On Discomfort

From the 1950s to the 1960s, America became increasingly embroiled in the Vietnam War. This conflict occurred just as television became ubiquitous in American homes. With journalists given near-unlimited access to combat zones, the Vietnam War became the first ‘living room war’: the American public could watch the war unfold from the comfort of their own living room (Ward). The bombardment of wartime broadcasts was traumatizing to many, which inadvertently encouraged American compartmentalization towards the war. Martha Rosler, having grown up in these troubled decades, created House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home. The photomontages in the collection were constructed by overlaying cut-outs from war photographs on top of images of model American homes (“Balloons”), bringing to light the tension between the pristine American life and the war they were waging overseas. This tension is exemplified in the photomontage Balloons. In Balloons, the exploration of relatable space represents aggressive remediation of photography, thereby breaking down American apathy towards war.

The photomontage’s title, “balloons”, refers to a bundle of colorful balloons in the corner of the room. One can assume that the original image intended to popularize a decorating technique for a cozy living room - the space in the home reserved for togetherness and relaxation. The color palette (mostly cool tones save for the balloons) and the structure of contrast (pastel colors/highlights surrounding the balloons, dark shadows covering the rest of the collage) serve to draw the viewer’s sight towards the balloons - the centerpiece of the image. However, before they could appreciate the balloons, their line of vision had to first travel through the sight of carnage at the front: a desperate-looking man cradling a wounded child. The man was looking to the right, hollowly peering into an undefined space, his head tilted upwards, his mouth agape and his face tainted by blood or dirt. The small child in his arms was largely unclothed, its lower body bloody, its limbs frozen at awkward angles. Contrary to usual representations of war in television or wartime photography, where there exists a great focus on capturing action, Balloons is void of any. The entire space is in stasis and silence, forcing the viewer to focus not on spectacle, but rather the emotional weight of horrific, mundane reality. The living room, supposedly safe and far away, has been intruded by an instance of violence; the illusion of tranquil life shattered by the brutality of war. The viewer quite literally has no choice but to confront war, loss and desperation in all their intimacy. This confrontation leads to a contradiction. The viewer consciously denies situating themselves as the subjects of the collage, for they were experiencing hostile realities absolutely, undeniably foreign and horrific to the American public. Nonetheless, due to their shared occupation of a familiar landscape - the model American living room - they will still subconsciously identify with the man and wounded child. They are at once both the man and the child and neither of them, at once inside the living room and outside of it, for both are one and the same.

Rosler’s imagined living room is thus striving for immediacy, forcing it, even. To achieve this forced, uncomfortable immediacy, the artist deliberately crafted a space inside the artwork for the spectator. In Balloons, we are standing on top of a staircase overlooking the gathering area, looking down onto the man and wounded child. Though we never directly meet his hollow stare, the indicated proximity between the viewer and the man engenders a wordless ‘interaction’: just as the man was helpless to help the child, the viewer is also helpless to alleviate their pain. I put ‘interaction’ in quotation marks for there is no actual possible interaction between the viewer and the subjects of the collage; in fact, this forced, immediate paralysis is poignant. It draws the viewer in, requiring them to face the war head-on. This in turn forces them to confront the passivity they exhibited during the war. Sharing a silent, static space as well as a relative emotional state with war victims serves to destabilize the detachment many Americans have developed towards the conflict overseas. 

By reconstructing war inside the model American home, Rosler constructs a very specific image of American apathy - one decorated with opulence, aesthetic and austerity. In juxtaposing the living room against the war, the artist is contrasting contentment against pain, wholeness against loss, cleanliness against gore, affluence against poverty, order against chaos, all to highlight the jarring disparity between a blooming yearning for aesthetics and the unspeakable horrors of war - both of which coexist in American reality and constitute the American media diet. To join these concepts is to abolish the concept of ‘us versus them’ - especially prevalent during conflicts - thereby awakening empathy and resistance in support of the ‘other’ side of the war.

In indirectly remediating photography and the experience of consuming televised media, which are mediums that boast a firm claim to reality, Balloons attempted to create something more real than the real. The Vietnamese pain, though surrounded by, is not subsumed by the American aesthetic, rather enhanced and realized by it. Had the viewer sat in their living room to look at the same cut-out of the man and wounded child, this would not have been possible. This is because in that case, the realization of the juxtapositions and hypocrisy at play is contingent on the viewer’s self-awareness, of their role in the war and outside of the living room. But here, Balloons took on the responsibility. It remediated the physical experience of consuming wartime media, transferring the autonomy of the viewer to the art. The viewer is reserved only one specific position in the image, the image only intends one way to be seen (it stays the same through different angles). As the autonomy of the spectator is taken away, they are forced to confront their similarities with the Southeast Asian war victims, their roles in the conflict, their emotions, abilities and rationality, and above all - the hypocrisy of their nation. Interestingly, while America (allegedly) fought the Vietnam War for freedom (from Communism), there is no freedom involved in the collage, from its subject to its uncomfortable confrontation and dictated space for the viewer. It is also interesting that Rosler chose balloons - a child’s plaything - as the centerpiece of the collage. The only child in the photo had neither the ability nor the opportunity to play with balloons. Its life was taken away by American violence. This disparity is heightened further by the realization that these aggressors are represented by, and could well reside in, the very same space the child and the balloons are assigned to: the American living room. Once again, by the inevitable logic of relatable space, the American viewer will thus realize their own role in the carnage: they are at once the aggressors - represented by the same apathetic, pristine living room - and yet also the victims. Through these processes, Balloons successfully dissolves the American ignorance towards the Vietnam War.

Balloons achieves immediacy by reserving a physical space for the spectator to imagine themselves in, going so far as to employ perspective techniques to imitate organic vision. The image is constructed according to linear perspective, such that the structure of the room aligns with our (elevated) view of the subjects. Immediacy, through relatable space, encourages and ensures the intended interpretations of the work. At the same time, this process of immediacy reveals a need for hyper-mediation. Aspiring to create a seamless image, various techniques including color grading and perspective-conscious collage call attention to the expertise involved in the creation of the piece and thus the medium of the piece itself (a flat collage). They also point clearly to the mediums the work is trying to remediate (photography directly, and television indirectly). There is no doubt that the collage is still in some sense a ‘photo’, for it follows the rules of perspective, lighting and coloring of photography. After all, through diligent abiding by such rules, the effects of immediacy - where the viewer can physically imagine themselves inside the artwork - were achieved. Yet Balloons definitely asserted itself as other-than-photo; it aggressively refashioned photography. The materiality of the artwork, though draws on photography, disregards its appreciation of setting, lighting or camerawork. Instead, such elements were emulated by artificial creation. By stripping away photography’s quest for representativity, which was especially noteworthy in wartime photography, the depiction broke free from the older medium’s constraints, setting itself in an entirely constructed, fictional context to force the viewers to become part of the art. ‍

Created in an era where the public at large is well-exposed to the Vietnam War, Balloons might not have meant to be informative, but rather provocative and contemplative. It literally offered a new way of looking at the war - from inside the tranquil home, leading the American focus away from the television and the living room to see their home and war with more immediacy. Through connecting the subjects of disparate realities to evoke immediacy, the remediation of Rosler’s collage shatters the emotional compartmentalization induced by the mass broadcast of violence and further implores the public to explore how they consume media, especially in times of conflict. Balloons serves as a call to reexamine how our interactions with different mediums create our collective experience of war.

References

“Balloons". House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home. The Museum of Modern Art, 

Ward, Maddie. “Vietnam: The First Television War.” January 25, 2018