often of older male artists, who tend to be characterized as ascetics rather than as public resources.
When I’d asked Rosler at our first meeting how she remains resilient when her work involves grappling with the bleakness of the news cycle, she’d replied, “Simple. I’m not a Christian, I don’t feel guilty; I feel engaged, which is different.” That, and she gardens. Lately, when she’s not trying to finish long-abandoned projects (“I guess I can’t pretend I’m young or even a midcareer artist anymore,” she said), she spends much of her time among her plants. “It’s an amazing way to stay in touch with what the world is about,” she said. In gardening, as in life, one’s tasks are “both in your control and basically not,” she continued.
We made our way downstairs, through her low-tin-ceilinged kitchen with its 1930s stove and out into the backyard and the bright April afternoon. Rosler had recently cut back an unruly forsythia bush near the wooden fence at the northern edge of a densely planted tangle of greenery. The daffodils had just wilted, and purple columbines had sprung up in their place. The work of gardening is maintenance, a constant wagering against the forces of chaos. This makes it difficult to measure progress, but it’s there, so long as you know where to look.
