Martha Rosler

Here’s the beginning of my review of Martha Rosler’s exhibit at the Worcester Art Museum:

Martha Rosler's exhibit "Bringing the War Home" at the Worcester Art Museum unites the New York artist's signature anti-Vietnam War montages with her recent anti-Iraq war work for a jolting, heartbreaking look at the echoes between the two conflicts.

Rosler was a pioneering feminist and political artist of the '60s and '70s. In her original "Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful" montages from 1967 to '72, she cut up magazines and pasted together war and home-decor photos to create nightmare scenes that recalled the World War I-era photomontage satires of German Dadaists Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield. Sticking the war into familiar American kitchens and living rooms made a strange, foreign, halfway-around-the-world fight seem more real, more shocking.

Read the rest here.

“Martha Rosler: Bringing the War Home,” Worcester Art Museum, 55 Salisbury St., Worcester, Sept. 22, 2007, to Jan. 13, 2008.

Pictured top to bottom: Martha Rosler’s “Saddam’s Palace (Febreze),” 2004; “Balloons,” 1967-’72; “House Beautiful: Giacometti” 1967-’72; and “Gladiators,” 2004. All copyright Rosler, courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.