London garage sale, Martha Rosler ; [accompanies: Martha Rosler, London Garage Sale (4 June - 17 July 2005) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London]

From the early 1970s the influential American artist Martha Rosler has utilised the apparatus of vernacular culture and the minutiae of daily experience to investigate and comment on contemporary society. In a version organised especially for the Institute, Martha Rosler brings her seminal work Garage Sale to the ICA. Over the six-week duration of this 'exhibition', visitors to the gallery are invited to rummage through piles of junk and clothes, bargain with the sales assistants and buy items on display in the gallery. All the proceeds from this cash-only Garage Sale will go to charity. Garage Sale, a now iconic installation and performance work, originally took place in 1973 in the Art Gallery of the University of California, San Diego. Advertised as a jumble sale in local newspapers but also as an art event within the art community, this work took the form of a house-hold sale where second-hand goods – clothes, books, records, toys, costume jewellery and personal letters and mementos – were displayed on racks and tables and sold off over the course of the exhibition. Garage Sale, with its reference to the status of the art work, art history and art audiences, is interested in examining art as a fetishised object and commodity. It is also a representation of a subjective history and a way of thinking, and it works as a potent metaphor for personal and social relations — especially given its genesis within the highly politicised context of the women's movement in the 1970s.