DURING my interviews with Rosler, he took my photo with his smartphone. Among his ongoing projects is a series of off-the-cuff portraits of journalists and students who come to talk to him, most of them younger women. Although she laments the fact that it is often only women who curate her work – suggesting that women artists, while they have gained entry into the gallery and museum world, are still often silenced – she writes that “ the interview business was, instead, made me happy. This suggests that young women continue to look to older women as still having something to say, something they want to hear.” When I met Rosler for the second time, at his home, a stripped-down Victorian house tucked behind a London plane tree on a busy street, the visit really felt like a pilgrimage. Sitting in his long, dark living room in next to four towering potted trees — a mango, a grapefruit and two avocados — he observed that our interviews centered on his early work, before acknowledging, with a mock grunt, “But if you ask me what what I’m doing now, I’m going to run out and say ‘out’!” Our conversation kept returning, naturally, to the past. Rosler, whether she likes it or not, has become a kind of memory keeper, a maternal conscience upon whom younger artists and citizens must rely and try to measure up. The role was less demanding of older male artists, who tended to be characterized as ascetics rather than as public resources.
When I asked Rosler during our first meeting how he stays grounded when his job involves struggling with the darkness of the news cycle, he replied, “Simple. I am not a Christian, I have not sinned; I feel engaged, which is different.” That, and he gardens. Lately, when he’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 a wonderful way to stay in touch with what the world is about,” she said. In gardening, as in life, tasks of a person is “both in your control and usually not,” he continued.
We went downstairs, through her low tin-ceilinged kitchen with a 1930s stove and out into the backyard and into the bright April afternoon. Rosler recently cut back a wild forsythia bush near the wooden fence on the north edge of a thickly planted tangle of plants. The daffodils just withered, and purple columbines appeared in their place. The work of gardening is maintenance, a constant bet against the forces of chaos. This makes progress hard to measure, but it’s there, as long as you know where to look.