Woman with Cannon (Dots),

1967–72, printed 2008

Produced at the height of the conflict in Vietnam, this photomontage belongs to the series <em>Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful</em>, in which Rosler inserted images from the Vietnam War into magazine-styled domestic interiors. The substitutions are scaled so as to appear seamless, heightening the works’ cognitive dissonance: public and private, militarism and eroticism collide to underscore that what happens “over there” in times of war directly impinges on what happens at home. Originally, Rosler photocopied and distributed the photomontages as leaflets at anti-war demonstrations; it wasn’t until the 1990s that she began to show them in galleries and museums.

A pioneer in the fields of Conceptual, performance, and video art, Martha Rosler has spent much of her career addressing issues such as violence, gender disparity, and social inequality. The photomontage <em>Woman with Cannon</em> belongs to the series <em>Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful</em>, produced at the height of the conflict in Vietnam. Relying solely on found material, Rosler inserted images of war into depictions of otherwise placid domestic interiors and then photographed the results. The juxtapositions are scaled so as to appear seamless, but this only heightens the works’ cognitive dissonance, as public and private, militarism and eroticism, East and West collide. Rosler’s series also lampoons the rabid consumerism of the 1960s, promoted in precisely the sort of lifestyle magazines sampled here. Initially, Rosler distributed <em>Bringing the War Home</em> in leaflets and broadsheets at anti-war demonstrations and reproduced them in left-wing newspapers.