Caren Kaplan: "Bringing the War Home"
b'At the close of the First Gulf War, feminist architectural historian Beatriz Colomina wrote that \\u201cwar today speaks about the difficulty of establishing the limits of domestic space.\\u201d That conflict of 1990-91 is most often cited as the first to pull the waging of war fully into the digital age and therefore into a blurring of boundaries of all kinds. Yet, most modern wars have introduced technological innovations that transform social relations and modes of communication and representation. In this paper Caren Kaplan focuses on a period that includes the Vietnam War (1955-1975) and extends into the \\u201cWar on Terror\\u201d through a consideration of Martha Rosler\\u2019s photo collage series \\u201cHouse Beautiful: Bringing the War Home\\u201d (1967-2004). The technique of collage reinforces the artist\\u2019s emphatic effort to bring together seemingly incommensurable elements\\u2014images of exquisite domestic interiors, glamorous consumer commodities, and landscapes and bodies damaged by warfare. Literally bringing wars waged by the United States throughout this long dur\\xe9e into the hyper commodified environment of fashion layouts and magazine advertisement, Rosler demonstrates the impossibility of limiting domestic space, an impossibility that challenges representation across genres and practices\\u2014televisual, photographic, cinematic, social media, analogue, digital, etc. Such disturbances of \\u201chere\\u201d and \\u201cthere,\\u201d \\u201cnow\\u201d and \\u201cthen,\\u201d resonate as powerful \\u201caftermaths\\u201d of wars visible and invisible, always already underway.\\n\\nCaren Kaplan is Professor of American Studies at the UC Davis. Her research draws on cultural geography, landscape art, and military history to explore the ways in which undeclared as well as declared wars produce representational practices of atmospheric politics. Recent publications include\\xa0Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above\\xa0(Duke 2018) and\\xa0Life in the Age of Drone Warfare\\xa0(Duke 2017).'