5.8 Martha Rosler. House Beautiful (Bringing the War Home). 1967-72

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En provenance du cours de The Museum of Modern Art

Art & Ideas: Teaching with Themes

125 notes

The Museum of Modern Art

Art & Ideas: Teaching with Themes

125 notes

This course is designed to help build critical skills that support theme-based teaching practices and build confidence in incorporating modern and contemporary art into interdisciplinary lesson plans. By addressing themes and questions that arise in relation to modern and contemporary art, the course will help you to think creatively about links to your curriculum and the ways that you can tap into students’ knowledge and life experience. In this course, you will explore four themes that educators at The Museum of Modern Art use frequently in their teaching: Places & Spaces, Art & Identity, Transforming Everyday Objects, and Art & Society. Through videos, slideshows, and a variety of resources, readings, and activities, you will explore the content and context of works of art in MoMA’s collection. Learners will… - Explore works of modern and contemporary art through a variety of themes that relate to classroom content and student experience. - Hear directly from artists about their ideas and processes. - Learn about the ways that a thematic approach supports interdisciplinary teaching and learning. - Gain exposure to a range of digital resources available for teaching with themes and incorporating content around works of art into your classroom.

À partir de la leçon

Module 5: Art & Society

Explore works of art created in response to the social, cultural, and political issues of their time. Gain a deeper understanding of history and contemporary society. Be encouraged to think critically about world events and how they are depicted.

5.5 Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother. 19362:00

5.7 Jacob Lawrence. Migration Series. 1940–412:09

5.8 Martha Rosler. House Beautiful (Bringing the War Home). 1967-727:36

5.9 Jasper Johns. Flag. 1954-551:52

5.10 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Street Dresden. 19081:20

5.11 Shahzia Sikander. Candied. 20031:47

5.12 Faith Ringgold. American People Series #20: Die. 19673:38

Rencontrer les enseignants

Lisa Mazzola
Assistant Director, School and Teacher Programs
Department of Education

My name is Martha Rosler and

we're discussing a body of work called House Beautiful Bringing the War Home.

When I was a young person in the mid 60s, we, the United States that is,

had gotten itself into a war that shocked my whole generation,

that started from a small action in Vietnam and gradually got bigger and

bigger and bigger and it seemed to be beyond reason.

But in addition, it was the first living room war,

where we saw timely footage of apples, and huts on fire, and so on.

Every evening at dinner hour broadcast by a television into our living rooms,

and I was absolutely traumatized by this thinking

how are we supposed to be eating our dinner watching a war?

I had been making some collages,

photo montages based on the images of women in the media.

And after a while, it occurred to me that I could use that same

technique of a kind of collision in space about the war.

So I began cutting things out and putting them together.

I live in an apartment building in Brooklyn and

there was a garbage room in the basement, and people would stack up magazines for

other people in the building, and I would go through those magazines,

mostly Life, and LOOK and a few others.

But I also went looking in the bins on Fourth Avenue

where there were lot of used of booksellers.

And they also had bins where you could buy prints for a very low price.

I was interested in architectural photographic

representations of modernist homes.

So the series is called House Beautiful, and it's called that because

it really is centered on the idea of domesticity safety.

Space and a static rightness but also,

Bringing the War Home because I am literally bringing images

of the war into spaces having to do with our domestic life.

If I was using news images, I wanted them to have just gone

over the curve of immediate memory, into something else,

of being vaguely familiar, but not ripped from the headlines.

In one I'm looking at here,

which was cleaning the drapes, you can see it's relationship to the body.

Beautiful series because it's a woman, pretty up to date,

with a vacuum cleaner that she's wearing which looks

like an attache case or brief case with a wand attached.

And she's vacuuming these drapes and outside is a photograph in black and

white of a couple of soldiers standing around in what amounts to a trench.

It's not an image of combat, they are tableaux in sthesis.

So that we take the action of war and look at it in a more contemplative way.

I'm looking at one that I call make up hands up.

So here's a rather nicely made up woman with beautifully manicured nails and

matching shiny pastel lipstick In a tight close up, putting on eye shadow.

And where her eye should be is a rather brutal cut of an image of

a soldier leading off a female Vietnamese captive.

The eye of the woman who is in color is cut out,

the eye of the woman whose being led away, the eyes are covered by a bandage.

She is a woman of color and the soldier is an African American soldier.

So I'm talking about several things at once, but

what's front and center for us is the image of the captive in war.

In other words,

a woman in a very different situation in relation to her ability to see.

And we were highly attuned particularly in that period,

to looking at women on the basis of whether they looked up to date and

well cared for and judging them on that basis.

And also judging social status through a woman's appearance.

So I wanted the viewer to not quite identify with the people in the images.

And it remains important to me to think about how we either ask for

or interrupt identification with the content of the photographic image.

For me it's really important that we identify immediately even if

we are at the same time refusing to identify and saying, no that's not me,

that's the other, and I think there's attention there that's really important,

and in some cases, amounts to a degree of vehemence and rejection of identification.

So that for me was always important in any photographic work I did of

where do you stand in relationship to that which is depicted.

I later realized that the reason the House Beautiful

montages were often in rooms or in other landscape

settings was because I wanted the viewer to have a place to stand, and

as soon as I formulated that thought, I thought yes, this is really important for

me, that you enter the image and see yourself standing there.

It's not as though you're on some higher plane or

it's a non-relatable physical space.

I saw it House Beautiful, not as art.

I wanted to be agitational, I distributed it to the anti-work community as fliers.

Xerox copies and this is very much in the context of the 60s.

If I were pressed by people saying, that's not art, that's propaganda

I would have to say, okay, the difference for me was that there were no slogans.

I didn't want to say stop the war, I didn't want to say anything, just to have

the images convey the message, which I hope would provoke enough of a shock and

a recognition in people to recognize this is an anti war offering,

and my list gesture is a very minimal scene taking place in nowhere land.

A soldier and a guy with a hat possibly a Vietnamese

running away from a car that maybe undersides, and

to their right is the backs of American soldiers running away.

And that was the last one.

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