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Martha Rosler and Mary Kelly: Effects of War and Media in Domestic Spaces

Name, AR-2543-2020
Academic Reading and Writing II: Final Paper Fall Semester 2021
Instructor: -
December 7, 2020
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Centering their work on female experiences around violence, politics and war, it is no

doubt that Mary Kelly and Martha Rosler have been active participants in the women’s

movement. Both Rosler and Kelly are similar in their response to the trauma they witnessed

through their media careers, with Kelly engaged in the experience of the people universally

during wartime, and Rosler covering the Vietnam War, creating artworks that highlight the

suffering and adversity caused by war. However, not only do they achieve that through exploring

non-mainstream imagery and techniques, but also using distinct art styles to rebel against

conventions in the art world. This paper delves into the works of Martha Rosler and Mary Kelly

and analyzes their depictions on the effects of war and violence in domestic spheres caused by

violent images circulated by public media agencies. Studying works such as Kelly’s “Mea

Culpa” (1999) and Rosler’s “Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful” (1966-1972 series, we

discover how the artists inspect pictures of war that affect civilians, specifically focusing on the

female gender as domestic spheres are often associated with female experiences, and express

their interpretations through various contemporary works of art.

Taking imagery and media to stand against war and violence, Kelly and Rosler both

incorporate sensationalism to induce extreme reactions to their Anti-War Art – Art that rebels

against the governments and denies censorship.1 However, while Kelly designs rather subdued

abstractions meant for reflection beyond the initial impact, Rosler’s work simply embraces the

visual spectacle alone. Martha Rosler’s “Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful” series is a

sequence of twenty dynamic photomontages that combine pictures from House Beautiful and

Life magazines. The images essentially juxtapose the scene of an American home with brutal

wartime pictures from 1966-1972, a peaceful view of a modern, immaculate interior space with

monumental white walls, an abundance of sunlight filtering in, and a palatial ceiling, and the
1
Laura Brandon, Art and War (London: Tauris, 2007), 76.
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serenity of it trampled upon with the horrifying illustration of a Vietnamese woman carrying her

limp child. During the aforementioned time frame, the American media overwhelmed its viewers

with simultaneously presenting both the idealized images such as the House Beautiful layouts,

and images of violence in war. Not only was this traumatizing for the viewers witnessing this

barbarity on their screens, Rosler herself claimed to have experienced “frustration with the

images we saw in television and print media. The images were always very far away, in a place

we couldn’t imagine.”2 This frustration is what lead her to immortalize what the media was

doing every day: ushering violence into American homes.

Martha Rosler, Bringing the War Home: House

Beautiful, 1966–72, photomontage.

Similarly, Mary Kelly’s Mea Culpa, although non-representational, offers narratives that

document four distinct politically influenced acts of violence, materializing the memories of
2
Laura Cottingham, The War is Always Home: Martha Rosler (New York: Simon Watson Gallery, 1991), 129.
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Kelly’s female protagonists.3 Mea Culpa is composed of 5 panels, each twenty feet in length and

prominently split into rounded sections of compressed lint. Every panel consists of a narrative

corresponding to the effects of war on women from different war zones, ranging from Beirut

(1982) and Phnom Phen (1975) to Johannesburg (1997) and Sarajevo (1992). These narratives

were constructed with vinyl letters attached to the lint layer on Kelly’s washing machine, who

then moved on to wash an abundance of black and white fabric, imprinting each text on her lint

layers, the text itself becoming legible as white fabric lightens the spaces without text. The

aforementioned text was formed through an archive of stories that Kelly had gathered during her

career in media, and thus they were often politically motivated and involved human rights

actions by the International War Crimes Tribunal. After narrowing down her selection to cases

that were taken for trial, she searched for narratives that concerned women, children, and the

effects of trauma.4 However, Kelly was worried that direct delineation of these narratives would

take away from them giving a conscientious look at women’s lives during wartime, and hence

she avoided all visual representation of human form in Mea Culpa, pushing the viewer to

experience the mourning that accompanies the violence.

To comprehend
Mary Kelly,the
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Culpa, 1999,text panels lint,
Compressed in Mea
17” x Culpa,
235” x 2”.itInstallation,
is important for the viewers to
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walk around the gallery and experience a ritualistic procession. It has become common in

3
Brandon, Art and War, 79.
4
Mary Kelly, “Mea Culpa: A Conversation with Mary Kelly,” in Juli Carson and Mary Kelly, Art Journal 58 (Winter 1999), 78.
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Western culture to need a “kinesthetic element”5 when memorializing their dead, which is

essentially movement around a monument that gives the viewer a sense of connectivity to the

memorial and activates the space. Perhaps American mourning has changed from a private

experience to a rather public one over the course of history, a shift partly caused by the rise in

media highlighting traumatic events, to the point where the spectator becomes emotionally

attached to the event and assumes grief as a relevant public emotion.6 This phenomena is

emphasized on in Mea Culpa through texts that represent the traumas of women around the

world, and the trauma of universal human experience. Not only does Kelly present narratives of

life, love, and death that have been exposed to the public through media, but also manifests the

personal experience of every woman that has now become part of public memory, experienced

by the public as their very own trauma.

In consonance with Sigmund Freud, trauma is a psychological illness induced by the

shock of such acts of violence, causing the subject to be unable to process their emotions.

Therefore, trauma exists because of psychic violence that occurs through trauma inducing events,

regardless of whether they are experienced first-hand or through media. It is fitting that both

Rosler and Kelly work with materials and images as fragments, since trauma is never understood

fully by its subject. Rosler’s design involves fragmenting her images, using a piece of destroyed

landscape or a singular figure to depict the brutal events happening in Vietnam. This collage of

images speaks of a much more comprehensive narrative than would any of the pictures in their

entirety. Similarly, following Freud’s contention that it is the psychic effect that produces

trauma, and not the real event, Kelly created Mea Culpta with her own reception of data from the

5
Erika Doss, “Spontaneous Memorials and Contemporary Modes of Mourning in America,” in Material Religion: The Journal
of Objects, Art, and Belief (London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2006), 300.
6
Doss, 306.
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media – her personal trauma.7 It is no doubt that dealing with war and trauma was a daunting

prospect for Kelly as she was sensitive to the fact that an artwork feeling with women’s

experiences as victims of war violence and trauma could easily be read as obsessive activism.

However, her avoidance of representation encouraged her cause, as the viewer is faced with a

narrative instead of being confronted with violent imagery. Similar to several contemporary

artists, Mary Kelly welcomed the presence of narratives in her work, and made it a primary

element of her artwork.

It is a noteworthy observation that both of the aforementioned artists chose a non-

traditional technique to highlight the insurgent nature of their artwork. Martha Rosler preferred a

technique rooted in political use. The art of photomontage and collage has been used by artists of

Dadaism to rebel against the aberrance of war throughout World War 1, such as the works of

artist Hannah Hoch who incorporated magazine and newspaper clippings in her popular

photomontage “Cut with the Kitchen Knife” (1919).8 These materials were intended for aesthetic

pleasure and creating preposterous images with unanticipated juxtapositions, such as blending

machine parts with human bodies. Likewise, Rosler also aimed to rattle the intended aesthetic of

magazines with unexpected compositions of politics within the sphere of domesticity, often

analogous with docility. Nonetheless, even with its prior usage, Rosler believed that collages

were constantly marginalized by art communities, and wanted to disengage from the tradition

world of art. Moreover, photomontages were deemed as fitting for artists who were active

participants in anti-war protests, and this lead to the 1960s becoming an emancipatory time for

7
Mary Kelly, “The Body Politic,” In Frieze: Contemporary Art and Culture (London: Frieze, 2007), 135.
8
Catherine de Zegher and Katherine Carl, “Drawing like Singing Drowns out the Sound of the Bombs,” in Persistent Vestiges:
Drawing from the America-Vietnam War, ed. De Zeghar (New York: Drawing Center, 2005), 15.
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artists to work in different media and create “happenings”9 that we now refer to as performance

art.

Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 1919,

114 x 90 xm, Staattiche Museum, Berlin.

Alternatively, while Mea Culpa may appear to relate to the mundane domestic space in

Mary Kelly’s choice of material – compressed lint – the process is actually part of her intent.

Kelly depicts the home, the private sphere, and the realm of womanhood through a repetitive

series of domestic chores whereby the material becomes an element of symbolic reference. The

lint alone is purely dust, but it can be represented as a symbol of death (“from dust to dust”).

However, the ephemeral quality of dryer lint is the most significant aspect of all, because of its

composition’s reference to abjection. Abjection is essentially that which creates an inner revolt,

partially resulting from a desire, which is then rejected. Hence, the abject is always related with

the human self, representing the space of a physical boundary that construes the frontier between

9
. Martha Rosler, “Place, Position, Power, Politics,” in The Subversive Imagination, ed. Carol Becker (New York: Routledge,
1994), 55-76.
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a corpse and a living being, heightening the display of human fragility.10 It is arduous to find

references to the body through the abject in the material choices of Mary Kelly, but delving

deeper into it, one realizes that the use of dryer lint creates curiosity that generates repulsion

while suggesting desire, because we have all felt nausea, and even disgust, when emptying out

the dryer lint screen since it consists of skin cells, expelled hair, and other debris from the body

that had previously clung to our clothes. Even though Kelly’s lint by comparison was clean and

pristine, as it was produced through clothes that never had any physical contact with the human

body, we still associate her material with our own experience with dryer lint.

Taking all of this in to account, it becomes apparent that technology and Globalization

has forced us to continuously reevaluate the private and public sectors and reassess our daily

experiences. Earlier in history, newspapers were the only worldly and public infringement into

domestic and private spaces, but these days we’re constantly updated to the second, seeking

news on the internet and television, even witnessing certain incidents “live.” Our exposure to

media is so vast now that it has become almost impossible to spend an entire day without a

glimpse of world happenings in some form or the other. As the global realm invades our reality,

it becomes part of our individual experiences, a process that is commonplace enough for us to

overlook how these global events, especially violent and traumatic events, influence us as

spectators. Martha Rosler and Mary Kelly’s depictions on the effects of violence and war in

domestic spheres caused by images circulated by the media help us focus on the potency of

media, and the need to engage with and confront the everyday traumatic occurrences in the

global theatre. Through a comparison of their works, we discover how the artists analyze images

10
Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (London & New York: Routledge,
2003), 389.
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of violence and their effect on viewers, and use distinct art styles to revolt against conventions in

the world of art.

Bibliography:
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Brandon, Laura. Art and War, 76-79. London: Tauris, 2007.

Carl, Katherine and Catherine de Zegher. “Drawing like Singing Drowns out the Sound of the
Bombs.” In Persistent Vestiges Drawing from the America-Vietnam War, 15. Edited by
Ze Zeghar. New York: Drawing Center, 2005.

Cottingham, Laura. The War is Always Home: Martha Rosler, 129. New York, Simon Watson
Gallery, 1991.

Doss, Erika. “Spontaneous Memorials and Contemporary Modes of Mourning in America.” In

aterial Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief, 300-306. London: Bloomsbury
cademic, 2006.

Kelly, Mary. “Mea Culpa: A Conversation with Mary Kelly.” In Juli Carson and Mary Kelly,
78-79. Art Journal 58. Winter, 1999.

Kelly, Mary. “The Body Politic.” In Frieze: Contemporary Art and Culture, 135. London,
Frieze, 2007.

Rosler, Martha. “Place, Position, Power, Politics.” In The Subversive Imagination, 55-76. Edited
by Carol Becker. New York: Routledge, 1994.