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LIVING ROOM WAR
The Vietnam War was the first U.S. military conflict to be televised. Never before had Americans been able to watch, from the comfort of their homes, scenes of a faraway war unfold in moving pictures. The war was also heavily covered by photojournalists, who operated free of U.S. military censorship and circulated their work in newspapers and widely read magazines like Life, Look, and Time. Media images of the war appear again and again in the art of the period, sometimes quoted directly, sometimes considerably transformed.The flow of visual information from combat zones to the home front made the war newly vivid and real to many Americans. Martha Rosler's photomontages combine documentary and advertising images cut from popular magazines, collapsing the distance between "here" and "there," essentially "bringing the war home," as she subtitled the series. Edward Kienholz's living room tableau also transports a distant war into a familiar domestic setting. Perhaps alluding to the potentially numbing effect of steady media coverage, it shows mass death and destruction contained to the scale of a television screen -- in the background and easily ignored. |