The Impact of Collage

- House Beautiful, Bringing the War Home

In the class of l’Histoire d’Art, we introduced the artwork of Martha Rosler under the topic of “Arts and Politics”, an artwork full of irony and power.

Martha Rosler is an artist with a longstanding interest in public sphere issues and the everyday life, particularly those relate to women. She often discusses war and national security environments in her artwork, linking everyday life at home to the acts of war abroad.

The photomontage series "House Beautiful- Bringing the War Home," was created by her between 1967 and 1972 in response to the Vietnam War. These works present the geopolitics of war and dispossession, showing how we divide the world between those who are entitled to a safe and comfortable life and those who are only entitled to lie dead outside the window.

These photo series could be said as a huge deterrent. In those pictures, you could see a desperate woman holding a dying child standing in the middle of a warm and colorful living room, you could see a housewife cleaning the curtain with a dust collector while there is the scene of war and soldiers behind the curtain, in a picture where young ladies are obsessed to take a beautiful selfie you could see the fire and war outside the window and those weak women and children lying on the ground with the last gasp…… Being put in one picture, those elements seem to be totally unmatched with each other. And this naked and obvious comparison just pierce through people’s heart, ironically and powerfully: even though the two worlds seem to go without harmony, they actually happen at the same time. People are dying while some others are still crazy on a luxurious life...

The power of the collage broke through the border line of different worlds. It brings in two worlds together, and the more apparent the contrast is, the more heart-taking the artwork could be to the audience. Sometimes it’s this break through that wakes up people and arouse their minds.

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Pictures from: Google