The East Is Red, The West Is Bending

1977, 20:25 min, color, sound

In an astute deconstruction of the political ideology that pervades the everyday, The East is Red, The West is Bending is a tongue-in-cheek presentation of a booklet that accompanies a newly marketed consumer appliance, a West Bend electric wok. In this performance-based work, Rosler reads the booklet in a manner that recalls an amateurish local television cooking demonstration. Demonstrating the wok at home, this "failed Mrs. Pat Boone" delivers an absurd corporate text. A few incongruous inserts into the booklet's language of corporate gentility suggest the imperialist attitudes that underlie attempts to convince us to transform ourselves into connoisseurs of exotic foreign cuisines.