Martha Rosler made House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home in protest against the Vietnam War. The photomontages in this series seamlessly combine images of the war with advertisements and glossy illustrations of fashionable American home interiors, many published in the pages of House Beautiful. By conjoining images of war and domesticity so that their subjects appear to share the same space, Rosler alludes to the phrase “living room war,” coined to characterize the Vietnam War, the first major military conflict to be extensively televised. Rosler considered these images to be agitprop and originally disseminated them as Xeroxed flyers at anti-war demonstrations.
Additional text from Seeing Through Photographs online course, Coursera, 2016