images | text

Martha Rosler
Born in Brooklyn, USA / Lives in Brooklyn,USA

Jens Hoffmann (JH): Bringing the  War Home: House Beautiful (1967– 72) is a series of photomontages combining images from the war in Vietnam and pictures from interior design magazines published in the United States. The horrors of the distant battlefields are brought together with the American Dream to create a disturbing, surreal nightmare. We see soldiers in living rooms and kitchens, and corpses in and around suburban houses. What was the reaction to such provocative work when you first exhibited it?

Martha Rosler (MR): I did not exhibit these montages, rather I handed out photocopied flyers at or near demonstrations, and some of them appeared in so-called underground newspapers. Thus, the reaction I got was almost uniformly positive. Even among art-world friends of an older generation, the work was seen as pointing to a self-evident truth. I do not think I knew anyone who was in favor of the war, or who did not understand the relationship between the war abroad and the war at home. There are no corpses in living rooms in this work. That was part of the point, about distance. There are war casualties, civilians, inside some of these living rooms, but not dead combatants. Some combatants are undeniably dead outside the windows, however.

JH: In 2004 you created a new series of montages with the same title, about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can you talk more about these newer works and why you chose to employ a similar strategy to utter your protest?

MR: The same title, but with the added phrase “New Series,” just like a periodical that has resumed after a hiatus. I decided to risk being seen as an old dog with no new tricks specifically to say—something that was still completely unacceptable to say in 2004—that we were embarked on the same idiotic, vicious, destructive, barbaric misadventure that we had undertaken in making war on Vietnam. In other words, I restarted something ended long ago, using a technique I had essentially stopped using, in order to say, “We are back where we were 30 or 40 years ago. We have learned nothing.” I wanted to repoliticize the earlier works, which I felt had been aestheticized and thereby at least partly depoliticized by their reception in an art context. I also took the opportunity to point out the degree to which the spaces represented are gendered; the new works make more of an issue out of that. In keeping with the “retro” idea I used essentially the same cut-and paste techniques as in the older works, although the output is digital.

JH: Why collage?

MR: Collage is able to point to fissure and suture simultaneously. It can underline something that may be conceptually obvious but which we have chosen to dissociate in our minds, namely images of our daily lives and happiness, and images of war, death, and disruption. We may ultimately be responsible for the violence, but it is so very far away.