Rosler conceived House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home as a protest against the Vietnam War. The artist seamlessly combined news photographs of violent battlefields in Vietnam with glossy advertisements for American luxury homes; layered images of soldiers with empty silhouettes of bodies; and spliced pictures of burials with those of military marches. By creating shocking contrasts between the destruction abroad and affluence at home, Rosler made visible the horrors of the “living-room war,” so called because the news of carnage in Southeast Asia only reached Americans via heavily filtered television reports. Rosler originally distributed her photomontages as flyers at anti-war demonstrations. “I saw House Beautiful not as art,” she later reflected. “I want it to be agitational.”
Gallery label from 2021