Transforming the Vietnam War: Artists’ reuse of published images and the destabilization of interpretation (1960-1972)
| dc.audience | Audience::Audience::Art Libraries Section | |
| dc.audience | Audience::Audience::Social Science Libraries Section | |
| dc.conference.sessionType | Art Libraries with Social Science Libraries | |
| dc.conference.venue | Centennial Hall | |
| dc.contributor.author | Lucker, Amy E. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-09-24T08:48:03Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-09-24T08:48:03Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2017 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This paper is excerpted from the Introduction chapter of the author’s doctoral dissertation currently in process. The dissertation examines artworks produced by a trio of visual artists in the period roughly from the early 1960’s through the mid 1970’s who chose to draw on images created by photojournalists and television reporters chronicling the American Vietnam War. By appropriating mainstream images and changing only the context in which they appeared, these artists were making statements that likely would have been clear to anyone who encountered the works, and would have raised questions, at the very least, about what the editors who originally published these images meant to communicate about the Vietnam War. | en |
| dc.identifier.citation | This paper is an extract of the introduction chapter of my dissertation, currently in process. That is, The Second Indochina War, 1955-1975, hereafter referred to simply as ‘The Vietnam War’. Others using repurposed images during and from the Vietnam War include On Kawara, Judith Bernstein, Carolee Schneeman, and James Rosenquist. That is, the history of works of photo collage by artists such as Hannah Höch or John Heartfield, amply demonstrates a politically charged interpretation, and one that fully explicates the source materials. Heartfield, in particular, is often brought up to Martha Rosler by interlocutors who assume that she was familiar with his work when doing her own. Art historians generally consider Heartfield primarily as a political artist; Mia Fineman’s description is a good example; “Heartfield was not a photographer himself, but he spent his career using photography to create politically motivated art …” Maud Lavin et al., eds., Montage and Modern Life, 1919-1942 (Cambridge, Mass. : Boston: MIT Press ; Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992). Ibid., 8. Mia Fineman, Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New York : New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art ; Distributed by Yale University Press, 2012), 104–5. Lavin et al., Montage and Modern Life, 1919-1942, 11. Penny Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks the Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2013), for example. For example: Lucy R. Lippard, A Different War: Vietnam in Art (Bellingham, Wash. : Seattle: Whatcom Museum of History and Art ; Real Comet Press, 1990); Peter Howard Selz, Art of Engagement : Visual Politics in California and beyond (Berkeley, Calif; London: University of California Press, 2006); Catherine Zegher and Drawing Center, Persistent Vestiges: Drawing from the American-Vietnam War (New York: Drawing Center, 2005); Francis Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester ; New York : New York, NY: Manchester University Press ; Distributed exclusively in the USA by St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Matthew Israel, Kill for Peace : American Artists against the Vietnam War, First edition. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013); David McCarthy, American Artists against War, 1935-2010 (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2015). Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent (Upper Saddle River, N.J.; Prentice Hall ;, 1996), 179. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 151. Harold Rosenberg, “Art of Bad Conscience,” The New Yorker XLIII, no. 43 (December 16, 1967): 138. H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, Culture, Politics, and the Cold War (Amherst, Mass: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000); Daniel C. Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Susan L. (Susan Lisa) Carruthers, The Media at War (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). These are just a few of the works to deal with the myth of how the media affected the outcome of the Vietnam War. James Estrin, “Stanley Greene, Whose Camera Captured War’s Brutality, Dies at 68,” The New York Times, May 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/business/media/stanley-greene-dead-war-photographer.html. See note 8, above. Israel, Kill for Peace, 132. Ibid., 133. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 20. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 177. Israel, Kill for Peace, 82. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago, Ill.: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2011), 173. | |
| dc.identifier.relatedurl | http://2017.ifla.org/ | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://repository.ifla.org/handle/20.500.14598/5993 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.rights | Attribution 4.0 International | |
| dc.rights.accessRights | open access | |
| dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | |
| dc.subject.keyword | American Vietnam War | |
| dc.subject.keyword | Rosler | |
| dc.subject.keyword | Martha | |
| dc.subject.keyword | Kienholz | |
| dc.subject.keyword | Edward | |
| dc.subject.keyword | Heinecken | |
| dc.subject.keyword | Robert | |
| dc.title | Transforming the Vietnam War: Artists’ reuse of published images and the destabilization of interpretation (1960-1972) | en |
| dc.type | Article | |
| ifla.Unit | Section:Art Libraries Section | |
| ifla.Unit | Section::Social Science Libraries Section | |
| ifla.oPubId | https://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/1676/ |
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