Martha Rosler's kitchen mise-en-scene

Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen: An Audition (video still), 2011. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI).

An Audition was but a small part of EAI’s two-hour food-centric program. The original Semiotics also screened with Rosler’s other “kitchen videos,” A budding gourmet (1974) and The East Is Red, The West Is Bending (1977). Watching these, wherein Rosler performs the culture of American cuisine, I was reminded of Michael Pollan’s 2009 piece Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, where he wrote of the theatricality of cooking shows today. In a nutshell, he argued that Americans no longer learn to cook from television but instead how to fetishize food and enact cooking.