WELCOME TO THE ’60S, YET AGAIN
by Jerry Saltz



In the late 1960s, Martha Rosler became known for a so-so series of collages titled "Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful." She juxtaposed images of models, home décor and the Vietnam War: A Vietnamese woman carried a bleeding baby in an unsullied American living room, housewives dutifully cleaned battlefields, and so on. Although on a formal level Rosler simply mixed the harshness of John Heartfield’s ’30s photomontages of the Third Reich with the pop-surreal sensibility of Richard Hamilton’s famous 1956 collage of a muscleman and a pinup girl in a contemporary living room, she did spice it with something new -- an ironic, media-savvy attitude that changed the look of much art.

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