Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975 (video still)

They took things very seriously in the 1970s. Well, some things anyway. And two of those things were video art and feminism. In art terms, there was the whole postmodern emphasis on parody and pastiche going on. With video, though artists might have enjoyed the playfulness of exploring a new medium and freeing performance art from the one-off event, the resulting work was often somewhat po-faced. And of course, challenging the longstanding notion that a woman’s place was in the home, where she should be chained to the kitchen sink, metaphorically at least, wasn’t to be taken lightly.

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