A Simple Case for Torture: Martha Rosler’s Critique of American Foreign Policy since 1975

A Simple Case for Torture: Martha Rosler’s Critique of American Foreign Policy since 1975 [SLIDE 1: TITLE SLIDE] Portentous music In her 1997 video Chile on the Road to NAFTA,1 Martha Rosler includes footage of the Chilean National Police Band performing publically in a gazebo a medley of the works of American composer John Williams who has worked extensively with director Steven Spielberg – scoring all but two of his films. Notably, Williams also worked with George Lucas, composing the film scores for the original Star Wars trilogy. Additionally, as humorously considered in musician and comedian Bill Bailey’s A Remarkable Guide to Music, Williams composed the theme to the NBC Nightly News – a theme called ‘The Mission’. It is full of urgency promoting 1 Grady T. Turner, “Martha Rosler at Jay Gorney”, Art in America, May 1997; on‐line: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n5_v85/ai_19385196 1|Page exultant expectancy, but mixed with a sense of gravitas that nonetheless is wedded to a string section provoking feelings of soaring uplift of the spirit. As Bill Bailey so aptly describes it: it sounds like ET on horseback chased down a beach by Darth Vader! I open with this note for a couple of reasons. One is to highlight a particular strategy within Rosler’s oeuvre – which is to incorporate into her work artefacts of daily life – especially in their complexly banal attire of popular culture as appropriated and deployed in amateur, quotidian settings and situations. This incorporation allows Rosler her pro‐situationist strategy of crafting decoys and disruptions through appropriation as détournément: the politically and aesthetically motivated hijacking of everyday life – the turning of material against itself. The second reason I mention Chile on the Road to NAFTA is to describe the highly unsettling nature of the musical footage in this video. As stated above, the John Williams medley is performed by the National Police Band of Chile. Only a few years into the ‘resumption’ of democracy post‐Pinochet at the time 2|Page of Rosler’s video, the sight and sound of the National Police performing leitmotifs from Star Wars that evoke the menace of Darth Vader, intercut with the opening refrains of the NBC Nightly News theme, is both unnerving and darkly comic, at least to an American viewer of a certain age who immediately recognises both of these aural landmarks and their varied resonances. This conceptually discordant medley is the perfect metaphor for both Rosler’s photomontage practice and for American foreign policy post‐World War II. In this Williams Police medley, we have a constellation of popular cultural sci‐fi villainy, media accounts of daily history and the dirty politics of American foreign policy and neo‐liberal economic theory enacted as a violently embodied practice, together with migrations of these policies into newer forms such as the North American Free Trade Agreement. Chile on the Road to NAFTA is a portrait of a country rebooted. Its previous incarnation under Pinochet is – we are told – almost like an alternate reality which has been banished by the undoing of a time paradox, for example, as if in a comic book world – from which, as we will see, I borrow the concept of the 3|Page reboot. The reboot allows the retrospective correction of narrative continuity issues within the world of the comic book. It allows the vanquishing of certain villains and the streamlining of characters, the scrapping of convoluted multi‐ verses and excessive cast numbers. Roz Kaveney has written very well in 2008 on the most notable reboots and event narratives of both DC and Marvel comic book worlds.2 But Chile on the Road to NAFTA also represents a further instalment in Rosler’s continued work on Chile since the 1970s, works which include 1977’s photo‐ text work “The restoration of high culture in Chile” 3 and 1978’s video Domination and the Everyday. These works are loaded constructions demonstrating her increasing sophistication of thought in the development of nuanced political artworks, which first began a decade earlier in John Heartfield‐esque photomontages. 2 Roz Kaveney, Superheroes! Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008); especially Chapter 5: “Some Kind of Epic Grandeur: Events and Reboots in the Superhero Universe”, pp. 176 – 200. 3 Found in her book Martha Rosler: 3 Works: 1. The Restoration of High Culture in Chile; 2. The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems; 3. in, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography) (1979; reprinted 2006); and in Martha Rosler: Positions in the Lifeworld (1999). A year earlier, 1976, Rosler produced the video Losing: A Conversation with Parents. The work can be seen as a correlate piece (much as The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems shares common concerns with Semiotics of the Kitchen which was produced at the same time (December 1974 – January 1975), although ostensibly dealing with separate subject matter), to this work on Chile. Losing can be read as a privileged (First World) look at ‘the disappeared’ in terms of the public‐private terror of anorexia rather than the public‐private terror of (Third World) death squads in Latin America. 4|Page Photomontages [SLIDE 2: Make‐up / Hands Up & Bowl of Fruit] Active in both the anti‐war and women’s movements of the 1960s and ‘70s in the US, American artist and activist Martha Rosler first began creating collages, which she rephotographed and called photomontages, during this time. She saw these works as separate from her art practice – at that time painting, and later video and photographic works. [SLIDE 3: FIRST LADY] Rosler’s photomontages explored questions of the conflicting roles for women in society, as well as the enforced segregation between the war in Vietnam and the domestic space of America. 5|Page [SLIDE 4: VACATION GETAWAY] With nightly news reports from the fighting ‘in country’ invading the American home via the television screen, the domestic space was already infiltrated with at least images of the war; [SLIDE 5: BEAUTY REST] and yet, what Nixon would later identify as his ‘silent majority’ could close their eyes and deny the reality of what was happening ‘over there’, in spite of the deluge of visual accounts pouring in at dinner time broadcasts. [SLIDE 6: BEAUTY REST & BEAUTY REST ADVERT] Rosler sought to both understand these artificial divisions and to undermine them through the exposure of that very artificiality through the collisions pictured in her photomontages. 6|Page [SLIDE 7: TRON & TRON in Goodbye…] These were produced as images for herself and for reproduction in underground newspapers and Xeroxed for distribution as flyers at anti‐war demonstrations. Gleaning her images from the pages of House Beautiful and Life Magazine, [SLIDE 8: TRON & TRON Life...] Rosler’s series, “Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful”, literally situated the media representations of soldiers and victims of the American war in Vietnam inside media depictions of the ideal American domestic interior; that most external of events – the war abroad – was actually internalised. 7|Page A Simple Case… This relationship between the collective dream of the ideal American isolation – withdrawal into the House Beautiful, the sanctuary of life in the city on the hill – and the reality of what actions were undertaken to preserve that dream, lies at the heart of Rosler’s 1983 video [SLIDE 9: NEWSWEEK COVER SLIDE 1] A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night. She revisited this work in 2007 in an essay entitled “A Case for Torture, Redux”.4 As that essay explains, the video focuses on an op‐ed piece published in Newsweek in 1982. “The Case for Torture”, written by Michael Levin, “an obscure philosophy professor at The City College of New York”,5 proposed 4 Martha Rosler, “A Case for Torture, Redux (2007)”, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media; on‐line: http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/Rosler/index.html 5 Ibid. 8|Page “that terrorism necessitated the official use of torture in various circumstances by the U.S. government.”6 Not only would certain scenarios necessitate torture of a terrorist as the efficacious interrogation tactic, it would prove actually to constitute the truly moral option given the millions of imperilled lives which could be saved if one succeeded in extracting the requisite information to thwart the terrorists’ plot.7 This proffered scenario is known as the ‘ticking time bomb’.8 Levin’s assertion was this scenario not only made the use of torture permissible, but in fact, “morally mandatory”.9 [SLIDE 10: NEWSWEEK COVER SLIDE 2] Rosler explains the methods she used in the video: In interrogating the professor’s argument point by point, the videotape moves into a long barrage of information from mainstream media showing how state‐sponsored terrorism in various Third World regions is underwritten by the United States and how financial and business communities are implicated. It also 6 Martha Rosler, “War in My Work”, p. 385 An ‘easy’ scenario which underpins the first series of the post‐9/11 US television hit 24 8 Martha Rosler, “A Case for Torture, Redux (2007)”, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media; on‐line: http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/Rosler/index.html Kristian Williams, p. 101 notes that “The standard example cited in defenses of torture is the ‘ticking time bomb’ case.” 9 Martha Rosler, A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night (1983; video); on‐line at UBUWEB: http://www.ubu.com/film/rosler_torture.html 7 9|Page focuses on the fact that women are special targets of such brutality. But it does these things in an almost unassimilable fashion, recreating as a particular kind of psychological torture, a relentless barrage of explanation and counterexplanation in which subjects in the Western democracies are told and mis‐told about the relationships among world events.10 Material in the section of the video entitled “Civilization and Barbarism”11 outlines a thesis not unlike that proposed two decades later by Naomi Klein in her examination of “disaster capitalism”: The Shock Doctrine.12 The video exposes the catalogue of US involvement in and sponsorship of state terror in Latin America and Vietnam, revealing that discussion of torture is not hypothetical as Levin would suggest, but a real and present danger. Quoting Levin against himself, we find we are “moving from the realm of imagination to fact”.13 10 Martha Rosler, “War in My Work”, p. 385 Martha Rosler, A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night (1983; video) Francis Frascina notes connections between Rosler’s renewed photomontage practice and Klein’s thesis in The Shock Doctrine, in Francis Frascina, “1968: Art and Politics in Chicago”, Art Monthly, No. 322, Dec 2008 – Jan 2009; pp. 22 – 23, especially page 23. 12 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p. 6: “I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, ‘disaster capitalism.’” Also see page 7 on Milton Friedman’s work with Pinochet. 13 Martha Rosler, A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night (1983; video) 11 10 | P a g e [SLIDE 11: NEWSWEEK COVER SLIDE 3] Rosler’s video works to expose this “guest editorial”14 in Newsweek as preparing the ground for a normalisation of the discourse of torture; aiming to shape public opinion in favour of entertaining the need for possibly introducing extreme practices in order to pave the way for a future reception of already existing practices. Rosler identifies that Levin’s argument seeks a reinstatement of a tyrannical sovereignty in lieu of democracy and mocks this position by crowning the by‐line photo of Levin with a golden paper crown. Behold the philosopher‐king. Within the video, Rosler manages to assert a sense of the historical continuity of abduction, state terrorism, and torture, linking current events in Latin America to the then just recent past of the American war in Vietnam to the events of the Second World War in Nazi Germany.15 14 Martha Rosler, “A Case for Torture, Redux (2007)”, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media Rosler writes on screen in the video: “When I was a young girl, / I often worried that” she would be taken and tortured, as if taken by Nazis; she feared that she would break and that she would name her friends in this imaginary disappearance. 15 11 | P a g e Rosler’s creation of a narrative of historical continuity of abduction and torture is vitally important. It reminds the viewer that torture is something we all believe happens only in the past, whether the temporal past or the spatial ‘past’ (the Second World War, not ‘now’; the Third World, not the developed First World). Yet Rosler seeks to break the sense that torture is anachronistic by highlighting not only the present deployment of torture in various parts of the world, but the support such tactics enjoy from the First World; and to draw attention to the frighteningly mainstream (Newsweek!) appeal to encourage a legitimisation of torture as merely one, specialised security tool which a government may choose to use when necessary. Martha Rosler’s fear that certain neo‐conservative factions within America wanted to see the extension of the powers of the executive to assume the role of a sovereign – to eliminate the vox populi – has been more than realised during the 2000s.16 Her concern that a discourse might develop normalising and bringing into the open, the concept of torture as legitimate in certain circumstances has been proven well founded (even if we don’t use the ‘T’ word in public). Infamously, at the start of the ‘war on terror’ “Jonathan Alter and 16 In Martha Rosler, “A Case for Torture, Redux (2007)”, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, Rosler writes on the resurgence of neo‐conservative calls for states of exception á la Carl Schmitt 12 | P a g e Alan Derschowitz proposed to ‘rethink’ human rights so that they could permit torture (of suspected terrorists).”17 With the Bybee Memos, aka the Torture Memos, such practices became Bush administration policy and an acknowledged reality (rather than the open secret as in US prosecution of power in Latin America, from the ‘50s through ‘80s in particular).18 This recasting of torture as merely ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ points to what I dub the reboot impulse within the Bush / Cheney modus operandi. It was precisely this impulse Rosler’s resumption of her anti‐war photomontage practice sought to throw into sharp relief. [SLIDE 12: GREY DRAPE & CLEANING THE DRAPES] As far as I was concerned, my photomontage period wrapped up in the mid to late ‘70s and I was quite surprised to find myself turning back to it in the early 2000s in response to our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which outraged me as much as the war in Vietnam had. And I realized that if I went back to the photomontage medium, I 17 Žižek, Iraq: the borrowed kettle, pp. 58 – 59 Giorgio Agamben rightly recognises in these actions the extension of the advocacy of the rights of the sovereign within the state of emergency: With Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee’s signature on the memoranda drafted in August 2002 by Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the United States, John Yoo, commonly known as the Torture Memos, speciously arguing that the war on terror necessitated an extension of the powers of the executive to make the use of torture legally permissible, such practices thereby became Bush administration policy and an acknowledged reality (rather than the open secret as in US prosecution of power in Latin America, from the ‘50s through ‘80s in particular). 18 13 | P a g e would be making that point – it’s the same message and it has the same politics, which is: we are responsible for this – this is us telling ourselves that life is beautiful here at home and this is what we do abroad.19 Elsewhere she offers details further the project’s specific orientation: [SLIDE 13: PHOTO OP & HOODED CAPTIVES] In 2003, while I was casting about for a way to address, within my art, the war we were launching, I realized that it seemed to make the most sense, finally, to return to a form of expression I had used back then – that is, simple photomontage, showing the ideal homes of today and their inhabitants, together with scenes of war and combatants abroad. I regarded this mode of expression as a “meta‐form,” in which the very return to this form, which I had not used for a long time, would itself signify a certain “retro”… element in the war itself. I wanted somehow to use this to make specific connections with Vietnam, the subject of attention of the earlier anti‐war montages. Among the similarities I wanted to call attention to were that the rationales for the war were obviously bogus, the professed aims constantly shifting, the press and Congress subservient and pandering, and the mood of the public gullible and its stance crudely bellicose. Finally, the war itself could safely be predicted to become a quagmire, a situation applied quite often to the war in Vietnam, a prognostication drawn from an awareness of the rather recent fate of the Soviets – and before them the British – in Afghanistan and of the British in Iraq. Thus, the return to photomontage – taking up a form in my work that was already acknowledged as constituting a body of “historical political art” of the mid‐1960s through mid‐‘70s – was meant as a 19 Martha Rosler, Slide show audio (2 mins. 46 secs.), The New York Times, September 5, 2008; my own transcriptions. Slide show on‐line at: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/09/05/arts/rosler‐ audioss/index.html 14 | P a g e signal concerning the war, as opposed to the vagaries of my particular practice through time.20 Rosler’s use of twins and doubles and replicated forms [SLIDE 14: INVASION] within these new series of 2004 and 200821 signals the uncanny repetitions unfolding in the second George Bush’s administration post‐9/11. It is these uncanny repetitions which point towards a very particular type of redux, what I label the process of the reboot. The term originates within IT, from the rebooting of a computer. It is a means of starting a new operating session without performing ordinary shutdown functions on the previous session. The term has been appropriated by the comic book world, followed 20 Gilbert, p. 198 It is worth mentioning that these new works were undertaken during the presidential campaigns of 2004 and 2008 specifically as agit‐prop. Rosler recognised that her increased visibility in the art world in the years since the Gulf War of 1991 meant that if she made the works as art this time round, they would actually reach larger audiences outside of the art world as they were likely to be discussed, reviewed and reproduced in the popular press as well as in art world publications. Such proved the case with Invasion featuring in the New York Times and Grey Drape appearing on the cover of Modern Painters. 21 15 | P a g e by adoption by the film community, to describe the renewal of a story franchise with a fresh start, which is not beholden to all the character, and plot developments of previous versions of that canon. Chris Nolan’s Batman Begins series or the 21st century James Bond films starring Daniel Craig are well‐known examples of such rebooting. A reboot is not the same as a sequel or a prequel to a film as it is a fresh incarnation of the story. Within commercial filmmaking, it is a means of refreshing a once lucrative film franchise with new actors so further instalments and profits can be made, as with the 2009 reboot of Star Trek, or the recent Andrew Garfield Spiderman reboot. It is not merely a re‐make, it is the chance to reduce or disregard complicated subplots which have accrued over the previous instalments and versions of the comic book or films. The relationship of the reboot to the previous versions is a complicated one. Rather than reading one cycle through the lens of the other, as with the example of the Old Testament seen in light of the New Testament of the Bible (or with the two cycles of Star Wars films), the focus is on a revitalisation of the 16 | P a g e core narrative contained in the original cycle of stories, but allowed a new incarnation free of accumulated lore. Differing in quality and degree from mere revivalism or revisionism, it is a starting afresh; a ground zero; an attempt to ‘get it right this time.’ [SLIDE 15: RED STRIPE KITCHEN & LOUNGING WOMAN] This is the key to Rosler bringing the war home again. It is not she who has chosen a hackneyed rerun of the ‘Vietnam era’ as New York‐based art critic Jerry Saltz has accused. What Saltz seems to disregard, or even to not understand, about the original series is that it is not merely a visually catchy, but ultimately disposable Pop pastiche on an earlier era of agit‐prop. The original series is itself a meta‐commentary on ideological representation which provokes critique of the ideology we internalise in relation to notions of national identity, the public versus the private, the everyday versus History. Rosler’s replication of her earlier work is meant to provoke an inquiry into the replications at work under the Bush / Cheney administration and their ‘war on 17 | P a g e terror’. Her renewed series serves to awaken us to the Vietnam narrative reboot employed by the American executive post‐9/11. [SLIDE 16: INVASION] But as in Invasion, this intractable onslaught of sleek but robotic Agent Smith / Mad Men figures appears to be an impossible re‐emergence of that which we thought was outmoded; passé; vanquished; laid to rest. Reboot Syndrome American New Left activist and politician Tom Hayden certainly thought Vietnam was laid to rest: he believed the one benefit of those atrocious years wasted in that American war was that it could never happen again. “That is perhaps the key legacy of Vietnam: the new and hard‐won potential of Americans to think twice before accepting our leaders’ words.”22 Critic and creator of the term ‘counterculture’ Theodore Roszak also finds the Vietnam reboot hard to believe. In the 2000s, he wrote in amazed and 22 Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Collier Books, 1988), p. 250 18 | P a g e bewildered tones about the resurgence of overt American military imperialism: “I could never have predicted that, after Vietnam, there would come a time when a benighted militarism would rise again to take control of my country’s government as part of another all‐consuming cause: the war on terrorism.”23 Rosler herself has “talked...about history repeating itself, along with [her] disbelief at the fact that the United States failed to learn – or quickly forgot – its lessons from the Vietnam War.”24 Noam Chomsky, linguist, academic, activist and public intellectual, however, feared at the time of the American war in Vietnam, writing in 1969, that such lessons were bound to be unlearned, overlooked, or forgotten.25 [SLIDE 17: PROSPECT FOR TODAY] Reflecting further, just after the American withdrawal from Vietnam and in the throes of continuing Watergate fall‐out, and hot on the heels of the oil crisis, 23 Theodore Roszak, World Beware! American Triumphalism in an Age of Terror, p. 34 Alan Gilbert, p. 197 25 Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: The New Press, 1967, 1969; 2002), p. 384 24 19 | P a g e Chomsky, in 1975, made an amazingly prescient statement about what it meant (and means), ‘post‐Vietnam’, to be, as Rosler has put it: “still in an empire‐building, war‐fighting period in world history”.26 In his statement of ’75, Chomsky acknowledged that the benefits of empire exist mainly for the privileged within the ruling society, with the costs, however, borne by the majority of the public, who: Therefore ... must be aroused by jingoist appeals, or at least kept disciplined and submissive, if American force is to be readily available for global management. Here lies the task for the intelligentsia. If it is determined that we must, say, invade the Persian Gulf for the benefit of mankind, then there must be no emotional or moral objections from the unsophisticated masses, and surely no vulgar display of protest. The ideologists must guarantee that no ‘wrong lessons’ are learned from the experience of the Indochina war and the resistance to it.27 28 26 Nesbit and Obrist, p. 42 Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War, p. 135. This is from “Chapter 4: The Remaking of History (1975)”. 28 Chomsky made it very plain what the stakes were regarding how ‘Vietnam’ will be seen: If America’s Vietnam ‘intervention’ is understood, as it properly must be, as a major crime against peace, then an ideological barrier will be erected against the future use of U.S. force for global management. Hence those who are committed to the founding principles of American imperialism must ensure that such questions are never raised. They may concede the stupidity of American policy, and even its savagery, but not the illegitimacy inherent in the entire enterprise, the fact that this was a war of aggression waged by the United States, first against South Vietnam, and then the rest of Indochina. These issues must be excluded from current and future debate over the ‘lessons of the debacle,’ because they go directly to the crucial matter of the resort to force and violence to guarantee a certain vision of global order. (Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War, p. 135. This is from “Chapter 4: The Remaking of History (1975)”.) 27 20 | P a g e Unlike Roszak and Hayden, Howard Zinn29 and Noam Chomsky (here as Cassandra) appreciated the long‐term implications if the American war in Vietnam were chalked up as just a bungle. Chomsky again: Suppose that the system of thought control re‐establishes the doctrine that the United States remains exempt from the principles we correctly but hypocritically invoke in condemning the resort to force and terror on the part of others. Then the basis is laid for the next stage of imperial violence and aggression. As long as these doctrines hold sway, there is every reason to expect a re‐ enactment of the tragedy of Vietnam.30 Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush (i.e., the elder) did much to rebuild faith in that very story of American exceptionalism following the blow it suffered after the war in Vietnam. Upon the conclusion of Desert Storm in 1991, “Bush announced on American radio that he had finally buried the Vietnam syndrome.”31 29 Howard Zinn recognised such a pantomime of truth and reconciliation, with the attendant illusion of a self‐ critical and self‐correcting system, post‐Watergate: ‘There was ... a need to satisfy a disillusioned public that the system was criticizing and correcting itself. The standard way was to conduct a publicized investigation that found specific culprits but left the system intact. ... The resignation of Nixon, the succession of Ford, the exposure of bad deeds by the FBI and CIA – all aimed to regain the badly damaged confidence of the American people.’ (William Blum, Killing Hope, p. 176) 30 Ibid, p. 152 – 153. 31 Jonathan Neale, Vietnam 1960 – 1975: The American War, p. 179 21 | P a g e Academic and anti‐war activist H. Bruce Franklin32 has charted the mutation and rehabilitation of the story of America’s involvement in Vietnam and, in closing, it is worth quoting him at length as we can see how in his account how the groundwork was laid for the rebooting of Vietnam: It was George Bush, vice‐president under Reagan from 1981 to 1989, the years when the history of the Vietnam War was being radically rewritten and re‐imagined, who broke the silence with these words: ‘The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory.’ President Bush’s usage of the term reflected what had become standard in American speech. ‘Vietnam’ was no longer a country or even ‘a place called Vietnam,’ as his predecessor [Reagan] had put it. It had become a war, an American war. Or maybe not even a war. It had become an American tragedy, an event that had divided and wounded America….Bush’s inaugural speech blamed ‘Vietnam’ for the ‘divisiveness,’ [present in American society].... ‘It has been this way since Vietnam,’ he lamented. Two years later, gloating over what seemed America’s glorious defeat of Iraq [in 1991], President Bush jubilantly proclaimed to a nation festooned in jingoistic yellow ribbons, ‘By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!’33 The scene was set for the Vietnam reboot. As Susan Sontag observed in 1966, “It’s hard to lead a holy war without allies. But America is just crazy enough to 32 Author, academic and anti‐war activist, who lost his position at Stanford during the Vietnam war for his outspokenness, was featured at that time, along with his wife Jane Franklin, in Time magazine because the furore was so newsworthy. 33 H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, pp. 26 – 27 P. 29: “This rewriting of history was fundamental to Reagan’s definition of the war as ‘a noble cause,’ a phrase he first presented along with another new term – the ‘Vietnam syndrome’ – in a 1980 campaign speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.” 22 | P a g e try to do it.”34 That could be the tagline on the movie poster for the film of the post‐9/11 ‘war on terror’: the American war rebooted. The urgency Rosler’s renewed images impart insists we recognise the folly of this reboot, to understand that no amount of tinkering can change the ultimate wrong of replicating the Vietnam narrative. 35 Her unbroken practice as a political artist has seen Rosler expose time and again the variety of ways in which we are conscripted into dangerous revivals 34 Susan Sontag, “What’s Happening in America (1966)”, Styles of Radical Will, p. 198 Rosler’s project to bring the war home is an attempt to force integration of the two Americas – the America at war and the America of the tranquil home. What remains to be seen when looking at the war brought home, is why Rosler felt she had to write her original “Bringing the War Home” series into (art) history in the first place, during the 1991 commencement of the Gulf War. For this is critical to why she felt compelled to renew the series more than a decade later. As we have seen, the critical factor was the denial which followed the American defeat in Vietnam. 35 How could this small nation of outgunned people (Vietnam) defeat the largest military machine on earth? This must surely represent an aberration, an exception within the story of the exceptional nation, America. The notion of the aberration, the anomaly provides the needed scapegoat to fuel the denial of this defeat. This must be down to a bad apple, bad policy or leadership; it can’t be systemic to the project of America (foreign policy) at large. An official scandal provides the requisite (ab)solution. As William Blum has noted: “Scandal, like the priestly confession, absolves.” (William Blum, Killing Hope, p. 176)” “It is characteristic of the scandal, whether it be Watergate or Enron, My Lai or Abu Ghraib, that abuses surface, promote outcry, are denounced as aberrations, and are addressed through narrow investigations, the punishment of individual wrongdoers, and (perhaps) modest reforms.” (William Blum, Killing Hope, p. 176) As Seymour Hersh identified in his work Chain of Command, scapegoating, the singling out of an individual culprit or handful of culprits, whether Lt. Calley or Lynndie England, allows the buck to stop with them and the higher ups within the chain of command to skate by uninterrupted. Such denial paved the way for the booby trap laid out as the post‐Vietnam American military reboot. 23 | P a g e and revisions which threaten to make barbarism respectable, or situate it discreetly out of sight. It is against the tyranny of such disguises and disappearances that Rosler’s work has struggled, work which offers an example of performative critique, an example from which we may all draw inspiration. Thank you. 24 | P a g e