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

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.

The bright experiments of postwar American architecture are covertly organized by the trauma of war—the trauma of the war that just finished and the trauma of the fact that it had not really finished after all. To understand this extraordinary blurring of military culture, image culture, and architectural culture, the condition of the postwar house needs to be dissected. A haunted picture emerges, domesticity at war. —Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War

In the winter of 1991-92, feminist architectural historian Beatriz Colomina wrote, “We are always on the edge of war. On the threshold” (1992, 3). The war that inspired these remarks was the first Persian Gulf War, a war that seemed to begin and end quickly in a matter of months. Yet in many ways that war disturbed any neat demarcations of time and place since the dynamics that produced it stretched from at least the nineteenth century to the present. The problem of determining when war begins and ends as well as the difficulty of grasping the full span of warfare's locations prompted Colomina to link the “battle of the family” to geopolitics as well as to interior design aesthetics and domestic architecture. In doing so, Colomina expanded the terms of Western feminist criticism, arguing that class- and race-based complicity with nationalist projects of “health and hygiene” were operationalized quite violently in the supposedly peaceful sphere of the modern home.

Colomina's analysis echoed a particular turn in feminist criticism in the United States in the 1990s just before and after the first Persian Gulf War, linked to the emergence of the fields of postcolonial, transnational cultural, and critical race studies, among others, as well as feminist global and transnational activism, stimulated in part by the UN conferences on women of that era and the burgeoning of non-governmental organizations that focused on gender equity and justice issues (Grewal 2017, 67; Lang 1997). As feminist inquiry into the power relations between the metropolitan centers and so-called “peripheries” brought renewed attention to the entanglement of First-World gender studies with racialized legacies of imperialism and colonialism, warfare “over there” became better understood as differently but persistently at work “at home.” However, one of the most rigorous feminist investigations into the co-constitution of home and away, private and public, nation and foreign had emerged years earlier, as agit-prop. In 1967, during the Vietnam War,^⁠1^ artist Martha Rosler created a series of flyers to be circulated at anti-war demonstrations in the US.^⁠2^ Composed of images clipped from the mainstream, glossy magazines House Beautiful and Life, the photomontage flyers pasted photojournalist representations of warfare in Vietnam into idealized scenes of North American suburban homes. Created initially as reproducible ephemera, the flyers floated around the margins of Rosler's politically charged artwork as House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967-72),^⁠3^ joining her photomontage series, Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain (1966-72)^⁠4^ from roughly the same time, as witty, incisive feminist political critique.

In 2004 and 2008, Rosler returned to photomontage to address the second Persian Gulf War and the so-called “war on terror.”^⁠5^ Although separated by decades, both iterations of the series bring together seemingly incommensurate elements—modernist domestic interiors, glamorous consumer commodities often associated with domestic femininity in an affluent society, 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's photomontages ask viewers to confront the seductive mythologies of consumer culture and liberal democracies; specifically, while the modernist designs and materials that symbolized US domesticity in the affluent post-World War II era promise personal empowerment and hopeful futures, foundational and persistent inequalities and state-sponsored warfare produce more violence, violence that cannot be wished away or kept at bay.

We may posit that the home is “a haven in a heartless world,” to use a Victorian phrase. But, in fact, it's as much part of the war machine in the maintenance and reproduction of the soldiers, the society, the work force, as the battlefield itself. So, I see this as absolutely stemming from a feminist critique of the way we think of daily life and the various realms and tasks that are assigned to different genders.

—Martha Rosler, in Laura Hubber, “The Living Room War: A Conversation with Artist Martha Rosler”

In montage images like Beauty Rest (c. 1967-72) (Figure 1), Rosler invites the viewer to consider the effect of “bringing the war home” into the space of domestic life in the US during wartime. The large marital bed, occupied by a white, heterosexual couple with their blond offspring, might be presumed to be a safe haven but we see it surrounded by a rising tide of dark water in a dirty, ruined room. While the Beauty Rest mattress is pristine and the couple and their child seem peacefully engaged in rest or at play, their world appears to be insecure.

Figure 1. Martha Rosler, Beauty Rest, c. 1967-72. From the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home. Photomontage. Courtesy of the artist.

In creating a single perspectival field, Rosler creates a space that is almost “real,” drawing our gaze to a reasonably probable scene even as we pull back from the implied threat to the family. The maintenance of scale and perspective in many of the House Beautiful photomontages, as Frances Jacobus-Parker argues, establishes a vantage point that is always “inside the house,” visually deconstructing the “physical separation between the (American) home front and the distant war” (2015, 61). As Rosler has written, “I wanted the viewer to have a place to stand, so the montages are often in rooms or in other landscape settings. This is really important for me that you enter the image and see yourself standing there” (2022).

Rosler clipped the images of domestic interiors in the first photomontage series from the pages of House Beautiful, one of the preeminent “shelter” magazines primarily targeted at middle-class female consumers that offered aspirational editorial content and high-gloss advertisements. Founded in 1896 and still published by the Hearst Corporation, House Beautiful has played a major role in producing a powerful “iconography of white, middle-class domesticity” (D. Harris 2013, 1). As Dianne Harris points out, magazines like House Beautiful instructed viewers “how to look like everyone else and, essentially, how to be white” (32). While the “look” of the popularized International Style modernism that “opened up” the plan of the typical family home in the US suburbs following the post-World War II housing boom is often framed as an almost natural evolution—the product of neutral scientific and technological innovation—it not only reinforced racialized hierarchies of homeownership and the policing of neighborhood boundaries but also constituted a specific national identity—the good life as a symbol of North American exceptionalism (Castillo 2010). In the pages of House Beautiful during the Vietnam War, no weapons or casualties would appear. Leafing through House Beautiful in one's living room or in the doctor's office waiting room, the seeming banality and quotidian nature of the activity and setting removed any obligation to critically engage with the material, thereby constructing and reinforcing “specific national policies and economic and social structures” (Castillo 2010, 2). “House beautiful” is a tenuous fantasy that requires energetic social and political reinforcement to maintain its luster and imaginative force. If one's own home is a “battleground,” as Deborah Cohler reminds us, “one cannot be on a homefront: it has become a war zone” (2017, viii).

Representations of house and home have circulated in uneasy and unruly ways between competing and uneven interests and stakeholders throughout the modern period as new materials and modes of production inspired innovative design and new subjects struggled for control over residential spaces.^⁠6^ Particularly in the influential middle-class in industrialized countries, distinct zones in the home were assigned by gender, race, class, and age. The “open-plan” home with central heating and gleaming electric appliances that began to proliferate in the postwar US suburbs appeared to promise not only freedom of movement and flexibility within the home itself but upward mobility. Yet study after study has demonstrated that programs ostensibly established to promote middle- to lower-income home ownership like the Federal Housing Administration and the Home Owners' Loan Corporation consistently denied mortgages to non-whites, steered white and non-white home buyers into separate enclaves, and turned a blind eye to or promoted racist covenants and discriminatory loan practices (Fishback et al. 2022). With the possessive investment in whiteness as constitutive of property relations in the US, the development of postwar housing developments and the discursive apparatus of print and visual culture combined to produce a raced and classed as well as gendered lived experience of domestic architecture (C. Harris 1993; D. Harris 2013; Cheng, Davis, and Wilson 2020). The postwar “boom” in suburban homes required assimilation into white racial identity and heteronormative family configurations that were heavily promoted by magazines and the newly available medium of television. As Cheryl Harris has argued, during the period following World War II, “whiteness as property” took on increasingly “subtle forms” while retaining “the legal legitimation of expectations of power and control that enshrine the status quo as a neutral baseline,” thereby “masking the maintenance of white privilege and domination” (1993, 1715).

The liberal phantasm of “domesticity” is co-constituted with nationalism, producing a mythic home that must be defined against and defended from foreign influences and invasions. If we understand the home, historically, as an “imperial formation,” to cite both Ann Stoler and Mimi Nguyen, then we need to seek out the many “graduated forms of sovereignty” that may be less overtly obvious but no less violently pernicious (Stoler 2008, 193; Nguyen 2012, 193). With the expansion of the middle-class in Europe and the US throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the influx of immigrants and formerly enslaved persons into formal and informal labor sectors, and the rapid development of residential housing around the inner-city cores, the sentimental Victorian trope of the white mother as the “angel” at the center of the domestic scene became a powerful symbolic component of the mythologized “American dream.”⁷ The free-standing, secure home and the celebrated privileges of the affluent, white housewife, however, were not available to most females in the US, or, the home itself (masking the worst abuses of patriarchal, racial, and class-based authority through a screen of “privacy”) was a source of danger or unhappiness. While domesticity could represent a privileged refuge for those who had experienced emotional vulnerability or economic insecurity, for others the sanctity of the private home could also represent a kind of prison-house of rigid mores and modes of life.

When Colomina referred to the “haunted picture” of postwar American architecture, she referenced gender as a war between progressive and conservative beliefs and practices and the home as the battleground both in practice and in the realm of cultural representation. Also haunting the US suburban home are the irrefutably violent legacies of empire, industrialization, and warfare: the removal of Native Americans from their lands; the enslavement of Africans over hundreds of years; and the ethos of “manifest destiny” that supports white supremacy, American exceptionalism, and settler-colonial ideologies. Amy Kaplan (2002) has argued that notions of domesticity were “intimately entwined” with the expansionist discourse of manifest destiny in nineteenth century North America, expressed and policed through contrasting spatial metaphors of separate spheres. In the period preceding the US Civil War, when Native American land was occupied and stolen at increasingly rapid rates, the home became represented as a “bounded and rigidly ordered interior space as opposed to the boundless and undifferentiated space of an infinitely expanding frontier” (Kaplan 2002, 25). The role of the “angel of the house,” the white housewife, demanded the elimination of all traces of “violent conflict” in the sanctity of the home (23). However, the linking of the domestic household to the health and welfare of the domestic nation at war in its own interior against Native Americans and abroad as part of an increasing effort to become an imperial power required a continual definition over and against foreign “others” (25-26). As Inderpal Grewal has contended in the case of the British suffrage movement in the early twentieth century, the “white-washing” of the violence work of empire was deployed by white feminists who strove to establish the modern home as a space that would be safe from the barbarisms attributed to those from outside the race and class parameters of the imperial nation state (1996, 230). Striving to ward off all “others” and wall in, as it were, the insiders who count as members of the family or nation has turned out to be a major cultural and political operation, generating the constant need for policing the boundaries that constitute the domestic against a flow of threats and destabilizations.

This ambiguous relationship between inside and outside, here and there, or domestic and foreign, has persisted. In inheriting this racialized “imperial domesticity,” during a period of struggles to achieve civil rights and decolonization, images of the post-World War II US suburban home have circulated discursively not only as prescriptive or aspirational but as deflective. This shifting of attention from the violent removal of Indigenous people from much of the land used for the new housing developments as well as from the military derivation of many of the materials and government programs made modern architecture possible along with “redlining” and other racist real estate practices. “Domesticity at war,” then, was not only a metaphor in Rosler's photomontages. A mythologized notion of the domestic has circulated in the US like so many other key elements of modern liberal society, offering what it cannot provide and often providing what it claims to reject.

It is a truism that fragmentation besets modernity, and collage/montage is a symptom, a strategy, and a form of resistance. ——Martha Rosler, “Untitled,” in Collage: The Unmonumental Picture

Rosler's use of photomontages can be situated within a set of radical democratic art practices that resist incorporation into elite institutions and openly invite creative praxis. Subverting any adherence to photographic realism by drawing attention to image manipulation, photomontage circulated first in the nineteenth century through gimmicky postcards, mementos, and albums to emerge as an aesthetic movement just after the close of World War I in the creations of early Dada and surrealism. Often associated in its early days with political resistance to fascism and to critiques of capitalism, Dada worked with and against the materials and practices of mass consumption, literally fragmenting and reorganizing materials to defamiliarize repressive discursive practices. While Rosler remembers herself as more strongly influenced initially by surrealist Max Ernst, it is hard not to position her work in relation to the more overtly “political” Dadaists from Berlin like John Heartfield, for example (Buchloh 1999, 25). Indeed, in discussing Heartfield, Rosler has pointed to the disruptive quality of his “manipulated” images: “In every photomontage was the implicit message that photography alone cannot 'tell the truth' and also the reminder that fact is itself a social construction” (2004, 279). Eschewing apolitical relativism, Rosler argues that all photographs “provide some sort of evidence” but that such artifacts cannot be viewed as purely transparent, objective, or definitive (279).

Like the early Dada photomontages from the 1920s and '30s, Rosler's photomontages call attention to the way the images themselves are created. A critique of authoritarianism, injustice, and war as well as a commitment to a democratizing approach to the art world also links Rosler's montage practice to Dada. As Rosler has written, “By using collage as simple as that taught in grade school, I wanted to suggest to the viewer that this was all well within their reach and that maybe they ought to make some works like this themselves” (2019, 352). The practice of photomontage also supports Rosler's commitment to the “decoy,” a “way of using images that are comfortably familiar, recognizable, uncomplicated, as a lure to draw attention” until “on closer inspection these things turn out to be something other” (Rosler 2018, 37). The decoy instigates an “act of unsettling” that “helps us reconsider 'things as they are' and come to see that change is possible” (37).

Rosler's work with photomontage in the 1960s first came into view with the Body Beautiful series that brought the political critique of “the personal” generated by the women's liberation movement into dynamic engagement with commercial imagery. If Body Beautiful demythologized patriarchal dictates for femininity in the age of industrialized mass consumption, foreshadowing other works by Rosler such as her video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) or installations such as Garage Sales (1973-2012), House Beautiful expanded Rosler's feminist critique to the geopolitics of empire and capitalism, including their discursive rationales for waging war. As Rosler has written, “my aim was to tear the seamlessness of the apparently transparent photographic image—still laboring under the burden of barely questioned truth value—to create a new space with a potentially very different narrative” (2007a, 50). Rosler's photomontages seek to bring the war “home” through startling juxtapositions that do not simply reveal the uncomfortable truth that the middle-class suburban home is a war zone but that the distinctions between home and away, domestic and foreign, here and elsewhere are unstable and political.

Rosler's photomontages fragmented the normalizing dream world promulgated by shelter magazines like House Beautiful and the realist documentary framework of Life, not through avant-garde modernism or abstraction but through an engagement with mass circulation print culture. If we consider the print magazine as an assemblage of images and texts that was often read out of order, in “scraps of time,” in all manner of places (waiting rooms, shops, buses, etc. as well as “at home”), any narrative linearity or unity of content is already disturbed (Stein 1993, 145). The fracturing techniques of photomontage are not so much in opposition to the practice of reading/viewing popular magazines, then, as an intensification. Doubling down on the interruptions and discontinuities of “reading” the compiled magazine, Rosler's use of photomontage calls attention to the illusory protections of domesticity and the complicity of the secluded domestic subject in national and worldly politics. The mixing of home and away, domestic and foreign, in the photomontages is not so much a leveling of differences as a powerful reminder of “co-belonging”—that supposedly oppositional categories like the domestic and foreign, or home and away, may be blurred or present in uneven and contingent ways, troubling the fissures created by patriarchal, imperial geopolitics (Rancière 2009, 58). In this context, the photomontages in Rosler's first House Beautiful series put the typical suburban home “on a war footing,” as Mignon Nixon points out, “asking how women infantilized by a postwar culture of masculine supremacy, early marriage, and compulsory consumerism...would be enlisted by the mass media in a 'living room war' and how an alternative visual culture engaged with feminist politics might help them to resist” (2019, 331-32).

War is not neatly contained in the space and time legitimated by the state. It reverberates in other terrains and lasts long past armistice. It comes home in ways bloody and unexpected.

—Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.

The House Beautiful photomontages from the era of the Vietnam War placed images clipped from photojournalism in Life magazine into incongruous settings, “forcing,” as Melissa Ho has put it, “here” and “there” into “one representational space” (2019, 19). One could make the case that the incessant “onslaught” of war reportage in print and via television already brought the war “home” (Jacobus-Parker 2015, 58). In addition to the saturation news coverage in magazines like Life, Time, and Newsweek, an unprecedented increase in the viewing of nightly news on the newly acquired television sets in most US households throughout the 1960s had created the sobriquet “the living room war” (Arlen 1969).^⁠8^ Pundits such as Marshall McLuhan referred to the conflict as the “first television war,” blurring the line between civilian and military while positioning the viewer as a “participant in every phase of the war” such that “the main actions of the war are now being fought in the American home itself” (McLuhan and Fiore 1968, 134).

If television news simultaneously gave viewers the impression that they could see over “there” from “here” at home, bridging chasms of experience and distance, the nature of the productions themselves in terms of editing and context reimposed or mediated distance, making it possible for viewers to go about their usual activities (like eating dinner while watching a broadcast) without too much disruption. Thy Phu has argued that the media representation of Vietnam produced an “American framework” that created a narrow and selective view of a country always already at war (2022, 5, 12). This orientalist stereotype of a “timeless” conflict encouraged views split between paternalism (the US should control the region based on its civilizational superiority) and futility (change is impossible in a former colony).^⁠^ Whether leafing through the pages of Life magazine, with its frequent photo spreads on the warfare, or absorbing the evening news on network television, the US public developed a complicated relationship to the times and places of war and to a growing awareness of the impact of the war at home.

Rosler's wartime photomontages prompt the viewer to look differently at photojournalism and to question received notions about documentary truth. The idea that the circulation of images of war atrocities can galvanize a public response is a dearly held tenet of post-World War II liberal visual culture.^⁠9^ In that context, the apparent “freedom” of journalists to circulate and report as they pleased has become a cherished myth of the Vietnam War, foundational to the enduring belief that objective journalism led to the ending of an increasingly unpopular conflict. Singular documentary photographs have, indeed, played significant roles in the contest for attention and reaction since more portable cameras first changed the dynamics of war reporting just prior to World War II. Nevertheless, widespread understanding of photography as a transparent and objective record of a stable reality has been destabilized at regular intervals by evidence to the contrary, leading to mixed attitudes towards the power and purpose of all documentary representation and, especially, the iconic images of violence. As Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas have argued, such images confer enormous cultural power even as they remain inadequate to the historical task of remembering and documenting the almost unimaginable or horrifically grievous event (2007, 2).

Rosler has written incisively on the limits of conventional photojournalism, arguing that “war photography oscillates between the ideological poles of gore for gore's sake and exaggerated compassion, in which the anguish and heroism of the photographer command most attention” (2004, 250-51). Regardless of the photographer's individual intentions, the economic structures and political pressures of publication usually prevented war imagery from producing anything other than a reflection of “personal anxiety” or “its alternative numbness” (250-51). Photomontage as a format offered Rosler a mode of working with ubiquitous imagery in a way that could nudge the viewer out of inattention via work that brought the operation of documentary realism into conscious perception. All montage—whether photographic or filmic—“allows difference to proliferate,” as Stephanie Schwartz has written; the basis for solidarity across differences, Schwartz argues, is to break up the narrative ordering by which representation takes place and to “order images differently” (Schwartz 2020, 15).

Rosler's Vietnam War-era photomontages order differently without producing abstraction or avant-garde estrangement from the “real.” For example, in Balloons lush green houseplants and a colorful sculptural pile of “balloons” bring cheerful life to a stylish living room (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Martha Rosler, Balloons, c. 1967-72. From the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home. Photomontage. Courtesy of the artist.

A Lucite coffee table and shag rug signal the absence of anything messy or dirty that might mar such an ideal modern interior, but there in the middle of the image, on the staircase, midway between the first and second floor, a Vietnamese woman in clear distress holds an injured or dead baby. In that liminal space between floors, the woman demands our attention. The space before her is very dark. In this work, the war is inside the house; there is literally and figuratively no escape from war. Evidence of the war blocks the stairway, maintains the center field of vision, and destroys any semblance of the “good life.”

Tron (Amputee) places an image of a young Vietnamese girl into a classic open-plan suburban living room complete with sectional furniture, picture windows, and a television set in pride of place (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Martha Rosler, Tron (Amputee), c. 1967-72. From the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home. Photomontage. Courtesy of the artist.

The girl is situated to one side and her arm is cropped at the elbow, reinforcing the violence of the amputation of her lower limb. The original photograph of Nguyen Thi Tron (who was twelve years old at the time) appeared on the cover of Life magazine on November 8, 1968, one of a series taken by iconic Vietnam War-era photojournalist Larry Burrows. The original image published in Life reverberates with the dynamics of empire that Mimi Thi Nguyen has termed the “gift of freedom”—“a world-shaping concept describing struggles aimed at freeing peoples from unenlightened forms of social organization through enactments of power and violence” (2012, 3). To free girls like Tron from the threat of communism and to offer the gift of the possibility of an idealized consumption-oriented domesticity, death or injury is the compensation for war. In lifting the figural image of Tron out of the pages of Life magazine, Rosler's act of collage dramatically shifts the “circulation and perception of the symbolic, cultural, and social capital associated with the original background image (Kruglinski 2014, 114). But in this instance, as in others, Rosler's photomontages cannot evade fully the postcolonial dynamics of the ”gift." The subject of the “gift of freedom”—whether liberated from communism or freed from mainstream narrative representation—lives in the world created by globalized liberalism and, therefore, as "thing, force, and gaze“ marks its difference from ”coloniality“ but also signals its ”linkage to it“ (Nguyen 2012, 22).

Rosalind Deutsche has argued that Rosler's wartime photomontages ”brought the American war and the American home together not only to examine the war's effects on the home but to stage the intimacy that already existed between the two“ (2018, 22). It might be more accurate to say that a photomontage like Tron (Amputee) mediates the troubled realm of depictions of young victims of war by simultaneously evoking ”intimacy“—Nguyen Thi Tron has been ”placed“ directly into a living room that might seem familiar to many viewers in the US—while withholding sentimentality or identification. The elements of the image, while plausible in terms of scale and perspective, are out of order, or ordered differently, to make us notice. Yet the use of an iconic photograph of wartime trauma raises complicated matters of point of view, reception, and the powerful tensions that produce humanitarian responses to warfare.^⁠10^ As Phu argues, ”so long as an American framework remains transfixed on the exposure of the Vietnamese child's pain while still perceiving the child as other,“ US and Vietnamese perspectives ”cannot overlap“ (2022, 14).^⁠11^

Rather than staging intimacy or simplistic equivalence between here and there, Tron (Amputee) creates difference as political and always in the process of becoming, therefore riven with unequal power relations. In discussing her wartime photomontages over the years, Rosler has made many references to her efforts to deconstruct the separation of ici et ailleurs (here and there) as not only a concept but crediting the inspiration provided by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville's 1976 film of that title. That film was made under complicated circumstances; first commissioned by the Arab League and Fatah as a documentary focused on the Palestinian resistance movement and partially shot on location, the project was interrupted when the fedayeen subjects of the film were murdered in Jordan during the events that came to be known as ”Black September,“ and resurrected as a reflection on the possibilities and limits of political solidarity and identification through a demystification of visual and sonic representation. The challenge presented in Ici et ailleurs is the construction of connection ”without allowing identification,“ to actively engage media instead of passively consuming content, and to resist romanticizing or victimizing the ”other“ and thereby collude in their destruction (Harrison 2018, 188).

The colonial histories that brought the US military to Vietnam make possible international and transnational solidarities as well as warfare. Thus, Tron (Amputee) conveys that Nguyen Thi Tron has been injured grievously in Vietnam and, simultaneously, ”Tron“ is ”here.“ The montage generates a viewer that is ”us" and US; that is, the nation that wages war views the results of its actions in close quarters. The photographic representation of Tron remains an image frozen in time, used by photographers, editors, and artists for various purposes. The benefits of these operations remain uneven, generating powerful sensibilities that struggle in and through cultural and political solidarity.

The window is the battlefield for all the tensions between the suburban interior and the outer landscape, the interface with the outdoors but also the space where it flattens into part of the inside. In its most popular suburban variation, the picture window, has become a metonym for suburban life in general. No other architectural element, not even the lawn, better encapsulates the suburban home's mission to release Americans from the cramped conditions of urban life into open space.

—Andrea Vesentini, Indoor America: The Interior Landscape of Postwar Suburbia

The “beauty” of many of the houses featured in House Beautiful during the era of the war in Vietnam—the magazine as well as the photomontages—was largely premised on an approach to “open-plan” design that relied in part on picture windows to convey the spaciousness that opened the otherwise private realm to the world. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, thanks to new technologies and materials, windows became stretched into walls, altering not only the look but the “feel” of homes (Eskilson 2018, 59). “Living in a window” meant not only that you could see out into an expanded vista but that others could see you (Isenstadt 2014, 156). Colomina has argued that the increasingly popular “glass walls” operated in this regard as “instruments of control,” increasing surveillance in numerous ways—the denizens of the household could be scrutinized by each other and as well as by those “outside” even as anxious homeowners could keep tabs on racialized or classed “others” who might be perceived to be intruding in neighborhoods structured as white, middle-class spaces (Colomina 2007, 153). Although the more cosmopolitan modernist glass houses of Mies van der Rohe or Philip Johnson were priced far beyond the means of most people, as Lynn Spigel has pointed out, the US public was familiar with architectural modernism because it was “widely publicized” through “fairs, museum exhibitions, department stores, home magazines, and the movies” (1988, 16-17). Picture windows were part of the “soft power” of US domestic architecture in this period, lending “physical and emotional immediacy” to “abstract ideological concepts” like democracy, middle-class values, and private consumption (Castillo 2010, xi, xix). Therefore, even if a Rosler wartime photomontage does not feature a picture window per se, by enlisting the representation of modern architectural elements to destabilize the division between here and there, the collaged image implicates the “glass wall” or “screen” in the project of “bringing the war home.”

Consider, for example, House Beautiful: Giacometti (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Martha Rosler, House Beautiful (Giacometti), c. 1967-72. From the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home. Photomontage. Courtesy of the artist.

In this work we see a fastidiously arranged contemporary living room, filled with art works, including a “Walking Man” statue by modernist sculptor Alberto Giacometti. One must look through the windows to notice that the serene scene includes views of Vietnamese war dead. The scale and tones of these inserted images are matched just enough that they register as distinct and yet they are not an egregious imposition on the composition. The war is outside of the house but, by filling the entire space of the windows, we might get the impression that there is nothing else in the world except war. Thanks to the implied large expanses of glass, the presumably secure boundary between inside and outside, here and there, becomes vulnerable, potentially permeable.

The complex operations of the picture window are also at work in Cleaning the Drapes, a photomontage that depicts a modish young woman deploying the latest innovation in vacuum technology (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Martha Rosler, Cleaning the Drapes, c. 1967-72. From the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home. Photomontage. Courtesy of the artist.

As she pulls aside her faintly colored, brocaded drapes, soldiers in a sandbagged foxhole are revealed as a black-and-white scene. Like a theater curtain opening on a performance, the view “outside” evokes for many viewers the televisual experience of the nightly newscast, “cleaned” up enough so that it cannot overly disturb US dinnertime. But is it a window or a TV screen? Colomina interprets the montage as an integration of the two, writing that in Rosler's photomontages “the image on the TV screen becomes the image in the picture window” (Colomina 2007, 290).^⁠12^ But Rosler has cast some doubt on this—prompting us to wonder why we assume that the curtains must frame an expanse of glass (Rosler 2007a, 50). In a discussion with Colomina published in Artforum in 2007, Homi Bhabha argued that in Cleaning the Drapes “the outside is brought as close as possible, but there is still an inside and outside...There is a curtain that can be opened or closed, and there is the plate-glass window that allows you to see outside but also protects you” (Bhabha, Colomina, and Griffin 2007, 444). Bhabha contrasted the binary discourses of the Cold War to the era of the “war on terror,” which he described as more “liminal” (445). In response, Colomina reminded Bhabha that “the collapse of inside and outside” also existed during the Cold War and is always an “historical process” (445). In a published response to Bhabha and Colomina titled “Here and Elsewhere,” Rosler (2007a) objected strenuously to the reduction of her photomontages to a metaphoric engagement with televisual screens and windows and, thus, solely to representation per se.^⁠13^ “Permeability” is a constant; Rosler pointed out that during the Cold War “windows could kill”—that is, the suburban home was no protection from nuclear flashes and other dangers (2007a, 50). It was the “interpenetration of fears” in that period that instigated Rosler's choice to bring architectural or interior design imagery and advertisements together with images culled from wartime photojournalism.

The ubiquity of picture windows in the imagery promoted in shelter magazines like House Beautiful belied mid-century homeowners' hesitancies and anxieties about invasion of privacy or surveillance but also masked concerns about views themselves. In many tightly clustered suburban developments, the windows did not look out always at the park-like surroundings associated with high-end, luxury homes but, instead, garbage cans, parked cars, and garage doors or, at best, fenced backyards (Vesentini 2018, 156). If the suburb offered white homeowners an escape from crowded, multiracial or multicultural urban communities, the view from the picture window might be a reminder that the distance traveled did not offer as great a difference as might have been desired. The troubled relations between here and there reverberated through various scales of the domestic—the family home, the neighborhood, the nation, and geopolitics—and the picture window, as Colomina has noted, serves as a “powerful reminder of the complexity of any divide between exterior and interior” (Bhabha, Colomina, and Griffin 2007, 443).

The real danger—as evidenced by the mass willingness of Americans to take refuge from uncertainty in the utterances of their leaders, regardless of the plethora of evidence contradicting them—is political; it is the danger that people will choose fantasy, and fantasy identification with power, over a threatening or intolerably dislocating social reality.

—Martha Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001

In the early 2000s, shortly after the advent of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under the rubric of the war on terror, a bumper sticker appeared with the slogan “Endless War” with “less” crossed out and “this” inserted above it. The imperative statement “end this war” disrupted the notion of “endless war,” implying that anti-war activism was needed and could make a difference. Protest against the bombing and occupation of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 and the ground war in Iraq in February of 2003 often reached unprecedented proportions,^⁠14^ but the global nature of the war on terror and the ambiguity of its origins and purpose contributed to a sense of unease about any possible endpoint. As the wars dragged on, marked by mounting civilian casualties and sagging US troop morale, protests became more diffused and less apparent as mass actions, moving into refugee assistance, cyber-activism, and long-term educational or art/performance projects. Despite the thousands, even millions, of people who poured into public spaces over many years to protest US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the sense that a seemingly endless war was engulfing civil society and bringing about ever greater consensus for a neoliberal world order created challenges for anti-war organizations and initiatives.

Invited to participate in a show in 2004 with the group Artists Against the War, Rosler decided to return to photomontage. As she explains, “I just knew I'd be asked why I'd returned to something after forty years, and I had a snappy comeback ready: Tell me what we, the United States, are doing differently now. How is this quagmire different from the one back then?” (2018, 44). For this “reboot,” Rosler had to address a different context in terms of the art world and commodification in an era of digitalization and globalized media (Davis 2013, 574). As she has written, “I also wanted to repoliticize the House Beautiful works, which were—all too predictably—being stripped of their directly political meaning. They had been agitational in the street but were now, on a museum or gallery wall, aesthetic objects from a past moment” (2018, 44). Rosler also had to contend with the similarities and differences of the wars waged by the US; Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq shared histories of Euro-American colonialism but they also could not be reduced to the same in terms of resistance to external forces of empire or internal forms of culture, economy, or politics. One constant prevailed; as Stephanie Schwartz puts it, “In order to protest a 'new' war in the Gulf, Rosler protested the 'old' war that was still being fought at home. It had to be this way. It still is this way” (2020, 16-17).

Accordingly, returning to the cut and paste method of photomontage as a “meta-form” could signal “a certain 'retro'...element in the war itself” (Rosler cited in Davis 2013, 569). Thus, the curtained reveal of Cleaning the Drapes from the earlier series is echoed in The Gray Drape from 2008 (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Martha Rosler, The Gray Drape, 2008. From the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series. Photomontage. Courtesy of the artist.

The massive picture windows in Vacation Getaway from the first series bring the war home once again in Lounging Woman from 2004 (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Martha Rosler, Lounging Woman, 2004. From the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series. Photomontage. Courtesy of the artist.

But there are, and should be, important differences; years have passed, the wars are in different places, the military draft has been eliminated in favor of “volunteer” personnel, weaponry and communications technologies have changed, and the conditions of art production and reproduction have altered as well. Rosler cut and pasted paper for her second series, but she also photographed and reproduced works digitally, lending a slightly different “feel” to the imagery, a more contemporary gloss (Evans 2019, 163).

In a further distinction from the Vietnam War-era works, by the first decade of the twenty-first century, the post-World War II interior architecture and decor no longer signaled an unambiguous invitation to the “good life” for class-mobile white Americans. In Photo-Op from 2004, the modernist interior now contains two young girls from the war zones, dead; one in an iconic Eames lounge chair favored by hipsters who prize “retro” mid-century modern furniture, while the picture windows reveal a fiery scene of battle (Figure 8).

Figure 8. Martha Rosler, Photo-Op, 2004. From the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series. Photomontage. Courtesy of the artist.

Meanwhile, two identical blonde, white fashionistas look into the screens of flip phones that display two different aspects of a male subject in distress. The costs of war are represented not only inside the house but they are also visible on the phone screens. As media has changed over the years, so too have the spatial and temporal features of the battleground.

These shifts are also fully apparent in Election (Lynndie) from 2004 (Figure 9).

Figure 9. Martha Rosler, Election (Lynndie), 2004. From the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series. Photomontage. Courtesy of the artist.

In this work we see US soldier Lynndie England, one of the central figures in the traumatic photographs leaked from Abu Ghraib prison just outside of Baghdad, in her now-iconic stance, holding the leash at the other end of which should be, could be, a debased and abused prisoner. Unlike the source photograph, in Rosler's photomontage the victim at the end of the leash is hidden by the countertop—which only enhances the terror.^⁠^ Intensifying the unheimlich tension in the domestic setting, Rosler has placed images of tortured Iraqi prisoners from the Abu Ghraib cache of snapshots in numerous locations around the gleaming kitchen; on the cover pages of food magazines like Saveur and Food and Wine, on books and papers on the countertops, and on the glass windows of the double oven. On the right-hand side of the photomontage, pasted onto the front of a cabinet, is a mockup of a New York Times op-ed from October 11, 2004 headlined “Be Part of the Solution.” Subtitled “Making Votes Count,” the op-ed presciently warned that election machines may not be secure, endangering democracy, and urging “ordinary Americans” to get “more involved in monitoring the election process” (New York Times 2004). The threat to the “home front” from decades of imperial wars can be observed throughout the image. The beautiful appliances, the fresh salad ingredients, and the comfortable spaciousness of the room itself can barely maintain the influx of danger and violence including domestic fascism. The subject of feminism, present or absent in the image, is fully implicated in the workings of the security state at home (Grewal 2017).

There are echoes here of Red Stripe Kitchen from the first series, a work that also features a state-of-the-art kitchen (Figure 10).

Figure 10. Martha Rosler, Red Stripe Kitchen, c. 1967-72. From the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home. Photomontage. Courtesy of the artist.

In the earlier work, the housewife we expect to see behind the counter seems to have just stepped out—her recipe in the magazine lies open, waiting to be consulted, and her paring knife and measuring spoons and even a few ingredients are situated as if she has just put them down for a moment. Visible through the dual doorways of the kitchen, we see two male soldiers in combat fatigues in the hallway, bent over as if in mid-search. Election (Lynndie) brings the implicated military figure right into the room. While the war is clearly taking place outside, the war is unalterably, and much more viscerally, embedded in the home, a domestic space linked to globalized media culture. Election (Lynndie) insists on the responsibility of US citizens in not only destroying the civil society of Iraq and Afghanistan but in undermining democratic social and political justice at home.

That is what becoming a feminist investigator of militarization does: it makes large militarizing structures and cultural tendencies clearer while shining a bright light on complicities closer to home.

—Cynthia Enloe, “Ticonderoga, Gettysburg, and Hiroshima: Feminist Reflections on Becoming a Militarized Tourist”

Rosler's photomontages question the spatialization of warfare in modernity; where is home and who are those we want to embrace as family and friends within that domestic structure and who is perceived to be a threat or cast outside as enemies? The project also disturbs the temporality of warfare by asserting links to conflicts across decades, even centuries. As protest flyers and as art objects that circulate in galleries and online, the photomontages duck and swerve through diverse cultural spaces of reception and use. Real things and representational decoys, these images reorder their material and conceptual elements in service to both differences and similarities. In considering connection without identification, Rosler's photomontages do not evade the violent power relations that have been generated by industrial capitalism and empire but they work hard to open pathways to affiliation and accountability.

Bringing wars waged by the US over many decades into the hyper-commodified environment of mainstream magazines and newspapers, in these two wartime series Rosler demonstrates the impossibility of delimiting domestic space as an innocent refuge from public and international spheres, an impossibility that challenges representational politics across formats and practices—televisual, photographic, cinematic, social media, analogue, digital, etc. Such disturbances of here and there, now and then, resonate as powerful aftermaths of empire's wars—visible and invisible, declared and undeclared, linked to past, present and future endings.

I would like to thank Katrin Mauer, Minoo Moallem, Lisa Parks, and Jennifer Terry for opportunities to present draft versions of this work. Inderpal Grewal, Laura Wexler, and Eric Smoodin, along with the editors of and contributors to this special section, offered helpful suggestions. I am deeply grateful to Martha Rosler for our conversations in person and online and for her generous permission to reproduce her photomontages.

¹ I use the term “Vietnam War” in this article, but it is important to note that the North Vietnamese refer to the conflict as the “American War.” See Phu 2022, 15.

² Over the years, Rosler has emphasized that the photomontages were created to be distributed at protests and occasionally printed in “underground” publications. As Rosler has noted, “I wanted these works to be agitational and didn't intend for them to enter the art world; putting images of casualties of an ongoing war into a museum or gallery seemed obscene” (2019, 352).

⁵ For example, B-52 in Baby's Tears (1972), depicts the imprint of a B-52 bomber in the moss-like texture of living plants. Prototype (Sandbox B2) (2006) offers the form of a stealth bomber worked in sand in a wood box. Fascination with the (Game of the) Exploding (Historical) Hollow Leg (1983) is an installation piece set in a simulated war room. Patriotic Jell-O Salad (2003) offers us a recipe for a molded and layered Jell-O dessert that parodies Ambrosia ingredients, replacing tiny marshmallows and chunks of fruit with toy soldiers and military hardware. Much of Rosler's art can be understood as critical analyses of the causes and forms of raced, gendered, and classed violence at work in the world today.

⁶ For an excellent study of early twentieth-century feminist efforts to reorganize the design and function of domestic spaces, see Hayden 2000. See the Matrix Feminist Design Cooperative ([1984] 2022) for analyses of patriarchal built environments. For a discussion of past and recent feminist art works that engage domestic spaces, see Morineau and Pesapane 2013. See also Rosler 1977.

⁷ For a comprehensive critical deconstruction of the essentialist mythos of gendered “separate spheres,” see Davidson and Hatcher 2002.

⁸ Lynne Spigel has noted, “While in 1950 only 9 percent of all American homes had a television set, by the end of the decade that figure rose to nearly 90 percent, and the average American watched about five hours of television per day” (1992, 188).

⁹ Given the vast literature on the topic, I would point to Susan Sontag's foundational work, On Photography (2010). See also the essays collected in Batchen et al. 2012. To complicate Sontag's overarching critical influence, see Nudelman 2014.

¹⁰ For a related discussion of the struggle over racialized visual representations of Muslims in postcolonial India in the context of lynchings and other violent attacks, see Grewal, forthcoming.

¹¹ See also Mimi Nguyen's (2012) analysis of the critical literature on Huynh Song “Nick” Ut's iconic photograph of Kim Phúc (aka “Grace”— often referred to as “napalm girl”).

¹² For discussions of the relationship between the television (or computer) screen and the window in relation to aesthetic perspective and the politics of representation, see Friedberg 2006 and Powell 2021.

¹³ Rosler points out that only four out of twenty of her photomontages from the first series include picture windows, rejecting the dominance of the trope attributed to her work by others (myself, included) (conversation with the artist, New York City, August 2021).

¹⁴ Protests in the US in October 2001 brought “hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets” (Vasi 2006, 137). On February 15, 2003, “there were protests in over 600 cities round the globe” and the demonstration in London “dwarfed any previous protest in British history” (Gillan, Pickerill, and Webster 2008, ix). Worldwide, “estimates ranged as high as fifteen million people across seventy-five countries” (Carty 2009, 21). See also Bacchetta et al. 2002.

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Caren Kaplan is Professor Emerita of American Studies at UC Davis, an institution located on Patwin (Wintun) ancestral land. Her research draws on cultural geography, landscape art, and military history to explore how representational practices of atmospheric politics contribute to undeclared as well as declared wars. Recent publications include Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Duke University Press, 2018) and Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke University Press, 2017).