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.
