6.9 Martha Rosler. House Beautiful (Bringing the War Home). 1967-72

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Del curso dictado por The Museum of Modern Art

Seeing Through Photographs

1986 calificaciones

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The Museum of Modern Art

Seeing Through Photographs

1986 calificaciones

Although taking, sharing, and viewing photographs has become second nature for many of us, our regular engagement with images does not necessarily make us visually literate. This course aims to address the gap between seeing and truly understanding photographs by introducing a diversity of ideas, approaches, and technologies that inform their making. In this course you will look closely at photographs from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art and hear a variety of perspectives on what a photograph is and the ways that photography has been used throughout its nearly 180 year history: as a means of artistic expression, as a tool for science and exploration; as an instrument of documentation; to tell stories and record histories; and as a mode of communication and critique in our ever increasingly visual culture. Learning Objectives • Develop skills to better examine and understand the differences between photographs and photographic images. • Discover how context influences the production, circulation, and reception of photographic images. • Learn about different modes of artistic and technological experimentation and innovation in photography. • Investigate photography’s role in our increasingly visual culture.

De la lección

Ocean of Images: Photography & Contemporary Culture

Many artists are turning to our image-saturated world as both a source for and subject of their work. Explore how they examine—and frequently disrupt—current methods of image production, presentation, and circulation.

6.7 Robert Heinecken. Are You Rea. 1964-681:26

6.8 Thomas Ruff. jpeg msh01. 20044:18

6.9 Martha Rosler. House Beautiful (Bringing the War Home). 1967-727:36

Conoce a los instructores

Sarah Meister
Curator
Department of Photography

My name is Martha Rosler and we are discussing

a body of work called House Beautiful (Bringing the War Home).

When I was a young person in the mid 60's we, the United States that is,

had gotten itself into a war that shocked my whole generation.

That started from a small action in Vietnam and gradually got bigger and

bigger and bigger and it seemed to be beyond reason.

But in addition, it was the first living room war,

where we saw timely footage of battles and huts on fire and so

on every evening at dinner hour, broadcast by a television into our living rooms.

And I was absolutely traumatized by this,

thinking how are we supposed to eat our dinner watching a war?

I had been making some collages,

photomontages based on the images of women in the media.

And after awhile it occurred to me that I could use that same

technique of a kind of collision in space about the war.

So I begin cutting things out and putting them together.

I lived in an apartment building in Brooklyn and

there was a garbage room in the basement, and

people would stack up magazines for other people in the building.

And I would go through those magazines, mostly Life and Look and a few others.

But I also went looking in the bins on Fourth Avenue

where there were a lot of used booksellers.

And they also had bins where you could buy prints for a very low price.

I was interested in architectural photographic

representations of modernist homes.

So the series is called House Beautiful, and

it's called that because it really is centered on the idea of domesticity,

safety, space and aesthetic rightness.

But also Bringing the War Home, because I am literally bringing images of

the war into spaces having to do with our domestic life.

If I was using news images, I wanted them to have just gone over

the curve of immediate memory into something else,

of being vaguely familiar but not ripped from the headlines.

In one I'm looking at here, which is cleaning the drapes

You can see it´s relationship to the Body Beautiful series because it´s a woman.

Pretty up to date with a vacuum cleaner that she´s wearing,

which looks like an attache case [LAUGH] or a briefcase with a wand attached.

And she's vacuuming these drapes, and outside is a photograph, in black and

white, of a couple of soldiers standing around in what amounts to a trench.

It's not an image of combat, they are tableaux in stasis,

so that we take the action of war and look at it in a more contemplative way.

I'm looking at one that I call Makeup/Hands Up.

So here's a rather nicely made up woman with beautifully manicured nails and

matching shiny pastel lipstick in a tight closeup, putting on eye shadow.

And where her eye should be is a rather brutal cut of an image of

a soldier leading off a female Vietnamese captive.

The eye of woman, who is in color is cut out.

The eye of the women who´s being led away, the eyes are covered by a bandage.

She is a woman of color, and the soldier is an African American soldier.

So I´m talking about several things at once, but

what's front and center for us is the image of the captive in war.

In other words,

a woman in a very different situation in relation to her ability to see.

And we were highly attuned, particularly in that period,

to looking at women on the basis of whether they looked up to date and

well cared for, and judging them on that basis, and

also judging social status through a woman's appearance.

So I wanted the viewer to not quite identify with the people in the images.

And it remains important to me to think about how we either ask for

or interrupt identification with the content of the photographic image.

For me it's really important that we identify immediately even if we are at

the same time refusing to identify and saying no that's not me that's the other.

And I think there's a tension there that's really important, and

in some cases amounts to a degree of vehemence in rejection of identification.

So that, for me, was always important in any photographic work I did of

where do you stand in relationship to that which is depicted.

I later realized that the reason the House Beautiful

montages were often in rooms or in other landscape

settings was because I wanted the viewer to have a place to stand.

And as soon as I formulated that thought I thought yes, this is really important for

me that you enter the image and see yourself standing there.

It's not as though you're on some higher plane or

it's a non-relatable physical space.

I saw House Beautiful, not as art, I want it to be agitational.

I distributed it to the anti-war community as flyers,

xerox copies, and this is very much in the context of the 60s.

If I were pressed by people saying that's not art,

it's propaganda, I would have to say okay.

The difference for me was that there were no slogans.

I didn't want to say stop the war, I didn't want to say anything.

Just to have the images convey the message,

which I hoped would provoke enough of a shock and

a recognition in people to recognize this is an anti-war offering.

And my last gesture is a very minimal scene taking place in nowhere land.

A soldier and a guy with a hat, possibly a Vietnamese,

running away from a car that may be under siege.

And to their right is the backs of American soldiers running away,

and that was last one.

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