Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful

The Vietnam War was often called "The Living Room War," in reference to the way in which broadcast television relayed news of the combat in southeast Asia into American homes. In a set of ten small, widely-reproduced works made between 1967 and 1972, at the peak of the controversial conflict, Martha Rosler literalized the epithet. The Brooklyn-born artist, who also works in photography, video, performance, and writing, seamlessly collaged images of prepossessing domestic interiors culled from House Beautiful magazine together with clippings from Life magazine of the war. The use of mass media images to comment upon-and protest against-socio-political events has a long history, going back at least as far as Francisco Goya, Surrealism, and the 1930s photomontages of John Heartfield. This series, Rosler explained, stemmed from her "frustration with the images we saw in television and print media, even with anti-war flyers and posters. The images we saw were always very far away, in a place we couldn't imagine"(quoted in