Unknown Secrets (The Secret of the Rosenbergs)
1973–2012

Installation with screenprinted black-and-white photographs on canvas, wooden towel rack with stenciled towel, Jell-O box, and photocopied text handout

Unknown Secrets (The Secret of the Rosenbergs) addresses the fate of the young Jewish couple Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were convicted of aiding the Soviet Union’s development of atomic bomb technology and executed for espionage in 1953. At the center of the installation is a life-size screenprinted photograph of Ethel Rosenberg, wearing a housedress and drying a dish in her small tenement kitchen on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She is framed by a montage of iconic 1950s images from magazines and newspapers: moms, models, advertisements for brassieres and girdles, maps of the Korean War and the USSR, diagrams of bombs, the Rosenbergs in their coffins. An alarm clock points to 8:16, the precise time when Ethel was electrocuted. Four props complete the assemblage: a towel rack and shelf; a Jell-O box on the shelf; a dish towel hanging on the rack; and a wooden pedestal bearing a typed handout. This is a fourteen-page essay by Rosler analyzing the trial of the Rosenbergs and summarizing the context of Cold War hysteria within which they were judged. It refers to the demonization of Ethel for her alleged role as instigator of the conspiracy, commenting on the perceived threat posed by politically active women.