ART REVIEW : ‘MEAL IN 3 COURSES’ IS NOT A VERY TASTY DISH

Martha Rosler is especially respected for her accessibility, and it is evident in “Global Taste: A Meal in 3 Courses” at Installation (447 5th Ave.). She uses familiar television commercials and related materials to create what we might call “sequential collages” in her video installation, which assault rather than seduce the viewer’s sensibilities.

Rosler has roots in San Diego. Although she hails from the East Coast, she earned her master of fine arts degree at UC San Diego. She returned to the East Coast to make her career as a “New York artist.” Rosler, a critic as well, is an associate professor of photography and media at Rutgers University, but for the last four months she has been a visiting artist at UCSD. Her works have been in 100 group exhibitions throughout the world, nearly three dozen solo exhibits and hundreds of publications, seminars, lectures and other presentations. Clearly, she is an artist with a substantial reputation, an artist to whom it would be appropriate to give some attention.

“Global Taste: A Meal in 3 Courses,” refers to three video monitors in different sizes showing three interrelated videotapes simultaneously juxtaposing images of language production, product consumption and the development of consumers.

Visitors will readily recognize many of the ads that appear, including those for Cheerios, Pampers, Gerber’s baby foods and Kellogg Corn Flakes. It is indeed astonishing to realize the extent to which your memory is cluttered with them--the jingles, the punch lines, the statistics, the cute slogans.

The gallery itself is used in the most basic way, a space for containing equipment--pedestals, chairs, three TV monitors, speakers--and visitors.

Because of the difficulty of watching three monitors at one time, interested visitors might want to make repeated visits, perhaps as many as five: the first for an initial immersion in the experience, the next three for focused concentration on each of the monitors and the last, again, for immersion in what will be by then relatively familiar material. A two-page orientation handout is available. It would be prudent to prepare yourself with it and occupy a seat for a 40-minute presentation.

The tape to the left in the space is composed for the most part of ads with children and food. Many are enactments of children learning adult language or product language, which are, according to Rosler, equivalent in the advertising world. It also includes excerpts from two films, “Escape from the Planet of the Apes,” featuring a congressional hearing with two civilized simians, and “Teacher,” a version of “The Miracle Worker,” the story of blind and deaf Helen Keller. Both are concerned with communication. An excerpt from the game show “Wheel of Fortune” links language, the basis of any civilization, to what Rosler calls “the product universe.”

The tape to the right--through images, texts and voice-overs--explores the theme of the industrialized world’s colonization of the Third World, equated with children, through the generation of demand for its products. One of the concerns expressed is for the role of television in unifying India at the expense of its cultural diversity.

Images of food and drink to the left contrast with images of famine in Africa on the right. Brief extracts of the “Live Aid Concert” (“Even the commercials raise money for the cause,” an announcer enthuses.) are juxtaposed with a Michael Jackson Pepsi ad to remind us that the entertainer has recently signed a contract with the soft drink company for an amount equal to that raised to relieve famine.

In the background in the third monitor, men auditioning for a singing Dr Pepper commercial drone on like an indifferent chorus seemingly interminably: “It’s fantastic! It’s so different! It’s got originality!”

Remember, this assault of images and sounds continues for 40 minutes.

The total experience is stupefying. One can sympathize with Rosler’s sense of moral indignation. Those who are already converted to her point of view will probably relish the use of the enemy’s own materials against it.

Others will be put off after only a few minutes of a lengthy visual experience whose meaning depends on a long, written text, distinguished for jargon rather than clarity.

Rosler in part defeats herself. Many of the ads are clever. They do bring humor to our lives. They are also educational. Consider, for example, the beneficial impact of contemporary advertising on personal hygiene. Consider also the role of television and the advertising industry in the development of a global consciousness and society.

Rosler is a moralist before she is an artist. She is stuck in the doctrinaire attitudes of her student days. Her installation will change neither hearts nor minds. It is a crashing bore!

The lesson is: Credentials do not make artists.

“Global Taste: A Meal in 3 Courses” is running for an unnecessarily long period--until June 28.