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Long before the advent of ‘fake news’, Martha Rosler was teaching us how to think critically about documentary imagery and reporting Irrespective, the artist’s first survey show in 18 years, opens with the towering, floor-to-ceiling photomontage Cargo Cult (1966–72): an image of dock workers unloading stacks of shipping boxes, doctored so that each container is covered with a photograph of a generically beautiful white women applying makeup The work presents Western beauty standards as a traded material, and a load women are expected to carry It also highlights the modus operandi of Rosler’s practice, treating media as material: an approach as relevant today as it ever was   Irrespective contains work from across Rosler’s five-decade career, including the now-famous photomontage series, House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967–72), in which images of domestic interiors from glossy magazines are spliced together with brutal photographs of the Vietnam War Originally, Rosler handed out photocopies of the collages at anti-war protests First Lady (Pat Nixon) appropriates a photograph of the First Lady standing in the White House taken for the popular lifestyle magazine, House Beautiful She smiles serenely at the camera, wearing a yellow dress and jacket that match the colour of the walls Rosler has replaced a painting in a gilded frame, hung above the fireplace, with a photograph of a woman’s disfigured body In another work from the series, Cleaning the Drapes, a thin, smartly dressed woman photographed for an advertisement demonstrates the ease of use of a vacuum cleaner She pulls open a curtain as she cleans to reveal soldiers in trenches Due to technological advancements in photography, the Vietnam War was the first to have images from the front-lines circulating in real time, entering American homes on television screens, as well as in newspapers and magazines Rosler’s collages are a reminder of how desensitised Western audiences have become to pictures of violence Today our screens, billboards and news publications are littered with violent imagery, and it’s hard to imagine how shocking the introduction of Vietnam War visuals were to the register of everyday life   Rosler revisited House Beautiful following the US invasion