Martha Rosler introduces The East Is Red, The West Is Bending at EAI on Wednesday, January 19, 2011.

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.