Martha Rosler In the middle of the 1960s, I was making collages that had to do with representations of women in magazines and newspapers.
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Female Narrator But when Martha Rosler opened a tabloid newspaper and saw a picture of a Vietnamese woman, with a look of absolute panic on her face, swimming across a body of water with a child in her arms, her intention changed.
Martha Rosler It occurred to me that the same kind of collaging that I had been using to critique the representation of women, I could use as a form of protest against the war.
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Female Narrator Like many artists, Rosler wanted to find a direct way to speak out against the violence in Vietnam.
Martha Rosler This war was what we were looking at every single night at dinner time on our TVs which is why it's called, “the living room war.” So, I was interested in a visual means of fighting something imposed on us visually. At the time, there were many people handing out flyers at anti-war demonstrations. And I thought, no one wants to read this stuff. So, what I thought of doing was taking these damn news photographs and putting them on images of our living rooms which is where we actually saw the footage. It was in our homes, which were supposedly safe and far away.
[expressive piano music]
Female Narrator Rosler made photocopies of her collages and handed them out at protests. By juxtaposing domestic scenes with images of soldiers and civilians on the battlefield, Rosler collapsed the distinction between here and there, the home and the battlefield.
Martha Rosler We are not a here and a there. We are all one, and this is crucial. The home and the war go together. The home is as much part of the war machine in the maintenance and reproduction of the soldiers, the society, the work force, as the battlefield itself.
[music ends]
