Medical Surveillance
1967

Photomontage; originally, collage.

In Medical Surveillance, Rosler collects printed images of medical teams performing surgeries into a montage of images. The piece refers to women's resistance to the godlike power ascribed to the overwhelmingly male doctor corps. It also makes a wry reference to the great theme in Baroque painting of the anatomy lesson or medical dissection. But where Rembrandt and others made the patient's body or corpse the center of their canvases, Rosler effaces that figure entirely. Doctors, anonymized behind surgical masks, work under arc lights reminiscent of those used in interrogations. At the lower left, an immense, all-seeing eye stares out at the viewer, who gazes back.