Domesticity at War: Bringing the War Home in Martha Rosler's "House Beautiful" Wartime Photomontages

Abstract

The uneven, sometimes violent relationship between “here” and “elsewhere” is evoked powerfully in Martha Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home—two linked sets of photomontages that engage the gender and racial politics of domesticity in the US as well as the geopolitics of empire. Troubling mythologies of warfare and documentary realism with dazzling wit and critical fury, these works refer materially and specifically to places and times of war in solidarity with protest movements while also raising questions of historical linkages and political accountability. Suturing their times and spaces into discontinuous contact, the two series bring together seemingly incommensurate elements—exquisite domestic interiors, glamorous consumer commodities often associated with conventional femininity, and the landscapes and bodies damaged and destroyed by warfare--to produce images of great immediacy and visceral power. Across the long arc of the wars waged by the US from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, Rosler has shown us how the modernist aestheticization of US domesticity in the affluent post-World War II era promised personal empowerment and hopeful futures yet, emerging from warfare itself, only brought about more war.