The Brooklyn Rail

A year after publishing her essay “truth is, or is not” in the Brooklyn Rail, Martha Rosler returns with an exhibition of the same name—staging in images the very crises she outlined in writing: media distortion, conspiratorial thinking, and the erosion of journalistic standards. In that essay, she cautioned readers that “matters of truth permeate public discourse, yet what the word itself denotes remains unstable, and the connection of truth utterances to the real is always at issue.” In the exhibition, her warning materializes as a landscape of media-saturated visual noise: a survey spanning nearly six decades of Rosler’s work, all coalescing in a moment when images of crisis feel at once hyperreal and weightless.

Since her earliest work, Rosler has explored the tension between representation and reality, often by piercing the illusion of truth in print media. In her 1966–72 series “Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain,” Rosler’s pioneering photomontage technique exposed the glaring commodification of women’s bodies, highlighting how they are posed, segmented, and packaged like products for consumption. As with any montage, the power lies in the collision of disparate pictorial spaces brought together to spark meaning through visual friction.

These early collages established both the formal and political strategies Rosler would later deploy more overtly in “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home”. Executed at the height of the Vietnam-era anti-war movement, the series juxtaposes pristine interiors from House Beautiful magazine with graphic battlefield imagery clipped from Time, thus literalizing the notion of the “living-room war”—the conflict in Vietnam was the first televised war where footage of carnage filtered into domestic spaces via nightly broadcasts. Rosler distributed the works as Xeroxed flyers at protests and published them in underground newspapers, aligning the project more with activist media than with the art market. As the war escalated half a world away, she sought to collapse the illusion of distance, making violence inescapably proximate.

In Patio View (ca. 1967–72), a serene suburban patio opens onto a scene of military tanks and a street scarred by the aftermath of violence, with drawn curtains emblematizing a boundary between the domestic comfort and the harsh reality of war. Tron (Amputee) (ca. 1967–72) places a young Vietnamese girl whose foot has been amputated within a quintessential suburban living room complete with sectional furniture, large picture windows, and a television. These carefully composed scenes unfold within a single perspectival field, where domestic idyll and brutal conflict bleed into one another, shattering the ideological boundaries that would otherwise keep them apart. Rosler’s goal was never merely to represent war, but to interrupt the systems—both political and visual—that render it distant, consumable, and abstract.

In 2004 and 2008, Rosler revived “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home” in response to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In some collages, soldiers storm pastel-toned kitchens, rifles raised as though mid-siege. In others, models strut glamorously while civilians run and duck for cover. In Photo-Op (2004), two dead girls from a war zone appear in a sleek modernist living room—one draped across an iconic Eames lounge chair, a symbol of retro-modernist taste. Through picture windows, a fiery battle rages, while inside, two identical blonde fashionistas glance at their flip phones, whose screens display fragmented images of a man in distress. Here we find an eerie prefiguration of the way news of violence not only invades domestic space, but also filters through personal devices, folding into our everyday life with unprecedented intimacy.

Rosler’s early montages once forced viewers to confront the realities of war alongside the aesthetics of aspiration, staging collisions between comfort and catastrophe. But today, these photomontage strategies meet an audience already too fluent in the visual logic of contradiction to be much unsettled by it. We are conditioned to the frictionless scroll in which ads, atrocities, memes, and political spectacle live side by side. Today, contradiction is not a glitch but a feature, an experience woven into the fabric of daily consumption.

Rosler’s POINT & SHOOT, a mourning thought (though I am more enraged than in mourning) (2016) meets this moment with incisive force. Titled as both a provocation and instruction, the work shows Donald Trump in the iconic Uncle Sam pose, finger pointed outward so the viewer becomes the target of his gesture, overlaid with his infamous claim: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Swarming around him is a list of names—Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor—of Black and brown individuals killed by police. Trump’s absurd delivery of such statements produces a kind of noise: chaotic, theatrical, and, within a media ecosystem built on distraction, ultimately obfuscating. Overhead, a maze of translucent plastic sheets printed with text fragments on authoritarianism, surveillance, and disinformation extends across the gallery. This installation, titled Reading Hannah Arendt (Politically) for an American in the 21st Century (2006), fragments the space, overlaying it with semi-legible slogans and half-visible headlines—warnings that are impossible to fully take in at once.

That same logic courses through It Lingers… (1993)), a photographic tableau composed of war imagery drawn from disparate sources including the Iwo Jima flag-raising photo, cinematic battle shots, and news photographs whose captions mislead more than they clarify. At the bottom, a series of clipped newspaper maps chart global flashpoints—Sarajevo, Chad, Israel/Palestine. Here, Rosler renders a world where the tools of representation fail to distinguish between fact and fiction, where meaning slips across captions and frames. Across from this layered assemblage are screens with reels of Rosler’s own photographs taken during demonstrations held in New York over the past decade, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter and marches staged just weeks before the exhibition opened. These images insert a grounded counterpoint, a grassroots visual record set against the spectacle and confusion of endlessly mediated war. Their placement is spatial, not hierarchical, a kind of visual footnote that asserts its own urgency. Rosler’s work might not resolve the fog of representation, but it pierces it, however briefly.

Writing here, on the same platform where Rosler diagnosed the instability of truth a year ago, feels less like asserting clarity and more like stepping into the noise—trying to trace meaning across fractured ground, in a world where we consume violence as readily as anything else. To write about Rosler is to risk reproducing the very contradictions of media she exposes. But perhaps that’s the point: her work doesn’t resolve dissonance; it insists we sit with it.