Star Wars: Return of the Sixties, Or, Martha Rosler versus the Empire Striking Back

This article was downloaded by: [University of Southampton Highfield] On: 01 August 2013, At: 10:16 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Third Text Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20 Star Wars: Return of the Sixties August Jordan Davis Published online: 01 Aug 2013. To cite this article: August Jordan Davis (2013) Star Wars: Return of the Sixties, Third Text, 27:4, 565-578 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.814439 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions Third Text, 2013 Vol. 27, No. 4, 565– 578, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.814439 Downloaded by [University of Southampton Highfield] at 10:16 01 August 2013 Star Wars: Return of the Sixties Or, Martha Rosler versus the Empire Striking Back August Jordan Davis 1. For excellent examinations of this variation of (police) enforcement, see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Penguin, London and New York, 2007; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2007; and Tariq Ali, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, Verso, London and New York, 2008. Amongst the myriad ‘forces of globalization’ that one might examine, whether broadly or more specifically in relation to art and criticism, as in the context of this special issue, surely the most fundamental is the literal force of military imperialism. From its explicit exertion as an invading and occupying force (for instance that of the US and UK in Afghanistan and Iraq) to its more slyly embedded position within expansionistic neoliberal economic policies (such as NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement – in Latin America), and the particular forms of policing these require (now as much through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as previously through death squads and juntas), imperialistic forces aim to shape a globalized world from compulsory expropriations conglomerating one (eminent) domain for a particular power.1 ‘Soft’ imperialism in the form of cultural colonizations can be no less forceful than military and economic co-options; through processes of insidious internalization of exogenous ideological positions a realignment of the territory of one’s inner life to match the contours of another’s hegemonic mappings takes place. This spectrum of imperialist reconstitutions – military, economic or cultural invasions (or any combination thereof, leading ultimately to full-spectrum dominance) – comprises the situation against which artist and activist Martha Rosler has worked for nearly 50 years. This article examines her critique of imperialism as a force of globalization rooted most directly within her series of photomontages Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (first series: 1967 – 1972; New Series: 2004– 2008) wherein I identify a meta-critical practice predicated on the concept of the reboot, as unpacked below. GENERAL DARTH VADER In her 1997 video Chile on the Road to NAFTA, Martha Rosler included footage of the Chilean National Police Band performing publically in a # 2013 Third Text Downloaded by [University of Southampton Highfield] at 10:16 01 August 2013 566 2. See Martha Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975 –2001, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2004. Also see August Jordan Davis, ‘Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975 – 2001’, The Art Book, vol 12, no 2, May 2005, pp 34 – 35. 3. There is an increasingly extensive literature of and on the theory, writings and practices of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. See Guy Debord and Gil J Wolman, ‘A User’s Guide to Détournement’ (1956), in Ken Knabb, ed and trans, Situationist International: Anthology, revised and expanded edition, Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, California, 2006, pp 14 – 21. Also see Situationist International, ‘Détournement as Negation and Prelude’ (1959), in ibid, pp 67 –68. 4. The touchstone for Rosler regarding challenging the mythologies/ideologies of everyday life has been the work of Henri Lefebvre. ‘Somebody stuffed a paperback copy of Lefebvre’s Everyday Life in the Modern World into my hand in the early ’70s, and it burnt a hole in my life. I hated it! And it was one of those paradigm shifts. Oh this is awful, this is totally right!’, Stephen Wright, ‘Deinstrumentalizing Knowledge – Interview with Martha Rosler’, in Paul Domela and John Byrne, eds, Martha Rosler Library, Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, Liverpool, 2008, p 13. Still from Chile on the Road to NAFTA, 1997, video, 10 minutes, colour with sound, courtesy the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix gazebo a medley of the works of American composer John Williams, who had worked extensively with director Steven Spielberg, scoring most of his films. Notably, Williams also worked with George Lucas, composing the film scores for the original Star Wars trilogy (directed by George Lucas, 1977, Irvin Kershner, 1980, Richard Marquand, 1983). Additionally, as humorously considered in British comedian and musician Bill Bailey’s recorded performance A Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra (2009), Williams composed an early version of the theme to the NBC Nightly News – a theme called ‘The Mission’ (1985). It is full of an urgency that promotes exultant expectancy; it evokes both a sense of gravitas and, through its string section, a soaring uplift of the spirit. As Bailey so aptly describes it: it sounds like ET on horseback chased down a beach by Darth Vader! I begin with this note for two reasons. First to highlight a particular strategy within Rosler’s oeuvre: the incorporation of 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 Situationist-inflected strategy of crafting decoys and disruptions through (mis-)appropriation as détournement,2 the politically and aesthetically motivated hijacking of everyday life – the turning of material against itself.3 The sheer fact of incorporation, the plain act of selecting to focus upon certain aspects of the ‘wallpaper’ of daily life – the ads, the buskers, the shop fronts, the detritus of modern, urban and peripatetic life – stops our attention just long enough to cause puzzlement as to why we are asked to consider items, images, situations or performances that initially seem so innocently mundane. It is the moment of the mini-double-take: the asking ourselves why bother with this, which is the point of Rosler’s larger project: the interrogation of the ideologies of everyday life and the socio-political economic privileges these afford certain power blocs.4 567 Downloaded by [University of Southampton Highfield] at 10:16 01 August 2013 5. Roz Kaveney, Superheroes! Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films, I B Tauris, London and New York, 2008, especially Chapter 5, ‘Some Kind of Epic Grandeur: Events and Reboots in the Superhero Universe’, pp 176 –200 6. Two exceptions were at the behest of arts institutions/ organizations, rather than at Rosler’s instigation, and were reimaginings or extensions of the original works. The first is Semiotics of the Kitchen: An Audition, which transformed Rosler’s blackand-white 1975 video performance and reworked it as a collaborative live performance (itself videotaped and now available on the Electronic Arts Intermix website, dated as 2011). This performance involved more than two dozen volunteers and was performed for the Whitechapel Gallery’s ‘A Short History of Performance, Part II’, November 2003; see August Jordan Davis, ‘Martha Rosler’s Fighting Legions: Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975/2003) Performance and the (Video) Document’, in Jonathan Harris, ed, Dead History, Live Art?: Spectacle, Subjectivity and Subversion in Visual Culture since the 1960s (Tate Liverpool Critical Forum), Tate Liverpool and Liverpool University Press, London and Liverpool, 2007, pp 209 –239. The second was If You Still Lived Here, an archive project with e-flux, 28 August –14 November 2009. Her solo shows at the London ICA, ‘London Garage Sale’ (2005) and at New York’s MoMA, ‘Meta Monumental Garage Sale’ (2012), constitute iterations of an ongoing project which commenced with her first ‘Monumental Garage Sale’ show in San Diego in 1973. The ‘Garage Sale’ series is interesting as a transitional work lying somewhere between vast installation art and 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 medley of music by John Williams is performed by the National Police Band of Chile. Only a few years into the ‘resumption’ of democracy post-Pinochet at the time of Rosler’s video, the sight and sound of the National Police performing leitmotifs from Star Wars evoking the menace of Darth Vader, intercut with the opening refrains of the NBC Nightly News theme, are both unnerving and darkly comic, at least to an American viewer of a certain age who immediately recognizes 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-Second World War. However, let us focus on the following convergence: 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 neoliberal 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 treated almost as though it were an alternate reality which has been banished by the undoing of a time paradox, as in a comic book world; from this I will develop the concept of the reboot. The reboot allows the retrospective correction of narrative continuity issues within the world of the comic. 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 the DC and Marvel comic book worlds.5 But Chile on the Road to NAFTA also represents a further instalment in Rosler’s continued work on Chile since the 1970s, including the phototext work of 1977 published as The Restoration of High Culture in Chile, and the 1978 video Domination and the Everyday. However, Rosler, with a few exceptions, rarely revisits previous works6 (although it can be said, as she herself does, that all of her works constitute fragments of but one overarching project: that her oeuvre is her single meta-work, what we can call her project of the critique of everyday life).7 This is crucial to understanding the meta-critique constituted by Rosler’s renewal of the Bringing the War Home series of anti-war photomontages in the 2000s. As with her selection of everyday artefacts instantiating a double take that asks us to enquire why we are prompted to look at this, her renewal spurs us to ask why she has renewed the project of Bringing the War Home. THE WAR BACK HOME In the 1960s and 1970s Rosler produced a series of photomontages she later entitled Bringing the War Home. Originally conceived not as part of her artistic practice but as agitational images for distribution at anti-war demonstrations8 and for reproduction in underground press publications,9 Bringing the War Home only entered the art world in Downloaded by [University of Southampton Highfield] at 10:16 01 August 2013 568 Red Stripe Kitchen, 1967– 1972, photomontage, dimensions variable, from Bringing The War Home: House Beautiful, photo courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes and Nash gallery Downloaded by [University of Southampton Highfield] at 10:16 01 August 2013 569 proto-relational/ participatory art (eg, do we identify this as an artwork, a series, an exhibition, or a project?). See http://www. moma.org/interactives/ exhibitions/2012/ garagesale/about. This is an area Rosler pioneered, specifically with her project If You Lived Here. . . (1987 –1989): ‘a series of events conceived and directed by Martha Rosler over the course of more than two years. . . including planning sessions; a series of three exhibitions; and open public “town meetings.” Rosler called this project “If You Lived Here. . .”, exploring general and specific issues of community and housing, homelessness, and urban planning, in particular, through diverse artists’ projects, public discussions styled as “town meetings” emphasizing participation of the audience, and rigorously compiled research.’ Charles Wright and Gary Garrels, ‘A Note on the Series’, in Brian Wallis, ed, If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism, A Project by Martha Rosler, New Press, New York, 1999, pp 9 –10. Equally, the various installations of the Martha Rosler Library since it began as an e-flux project in New York in 2005 merely exist as various venues on what has become an extended travelling exhibition. Like her many photo-text series, such as In the Place of the Public, commenced in the early 1980s, these are not revivals of past works but protracted series of works spanning decades of production and exhibition, with varying incarnations of display and methods of dissemination. 7. See Benjamin Buchloh, ‘A Conversation with Martha Rosler’, in Catherine de Zegher, ed, Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World, Ikon Gallery, Generali Foundation, and MIT Press, Birmingham, the early 1990s at the time of Desert Storm.10 As the ‘war on terror’ commenced, however, Rosler searched for a means within her work of confronting this resurgent American bellicosity. 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 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.11 In an interview with Alan Gilbert, Rosler further explicated the conditions under which the renewed images were produced. It is critical to quote from this statement at length: 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 antiwar 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. . . 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 signal concerning the war, as opposed to the vagaries of my particular practice through time.12 Rosler was acutely aware that critics would dismiss the work and disregard the point her renewal as meta-commentary made.13 Nonetheless, she jumped in with both feet. A MODEL WAR Rosler’s use of mass-media imagery, particularly the use of fashion models in the new series, has been a focus for some of the dismissals of this work.14 These criticisms include: . . . remarks to the effect that [the models’] appearance [in the photomontages] signals that I think – or that someone. . . might think that I think – that the war was caused by women who shop or by models. These questions hardly merit a response, since if nothing else is clear, it should be obvious that my work is precisely not about the immediately visible, or ostensive, subject. In the case of the montages, of course the ‘subject’ is mass-media imagery, not those who labor in the vineyards of the rag trade or their busy customers.15 Downloaded by [University of Southampton Highfield] at 10:16 01 August 2013 570 Hooded Captives, 2004, photomontage, dimensions variable, from Bringing The War Home: House Beautiful, New Series, photo courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes and Nash gallery 571 Downloaded by [University of Southampton Highfield] at 10:16 01 August 2013 Vienna and Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998, pp 23 –55, especially p 50, p 54. 8. Martha Rosler noted that the audience for these images was ‘counterculture folks, including antiwar protesters, dissidents, feminists, poets, passersby, hippies’ at the demonstrations where she distributed them. Rosler also confirmed that San Diego (where she primarily lived in this period) was not the only locale for the reproduction of her images at that time, but their production for distribution as fliers and posters was handled solely by her. Email conversations between the author and Rosler, 4 –6 January 2011. 9. The third issue of the independent, ‘underground’ San Diegobased feminist publication Goodbye to All That, 13 October 1970, reproduced one of Rosler’s anti-war photomontages – Tron (Amputee) – as a full-page spread on the back cover (p 16) of that issue. Rosler also acknowledged she published them in other independent publications in other cities at the time in emails between the author and Rosler, 4 –6 January 2011. 10. Martha Rosler, ‘Place, Position, Power, Politics’, in Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975 –2001, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004, pp 355 –356. Also see Laura Cottingham, ‘Crossing Borders’, frieze 13, November –December 1993, http://www.frieze. com/issue/article/crossing_ borders/. 11. Martha Rosler, ‘Slide show’ (audio: 2 minutes 46 seconds), New York Times, 5 September 2008, author’s transcription. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2008/09/05/arts/ rosler-audioss/index.html Yet, one could read the use of models as significant if one sees them as models. As a poetic allusion, the foregrounding of the models could be seen in terms of a Baudrillardian reading of the second Gulf War, viewed through the lens of his critique of the first Gulf War, where Jean Baudrillard felt that: ‘The victory of the model is more important than victory on the ground.’16 Of course, Baudrillard was no more talking of fashion models than is Rosler. He was addressing the model of the model American war narrative. Famously, Baudrillard wrote at the time of the (now first) American Gulf War about the role of virtuality in that ‘combat mission’. He cast it as war as spectacle, an arms fair display presenting a model of American military might, a model indebted to Hollywood films of the triumphant US victors of the Second World War. This was a machine to which the Vietnam defeat had not occurred. This was a catwalk war debuting the new line of equipment which would rid the US of, as Bush ‘senior’ dubbed it, the ‘Vietnam syndrome’: . . . they present to themselves and to the entire world the spectacle of their virtual power. They will have allowed the war to endure as long as it takes, not to win but to persuade the whole world of the infallibility of their machine.17 It does not take much imagination to see just this sort of ‘virtual power’ at play in George W Bush’s obscenely premature ejaculation ‘Mission Accomplished!’ in his May 2003 aircraft carrier spectacle. If there is a model to be blamed within these present wars, it is the model of an undefeated and indefatigable American military superpower, eliminating both the record of and lessons learned from the American war in Vietnam. This is the model the Bush administration sent down the catwalk of international relations and which owes its existence to the neo-conservative revisionism I read through the lens of the ‘reboot’. It is to this concept we now turn. DUPLICITY Rosler’s renewed photomontage series is populated with a variety of doubles – Photo Op and Hooded Captives (Bringing The War Home: House Beautiful, New Series, 2004 and 2005) being just two cases in point – and those doubles are significant, underscoring the doubles within American foreign policy and the ideological stories we as Americans tell ourselves and the world about our policies and intentions. For example, in US high school history classes the American wars in Korea and Vietnam are offered as almost conceptually concurrent twins; in both cases, a country riven in two because of a battle against or for Communism, depending which side of the divide you recognize. The TV show M ∗ A ∗ S ∗ H (created by Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, 1972 – 1983) did much to compound this conceptual twinning of these two separate conflicts, divided by more than a decade. Now, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is as though that imagined duo finally is concurrent. Within Bringing the War Home the operative role of the doubles – at each level within the series, both in iconographic terms and in terms of the renewal of the original series itself – is the deployment of Rosler’s 572 12. Alan Gilbert, ‘The Street is a Collage: An Interview with Martha Rosler’, in Rosler, et al, The House, the Street, the Kitchen, Robert Ian MacCandless Carrey and Juan Santana Lario, trans, Diputación de Granada, Centro José Guerrero, Granada, Spain, 2009, p 198 Downloaded by [University of Southampton Highfield] at 10:16 01 August 2013 13. Ibid, p 198, p 200 14. Ibid, p 200 15. Ibid, p 201 16. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’, in Mark Poster, ed, Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings (1988), Polity, Cambridge and Malden, Massachusetts, 2004, p 251 17. Ibid Photo-Op, 2004, photomontage, dimensions variable, from Bringing The War Home: House Beautiful, New Series, photo courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes and Nash gallery meta-commentary on the Bush administration’s uncanny (re)doublings, its reboot of the narrative of Vietnam within the ‘war on terror’. As we shall see, the cipher for this theoretical interpretation lies within Rosler’s 2008 image Invasion. INVASIVE 18. The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and The Matrix Revolutions (2003); all three films were written and directed by Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski. 19. The ‘Matrix’ is the virtual reality system established to pacify the minds of the sleeping bodies of humans kept as batteries for the machines that now rule planet Earth in this postapocalyptic and high-tech dystopian Earth. Before addressing Rosler’s photographic appropriations within Invasion, we must turn to her (popular) cultural appropriations, the allusory conscription within Invasion of The Matrix trilogy.18 In the first of these films, the lesson Morpheus teaches the protagonist Neo is that within the spectacular, unnatural, virtual reality of the Matrix one does not have to obey the laws of nature and physics.19 Any feat may be accomplished as long as one imagines doing it, the virtual body performing accordingly. Danger, however, remains ever-present: if someone believes they have been wounded fatally whilst plugged into the Matrix, their brain will psychosomatize the injuries, inducing actual death. Yet the radical lesson remains that the resistance movement does not have to play by the established rules of engagement, which is, of course, the traditional underpinning of guerrilla warfare. It is not only the resistance movement in a war which can adapt to new realities, however. In the second Matrix film, The Matrix Reloaded (2003), we discover that the nemesis of Neo, Agent Smith, has himself learned from Neo’s example of bending laws to suit one’s own agenda. Agent Smith has co-opted the principle of recoding. Downloaded by [University of Southampton Highfield] at 10:16 01 August 2013 573 Invasion, 2008, photomontage, dimensions variable, photo courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes and Nash gallery 20. The term Web 2.0 designates a more interactive vision for the Internet and World Wide Web, largely reliant on user-supplied content, of which social networking is the most prominent current example. It also can be considered a moniker for the revitalized credibility of the Internet as an area for venture capital investment as web-based businesses and applications once more appeared potentially profitable, following recovery from the bursting of the ‘dot com bubble’ in 2001. The Guardian devoted an entire issue of its Weekend magazine to the subject of Web 2.0 on 4 November 2006, http:// www.guardian.co.uk/ weekend/page/ 0,,1939196,00.html. Also see Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together, Penguin, London, 2009. 21. Although to sate audience expectations, one imagines, they do retain the idea that there is the ‘primary’ Agent Smith, as we see in the fight He is now a rogue Agent – no longer merely a coded representative of the Matrix. He is now a viral entity within the code. And as with viral phenomena, he has learned the art of replication. In the visually impressive fight scene in this second film, Agent Smith (attired in his usual garb of early 1960s black suit, white shirt, and skinny black tie) meets Neo on a simulacrum of an inner city New York playground where he reveals that he is now effectively Agent Smith 2.0.20 He has the ability to convert anyone in the Matrix into a clone of himself. In fact, there cannot be said to be any one Agent Smith any longer;21 he embodies the film’s Baudrillardian ethos of ‘simulation and simulacra’.22 Dozens, eventually hundreds, of Agent Smiths arrive to fight Neo. Neo escapes only by deciding he has the power of rocketing flight, busting out of the ruck of Smiths into the sky and away. The ante is upped even further when in, the third and final film, The Matrix Revolutions (2003), amidst a terrible rainstorm, Neo arrives for the obligatory showdown with Agent Smith, who has now hijacked all the inhabitants of the Matrix. They are all now Agent Smith. Smith asks Neo, ‘Do you like what I’ve done with the place?’ They fight oneon-one as Smith concedes that all the rest of him will sit back and enjoy the spectacle of the bare-knuckled combat. Ultimately, Neo goes into the ‘body’ of Agent Smith and destroys him from the inside out. A MODEL REPLICATION For Invasion, Rosler has appropriated the photographs of Steven Klein for the Dolce & Gabbana Spring 2008 Men’s Collection.23 Klein’s photographs foreground a row of beautifully sleek ‘suited and booted’ men 574 scene in the third film The Matrix Revolutions. Downloaded by [University of Southampton Highfield] at 10:16 01 August 2013 22. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Sheila Faria Glaser, trans, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1994 23. The Steven Klein Dolce & Gabbana images are archived online at http:// www.ohlalaparis.com/ ohlalaparis/2008/01/thedolce-gabba.html marching confidently forward (they are fully frontal in his photo).24 They are captured mid-stride and several are giving the camera – and thus the viewer – icily menacing stares. They look unstoppable in their progress. They are on a slick cobbled street lit at night and to their left is a structure, much like the roof of a covered market perhaps, topped with barbed wire. The other photographs from this Spring 2008 campaign confirm this image of an elite squad. In one of these photos we see the models again at night in the same street, in the same formation, but garbed in shiny combat-gear-inspired menswear, all blacks and steely greys. Yet another photograph from this campaign shows the models by day in the cobbled street, one of them heading away from us on our left, but gazing back over his right shoulder at the camera, his comrades all advancing on us once more. This time they are decked out in desert sand-coloured casual wear. This is an eroticized but nonetheless resolute Special Forces unit in which the Daniel Craig-era 007 reboot would not seem out of place. REBOOT 24. The StillAd website, http:// www.stillad.com/dolcegabbana-man-springsummer-2008-353.htm, lists the models featured as Chad Dunn, Evandro Soldati, Marcus Hedbrand, Michael Camiloto, Noah Mills, Sam Webb, Sean Harju, Tom Warren and Tyson Ballou. My assertion is that this idea of the reboot is vital to a reading of Rosler’s renewal of Bringing the War Home. Originating within the world of information technology (IT) and referring to the process of ‘rebooting a computer’, the term indicates a method of starting a new operating session without performing full shutdown functions on the previous session. The term was adopted by the comic-book world, and then by the film industry, to describe the renewal of a franchise with a fresh start, unbeholden to all the character and plot developments of previous versions of that canon. Batman Begins (directed by Christopher Nolan, 2005) or the twentyfirst-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; it is a fresh incarnation of the story. In terms of commercial film-making, it is a means of refreshing a once-lucrative film franchise with new actors so further instalments can be made, garnering new profits accordingly, as did the 2009 reboot of Star Trek, or the Andrew Garfield Spiderman and the various Superman reboots. It is not merely a re-make, but the chance to reduce or disregard complicated subplots which have accrued over the previous instalments and versions of the comic books or films. The relationship of the rebooted version to previous instantiations 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 revitalization of the core narrative contained in the original cycle of stories, but allowed a new incarnation free of accumulated lore. It is an attempt to ‘get it right this time’. This is the crux of Rosler bringing the war home yet again. It is not she who has chosen a hackneyed re-run of the work of the ‘Vietnam era’ as critic Jerry Saltz accused. What Saltz seemed to disregard, or even not to understand, about the original series is that it was itself not merely a visually catchy but ultimately disposable Pop pastiche on an earlier era 575 Downloaded by [University of Southampton Highfield] at 10:16 01 August 2013 of agit-prop. The original series was also a meta-commentary on ideological representation agitating for a critique of the ideology we internalize 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 terror’. Rosler’s renewed series – and, as stated above, I see Invasion as the cipher which allows for decryption of this series’ core purpose – serves to awaken us to the Vietnam narrative reboot employed by the American executive post-9/11. Invasion pictures for us the unstoppable robotic future nightmare marching out of hell and into the present day. It is in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (directed by James Cameron, 1991) when the second incarnation of the Terminator robot, sent from the future back to early 1990s Los Angeles, reforms from molten mercury and emerges whole from the fire to continue his seemingly implacable pursuit of the heroes. It is Agent Smith reloaded: replicated and replicating again and again, exponentially, aiming to eventually usurp all other life forms. It is the resurgence of that which we thought was laid to rest. REBOOT SYNDROME American New Left activist and politician Tom Hayden certainly thought Vietnam was laid to rest. He believed there was one gain from the atrocious years wasted in that American war: surely it could never happen again. ‘That is perhaps the key legacy of Vietnam: the new and hardwon potential of Americans to think twice before accepting our leaders’ words.’25 Yet the view from here shows just how wrong Hayden was. Critic and creator of the term ‘counterculture’ Theodore Roszak also found the Vietnam reboot hard to believe. He wrote in tones of amazement 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.26 25. Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir, Collier, New York, 1988, p 250 26. Theodore Roszak, World Beware! American Triumphalism in an Age of Terror, Between the Lines, Toronto, 2006, p 34 27. Gilbert, op cit, p 197 Alan Gilbert notes that 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’.27 However, Noam Chomsky, linguist, academic, activist and public intellectual, feared at the time of the American war in Vietnam that such lessons were bound to be unlearned or overlooked or forgotten. In his first political book, published in 1969, Chomsky recognized already that: Whatever happens in Vietnam, there are bound to be significant domestic repercussions. It is axiomatic that no army ever loses a war; its brave soldiers and all-knowing generals are stabbed in the back by treacherous civilians. American withdrawal is likely, then, to bring to the surface the worst features of American culture, and perhaps to lead to a serious internal repression. On the other hand, an American ‘victory’ might well 576 have dangerous consequences both at home and abroad. It might give added prestige to an already far too powerful executive.28 Downloaded by [University of Southampton Highfield] at 10:16 01 August 2013 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, Chomsky in 1975 made an amazingly prescient statement about what it meant (and means), ‘post-Vietnam’, to be ‘still in an empire-building, war-fighting period in world history’ as Rosler has put it.29 In his statement, Chomsky acknowledged that the benefits of empire usually exist for the privileged in the ruling society while the costs are paid by the majority of the public, who: 28. Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (1967), New Press, New York, 2002, p 384 29. Molly Nesbit and Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘Martha Rosler in conversation with Molly Nesbit and Hans Ulrich Obrist’, in Inka Schube, ed, Martha Rosler: Passionate Signals, Hatje Cantz, Hanover, 2005, p 42 30. Noam Chomsky, ‘Chapter 4: The Remaking of History (1975)’, in Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There, Sinclair Browne, London, 1982, p 135 31. Ibid 32. Ibid, pp 152 –153 33. Jonathan Neale, The American War: Vietnam 1960 –1975 (2001), Bookmarks, London, 2005, p 179 34. Author, academic and antiwar activist, Franklin lost his position at Stanford during the Vietnam war for his outspokenness and actions, and was featured at that time, along with his wife Jane Franklin, in Time magazine because the furore was deemed so newsworthy. Also see H Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Massachusetts, 2008. 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.30 Chomsky made it very plain what the stakes were regarding how ‘Vietnam’ would 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.31 Unlike Roszak and Hayden, who believed, erroneously as it turns out, that the battle was won and the war truly over, Chomsky (as Cassandra) appreciated the long-term implications if the American war in Vietnam were chalked up as just a bungle: 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.32 Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush (Bush ‘the elder’) did much to rebuild that faith in the story of American exceptionalism after the hit it took from the American war in Vietnam. After the end of Desert Storm in 1991, ‘Bush announced on American radio that he had finally buried the Vietnam syndrome’.33 Academic and anti-war activist H Bruce Franklin has charted the mutation and rehabilitation of the story of America’s involvement in Vietnam.34 It is important to offer his significant statement at some length: Downloaded by [University of Southampton Highfield] at 10:16 01 August 2013 577 35. H Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Massachusetts, 2000, pp 26 –27. Later, on p 29, Franklin writes: ‘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.’ 36. Susan Sontag, ‘What’s Happening in America’ (1966), in Sontag, Styles of Radical Will, Penguin Modern Classics, New York and London, 2009, p 198 37. Gilbert, op cit, p 201 38. See Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimilies, Zone, New York, 1998, p 65. Also See Alexander Alberro, ‘The Dialectics of Everyday Life: Martha Rosler and the Strategy of the Decoy’, in Catherine de Zegher, ed, Martha Rosler: Positions in the Lifeworld, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998, pp 72 –112, p 76, footnote 9, where Alberro cites the importance of Dostoevsky for Rosler. Also see Stephen Wright, ‘Deinstrumentalizing Knowledge’, op cit, p 15, in which Rosler discusses her interest in Doppelgängers. 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. The grotesque title of one widely adopted history textbook reveals far more than intended: Vietnam: An American Ordeal. 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!’35 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 try to do it.’36 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 is to recognize the folly of this reboot and to understand that no amount of tinkering can change the ultimate wrong of replicating the Vietnam narrative. Within Rosler’s image of Invasion, the issue of replication is reinforced not just through reference to The Matrix trilogy, but also through its obvious use of duplication. Rosler includes multiple copies of the Dolce & Gabbana models in Invasion, the fact of replication on show in the work itself. This photomontage was made using Photoshop, enabling Rosler to replicate these Agent Smith clones.37 Not only is the resultant image reminiscent of the final instalment of The Matrix trilogy, when Agent Smith has infected all the inhabitants of the Matrix: they are all now Smiths. Invasion also emphasizes the temporal replication (ie the reboot of the Vietnam narrative, sans defeat) at work in the ‘war on terror’ by underscoring the Mad Men (created by Matthew Weiner, 2007 to present) retro quality of these clones’ sartorial outfitting; they look like something marching forth from Dr Strangelove (directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1964). Furthermore, this image of fearsome replicants recalls the exponential extension of the double, as imagined by Fyodor Dostoyevsky for his character Golyadkin in his 1866 reworking of The Double: Dreams Golyadkin. . . ‘with every thud of his foot against the granite of the pavement there would spring up, out of the ground, an exact likeness of the repulsive Mr. Golyadkin with his corruptness of heart. And all of these exact likenesses, immediately upon making their appearances, began running one after the other and stretched out in a long chain like a string of geese, waddling after Mr. Golyadkin Senior, so that there was nowhere to escape to from these exact likenesses.’38 In Invasion, Rosler presents this sense of the dread of the uncanny terror ineffably marching onwards, our own self, made multiple and wickedly animated beyond our control. The notion of the evil twin, bearing our likeness as it commits unthinkable acts. The ‘war on terror’ as Vietnam Downloaded by [University of Southampton Highfield] at 10:16 01 August 2013 578 39. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Peggy Kamuf, trans, Routledge, New York and London, 1994. reboot is a case of a terrible figure from the past escaping the confines of history to insinuate itself in what should be a wholly alien present day. The anachronistic figure which has escaped and knowingly haunts our present is the ghost of the American war in Vietnam, refigured. For the reboot does not always magic the system back to full working order, it does not account for the ‘ghost in the machine’. But what Rosler’s hauntological reboot allows us is a chance to look at the war over there,39 committed in our name, continuing in various ways in both Iraq and Afghanistan to this very day, and to recognize within it our own features made horribly double and doubly horrible. Rosler’s photomontages prompt us to look at ourselves more closely and ask us to recognize the absurd divisions we erect between here and there, us and them; divisions we internalize such that we exculpate ourselves from our own wars. These works exhort us to face the reality that our policies give with the left hand and take away with the right, or as the band Low sing in their 2007 anti-war song ‘Breaker’: ‘It’s just a shame/My hand just kills and kills/There’s gotta be an end to that.’ Indeed, there must be an end to that.