Martha Rosler | Garage Sale Standard

Martha Rosler

Garage Sale Standard

16 pp., 42 x 28 cm., tabloid newspaper

New York City, USA: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012

Edition size unknown

I had a standing date with a friend every summer Saturday morning for many years. She would pick me up and I would drive her car and we would hit every garage sale listed, from about seven in the morning until noon. She designed store windows so was looking for unusual items that could be used as display props. I was primarily looking for books and records (either for myself, or to quickly flip to pay for this sometimes costly addiction) but also furniture, and objects that I might use in artworks. 

Eventually the idea of the Garage Sale as an artwork occurred. This was before I had access to a gallery, so I think the main appeal was being able to advertise on lampposts and attract a modest audience. The ideal audience, in a way - at least one who would be familiar with the subject matter. 

I wanted to maybe produce a book of photographs I had taken at garage sales (or of items I had found there) and perhaps launch the book that way. I suspect feeling bad about the bait & switch is what prevented this from ever happening. Serious Garage Salers are on a tight schedule and would likely resent their time being wasted. 

Either way, Martha Rosler - it turns out - hosted such a thing many, many years prior. She presented her very first Garage Sale art work at the University of California San Diego Art Gallery, in 1973, when she was a graduate student. 

It was publicized in local media as both a sale and an art installation. The artist solicited donations from friends and colleagues of clothes, books, toys and household items, and displayed these alongside personal effects, such as private letters, her son’s baby shoes, and her used diaphragms. She also projected a slideshow of found images procured at an estate sale. 

Sometimes billed as the Monumental Garage Sale, the project travelled to nearly a dozen galleries, museums and art fairs in Vienna, Berlin, London, Stockholm, Rotterdam, Basel and Dublin, among other cities. 

Like many retail projects instigated by artists (Claes Oldenburg, Keith Haring, George Brecht & Robert Filliou, Tracey Emin & Sarah Lucas, David Hammons, N.E.Thing. Co, Sarah Staton, etc.) the work investigated ideas around value and exchange. 

In its final iteration,  this time entitled Meta-Monumental Garage Sale, it was held in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, in 2012. It was Rosler's first solo exhibition at MoMA, a venue she had been critical of in earlier writings. 

For two weeks visitors could haggle with the artist and gallery staff in the atrium of the gallery, which had been transformed into a large-scale version of the classic American garage sale.

Gallery visitors could also take home copies of the Garage Sale Standard, a free tabloid newspaper published by MoMA. Designed by Kelli Anderson (who kindly sent us copies of both), the newspaper features essays, interviews, an excerpt from Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, even a crossword puzzle (sample answers: Pussy Riot, Lena Dunham, Dr. No). 

It includes a negative newspaper review of the original Dan Diego exhibition from 1973, which argues that the project failed to transcend life and reality. The paper ran Rosler's response the following week, which is also reprinted here (sample line: "If Art seems close to Life, so much the better"). Other texts include "Domestic Work in New York City", "Where Does Electronic Waste End Up?" and Rosler's "On Obsolescence". 

Download both issues as PDFs from the Museum of Modern Art, here. 

"It stemmed from my shock that there was such a thing: that people would sell their stuff and that other people would buy it and not find the transaction strange. Garage sales didn’t exist where I grew up, in Brooklyn. It was only in the late 1960s, when I moved across the country for graduate school, that I came across this phenomenon. Once I understood the garage sale as a social ritual, run primarily by women, my initial horror changed to sympathy. I realized that I needed to take garage sales seriously. “Why do people, why do women, do this?” I asked myself. At the time, the country was in the middle of an oil crisis. When Sabine Breitwieser [chief curator of media and performance art at MoMA] asked me to hold a garage sale during yet another crash, it felt opportune. The work also sets in train the question of value systems, and since I am an artist, the system I was most interested in contrasting it with at that point was the art system, so it had to be held in or in conjunction with an art gallery, a noncommercial one."

- Martha Rosler