Martha Rosler and Postmodern Despair
by Jesse Anderson
Art has always found a way to survive. Through recessions, revolutions, and world war, people have turned to art for expression, solidarity, and documentation.
The Vietnam War was the first televised war: played on American television screens in family living rooms. Distress, destruction, and decimation streamed into family homes through the same device that streamed Saturday Night Live. The integration of war into households through the television inspired Martha Rosler to create a photomontage series titled Home Beautiful: Bringing the War Home. Rosler spliced images from home decorating magazines with photojournalism of the war from LIFE magazine. She called her series What transpired was a jarring realisation of how war footage had come to play an everyday role in the American household.
Rosler studied at Brooklyn College in New York before subsequently acquiring a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in 1974 at the University of California, San Diego. Though trained in abstract art, Rosler decided she wanted to pursue an artform which more directly confronted sociopolitical issues such as women’s position in the patriarchy. Her video work, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975, for example, explored the female subject within the patriarchy.
Beauty Rest from the series House Beautiful: Brining the War Home, 1967-72, Martha Rosler, Inkjet print
During the Vietnam war, Rosler examined how desensitized American citizens had become to the atrocities of war due in part to their continual exposure to uncensored coverage. Averse to the idea of profiting from this series, Rosler distributed photocopies of her work amongst anti-war communities and published it in underground periodicals. Rosler refused to follow in the footsteps of profiteering news channels, instead examining bystander complicity in the raging war.
Exemplifying Postmodernism as an art style that emerged in the later twentieth century, Rosler’s images question our ideas of reality and truth. Home Beautiful: Bringing the War Home reflects the sense of despair in Postmodern art responding to contemporary culture. Postmodernism is a movement difficult to define, characterised by complexity and subversion. Where Modernism might present a hopeful future, Postmodernist art is often characterised by a sense of hopelessness.
In Beauty Rest, Rosler places a family lounging on a large, cream, quilted bed against a backdrop of destruction. The contented ease of the family is at jarring odds with the dereliction of the room. The floral, satiny textures of the family’s bed and pyjamas contrast the decrepit room. The father figure playfully manoeuvres a toy airplane above the young boy’s head, a sardonic act which alludes to the manner in which information about the war was disseminated to the American populace by authoritative figures. Beauty Rest also nods to the complicity of those who continued life as normal. The family constitutes a closed circle, apparently unaware of the destruction of the room in which they relax, looking inward. There is a sense of blissful, privileged ignorance. While death and destruction at the hands of the officials occurs elsewhere, people may read, play, and lounge in the safety of a war not fought on American soil.
Red Stripe Kitchen, from the series House Beautiful: Brining the War Home, 1967-72, Martha Rosler, Inkjet print
A feeling of unease naturally pervades Rosler’s images. At fleeting first glance, Red Stripe Kitchen seems non-confrontational. However, upon realising that the two figures at the back of the image are soldiers searching, we begin to feel uneasy. The house is pristine: cooking utensils await usage as if a very organised occupier has stepped out for a moment. A silence falls upon the image, a quiet sense of fear. The act of looking reminds the viewer of the nature of the Vietnam war: the Vietcong knew the land on which they were fighting, they could use tunnel-systems and jungle cover which meant that soldiers were difficult to find. Over the course of the Vietnam war, the US military conscripted nearly two million people. Red Stripe Kitchen gives a sense of things being in the wrong place. The man on the right holds a weapon, at with the normal, everyday objects of the telephone, the cut flowers. Yet, Rosler’s splicing is clean: the men are objectively well-assimilated into the home. The sense of invasion comes from the connotations of their identities as soldiers and the act of looking. The viewer is left wondering what could be in those places we cannot see, and what they could be looking for, though we might not want to know. Rosler's Postmodernism manifests through her transformative depiction of a familiar space: turning the kitchen into a battleground.
By recontextualising images from the Vietnam War, placing them into American homes, Rosler re-enacts a silencing that many felt the US government were employing in their coverage of the war. Washington Post journalist Josh Zeitz writes that ‘the Johnson administration downplayed Vietnam at every critical juncture’, consistently hiding the truth from the US population, resulting in decreasing faith in the government on behalf of American citizens. Her image Balloons is perhaps one of the most striking in the series. Rosler takes the image of somebody carrying a child, their face struck with fear. This intimate, fearful moment is placed in another pristine home. Balloons are piled in the far corner, reminiscent of childhood or frivolity. Sentiments highly contrasting the presence of the central figure, who symbolises the humanity at risk in wartime. The central figure occupies but a small portion of the image, but we cannot tear our gaze from them. Such a jarring recontextualization of this image might beg the question of how effective Rosler’s photomontages are. Do they feel diminishing? Does such a grand recontextualization feel inappropriate? Yet, Rosler aims to humanise, to bring home a conflict which is too easily brushed off by geographical distance. We can only imagine the original context of the image which Rosler hides from us. In discarding the original context, Rosler emphasises the humanity at stake in war. She refrains from sadistically glorify the horrors of war, as is too often witnessed. Instead, she prompts us to reflect on our ignorance in such conflicts, and the risks inherent in warfare.
Balloons, from the series House Beautiful: Brining the War Home, 1967-72, Martha Rosler, Inkjet print
Now, more than ever, we may feel desensitized to the atrocities of war. We scroll past brutal images of war posted alongside everyday happenings. Reports of war crimes posted amongst Sunday brunches. How do we save ourselves from being desensitized when every time we open Instagram we are faced with an onslaught of new reports, new images, new statistics? How can we avoid ignorance without spreading misinformation, or engaging in performative activism? Given the novelty of the predicament we now find ourselves in, it’s difficult to know the answers to these questions. There feels to be no conclusion, no simple, articulate way of wrapping up such a devastating, despairing issue. What could possibly come after Postmodernism?
Bibliography:
“Bringing it All Back Home: How Martha Rosler brough the Vietnam War into the American living room”, Minneapolis Institute of Art, accessed: December 9, 2023,
“How Americans Lost Faith in Government”, The Washington Post, Accessed December 8, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/01/30/how-americans-lost-faith-in-government/
“Martha Rosler”, Tate, accessed December 8, 2023, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/world-goes-pop/artist-biography/martha-rosler