City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

Travelling garage sale

eng

Travelling garage sale

"The 'Monumental Garage Sale' was a multimedia installation and performance by Martha Rosler held in the Art Gallery of the University of California, San Diego in 1973 and repeated later as the 'Travelling Garage Sale' in the garage of La Mamelle, an artist run gallery in San Francisco in 1977. It was staged as both a real sale and as an 'exemplary work' with the artist adopting the role of the vendor - a Southern Californian woman and a mother, with roots in the counterculture - selling personal items and occasionally bargaining and chatting with visitors.... This work has a range of political and philosophical implications relating to the function of objects, including items deemed 'art' within social processes, their use value, their commodification and their transition between public and private realms. Operating on a number of levels, including the theatrical and the psychoanalytic, it suggests a method by which an artwork can address the complexity of the political sphere while maintaining its own multiplicity." Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 2005 http://www.project.ie