This photocollage at Seattle Art Museum is one several featured pieces from Martha Rosler’s anti-Vietnam War series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home.
Called Giacometti, it emphasizes the modernist sculpture of the oversize man frozen in mid-stride, emaciated, fragile, and alone, by the Italian artist Alberto Giacometti. The man is poised toward the photojournalistic scene of Vietnam War horror that Rosler has collaged in behind the regal curtains in the 1960s magazine spread.
But the man is just art, and in this case, art easily turned into fashionable accessory. While he represents suffering, he makes no difference to the people who are suffering in that photograph or the many like them. Instead, in this case, he makes their deaths seem inevitable and beautiful, future subjects for tragedy that will make for stronger advertising spreads.
The collage reminds me of something that the artist Kehinde Wiley, also showing at SAM, told me last week (emphases mine).
“My work is about that sad underbelly of what you’re seeing here, because in the end, I’m not transforming anyone’s life; in the end, I’m not changing negative history or stereotypes,” he said. “All I’m doing is rubbing these two oppositional forms together and creating a sensation that’s bittersweet because the art points to something, but it’s not in and of itself a redemptive act.”
