Vivienne Le

2018. vintage television, smart TV, steel rods, curtains, printed fabric, found audio recording, archived documentary footage. Dimensions variable.

Their war / Our war creates a tension found between the conflicting histories of the Vietnam War, or the American War as commonly perceived in Vietnam. It investigates power dynamics and ownership as they relate to collective memory and history within domestic objects such as the television. The war witnessed the medium enter massive popularity and common ownership, and is also known as the first “Television War” and “Living Room War.” The conceptual vision had its origins in the collages of an artist during this period, Martha Rossler and her piece, Cleaning the Drapes from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967-72). Juxtaposing images of war-torn Vietnamese with affluent homes depicted in the glossy magazine House Beautiful, Rossler explored how the media shaped American’s worldview and collective experience of a lost war, a dark chapter in American history.

Furthering Rossler’s negotiation of memory and media, the piece is in conversation with Cleaning the Drapes yet speaks of a dearth in American media of Vietnam ever since the war. Effectively, the United States has put the idea of post-war development of Vietnam on “static,” by lack of public news coverage. This myopic worldview is ironically compounded by an archive of artefacts owned by the U.S. of a war that American memory refuses to claim responsibility for and insists on forgetting. The found interview recording used speaks to this endeavor to forget as President John F Kennedy says, “It’s their war, they’re the ones who have to win it or lose it… the people of Vietnam.” Le invites viewers to claim agency on history by sliding the curtains of opposing histories, one of Vietnam in stasis and the other of a multi-faceted country in the process of recovering from foreign militarization, yet vibrant and thriving all the same.