INTRODUCTION
1. See, for example, The 2004 Memorials of War at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
2. See Lucy Lippard, A Different War: Vietnam in Art. Ed. Independent Curators Incorporated and Whatcom Museum of History and Art (Bellingham, WA: Whatcom Museum of Art, 1990); Maurice Berger, Representing Vietnam: The Antiwar Movement in America, 1965–1973 (New York: Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, Hunter College, 1988); and Francis Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). After I began my research, Julia Quinn Bryan-Wilson’s “Art/Work: Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Artistic Labor in the Vietnam War Era, 1965–1975” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2004) was published as Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Bryan-Wilson’s study, which concentrated on the political engagement of some Art Workers’ Coalition participants, has been a significant contribution to the field of Vietnam-era production. I should also mention here another point of departure, Beth Ann Handler’s “The Art of Activism: Artists and Writers Protest, the Art Workers’ Coalition, and the New York Art Strike Protest the Vietnam War” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2001), 86.
3. See David McCarthy, “Fantasy and Force: A Brief Consideration of Artists and War in the American Century,” Art Journal, vol. 62, no. 4 (2003), 100.
4. For more on the RAND Corporation, see Alex Abella, Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
5. Lucy Lippard, “Dreams, Demands, and Desires: The Black, Antiwar, and Women’s Movements,” in Tradition and Conflict: Images of a Turbulent Decade, 1963–1973. Ed. Mary Schmidt Campbell and Studio Museum in Harlem (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1985), 77. See also Handler, “Art of Activism,” 86.
6. One could clarify this statement by saying that it was the most important piece of literature with the exception of the Pentagon Papers (which I will discuss subsequently), a massive history of the war in which the war’s architects revealed the faulty assumptions on which their strategies were based.
7. Please note that I specifically do not refer to actions undertaken by the Art Workers’ Coalition as a whole anywhere in this text, but instead speak of them as being undertaken by participants of AWC or certain factions of AWC. This is because AWC was never a unified group. As I explain later on, it was deliberately kept loosely organized: their were no actual “members” of AWC, there was no such thing as a unified body of AWC; instead, there were endless factions, and certain AWC committees could do basically whatever they wanted without approval from anyone else. For more on this topic and the AWC, see Lucy Lippard, “The Art Workers’ Coalition: Not a History,” in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York: Dutton, 1984), 10–19, originally published in Studio International, November 1970. This perspective was also gained from Lippard’s notes on the manuscript.
CHAPTER ONE
1. The only break in French rule occurred during World War II when Japan occupied the country.
2. This was an unusual move for the United States, which historically had not involved itself in colonial wars. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had especially been against them, yet his death paved the way for an alternative approach to U.S. policy.
3. “President Harry S. Truman’s Address Before a Joint Session of Congress, March 12, 1947,” The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/trudoc.asp.
4. See Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin, 1984), 184.
5. See David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Ballantine, 1993), 338. Though the United States never gave anything more than financial support to the French, the offer of more seemed to be on the table for the duration of the war. Frances Fitzgerald comments, “It was not until June 15, 1954, that Secretary of State Dulles told the French definitively that the United States would not commit its own troops and planes to the Indochina war.” See Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002), 76.
6. After the Vietnam War, the war became known as the First Indochina War. See Karnow, Vietnam, 185.
7. The major accounts of Dienbienphu are Bernard B. Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1967); and Jules Roy’s The Battle of Dienbienphu (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). Michael Herr, the author of Dispatches (New York: Vintage, 1977), which would become one of the most significant memoirs on Vietnam, commented that during the siege at Khe Sanh, these two books kept appearing among members of the press, since Khe Sanh was feared to be a repeat of Dienbienphu.
8. The DMZ specifically extended about a mile on either side of the Ben Hai River and ran west to east from the Laotian border to the South China Sea.
9. Specifically, from the date of the Accords, all armed forces and civilians were given three hundred days to retreat.
10. Karnow, Vietnam, 230.
11. Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, 76.
12. Diem had deposed Bao Dai, former emperor of Annam under French rule and then chief executive of the French-controlled State of Vietnam from 1949 until 1955. Ignoring the Geneva-proposed countrywide elections, he proclaimed himself head of state. Fitzgerald comments that “Diem’s efforts to destroy the sects cost the American government some $12 million in bribes—or subsidies” (ibid., 79). She also explains that by 1956, the United States was paying the South Vietnamese regime an average of $270 million a year—more aid per capita than it spent on any other country in the world except for Laos and Korea (ibid., 85). See also Karnow, Vietnam, 246.
13. This brief explanation is not meant to deny the fact that the character of the NLF and its relationship to the communists in Hanoi has caused considerable debate among scholars, antiwar activists, and policy makers. From the inception of the NLF, government officials in Washington asserted that Hanoi directed NLF attacks against the Saigon regime. The NLF, on the other hand, argued that it was independent of the communists in Hanoi and was composed mostly of noncommunists.
14. This figure of nine thousand is specific to 1962.
15. Karnow, Vietnam, 272.
16. Ibid., 273.
17. Ibid., 281.
18. Halberstam, Best and the Brightest, 250.
19. Karnow, Vietnam, 301.
20. Ibid., 302.
21. Ibid., 294.
22. Halberstam, Best and the Brightest, 351.
23. In the words of Frances Fitzgerald, this sequence of events made “Saigon politics [take] on the pace and style of a Marx Brothers movie.” Fire in the Lake, 257.
24. See ibid., 246; and Karnow, Vietnam, 350.
25. Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, 257
26. Karnow, Vietnam, 341.
27. Ibid., 379.
28. In mentioning espionage, I refer to covert activities that had begun in January under the code name 34A. See Halberstam, Best and the Brightest, 408. Robert McNamara and Vo Nguyen Giap, the brilliant leader of the Government of the Republic of Vietnam, recently concluded that the second attacks never happened. See Karnow,Vietnam, 152, 377, 389; and Halberstam, Best and the Brightest, 411.
29. The two dissenting votes were those of Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening.
30. Though in the meantime, as Karnow explains, American aircraft flew sixty-four sorties against four North Vietnamese patrol boat bases and a major oil storage depot, “severely” hitting all the targets. See Karnow, Vietnam, 393.
31. Pollster Lou Harris commented at the time that before the events at Tonkin and the resulting resolution, 58 percent of Americans approved of Johnson’s conduct in Vietnam, but afterward 72 percent of the country approved of his reprisals. See Halberstam, Best and the Brightest, 423.
32. See Johnson’s address to the American Bar Association, August 12, 1964, available online at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=26434&st=&st1=#axzz1z%20i0blljy.
33. See Halberstam, Best and the Brightest, 160–161. Notably, such faith had blinded these men to subsequent reports that airpower had not worked in certain instances during World War II, and allegations that it had actually intensified German resolve.
34. Karnow, Vietnam, 421.
35. Ibid., 426.
36. Ibid., 468.
37. Halberstam, Best and the Brightest, 512.
38. Ibid., 538.
39. This disclosure came months after the State Department had decided this would be its course of action. See Karnow, Vietnam, 433.
40. For further draft statistics, see David Card and Thomas Lemieux, “Going to College to Avoid the Draft: The Unintended Legacy of the Vietnam War,” paper presented at the meeting of the American Economics Association, January 2001. Draft calls reached a high of forty-two thousand a month during the spring of 1968. In November 1969 a draft lottery was installed, dropping draft calls to nineteen thousand a month. By August 1971 the rate of induction was two thousand a month; by 1972 it was forty-one hundred a month; in February 1973 the draft was suspended.
41. Malcolm Brown, The New Face of War (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965); David Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965).
42. The designation of the “living room war” has stuck to this day. Omitted from our historical understanding of this term is the fact that Arlen’s writings on the war and television critiqued the American media’s ability to transmit the realities of the war via television. For instance, though Arlen believed that the footage of the war was “extraordinarily good” (as was the lightning speed by which it traveled back to the United States), because of the press’s disinclination to investigate all parts of the “Vietnam picture” and the necessity that news be restrictively determined by visual criteria, coverage often added up to a series of isolated details and an excessively simple view of what was, at best, a “mighty unsimple situation.” Further complicating matters, according to Arlen, was “the physical size of a television screen, which, for all the industry’s advances, still transmitted one picture of men three inches tall shooting at other men three inches tall, which was then trivialized, or at least tamed by, the enveloping cozy alarums of the household.” In this vein, Frances Fitzgerald has noted that technology and communications made the war absurd for both sides. She explained, “To one people the war would appear each day, compressed between advertisements and confined to a small space in the living room; the explosion of bombs and the cries of the wounded would become the background accompaniment to dinner. For the other people the war would come one day out of the clear blue sky. In a few minutes it would be over: the bombs, released by an invisible pilot with incomprehensible intentions, would leave only the debris and the dead behind.” See Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, 5. See also Liz McQuiston, Graphic Agitation (London: Phaidon, 1995), 42; and Michael J. Arlen, Living-Room War (New York: Penguin, 1982).
43. See George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 142.
44. When SDS first made the call for the march in December 1964, they expected only a few thousand people to attend.
45. In the weeks following the Ann Arbor event, the form was imitated at Columbia University, Case Western Reserve University, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Buffalo. And in May a national teach-in was held, which included members of Congress as well as State Department officials.
46. For more on the University of Michigan teach-in, see Matthew Newman, “U-M Faculty’s Historic Teach-In of 30 Years Ago ‘a Vital Service to Their Country,’” Michigan Today, October 1995, http://www.ns.umich.edu/MT/95/Oct95/mt11o95.html.
47. Those who objected to the draft’s greater socioeconomic inequities also protested. Later the draft came under further condemnation when it was found out (via the publication by New Left Notes of a Selective Service document in January 1967) to be a secret means by which the government was controlling what young men did with their lives professionally, through its process of “channeling.” Channeling was a strategy of offering draft deferments to those occupations the government deemed in the national interest (teaching, engineering, etc.) and, by contrast, not offering them to professions it deemed inessential (musicians, artists, etc.). As a result, without directly ordering young men into certain professions, the government used the draft to ensure that these professions would be filled by granting deferments to students enrolled in disciplines that would lead to them. For more on this issue, see Michael S. Foley, Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 61.
48. Notably, Peter Saul and Leon Golub, artists who were significant in antiwar protest and who will be discussed subsequently, specifically cited Ramparts and I.F. Stone’s Weekly as sources of information about the war. See David McCarthy, “Dirty Freaks and High School Punks: Peter Saul’s Critique of the Vietnam War,” American Art, vol. 23 (Spring 2009), 78–103. David Schalk, a historian of intellectual political engagement in France and Vietnam during the Algerian and Vietnam Wars, has explained that the importance of the New York Review of Books was due to its ideological underpinnings, intended audience, the niche in the intellectual field the periodical was designed to fill, its aesthetic concerns, its editorial policy regarding biweekly coverage of general news, and, finally, the space it provided for such articles. See War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 130. Because of its centrality, during the war members of the mainstream or conservative press regularly maligned the NYRB, as did high-ranking members of the U.S. government.
49. See Lippard, “Dreams, Demands, and Desires,” 75. As well, see Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963–1975 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), 41; H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 56; Bradford Martin, The Theatre Is in the Street: Politics and Performance in Sixties America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2002), 134; and David R. Colburn and George E. Pozzetta, “Race, Ethnicity, and the Evolution of Political Legitimacy,” in The Sixties: From Memory to History. Ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 121.
50. Zinn quoted in Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? 24
51. Quoted in James E. Westheider, The African American Experience in Vietnam: Brothers in Arms (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 24.
52. See Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, 59.
53. The photographs were taken by William F. Pepper, a political scientist and human rights activist, to accompany his article “The Children of Vietnam,” Ramparts, vol. 5 (January 1967), 44–68. See also Peter Richardson’s A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of “Ramparts” Magazine Changed America (New York: New Press, 2009). Specifically, King saw them on January 14, 1967, while waiting in an airport. See David Maranis, They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 72.
54. Maranis, They Marched into Sunlight, 72.
55. It is important to recognize that King’s speech had major critics within the upper echelon of the African American population, among them Jackie Robinson and Roy Wilkins. Such individuals believed that while the war was obviously worth protesting—since, among other reasons, it was more harmful to blacks than whites and it drained money from poverty programs—taking a stand against it, as King was doing, was too big a risk, as there was the possibility it would alienate the support and respect the civil rights movement had worked so hard to gain over the years.
CHAPTER TWO
1. These advertisements were reminiscent of a 1962 advertisement the group had placed to advocate for nuclear disarmament, which stated, “We artists of the United States are divided in many ways, artistically and ideologically, but we are as one in our concern for Humanity.” See Lippard, “Dreams, Demands, and Desires,” 77. This is not to say that this early engagement was substantial at all compared to AWP’s subsequent engagement with the Vietnam War.
2. AWP noted, however, that the list could have been even bigger. At the end of the ad the group explained, “Many other signatures were received too late to be included.”
3. The prime movers behind the statements were Denise Levertov and Mitchell Goodman (both of whom had links to The Nation). See Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 21.
4. As Therese Schwartz explained, “The artists’ action, in its substance and method, was indistinguishable from theirs [the ads of other professional groups].” See “The Politicization of the Avant-Garde: Part I,” Art in America, vol. 59, no. 6 (1971), 98.
5. The Algerian War began in 1954, when an Algerian guerrilla force, the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale, FLN), started a campaign in Algeria against France, which had occupied the country since 1830, and appealed to the UN for sovereignty. The central fighting of the war took place in Algiers during the “Battle of Algiers,” between 1956 and 1957. It was the intensity of this urban fighting—which began with brutal attacks by the FLN and ended with the brutal suppression of the FLN (by more than five hundred thousand French troops)—that eventually led the French government to concede the right of the Algerians to rule themselves in 1959. Three years later, Algerians were officially given their independence. This eventual independence came, however, after more violence in Algiers, but also in France, where French groups opposed to Algerian independence staged terrorist attacks. The principal group undertaking these actions was the Organisation de l’Armée Secrete, which was implicated in more than six hundred bombings in 1961.
6. It should be noted also that May Stevens and Rudolf Baranik lived in France, yet during an earlier period, between 1948 and 1951.
7. Intellectuals linked the two conflicts early on. One of the first to do so was D. A. N. Jones, in his article “The Monstrous Thing,” which was published in the New York Review of Books on December 17, 1964. For a discussion of further similarities between the two conflicts and the intellectual reaction to them, see Schalk, War and the Ivory Tower; as well as Sandy Vogelgesang, The Long Dark Night of the Soul: The American Intellectual Left and the Vietnam War (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
8. Irving Petlin, personal interview, April 2, 2009. See also Handler, “Art of Activism,” 78.
9. See Jeffrey Kastner, Mark di Suvero, Irving Petlin, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, “Peace Tower: Irving Petlin, Mark di Suvero, and Rirkrit Tiravanija Revisit The Artists’ Tower of Protest, 1966,” Artforum, vol. 44, no. 7 (2006), 252–257.
10. Petlin quoted in Gerald Marzorati, A Painter of Darkness: Leon Golub and His Times (New York: Penguin, 1992), 225.
11. Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 23. For more on the issue of American intervention in the Dominican Republic, see Abraham F. Lowenthal, The Dominican Intervention (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
12. Petlin quoted in Marzorati, Painter of Darkness, 230–231.
13. The ad may have been purposefully timed to appear as it did, between the two AWP ads. Notably, at the bottom of the second ad run by AWP, it explains that APC offered its “West Coast” endorsement for the ad. The text read, “The Artists’ Protest Committee of Los Angeles, representing two hundred working artists, expresses its full support for the above statement.”
14. See “White Out Blacked Out: Protest by Art Community Gets Silent Treatment,” Los Angeles Free Press, May 21, 1965, 1–2.
15. Ibid. In subsequent scholarship the one exception is Francis Frascina’s Art, Politics, and Dissent.
16. Marzorati, Painter of Darkness, 230.
17. Ibid.
18. See Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 35. RAND labeled the effects of such strategies “megadeath” or “overkill.”
19. “Artists Protest at Rand Corp.,” Los Angeles Free Press, June 25, 1965, 1.
20. Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 37. See also Marzorati, Painter of Darkness, 232.
21. According to Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 54n99, these were Bernard Brodie, Social Science Department, history and strategy; Edward C. De Land, Computer Sciences Department, mathematical models of blood chemistry; Alton Frye, Social Science Department, politics of space; Brownlee Haydon, assistant to the president, Communications Department; Amron Katz, Electronics Department, physicist, reconnaissance specialist; Kolkowicz, Social Science Department, specialist in Soviet politics; Leon Lipson, Social Science Department (consultant), professor of law, Yale University; Guy Pauker, Social Science Department, specialist in Southeast Asia; and Robert Wolfson, Logistics Department, economist.
22. Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 40. He bases this information on interviews with Petlin and Golub as well as their comments included in Albert Mall, “Artist Versus RAND Debate Not a Fruitful Exchange,” Los Angeles Free Press, August 13, 1965.
23. Marzorati, Painter of Darkness, 232–233.
24. Lippard quoted in Martin, Theatre Is in the Street, 128.
25. Lippard, “Dreams, Demands, and Desires,” 77; Handler, “Art of Activism,” 86.
26. Martin, Theatre Is in the Street, 128.
27. Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? 44.
28. “Nation: Festival of the Arts,” Time, June 25, 1965.
29. Dwight MacDonald, “A Day at the White House,” New York Review of Books, July 15, 1965, 10; Richard Shepherd, “Robert Lowell Rebuffs Johnson as Protest over Foreign Policy,” New York Times, June 3, 1965, 1–2. In the same article, Shepherd quotes Lewis Mumford’s May 19, 1965, statement denouncing the U.S. political and military policy in Vietnam as a “moral outrage” and “abject failure.” (Mumford at the time was president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.)
CHAPTER THREE
1. Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, 304
2. Shelters for the people were located underground and from above appeared to be manholes in streets. In the country, extensive networks of tunnels ran from villages to fields, to enable the cultivation of food to continue even during attacks.
3. Karnow, Vietnam, 474.
4. Bombing halts, which occurred several times over the course of the war, the first on May 13, 1965, were a complicated issue for both sides. The United States feared that if it did stop bombing, the communists would use the time to build their forces up in the interval, while the communists believed that, like the French, the United States would do the same or engage in other means of aggression. See ibid., 437.
5. Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? 76.
6. See Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” which was first published in 1960 as a pamphlet by the Voice of America. It then appeared in Arts Yearbook, vol. 4 (1961); with slight revisions in Art and Literature, vol. 4 (1965); and then in The New Art: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1966).
7. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Battcock, New Art, 203.
8. See Irving Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era (Boulder, CO: Westview/Icon Editions, 1996), 293.
9. Clement Greenberg, “Interview Conducted by Lily Leino (United States Information Service, April 1969),” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4. Ed. John O’Brien (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 311–312. Because of the source, however, one wonders if Greenberg might have spoken differently to another (non-government-affiliated) interviewer.
10. Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era, 293.
11. One cannot discount Greenberg’s critical appeal during the 1950s and 1960s. Before Greenberg lay what Barbara Rose described as a criticism of jargon or what Rosalind Krauss saw as vagueness and unverifiable opinion championing abstract expressionism. This could be seen in the writings of “everyone,” Krauss has explained, though she specifically cites the work of Sidney Janis, Thomas Hess, Harold Rosenberg, and Dore Ashton. Apart from this kind of thinking, there were few aesthetic “positions” in the art world, other than that of John Cage and Susan Sontag, whose “Against Interpretation” is essentially a restatement of Cage’s position. See Amy Newman, Challenging Art: “Artforum,” 1962–1974 (New York: SoHo Press, 2003), 167. Newman’s book also features comments by Rose discussing Greenberg as a kind of paternal authority who offered writing grounded by philosophy and aesthetics, in concrete terms, with claims you could check out (59).
12. Ibid., 216.
13. See Michael Fried, “Manet’s Sources: Aspects of His Art, 1859–1865,” Artforum, vol. 7 (March 1969), 28–82.
14. Considered one of the most shocking rejections of Greenbergian formalism was Barbara Rose’s series of articles “The Problems of Criticism: The Politics of Art,” which ran in Artforum from February 1968 through May 1969.
15. See Michael J. Lewis, “Art, Politics, and Clement Greenberg,” Commentary, June 1998.
16. For the first discussions of minimalism’s denial of content, see Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” Art in America, vol. 53 (October/November 1965), 57–69; or Lucy Lippard, “The Third Stream: Painted Structures and Structured Paintings,” Art Voices (New York), vol. 4, no. 4 (1965), 44–49. Also see, for example, the comments of Hilton Kramer in Newman, Challenging Art, 299; or Irving Sandler, American Art of the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 267. Importantly, the canonization of “minimalism,” and particularly its conceived homogeneity, has been progressively reversed by recent scholarship, such as James Meyer’s Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Meyer has called minimalism “a field of difference” (8) in this way. See also Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 1998), 15.
17. Sandler, American Art of the 1960s, 61.
18. See Carl Andre, “Preface to Stripe Painting,” in Sixteen Americans. Ed. Dorothy Miller (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 76.
19. See Bruce Glaser and Lucy Lippard, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” Art News, September 1966, 58–59.
20. See Robert Hughes, “The Rise of Andy Warhol,” New York Review of Books, February 18, 1982, 7.
21. See Alex Potts, “‘in . . . cool white’ and ‘infected with a blank magic,’” in Dan Flavin: New Light. Ed. Jeffrey Weiss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 19.
22. In the late fall of 1965, army units were beginning to suffer heavy casualties due to ambushes, such as at Ia Drang Valley, where one unit lost 151 men. See ibid.
23. See Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 80. As she explains, the fact that the manufacturer of Andre’s works, Dow, was hidden under his pieces allowed him to avoid the criticism Flavin endured (discussed later in this chapter). She also suggests that Andre’s high status in AWC also enabled him to be insulated from criticism (74).
24. See Handler, “Art of Activism,” 152; and Carl Andre, “Carl Andre Interviewed by Achille Bonito Oliva,” Domus, vol. 10, no. 515 (1972), 51.
25. David Raskin, “Specific Opposition: Judd’s Art and Politics,” Art History, vol. 24, no. 5 (2001), 683.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 688.
28. Ibid., 683.
29. Tischler quoted in ibid., 694, 702.
30. Ibid., 697
31. Of the thirty-two quotations, twelve appeared, in part or in full, in issues of Public Life. See ibid., 692.
32. See Leon Golub, “Letter,” Artforum, vol. 7, no. 7 (1969), 4.
33. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 77.
34. This came up as a result of the Spaces exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which ran from December 30, 1969, to March 1, 1970.
35. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 77.
36. See, for example, Joan Seeman-Robinson’s proposal for “They Ruled the Night,” in the Irving Sandler files at the Getty Research Institute. According to Seeman-Robinson, Marden “recollected that he commenced his mid-60s gray paintings as the war began.” He explained about them, “It was as if your country was making death . . . I wanted the viewer to come away from my paintings feeling twisted” (11).
37. Judith L. Dunham, “Wally Hedrick Vietnam Series,” Artweek, June 28, 1975.
38. Saul’s work, which will be discussed subsequently, was seen as an “errant breed” and a progenitor of pop, and Rosler’s works could be easily compared with early pop collages by Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi.
39. As Michael Lobel has recently commented, “The sense of F-111 as a Vietnam painting is part and parcel of latter-day critical accounts of the work.” See James Rosenquist: Pop Art, Politics, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 144. The combination of a young blonde girl in the pilot’s seat and presentation of American consumer products has also been read as criticism of the collusion between American society and the American war machine.
40. Previously the painting had only been shown in 1965 at the Castelli Gallery and briefly at the Jewish Museum the following summer. Between 1965 and 1968, the painting went on a “European tour” of sorts, traveling to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden, and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. A section of the painting was also shown in Brazil, as part of an exhibition at the Sao Paulo Bienal, curated by William Seitz. Interestingly, Rosenquist didn’t even intend for the work to exist as one work after the initial show but had wanted it to be sold off in pieces.
41. Lobel, James Rosenquist, 145. The exhibition in which F-111 was shown is worth noting as it truly foregrounded the painting, probably in the most significant way in its history. Titled History Painting, the exhibition installed F-111 alongside three historically central history paintings from the museum’s permanent collection: Nicolas Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women (1634–1635), Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates (1787), and Emanuel Leutze’s George Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851). With the installation, the museum seemed to assert that F-111 was equal in stature to these three works. The exhibition was the work of Thomas Hoving, who had taken over as director in 1967 and who sought to make the Met a populist institution. Along with J. Carter Brown (the director of the National Gallery of Art from 1969 to 1992), Hoving originated the blockbuster exhibition. Hoving also oversaw—to both acclaim and condemnation—a huge expansion of the Met into Central Park, the creation of a contemporary art department, and the installation of the now-familiar banners and monumental staircase framing the museum’s front doors. For an example of some of the backlash against Hoving, see Matthew Israel, “As Landmark: An Introduction to ‘Harlem on My Mind,’” Art Spaces Archives Project, December 2004; as well as Steven Dubin,Displays of Power: Controversy in the American Museum from the “Enola Gay” to “Sensation” (New York: New York University Press, 1999). In addition to being labeled as antiwar, F-111 was harshly reviewed as part of History Painting. In the New York Times, John Canaday and Hilton Kramer both found it overblown and superficial. Yet, as Lobel argues, this hostility was probably more attributable to Hoving’s management of the museum and the provocation of his exhibition than to the painting itself and particularly its criticisms of the United States (148).
42. Lucy Lippard, for example, commented in her notes on the manuscript, “Rosenquist certainly went along with and as I recall agreed that F-111 had something to do with the war.”
43. Rose quoted in Martin, Theatre Is in the Street, 152.
44. Barbara Rose, “Oldenburg Joins the Revolution,” New York, June 2, 1969, 54.
45. See Tom Williams, “Lipstick Ascending: Claes Oldenburg in New Haven in 1969,” Grey Room, vol. 31 (Spring 2008), 117–144.
46. Between September 19 and September 26, 1970, well-known galleries including Andre Emmerich, Leo Castelli, O. K. Harris, Richard Feigen, Terry Dintenfass, Bykert, Poster Originals, and Sidney Janis, regardless of what they were showing, organized themselves in an effort to become peace centers and distributed antiwar literature. This organization was the aforementioned “Art for Peace” and it ended up comprising thirty-two galleries in New York. The precedents for this were the events in Boston, where artists held a benefit show for Eugene McCarthy and raised $17,000. Boston art dealers also had a fund-raising drive called “Fifteen Days in May.” See Jane Holtz Kay, “Artists as Social Reformers,” Art in America, January/February 1969, 44–47. During this week a benefit auction was held at Parke Burnet, and the Oldenburg drawing was on the catalog cover. The drawing also served as an advertisement for the auction postcard, a copy of which is in the Lucy Lippard Papers at the Smithsonian Institution.
47. Williams, “Lipstick Ascending,” 125.
48. See Max Kozloff, “A Collage of Indignation,” The Nation, February 20, 1967.
49. Kozloff quoted in Newman, Challenging Art, 269. Formalism’s influence was also to blame for the absence of artistic antiwar engagement from television. Yet equally at fault was the American mainstream media’s tendency—almost throughout the war—to both reflect the government’s view of the antiwar movement as irrelevant and wrongheaded, and to present only the most eye-catching images for its audiences, which most often were images of graphic, war-front violence. See Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? xiii.
50. Newman, Challenging Art, 406.
51. Linda Nochlin recently explained to the author in a personal interview that her work at the IFA was always completely politically engaged during this period. Nochlin earned her PhD at the IFA in 1963 and her research focused on Gustave Courbet, 1848, and the Nürnberg Kleinmeister. However, this would make Nochlin an exception to the rule, and as is well-known, in so doing she paved the way for feminist art history.
52. By challenging scholarship and exhibitions, I mean to refer to the publication of Camilla Gray’s seminal study, The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863–1922 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962); and Gene Swenson’s The Other Tradition, which he curated in 1965 at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art.
53. In addition to examples that will be discussed in later chapters, Rudolph Baranik used Picasso’s woman wailing over her child and a soldier being trampled by a horse—both at the bottom left of the painting—in one of two posters he designed for Angry Arts Week in 1967. The November 1, 1965, cover of Newsweek also featured a student poster that used a portion of Guernica juxtaposed with the text, “Stop the War in Vietnam Now.” See McCarthy, “Dirty Freaks and High School Punks,” 95. For more on Guernica, see Gijs van Hensbergen, Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon (London: Bloomsbury, 2005).
54. For the information about the MoMA retrospective I am indebted to David McCarthy. See “Dirty Freaks and High School Punks,” 96.
55. Gertje Utley, Pablo Picasso: The Communist Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 117.
56. This occurred to such an extent that “when United Nations delegates gathered in Panmunjom, Korea, in July 1953 to sign the armistice ending the war, representatives of the pro-American powers refused to enter the building where the documents would be signed because Communist workmen had installed the Peace Dove over the entrance.” Ibid., 128.
57. Ibid., 106.
58. Ibid.; and Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 222.
59. For example, the dove was used as the backdrop for the awarding of the 1951 Stalin Peace Prize.
60. Schwartz, “Politicization of the Avant-Garde,” 98.
61. See Sandle r, American Art of the 1960s, 292.
62. By that point Chicago had been included in 1966’s seminal exhibition of minimalist work, Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum. Clement Greenberg notably called her work Rainbow Picket one of the best in the exhibition. See Edward Lucie-Smith, Judy Chicago: An American Vision (New York: Watson-Guptill, 2000).
63. This specific description of the tower I owe to Frascina; see Art, Politics, and Dissent, 67.
64. For example, see Artforum, May and December 1965.
65. The bulletin was sent out in Italian, French, Spanish, and English, and panels were sent or brought in by artists to designated drop points across the United States and in Europe. See Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 5; Schwartz, “Politicization of the Avant-Garde,” 98. Leon Golub’s studio was the central New York drop point.
66. This number is one estimate of the amount of panels actually installed on the tower. An accurate count cannot be established for a few reasons. First, no complete count was undertaken or complete photographic record made at the final installation. Second, the panels were sold off individually—this will be discussed subsequently—when the tower was taken down, so no grouping of them still exists to count. Third, there were multiple lists of names: Irving Petlin had a packing list from the European artists who contributed, from Galerie du Dragon, that included 319 names; there was an advertisement published in the New York Times announcing the opening of the tower that listed 166 names of American artists; and, finally, a letter written by Arnold Mesches inviting financial support for the project lists twenty-two significant artists who would be involved, and some of Mesches’s names are absent from the other two lists. See Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 65. Frascina includes all the names included in the various lists in his footnotes and I reprint them here as a historical reference even though (as Frascina explains) what was most important about the tower was that it was in the end a collective statement and not about the individual artists who participated. (For Frascina’s lists see p. 98n22, though they are also reproduced below.) To begin with, Petlin’s typed, uncorrected list, according to Frascina, was as follows: Ailland, Gilles; Aitkin, S.; Allen, Tom; Appel, Karl; Arcilisi, Vincent; Armoto, Sam; Arnal, Francois; Aronson, Sardo; Arroyo; Asher, Elsie; Avalon, Helen; Baker, Walter; Baranik, Rudolf; Barnet, Will; Baruchello, Gianfranco; Beberman, Edward; Belzono; Bleek, Margit; Bubalo, Vladamire; Bayer, Walter; Boutin, Allen; Blaire, Camille; Brill, J.; Butts, Freeman; Blackwell, Patrick; Berlant, Anthony; Brown, Ray; Brooks, James; Blaine, Nell, Brach, Paul; Bolles, Bob; Brittin, Charles; Benjamin, Karl; Brown, M.; Bird, Annette; Bromfomel, I.; Botts, Edward; Bowin, Milton; Bleckman; Brooks, James; Berman; Biras; Busse, Jacques; Benoit, Jean; Collins, Jess; Conti-no, E.; Crampton, Rollin; Cannon, J.; Cajori, Jim; Cruz, Emilo; Clayberger, Sam; Clutie; Colbern, Jan; Camacho; Cardenas; César; Chemay; Cremonini; Cueco; Candell, Victor; Copley, William; Cohen, G.; Coleman, John; Chavez, Roberto; Celmins, Vija; Curtis, Ron; Canin, Martin; Dougherty, Frazer; De Hirsch, Storm; Donley, Robert; d’Archangelo, Allen; Di Meo, Dominich; Dimondstein, Morton; Dovvos, Peter; de Kooning, Elaine; Dash, Robert; Diebenkorn, Richard; Dillon, Dejon; De Feo, Jay; Dimetrakas; Dmitrienko; de Noailles, Marie; Dewasne, Jean; Erythrope, Ilse; Eunese, Mariano; Evans, D.; Evergood, Philip; Elgard, Elliot; Etherton, Tom; Fuller, Mary; Francis, Sally; Feldman, Bella; Flomelbalch, Sidro; Fine, Perle; Finch, Kieth; Ferrer, Joaquin; Freedensohn, Elias; Eilmus, Tully; Finkelstein, Max; Formica, Rachel; Frasconi, Antonio; Golpinopoulas, P.; Gikow, Ruth; Golden, Leon; Girona, Julio; Goodman, Sidney; Golub, Leon; Greene, S; Gordon; Greene, Cynthia; Gershgoren, M.; Gutman, Walter; Garcia, Jose; Gwathmey; Gilchriest, Loreno; Greene, Balcomb; Grayson, Marvin; Gillson, George; Guston, Philip; Gill, James; Gelber, Anne; Gebhardt, Al; Goswell, Stephen; Greenough, Lowell; Gilbert, Hugo; Gerardo, Chaves; Hunt, Richard; Hanson, Bert; Hui, H.; Hielihia; Hirsh, Joseph; Hopkins, Budd; Halkin, Theodore; Holbrook, Peter; Hubbard, W; Honig, Etheleyn; Hornisher, Anna; Hanson, Hardy; Hesse, Eva; Hatch, David; Hardin, Marvin; Hairer, Carol; Hulpberg, J.; Harris, Kay; Helion, Jean; Ippolito, Angelo; Johnson, Ives; Jakoson, Ward; Junkers, Adja; Joffey, W.; Jaffee, Nora; Juke, Richard; Kramer, Harry; Kahn, W.; Kaufman, Jane; Kippelman, Chaim; Kadish; King, Raymond; Kapsalio, Theodore; Kosta, Angela; Kraicke, Jane; Kantowitz, Howard; Katzman, Herbert; Kaplan, S.; Kishing, William; Koppelman, Dorothy; Kassay; Kline, Jane; Klix, Richard; Kadell, Katherine; Koster, Sue; Krof, N.; Kozloff, Max; Lysowski, J. S.; Little, John; Lyons, Marvin; Liebowitz, Diane; Lawrence, Michael; Lublin, Lee; Leroy, Phillipe; Leap, June; Levin, Kim; Levin, Jack; Lunk, David; Lewen, Si; Lindaberg, Linda; Lubner, Lorraine; Laderman, Gabriel; Lichtenstein, Roy; Lawless, David; Matter, Herbert; Matter, Mercedes; Mattox, Charles; Miller; Maurice, Henry; Melliken, Margaret; McKnight, Eine; Motherwell, Robert; McNee, Joan; Main, D.; Martiner, Joseph; Monoru; McChesney, Robert; Merz, R.; Majdra-koff, Ivan; Maggi, Anthony; Moesle, Robert; Matta; Mercado; Mellon, James; Marcus, Mardin; Mesches, Arnold; Mugnaimie, Joe; Neufeld, Tanya; Nevelson, Louise; Nesbitt, Lowell; Oster; Gerald; Ohlson; Douglas; Petlin, Irving; Pearl, Judith; Presonello, Harold; Pedreguera, R.; Parker, Ray; Padron, Abilio; Picard, Lil; Pit-tenger, Robert; Passirntino, Peter; Pazzi, L.; Pessillo, Christina; Paris, Freda; Paris, Harold; Pinsler, Jorry; Pollack, Sam; Palestino, Dominick; Pearlstein, Philip; Pfriem, Bernard; Parker, Keith; Piqueras; Pellon, Gina; Parre, Michel; Rosenbein, Sylvia; Rosenquist, Jim; Rosenhouse, Irwin; Reisman; Philip; Rieti, Falio; Robert, Niki; Rockless, Robert; Rooney, Pauline; Rapoport, Sonya; Roff, Richard; Richen-heimerk, Alice; Rubens, Richard; Reinhardt, Ad; Raffaele, Joe; Rosofa sky, Seymore; Russ, Charlotte; Rich, Marsha; Rivkin, Jay; Rancillac, Bernard; Ramon; Secunda, Arthur; Sterne, Hedda; Saar, Betye; Sherman, C.; Serisawa; Spaventa, George; Ste-fanelli, Joe; Schapiro, Meyer; Schwartz, Ellen; Schnackenberg, Roy; Sotz, Rick; Szapocznikow, Alina; Stewart, Michelle; Sanders, Joop; Sonberg, A. H.; Stevens, May; Simon, Ellen; Soyer, Moses; Speyer, Nora; Swartz, Shol; Spero; Sonenberg, Josh; Soyer; Rudolf; Sugarman; Seley, Jason; Sugarman, George; Sherman, S.; Ta-lachnik, Acne; Teschout, David; Tytell, Lois; Toney, Anthony; Tauger, Susanna; Todd, Mike; Tavoularis, Constantine; Tunberg, Wm.; Thek; Paul; Telemaque, Nerve; Tabuchi, Yasse; Uraban, Reva; Vicente, Esteban; Vlack, Don; Valentin, Helene; Vincent, Richard; Voss, Jan; Van Veer; Walters, Charles; Wines, James; Weal, Alica; Weber, Ellen; Wesselmann, Tom; Wolf, Sara; Witherspoon; White, Charles; Watlin, Larry; Wiegand, Robert; Yamii, Alice; Yeargans, H.; Zajac, Jack; Zaro, Sid; Zaslove, Allen. The New York Times advertisement of February 1966 names the following artists: Susie Aitkin; Elise Asher; Helen Daphnis Avlon; Tony Balzano; Rudolf Baranik; Walter Barker; Will Barnet; Baruchello; Margit Beck; Milton Berwin; Edward Betts; Nell Blaine; R. O. Blechman; Bob Bolles; Paul Brach; L. Bronfman; James Brooks; Charles Cajori; Victor Candel; Martin Canin; Herman Cherry; George Cohen; CPLY; Emilio Cruz; Robert Corless; Ron Curtis; Allan D’Arcangelo; Robert Dash; Storm De Hirsch; Elaine de Kooning; Fraser Dougherty; Georfe Dworzan; Isle Erythropel; D. Evans; Philip Evergood; Tully Filmus; Perle Fine; Rachel Formica; Elias Friedensohn; Sideo Fromboluti; Ruth Gikow; Lorenzo Gilchrist; George Gillson; Julio Girona; Leon Goldin; Peter Golfinopoul; Leon Golub; Ron Gorchov; Balcomb Greene; Cynthia Greene; Stephen Greene; Philip Guston; Walter Gutman; Robert Gwathmey; Carol Haerer; Kay Harris; Burt Hasen; John Heliker; Eva Hesse; Joseph Hirsch; Budd Hopkins; Helene Hui; John Hultberg; Robert Huot; Angelo Ippolito; Donald Judd; Ward Jackson; Nora Jaffee; William Jeffrey; Reuben Kadish; Wolf Kahn; Howard Kanowitz; Bernard Kassoy; Herbert Katzman; Jane Kaufman; Chaim Koppelman; Dorothy Koppelman; Max Kozloff; Harry Kramer; Gabriel Laderman; Jacob Landau; David Lawless; June Leaf; Kim Levin; Jack Levine; Si Lewen; Roy Lichtenstein; Linda Lindeberg; John Little; David Lund; Manuel Manga; Ernest Marciano; Marcia Marcus; Emily Mason; Herbert Matter; Mercedes Matter; Eline McKnight; James Mellon; Jack Mercado; Margaret Milliken; Robert Motherwell; Bob Natkin; Alice Neel; Lowell Nesbitt; Louise Nevelson; Doug Ohlson; Gerald Oster; Ray Parker; Peter Passantino; Philip Pearlstein; R. Pedreguera; Christina Pesirillo; Harold Pesirillo; Bernard Pfriem; Lil Picard; Bob Pittinger; Lucio Pozzi; Andre Racz; Joe Raffaele; Ad Reinhardt; Philip Reisman; Pauline Roony; Irwin Rosenhouse; James Rosenquist; Richard Rubens; Joop Sanders; Jason Seeley; Meyer Schapiro; Sarai Sh erman; Burt Silverman; Ellen Simon; Jack Sonenberg; Phoebe Sonenberg; Moses Soyer; Rafael Soyer; George Spaventa; Nancy Spero; Nora Speyer; Joe Stefanelli; Hedda Sterne; May Stevens; Sahl Swarz; Michelle Stuart; George Sugarman; Susanne Tanger; Paul Thek; Mike Todd; Anthony Toney; Louis Tytell; Reva Urban; Helene Valentin; Stuyvesant Van Veen; Esteban Vicente; Richard Vincent; Don Vlack; Ellen Weber; Tom Wesselman; Robert Wicgand; John Willenbacher; James Wines; Sara Wolf; Alice Yamin; Heart-well Yeargens; Adja Yunkers; Sidney Goodman; Eddie Johnson. Mesches’s list is as follows: Elaine de Kooning, Herbert Ferber, Sam Francis, Judy Gerowitz [Judy Chicago], Lloyd Hamrol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Lee Mullican, Ad Reinhardt, Larry Rivers, Jim Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, George Segal, Jack Zajac, Philip Evergood, George Sugarman, Claes Oldenburg, César, Karel Appel, Jean Helion, Leon Golub. The citation from Frascina regarding the Mesches list is Arnold Mesches, “Letter,” University of California, Department of Special Collections, Collection 50, “A Collection of Underground, Alternative and Extremist Literature,” Box 36, Folder “Artist’s Tower Los Angeles.”
67. I am indebted here to ideas included in Beth Handler’s dissertation. See “Art of Activism,” 50.
68. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 5.
69. Duncan’s article “The Whole Thing Was a Lie: Memoirs of a Special Forces Hero” ran in Ramparts in February 1966. Also, at the dedication, children released six white doves to “symbolize peace.” See Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 48.
70. Susan Sontag, “Inventing and Sustaining an Appropriate Response,” Los Angeles Free Press, March 4, 1966, 4.
71. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 8.
72. Petlin, personal interview.
73. According to Petlin, the lease was carefully and ambiguously worded because they knew the landlord wouldn’t comply. Frascina comments that the owner’s anger at the artists stemmed also from attacks on himself by others, who accused him of being “soft on communism.” For more information on both of these issues, see Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 60.
74. Schwartz, “Politicization of the Avant-Garde, Part I,” 99.
75. Where this was has not been clarified.
76. Petlin, personal interview.
77. See Lucy Lippard, “Flagged Down: The Judson Three and Friends,” Art in America, vol. 60 (May/June 1972), 48.
78. Radich was sentenced to either sixty days in jail or a fine of five hundred dollars. After the exhibition, Morrel did not stop making his flag works. For example, his contribution to the Collage of Indignation in 1967 was a facsimile of a flag that was incorporated into a sculptural construction. Like the other flag works he made, this work was removed from the Collage because NYU authorities deemed it “disrespectful.” Specifically, the director of the student center at NYU removed the work as he was instructed to do by the university coordinator of protection.
79. Jeanne Siegel, Artwords: Discourse on the 60s and 70s (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1992), 117.
80. According to Carrie Lambert-Beatty, the work stemmed from a 1965 painting by Johns, in which “the viewer’s concentrated gaze at the mis-colored flag could produce the official red, white and blue as an optical illusion when the eyes moved down to a gray monochrome version below.” See Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 340n82. Johns also used the same image in a series of 1966–1967 prints.
81. In later years it should be noted that Donald Judd created a similar image, which he hung outside his studio window and which Yvonne Rainer borrowed for the performance of her 1970 work War.
82. Martin, Theatre Is in the Street, 151.
83. See Lippard, A Different War, 26–27.
84. Grace Glueck, “A Strange Assortment of Flags Is Displayed at People’s Flag Show,” New York Times, November 10, 1970, 53; Clark Whelton, “The Flag as Art: Bars and Stripes Forever,” Village Voice, November 19, 1970, 1, 20; Grace Glueck, “Art Notes,” New York Times, November 1, 1970, sec. 2, 22.
85. Martin, Theatre Is in the Street, 151. The flag draped over a toilet bowl was by Kate Millet.
86. Ibid., 152.
87. However, the show, against the DA’s orders, stayed open on its last day.
88. See Judson 3 Defense Committee, “Historical Background of the People’s Flag Show,” 1–6, reprinted in Jon Hendricks, Jean Toche, Guerrilla Art Action Group, et al., GAAG: The Guerrilla Art Action Group, 1969–1976: A Selection (New York: Printed Matter, 1978). See also Lippard, A Different War, 26–27, 34–62, n. 119.
89. Though in contrast to Spero’s series, these works presented American weaponry as automated or robotic, often with the inclusion of robotic-looking soldiers. For example, Lichtenstein’s Preparedness, combined pop and 1930s-style realism to show soldiers as parts of a grand war machine; and the works of Nancy Grossman, Bernard Aptekar, and Arnold Belkin “invented gruesome automata with anatomies of weapons.” For some discussion of this, see Joan Seeman-Robinson’s book proposal for “They Ruled the Night,” in the Irving Sandler Papers at the Getty Research Institute, 2000.M.43: Sandler, Box 42.
90. Bernstein’s work is best known because of its involvement in a controversy in the early 1970s. Specifically, her Horizontal, a huge (9-1/2 × 12 foot) charcoal drawing of a screw-like penis, was withheld from “Women’s Work: American Art 1974,” an exhibition at the Philadelphia Civic Center. This action of censorship provoked protests from various significant artists and writers.
91. Dispatches (New York: Vintage, 1977) was culled from Herr’s late 1960s reports for Esquire magazine.
92. Ibid., 160.
93. Ibid., 9.
94. See, for example, James Aulich, “Vietnam, Fine Art, and the Culture Industry,” in Vietnam Images: War and Representation. Ed. James Aulich and Jeffrey Walsh (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 76.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. Karnow, Vietnam, 520.
2. Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? 110. As usual, estimates varied according to the source. There was also a huge demonstration in San Francisco on the same date.
3. Though the article was published in a number of places it is characteristically seen as a NYRB contribution.
4. Chomsky, “Responsibility of Intellectuals.”
5. George Steiner, “Letter to Noam Chomsky,” New York Review of Books, March 23, 1967, 28.
6. See Schalk, War and the Ivory Tower, 57.
7. See Noam Chomsky, “On Resistance,” New York Review of Books, December 7, 1967.
8. Many of those involved in Angry Arts Week had actually been involved in the Peace Tower as well. See Aulich, “Vietnam, Fine Art, and the Culture Industry,” 75.
9. From copy of the announcement in the “Dore Ashton” file, PAD/D Archive, Special Collections, Museum of Modern Art Library.
10. Ibid.
11. Schneemann remembers first hearing of the war around 1960 when she and her partner, James Tenney, met a young Vietnamese poet while they were both graduate students at the University of Illinois. See Carolee Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings. Ed. Bruce R. McPherson (Kingston, NY: McPherson, 1997), 146.
12. Carolee Schneemann, personal interview, March 24, 2009.
13. In this respect, Schneemann commented recently that some members of her audience were not particularly happy to submit to her work. They said to her angrily after seeing it, “You’re forcing us to think about this; you’re forcing us to look at this!” Ibid.
14. Robert C. Morgan, “Carolee Schneemann’s Viet-Flakes (1965),” in After the Deluge: Essays on Art in the Nineties (New York: Red Bass, 1993), 36. For a discussion of the effect of flashing lights on the consciousness, see National Research Council Committee to Review and Assess the Health and Productivity Benefits of Green Schools,Green Schools: Attributes for Health and Learning (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2007).
15. See Berger, Representing Vietnam, 5–6. Berger also discusses—through the examples of Roland Barthes—how indirect evidence can be moving.
16. Ibid.
17. The quote is from Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the American Civil War, which Susan Sontag quotes in her Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), 53.
18. See Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, 71. The national and global campaign to publicize the disastrous effects of napalm began in and around Stanford University in 1966.
19. See Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 116, 118, 125.
20. Thanks to Linda Nochlin for making this connection between Baranik and Goya.
21. For example, WBAI reported live on the 1968 riots at Columbia University and innumerable antiwar protests. The station also was the first station to broadcast Arlo Guthrie’s countercultural anthem “Alice’s Restaurant,” and it hosted audio experimental theater, featuring groundbreaking work by performance artists like Yvonne Rainer, Vito Acconci, John Cage, Robert Wilson, and Richard Foreman. As well, in the 1970s, it featured weekly arts coverage by critics such as John Perreault, Les Levine, Cindy Nemser, and Kenneth Koch.
22. There is some debate about what Petlin wrote. Martin believes the inscription said, “LBJ, infant people burner/Long may you roast in History’s Hell!” Also, in the next year, Black Mask would change its name to Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers.
23. For more on specific contributions to the Collage, see Handler, “Art of Activism,” 51.
24. Regarding attendance figures of the Week, Angry Arts estimated that sixty-two thousand people attended all the events of the Week. Notably, after the conclusion of Angry Arts Week, the organization met with other groups, distributed works to colleges and universities, and contributed to the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, which took place on April 15, 1967. For the Mobilization they decorated performing platforms and created six floats. One of them, by Marc Morrel, was a twenty-foot-high yellow mound, meant to represent Vietnam, which was topped with a coffin and an American flag. See Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 125; as well as my descriptions of Morrel’s flag show in chapter 3.
25. See Handler, “Art of Activism,” p. 55 and n. 39 for an impressive list of literature on the Collage. Notably, Rosenberg contrasted the Collage with an exhibition held at the same time at the New School for Social Research, Protest and Hope, curated by Paul Moscanyi. Protest and Hope featured works by Robert Rauschenberg, Red Grooms, and George Segal, among others. Rosenberg markedly praised the show for successfully braving the issue of aesthetic quality versus politics. See Rosenberg, “Art of Bad Conscience,” New Yorker, December 16, 1967.
26. Kozloff, “A Collage of Indignation,” The Nation, February 20, 1967.
27. See Martin, Theatre Is in the Street, 295.
28. Hoffman specifically invoked a pantheon of global deities and played cymbals.
29. Norman Mailer, excerpt from The Armies of the Night, in Reporting Vietnam (New York: Library of America, 1998), 510.
30. Importantly, in his speech, David Dellinger specifically urged people toward such a transition.
31. The petition is quoted from Handler, “Art of Activism,” 103. For Meyer Schapiro’s involvement in this petition, see Francis Frascina, “Meyer Schapiro’s Choice: My Lai, Guernica, MoMA, and the Art Left, 1969–1970: Part I,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 30, no. 3 (1995), 495.
32. Via Cecilia Clarac-Serou. From Petlin, personal interview.
33. During the fall of 1967, Golub also organized the benefit exhibition Art for Peace at his studio. The dates for the benefit were October 18–22, 1967.
34. See Martha Rosler, “Here and Elsewhere,” Artforum, vol. 46, no. 3 (2007), 50. Not all the collages include a specific Vietnam reference. Her First Lady features Faye Dunaway shot up at the end of Bonnie and Clyde in a framed “tondo” above a fireplace in Pat Nixon’s White House. Toward the end of the series, the collages are images of soldiers against a completely white background of the card stock to which the collages were affixed (as can be seen in Rosler’s last work of the series, Scatter). Additional images from the series collage in images from protests, such as Boys Room, a work that includes an image of a protestor being subdued.
35. Martha Rosler, personal interview, April 3, 2008.
36. Rosler was also influenced by images she saw on television. However, after a certain point she said she dismissed TV coverage. She explained recently that this was due to her disgust that television images would be shown during dinnertime. She remembers most often these images would feature correspondents speaking into the camera “with huts burning behind them!” She asked herself, “How could I watch this? What do they expect me to do? Get up and cook dinner? Go and see a movie?” Ibid.
37. Rosler, “Here and Elsewhere.”
38. See Tim Griffin, “Domesticity at War: Beatriz Colomina and Homi K. Bhabha in Conversation,” Artforum, vol. 45, no. 10 (2007), 442–447.
39. As Rosler explains, windows and doors separate spaces in only four of the twenty images of the series.
40. Rosler’s work was reproduced in Goodbye to All That! on October 13, 1970, and on other occasions.
41. In 1968, the Journal estimated that readership was a third of million; ten months later it put the figure over two million (an increase of 600 percent). See Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, 90. He also quotes from Robert J. Glessing, The Underground Press in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 120.
42. Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, 90, citing Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). Other useful sources on the subject are Lawrence Lerner, The Paper Revolutionaries: The Rise of the Underground Press (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972); and Roger Lewis, Outlaws of America: The Underground Press in Its Context: Notes on the Cultural Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). See also David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: The American Military Today (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), 283. Cortright gives a detailed list of 259 GI newspapers he was personally able to locate.
43. Much of the story of the underground press and its relationship to dissent during the Vietnam War has disappeared into the “black hole of national amnesia.” See Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, 71–91. In the late 1960s, mainstream media continued to dominate the news landscape, and its antipathy toward underground media sources meant the underground was largely overlooked. The short life spans of many of these underground outlets and their lack of accessible archives also have made it hard for their impact to be felt in the wider media culture.
44. Interestingly, a Violet Ray was a machine that administered low-frequency shocks to the body that was used in sexual situations but also covertly by law enforcement. There is no confirmed relationship between the machine and the artist’s choice of the name, however.
45. The image was captured by the Japanese photographer Kyoichi Sawada.
46. See unpublished Violet Ray biography, sent directly to the author. The pamphlet then continues, “Don’t wait for the news to tell you what’s happening. Make your own headlines with prestype. Cut up your favorite magazine and put it together again. Cut big words in half and make little words out of them—like environ mental crisis. All you need is a good pair of scissors and rubber cement. Abuse the enemy’s images. Turn the man from Glad into a Frankenstein. Make comic strips out of great art. Don’t let anything interfere with your pleasure.” See Violet Ray’s anonymously published The Anti-Mass, printed in 1970, which was sent to author by Ray.
47. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), 31, 110.
48. Ibid., 110.
49. Ibid., 99. Information on sentencing was difficult to come by, according to Brown-miller. She explains, “A sentence of two to eight years at hard labor might be typical for rape, even in cases in which the victim had been murdered; sodomy, attempted rape and attempted sodomy were preferred as charges because they carried lesser penalties; and sentences were routinely cut in half by a board of review” (101).
50. See Karen Stuhldreher, “State Rape: Representations of Rape in Viet Nam,” in Nobody Gets Off the Bus: The Viet Nam Generation Big Book (Tucson, AZ: Burning Cities Press, 1994).
51. Among others, Esquire published a special issue on violence in the United States, pointing to mass murders and rape, the ease with which Americans could purchase weapons, and the numerous recent best sellers on deviant behavior, among them In Cold Blood and The Boston Strangler. The essayist Tom Wolfe characterized the national obsession as a “mass perversion called porno-violence.” Meanwhile, The Dirty Dozen, a film about misfits, murderers, and rapists sent on a special mission by the United States Army during World War II, was on its way to becoming the top-grossing film of the year. See McCarthy, “Dirty Freaks and High School Punks,” 92.
52. Dan Cameron, Peter Saul (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2008), 14.
53. These words are distorted in such a way to be suggestive of decals found on hot rods, or the painted images found on planes during wartime. See Joseph Mas-check, “Peter Saul,” Artforum 10 (January 1972), 85. Saul was very influenced by comics, such as Crime Boy and Squeaks and Crime Does Not Pay. Also in the mix was Little Orphan Annie. And then there were the “undergrounders” like Mr. Toad, which Saul says he still owns. Saul, personal interview, April 6, 2009. In other places, Saul dubbed soldiers during the war “dirty freaks” and “high school punks.” See McCarthy, “Dirty Freaks and High School Punks,” 79.
54. See “Letter to Ellen H. Johnson,” in Cameron, Peter Saul, 149. See also McCarthy, “Dirty Freaks and High School Punks,” 94.
55. The use of the green beret in Saigon is particularly significant. It identifies members of the U.S. military’s Special Forces group, founded in 1952 and promoted by Kennedy to combat “wars of liberation” funded by the Soviet Union and China. On the one hand these men were celebrated, top-tier members of the armed forces. Robin Moore’sThe Green Berets (New York: Crown) was a New York Times best seller in 1965 (and would be made into a movie by John Wayne in 1968). Sergeant Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets” was number one on the pop music charts in 1966. On the other hand, I. F. Stone wrote of the Green Berets as “communists in reverse,” and “fascists,” who operated according to “cloak and dagger methods” and “dirty tricks.” See “When Brass Hats Begin to Read Mao Tse-Tung, Beware!” I. F. Stone’s Weekly, May 15, 1961, reprinted in I. F. Stone, In a Time of Torment (New York: Random House, 1967), 170–173. Former member Donald Duncan—who spoke at the dedication of the Peace Tower—also ended up exposing the methods of the Green Berets in his writing in Ramparts (“It Was All a Lie,” February 1966) and his publication of The New Legions (New York: Random House) in 1967, explaining the “hard truths” of training to be in the Special Forces, their violent actions in Vietnam, and how he managed to stay alive.
56. Alfred V. Frankenstein, “Saul’s Caricature of Agony,” San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle, August 11, 1968, 37. See also McCarthy, “Dirty Freaks and High School Punks,” 90.
57. In contrast to McCarthy’s view of the baby as a product of an American and Vietnamese coupling, it seems to me that the baby is meant more to suggest the infancy of American soldiers. See McCarthy, “Dirty Freaks and High School Punks,” 90.
58. McCarthy explains that Saul’s parents took him to see Picasso: Forty Years of His Art when it traveled to San Francisco. Saul also saw the painting in the summer of 1956 when he was in Amsterdam, while the painting was there on tour. McCarthy additionally discusses the fact that the painting would have been available to Saul through books, such as Alfred H. Barr’s Picasso: Forty Years of His Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1939) and Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946); Juan Larrea’s Guernica (New York: Arno Press, 1947); and Rudolf Arnheim’s Picasso’s Guernica: The Genesis of a Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962). See also McCarthy, “Dirty Freaks and High School Punks,” 96.
59. McCarthy, “Dirty Freaks and High School Punks,” 96.
60. For Picasso’s comments on the symbolism of the mural, see Jerome Seckler, “Picasso Explains,” New Masses, vol. 54 (March 13, 1945), 5, reprinted in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics. Ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 487.
61. McCarthy, “Dirty Freaks and High School Punks,” 96.
62. Ibid., 97.
63. Ibid., 82.
64. Ibid.
65. For example, see John Perreault, “Art: Repeating Absurdity,” Village Voice, December 14, 1967.
66. See McCarthy, “Dirty Freaks and High School Punks,” 100. He cites the Saul questionnaire, File: 69.103, Whitney Museum of American Art. Saul’s comments likely were shaped by artist Rockwell Kent’s gift of $10,000 to the “suffering women and children” of the Vietcong in the late spring of 1967. Along with the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros and the German peace activist Martin Niemöller, Kent had just been awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union. Kent directed the Soviet Union to transmit the money to North Vietnam’s ambassador in Moscow. See Associated Press, “Rockwell Kent Gift Sent to Vietcong,” New York Times, July 7, 1967, 12. For further proof of Saul’s belief that his efforts were serious, see Marjorie Heins, “I Like to See Things Crudely,” San Francisco Express Times, August 21, 1968, 8. As well, see Beth Fagan, “Saul Intends Provoking Reaction with Vietnam Paintings,” Sunday Oregonian, September 22, 1968, 18.
67. Cameron, Peter Saul, 30–31.
68. Saul, personal interview.
69. See Joyce Carol Oates, “The Miniaturist Art of Grace Paley,” originally published in the London Review of Books, April 16, 1998, and reprinted in Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose (New York: Plume, 1999). A copy of Schlanger’s poster is in the Charles Brittin file at the Getty Research Institute, 2005.M.11, FF 2: “Artists’ Tower Ephemera.” Other posters of the time used additional government rhetoric in conjunction with images of napalm victims; phrases such as “Know Your Enemy” or “Winding It Down” were common. The juxtapositions suggested that the government accepted these injuries and deaths as collateral damage. Texts accompanying napalm images could also be used in a more straightforward fashion, the text itself acting as a kind of direct evidence echoing the image. One example is a poster created by the San Francisco–based Angry Arts Against the War (different from Angry Arts in New York), which uses the text “Napalm Bombed” in conjunction with the image of a boy whose chin and lower lip have been almost entirely melted by napalm to the extent that they blend horrifically into his upper chest.
70. Thomas McEvilley has recently written of this technique as a formal breakthrough. He says, “This scraped and scarred surface, on which the original image lay in irregular patches, might have been regarded as a proposal for a new mode of the quality of ‘touch’ that foremost critics of the Greenbergian era cherished as the essence of painterliness. But if so, it was not a friendly proposal. To anyone formed in the Greenbergian mold, it seemed, rather than a new mode of touch, a rejection of the quality of touch altogether and that the sensibility that had promoted reverence toward it.” See “Outside the Comfort Zone,” Art in America, vol. 90, no. 4 (2002), 102. Max Kozloff has also called these surfaces attractive. He explains that during the 1950s and early 1960s, “[Golub] endowed the surfaces of his burnt men with an exquisite, darkening, enamel-like film, corroded and crusted in such a way as to make them dreamy landscapes of incineration. It was as if fleshy oils had half-carbonized into a mineral splendor, rendering the excruciating cruelty of his theme lookable and even pleasurable. Here then was that special psychic economy of modern art: the discount it makes on its own pessimism through the care lavished on imaginative processing. No doubt these burnt men of Golub’s were terrible images, but they censored some portion of their terror by the effective beauty of their textures.” See “The Late Roman Empire in the Light of Napalm,” Art News, vol. 69, no. 7 (1978), 77.
71. Marzorati, Painter of Darkness, 166.
72. Frumkin also represented Peter Saul.
73. Quoted in Marzorati, Painter of Darkness, 200. See the same page in Marzorati for Golub’s humorous reply to Rubin. He wrote, “Dear Billie, / Honey, I want you to know what a big slob you are—After comparing your bully boy critique of my paintings in ‘New Images’ with your next pretty boy ecstasy—it’s a pleasure to call you a sap, you sap—Yum, yum, kid / Leon Golub. / turn over, sap, for original drawings.” The drawings were titled Hey Bill! heads up! time to write an article! And below this was an image of a cartoon figure flushing his head in the toilet. Below that was the text “oh, i love to write art criticism, i love it.” (This topped a cartoon figure with his arms thrown back, either pissing or ejaculating a large looping stream in front of his body.) It is unclear whether this letter was ever sent.
74. Ibid., 235.
75. David Levi-Strauss, “Where the Camera Cannot Go: Leon Golub on the Relation Between Art and Photography,” Aperture, vol. 162 (Winter 2001), 55.
76. Golub quoted in Marzorati, Painter of Darkness, 64.
77. Ibid., 119.
78. McEvilley, “Outside the Comfort Zone,” 105.
79. See Deborah Wye, Committed to Print: Social and Political Themes in Recent American Printed Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 73.
80. Michelle Oka Doner, personal interview, March 6, 2009. Subsequently, these works gained national exposure in the major 1968 Smithsonian Institution exhibition of craft objects, Objects USA, which was featured on NBC’s Today Show. The next large exhibition of craft objects did not occur until 1987’s Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical, at the American Craft Museum. See Robert Barnard, “Crafts in a Muddle,” New Art Examiner, February 1987.
81. Frank Starkweather, Traditional Igbo Art, 1966: An Exhibition of Wood Sculpture Carved in 1965–1966 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1968).
82. Baranik quoted in Wye, Committed to Print, 69.
83. The image was also used as the centerpiece for various antiwar posters and flyers he made during the late 1960s. One flyer, for example, prints the image and then below, in capital letters, asks, “for this you’ve been born?” Another poster, which Baranik made, features the photograph and above it the title of the group for which the poster was made: “Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam.” (The other poster Baranik created for Angry Arts was based on images from Guernica, mentioned above.)
84. “Conversation with Rudolf Baranik, Charlene Spurlock and William Spurlock,” in Rudolf Baranik, Charlene Spurlock and William Spurlock, Rudolf Baranik: Napalm Elegy and Other Work (Dayton: Wright State University Art Galleries, 1977).
CHAPTER FIVE
1. While I stipulate January as a start date, it has been argued that the offensive actually began in September 1967 with various North Vietnamese offensives against specific targets. See Karnow, Vietnam, 551.
2. While the Americans and South Vietnamese eventually reclaimed Hue on February 24, it was only after three thousand people had been killed by the DRV (and subsequent research has argued that the death toll was probably even higher).
3. Khe Sanh and the other so-called hinterland battles were later realized to be a means to draw the Americans away from Saigon and the urban areas for the Vietcong assaults that eventually took place there. At the time, Westmoreland believed the reverse: that urban battles were the diversion from battles such as Khe Sanh. See Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, 392; and Karnow, Vietnam, 355.
4. Karnow, Vietnam, 558–559.
5. Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, 390. Tet is now seen as an intelligence failure comparable to that of Pearl Harbor. See also Karnow, Vietnam, 536.
6. Karnow, Vietnam, 536.
7. Ibid., 546.
8. The photograph won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. The captive’s name was Nguyen Van Lem. Not well-known is the fact that the image was also captured on film and broadcast on NBC at the time. The story behind the Adams photograph was that beforehand, communist invaders had killed several of Loan’s men; one of them was gunned down along with his wife and children in their house. A group of soldiers marched up to Loan with Lem, the communist prisoner, and Loan took out his pistol, waved his men back with it, and then, without hesitation, executed Lem in the street. Vo Suu captured the image on film. The film (slightly edited so as not to show the spurt of blood coming out of the prisoner’s head) was shown on NBC the following night.
9. Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? 151–152.
10. Tom Wicker, “Kennedy Asserts U.S. Cannot Win,” New York Times, February 9, 1968, 1.
11. Ibid. See also excerpts from Kennedy’s speech excerpted in the same article.
12. Karnow, Vietnam, 580.
13. In the late 1960s, most of the country, and especially New York City, consistently saw itself on the brink of race war. For example, in addition to the assassination of King, the Black Power movement had reached an international audience, black students had immobilized Northwestern and Columbia Universities, and a special committee formed by the mayor of New York reported “an appalling amount of racial prejudice” in the city. The mayor warned that if “lines of communication and understanding were not formed quickly, this city will suffer severe traumas of successive racial and major confrontations.” For more on this subject in relation to art history, see Israel, “As Landmark.”
14. See Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), 331.
15. Ibid., 319.
16. This figure is drawn from various sources. See, for example, Patricia Kelly, 1968: Art and Politics in Chicago (Chicago: DePaul University Art Museum, 2008), 10. See also Gitlin, Sixties, 327.
17. Gitlin, Sixties, 334.
18. Among the various sources that discuss this matter, see Kelly, 1968, 14–15. The two-year proposal was authored by the New York artist Hedda Sterne and Jesse Reichek, a professor of painting at the University of California, Berkeley. Fifty artists signed it.
19. See “Artists vs. Mayor Daley,” Newsweek, November 4, 1968, 117.
20. See Kelly, 1968, 15. Feigen is quoted from an interview in the archives of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. See also Aulich, “Vietnam, Fine Art, and the Culture Industry,” 73. The exhibition ran from October 23 to November 23.
21. For the full list of participating artists, see Kelly, 1968, 27.
22. During the exhibition, Motherwell explained, “There is a certain kind of art which I belong to. It can no more make a direct political comment than chamber music can. But by exhibiting with these artists who can, and with the theme of the exhibit, we are showing our support.” See “Artists vs. Mayor Daley,” 117. The quote is also included in Kelly, 1968, 28.
23. Kelly, 1968, 15.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid. As a final note, as Patricia Kelly has explained, the Daley exhibition was not the first time in recent history a Chicago art gallery dedicated itself to works concerning a major political figure. Predating Feigen’s exhibition by more than a year was Portraits of LBJ at the Richard Gray Gallery, which opened in February 1967. The show was conceived as a response to President Johnson’s 1966 rejection of a commissioned portrait by the New Mexico artist Peter Hurd. When the painting was unveiled, Johnson described it as “the ugliest thing I ever saw.” Yet Johnson made the completion of the painting incredibly difficult for Hurd. From the onset of the commission, Hurd was denied access to the president, and he was allowed only two sittings to complete the work, and during one the president was rumored to have fallen asleep.
26. Introduction to Peace Portfolio, viewed in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art.
27. Lippard, A Different War, 17. She takes the quote from Reinhardt’s cartoon in PM, “How to Look at More Than Meets the Eye,” September 22, 1946.
28. Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, 403. For example, Nixon proposed that he might be able to persuade the Soviet Union and China to press North Vietnam to acquiesce to an acceptable solution to end the war. It was well-known that the war was draining the Soviet economy, since the Soviets had a massive aid program in effect for North Vietnam. Nixon also wanted to bring China closer to the United States to add leverage to both of their dealings with the Soviet Union. He wrote in Foreign Affairs in late 1967 that “we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations . . . to live in angry isolation.” Nixon also had his madman approach to end the war, which he did not publicize. This was the idea that if he looked like he could drop an atomic bomb on Vietnam and was unpredictable, the enemy would capitulate. See Karnow, Vietnam, 597.
29. For the most extended discussion of this show, see Sébastien Delot, “New York, 1968: Une exposition de groupe manifeste à la galerie Paula Cooper,” Les Cahiers du MNAM, vol. 82, no. 99 (2007), 82–95.
30. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 145.
31. Press release, accessed at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
32. Importantly, though Lippard, Huot, and Wolin use “art-for-art’s-sake” here to describe these artists, the term refers in actuality to a nineteenth-century movement that emphasized the pleasure of art over its possible morality. Thus it had little to do with these artists.
33. Grace Glueck, “Art Notes,” New York Times, October 27, 1968.
34. Gregory Battcock, “Art: Reviewing the Above Statement,” New York Free Press, October 31, 1968.
35. Ibid.
36. See Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 151.
37. Rosenthal’s image is arguably the most widely reproduced photograph ever taken. Rosenthal has also endured over fifty years of accusations that the image was staged. See, for example, James Bradley and Ron Powers, Flags of Our Fathers (New York: Bantam, 2000); as well as the 2006 Clint Eastwood–directed movie based on the book.
38. Ed Kienholz, “The Portable War Memorial (1968),” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 514.
39. Archie Goodwin et al., Blazing Combat (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2009), 39.
40. See ibid., 46. Other stories focus on the effect that killing has on soldiers, especially those who came into the war looking for some “action.” See, for example, “Face to Face,” 65. There is also a profile of a fighter pilot named Billy Bishop. The story ends by explaining, “It’s not the tally of kills, nor his medals, that makes Bishop unique. . . . It’s not his flying or shooting skills . . . nor his incredible dash and daring. . . . This is what makes Billy Bishop unique . . . he walked away [from the war] . . . alive!!” See “Lone Hawk,” 77.
41. See “A Conversation with James Warren,” in ibid., 187.
42. See Seeman-Robinson, “They Ruled the Night,” 14.
43. Stevens specifically cites a snapshot of her father sitting in front of the television as the root of the series. Lucy Lippard makes the link between the threat of drafting Stevens’s son and the Big Daddy series. Lippard also explains that Stevens’s teaching at a midwestern college “exacerbated her antiwar feelings” due to the ignorance and callousness of the people she encountered there. See Lippard’s essay in May Stevens: Big Daddy, 1967–75: Lerner-Heller Gallery, March 11–29, 1975 (New York: Lerner-Heller Gallery, 1975).
44. May Stevens: Big Daddy, 1967–75.
45. In this vein, Stevens also made a Big Daddy coloring book.
CHAPTER SIX
1. Vietnamization officially began on April 10, when Defense Secretary Clark Clifford announced a ceiling of 549,000 American troops in Vietnam, and said that the administration had decided to shift the burden of the war to the South Vietnamese.
2. See Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? 269.
3. Richard Nixon, “Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam,” November 3, 1969, available online at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=2303.
4. Haeberle’s photographs were then published on November 20 in Life. While the number of deaths at My Lai is still debated, with estimates ranging widely between 109 and 567, most reports tend toward 567. The initial coverage of My Lai was quickly followed by national newspaper coverage and then television coverage. Two of the most significant examples of television coverage were Walter Cronkite’s December 5, 1969, report on the CBS Evening News and a November 24, 1969, 60 Minutes interview between Mike Wallace and Paul Meadlo. For more explanation of media coverage, see Frascina, “Meyer Schapiro’s Choice.” For a follow-up report on My Lai, in which he expanded on the disturbing realities of Charlie Company, see Hersh, “My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath,” Harper’s, May 1970, 53–84.
5. Fitzgerald explains My Lai was comparable to Nazi atrocities at Lidice in 1942. Lidice was once as infamous as Guernica or Auschwitz. Today few outside the Czech Republic recognize the name. At Lidice, a few kilometers west of Prague, on June 10, 1942, the Nazis took revenge on the village, which was suspected of harboring suspects in the murder of the Nazi Staatssekretär of the Protectorate, Reinhard Heydrich. One hundred and seventy-three men were executed; nearly two hundred women were transported to Ravensbruck. Lidice’s children were sent to families in Germany and elsewhere to be “Germanized.” Of one hundred and four children taken away, only sixteen were ever found after the event. In the days that followed, the town of Lidice was systematically erased from the face of the earth. Even the town’s cemetery was desecrated, its four hundred graves dug up. Jewish prisoners from the camp at Terezin were brought in to shift the rubble, new roads were built and sheep set down to graze. No trace of the village remained.
6. The exhibition specifically ran from November 1968 through February 1969.
7. MoMA’s explanation for why the original work was not included was because it had to be shipped from Paris.
8. This information is from Takis’s handbill, which is discussed in more detail below. See Sandler, American Art of the 1960s, 296.
9. See “Takis’ Letter to Sindrofoi,” in Art Workers’ Coalition: Documents, Open Hearing (Seville: Editorial Doble J., 2009), 1.
10. See Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 4, 165. For more on the Harlem on My Mind protest see Dubin, Displays of Power, 18–63. See also Israel, “As Landmark.”
11. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 4–5, 14–15.
12. See Jeanne Siegel, “Carl Andre: Artworker,” in Artwords, 130. Originally published in Studio International, vol. 180, no. 927 (1970), 175–179.
13. Sandler, American Art of the 1960s, 297.
14. Ibid., 296.
15. MoMA still remained the central focus of the majority of speeches, however, since it was the most important museum of modern and contemporary art in the world and one of the primary tastemakers for the period’s art market. See Martin, Theatre Is in the Street, 133–134. The meeting lasted over four hours, exemplifying the epic meeting phenomenon that “typified 1960s oppositional politics.” A wide range of issues was discussed, such as alternatives to the art museum, the reform of art institutions, the legal and economic relationship of artists to galleries and museums, the artists’ relationship to society, and the situation of black and Puerto Rican artists. One of the most historically significant speeches of the meeting was Lee Lozano’s discussion of her General Strike Piece, which initiated her departure from the art world.
16. According to Irving Petlin, the poster committee procured a copy of Haeberle’s photograph by breaking into the Life magazine offices in New York City. They believed they had license to take the image when they found out from Haeberle that the magazine had printed the image but kept it in their possession, even though Life had one-time-use permission only.
17. “Transcript of Interview of Vietnam War Veteran on His Role in Alleged Massacre,” New York Times, November 25, 1969, 16. This was actually the first time that an item from 60 Minutes would grace the cover of the Times. See David Blum, Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick . . . : The Long Life and Turbulent Times of “60 Minutes” (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 48.
18. Petlin manipulated the text. This fact is worth mentioning because Bryan-Wilson (in Art Workers) describes the text as being “typed out” by the poster committee, rather than having been appropriated from the actual newspaper in which the interview was featured.
19. Notably, even though the poster committee wanted AWC to be known as the author, Petlin, Jon Hendricks, and Fraser Dougherty created it. See, for example, Handler, “Art of Activism,” 257. Also see Art Workers’ Coalition, “To the Editor,” in “Art Mailbag: Why MoMA Is Their Target,” New York Times, February 8, 1970, 23–24. Information also drawn from Petlin personal interview with the author.
20. Newman, Challenging Art, 267.
21. Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Box 6, “Art Workers’ Coalition.”
22. See Lippard, “The Dilemma,” in Get the Message? 8.
23. Newman, Challenging Art, 267. See also Lippard, A Different War, 27.
24. Lucy Lippard, personal interview, July 30, 2009. As part of National Peace Action Week, on April 24, 1971, AWC participants wore the Calley masks again and distributed five thousand of them to other demonstrators.
25. Marzorati, Painter of Darkness, 235.
26. Notably, the three did continue to be involved with AWC. Martin, Theatre Is in the Street, 138.
27. Ibid. For example, at one point, the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York State Council for the Arts gave AWC $17,000 for community cultural centers in Spanish-speaking sectors of New York City. GAAG (and others) did not approve of such support from the established authorities. Importantly, though GAAG formed out of AWCand apart from it, GAAG was involved with AWC’s Action Committee, AWC participants supported GAAG actions, and those involved with both groups worked together often, according to Lippard’s notes on the manuscript.
28. Martin, Theatre Is in the Street, 145.
29. See Jean Toche, “Letter, Dedicated to Marcel Broodthaers,” May 10, 1968, in Hendricks, Toche, Guerrilla Art Action Group, et al., GAAG.
30. Dore Ashton, “Response to Crisis in American Art,” Art in America, vol. 57 (January/February 1969), 33.
31. Alan Moore, “Collectives: Protest, Counter-Culture, and Political Postmodernism in New York City Artists Organizations 1969–1985” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2000), 20–21.
32. Hendricks, Toche, Guerrilla Art Action Group, et al., GAAG.
33. David Rockefeller was chairman of the board of trustees of the Museum of Modern Art. Nelson Rockefeller, the pro-war Republican governor of New York, was at that time a high-profile member of the MoMA board of trustees. In a further link to the family, the museum had been founded by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.
34. GAAG sources much of its material used in the statement. It cites Lundberg’s The Rich and the Super-Rich, Hersh’s Chemical and Biological Warfare, and Thayer’s War Business. See Martin, Theatre Is in the Street, 6. For a further understanding of the greater movement to redefine legitimate corporate behavior by the New Left, the women’s liberation movement, and the counterculture, Martin recommends Terry H. Anderson, “The New American Revolution: The Movement and Business,” in The Sixties: From Memory to History. Ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 175–201. Also, as Martin has noted, though commendable for its confidence and forthrightness, GAAG’s letter was compromised both by its inability to link Rockefeller interests directly with the war and by its skewing of evidence. For instance, the Rockefellers’ relationship to United Technology Center dated to 1966, and there was no indication as to whether it was still involved. (In fact, by 1967, Dow was the only company producing napalm.) See Martin, Theatre Is in the Street, 140.
35. See “Guerrilla Art Action at the Whitney Museum of American Art,” in Hendricks, Toche, Guerrilla Art Action Group, et al., GAAG. Also, it should be noted that this action took place during the installation in the lobby of Paul Thek’s Tomb, one of the lost monuments of 1960s art. Before, during, and after this point, in addition to this action and Blood Bath, GAAG organized other extra-artistic actions against the war, two of which will be discussed later on. What will not be covered in detail are the following: their action no. 13 (a protest of the censorship of Abbie Hoffman on CBS); their action no. 16 (a letter to Nixon protesting the escalation of the Vietnam War); their action no. 22 (letters in support of the Pentagon papers); and their action no. 32 (a broadside protesting the carpet bombing of North Vietnam). Additionally, on October 31, 1969, Hendricks and Toche removed Kazimir Malevich’s Supremacist Composition: White on White of 1918 and hung in its place the group’s October 30 manifesto. The manifesto made three demands. Foreshadowing the Art Strike, the third demand was that MoMA close until the war in Vietnam was over. GAAG explained, “There is no justification for the enjoyment of art while we are involved in the mass murder of people. Today the museum serves not so much as an enlightening educational experience, as it does a diversion from the realities of war and social crisis. It can only be meaningful if the pleasures of art are denied instead of reveled in. We believe that art itself is a moral commitment to the development of the human race and a negation of the repressive social reality. This does not mean that art should cease to exist or to be produced—especially in serious times of crisis when art can become a strong witness and a form of protest—only the sanctification of art should cease during these times.” See Hendricks, Toche, Guerrilla Art Action Group, et al., GAAG.
36. Handler, “Art of Activism,” 270–273. For the full text of the AWC participants’ statements, see Lucy R. Lippard Papers, Box 6, File “Art Workers’ Coalition.” Bryan-Wilson has recently pointed out that even though And Babies was held up as a parallel to Guernica, there were fundamental differences between the two works that made such a comparison problematic. For one, she clarifies that Guernica is monochrome and full of activity, and And Babies is colorful and features a pile of dead bodies. See Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 21.
37. A letter from Meyer Schapiro was a notable absence. Schapiro rejected the ideas involved and wrote a significant response to the organizers, which has been covered in-depth in various locations, yet none more than Frascina’s two-part series of articles, “Meyer Schapiro’s Choice.”
38. Petlin also has said that a column written by Lawrence Alloway further complicated the distribution of the petition by making it national news. It seemed like those involved wanted to approach artists and especially Picasso in a controlled fashion. See Lawrence Alloway, “Art,” The Nation, February 23, 1970.
39. Hanson’s work is in the collection in the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Dulsberg, Germany, and has been exhibited in the United States only once, in Fort Worth, where a 1994 retrospective of Hanson’s works traveled from its original site in Montreal.
40. I say never fully executed because an abbreviated version was exhibited in 2004 at the Whitney Museum. At the same time, it is unclear whether Kienholz ever expected to fully realize the work. He may have just seen the piece as a conceptual statement.
41. Among other endeavors, Kienholz and Hopps established the landmark Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles together in 1957.
42. See Walter Hopps, Kienholz: A Retrospective (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996), 144.
43. Martin says that they marched to the “war memorial” at Columbus Circle, and this seems to be the memorial to the battleship Maine, whose explosion in Havana harbor was the catalyst for the Spanish–American War. Irving Petlin, who organized this action, recently explained in my interview with him that the body bags were bought from “a little Jewish firm” on 8th Street and Broadway that supplied many of the body bags the government used. Petlin located the firm through an Orthodox friend of his, and said he was able to procure the bags because he knew a little Yiddish. Upon finding out that its bags were used in the march however, Petlin said, the firm was not particularly happy with him.
44. Martin, Theatre Is in the Street, 137. See also Lippard, A Different War, 24; and Get the Message? 16.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. Karnow, Vietnam, 621
2. An aide to Nixon called this unrest the most severe security threat since the Great Depression. See Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 112.
3. While some believe that the protest’s diversity of aims pushes the Jackson State incident out of the historical discourse, such exclusion probably has more to do with the fact that Jackson State was a black college.
4. Using Walls was one of several forays into vanguard art made by the Jewish Museum. The exhibition included fifteen artists, whom the museum asked to make works on the walls of the institution. The works would be destroyed when the exhibition closed. According to a press release, the works were conceptual, ephemeral, and temporal. Without autonomous physicality they were not commodities. As such, the press release claimed, these non-objects rejected the mediation of dealers, critics, and museums. They also offered a new experience for the viewer. The show included two groups of artists who created public murals: Smokehouse Associates and City Walls Inc. According to the Jewish Museum, both groups were interested in a socially committed public art that engaged and benefited urban communities. For more on the Jewish Museum during the 1960s, see Matthew Israel, “A Magnet for the With-It Kids: The Jewish Museum, New York, of the 1960s,” Art in America, vol. 95, no. 9 (2007), 72–83.
5. See Handler, “Art of Activism,” 355.
6. On May 15 Morris announced he would close the exhibition on May 18; the exhibition was scheduled to run through May 31. See, for example, Sandler, American Art of the 1960s, 299.
7. Handler, “Art of Activism,” 356. A copy of the statement is included in the MoMA Archives; see John Hightower Records, III.i.13.
8. In 1970 the number of strikes by union workers had reached a postwar high, and as labor historians have documented, “large strikes were more important in 1970–72 than at any time during the 1930s, and the proportion of workers involved in them and was surpassed only in 1946–49.” See P. K. Edwards, Strikes in the United States, 1881–1974(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 180. As part of what has been called “the Vietnam-era labor revolt,” a postal wildcat strike in March 1970 halted the U.S. mail in fifteen states, and record numbers of wildcat strikes by autoworkers shut down plants in the Midwest. See Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972), 249. High-profile strikes such as the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike, the United Farm workers strike of 1973, the 1972 longshoremen strike, the 1968 New York City teachers strike, and late 1960s wildcat strikes in the auto industry led some union workers to coin this phrase. In April 1970, the Teamsters, air traffic controllers, steel workers, various teachers’ unions, and newspaper workers held significant strikes in New York. See “Scorecard on Labor Trouble,” New York Times, April 5, 1970, 159.
9. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 25.
10. Ibid., 118. According to Bryan-Wilson (Art Workers, 118), Morris took his theory of artistic negation directly from Marcuse, as seen in the following statement made by Morris in 1970: “My first principle for political action, as well as art action, is denial and negation. One says no. It is enough at this point to begin by saying no.” She cites Robert Morris, notebook page, ca. 1970s, Robert Morris Archives.
11. See Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 119.
12. Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 92. For a further discussion of the New Left in this context, see Stanley Aronowitz, “When the New Left Was New,” in The 60s Without Apology. Ed. Sohnya Sayres et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1984), 20.
13. See Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, 91; and Berger, Labyrinths, 121–132.
14. See Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 103.
15. See Berger, Labyrinths, 114.
16. Handler, “Art of Activism,” 357.
17. See Lippard, A Different War, 53; and Cindy Nemser, “Artists and the System: Far from Cambodia,” Village Voice, May 28, 1970, 20–21.
18. Berger, Labyrinths, 111. Berger notes that this information is from an undated May 1970 press release in the Morris Archives, Gardiner, New York.
19. In her notes on the manuscript, Lippard explained that Johnson was elected as cochair because people “insisted on a woman leader too.”
20. Corrine Robins, “The New York Art Strike,” Arts Magazine, vol. 45, no. 1 (1970), 27.
21. Grace Glueck, “Art Community Here Agrees to Fight War, Racism, and Oppression,” New York Times, May 19, 1970, 30.
22. Involved in the steering committee, in addition to Morris and Johnson, were Frank Stella, Irving Petlin, and Max Kozloff. See Grace Glueck, “Peace Plus,” Art in America, vol. 58, no. 5 (1970), 38.
23. See Grace Glueck, “500 in Art Strike Sit on Steps of Metropolitan,” New York Times, May 23, 1970.
24. Ibid. See also John Hightower Files at MoMA, JBH, I.1.13.
25. See Glueck, “500 in Art Strike Sit on Steps of Metropolitan.”
26. See Sean Elwood, “The New York Art Strike of 1970” (master’s thesis, Hunter College, 1981).
27. See, for example, John Perreault, “On Strike,” Village Voice, May 28, 1970, 17.
28. See Gregory Battcock, “Art and Politics at Venice: A Disappointing Biennale,” Arts, September/October 1970; Barbara Rose, “The Lively Arts: Out of the Studios, on to the Barricades,” New York, August 10, 1970, 54–57. Rose explains that although many art world luminaries signed in support of the call, no one was willing to pull their art from the Biennale. She comments, “Government support of the arts was so provisional that artists, loath to give up the little gravy they were getting at the affluence banquet, were not anxious to draw attention to themselves.”
29. Statement from ECG press release, from Berger, Labyrinths, 125.
30. These artists were Richard Anuskiewicz, Leonard Baskin, Herbert Bayer, Robert Birmelin, John Cage, Raymond Deshais, Jim Dine, Sam Francis, Ron Kitaj, Nick Krushenick, Roy Lichtenstein, Vincent Longo, Sven Lukin, Michael Mazur, Deen Meeker, Robert Morris, Robert Motherwell, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Lucas Samaras, Frank Stella, Carol Summers, Ernest Trova, Andy Warhol, Jack Youngerman, and Adja Yunkers. See Berger, Labyrinths, 125n16. Other sources list different artists and different counts. Barbara Rose in “Out of the Barricades” (56) says twenty-two artists withdrew.
31. Petlin, personal interview.
32. See Battcock, “Art and Politics at Venice.”
33. Handler, “Art of Activism,” 386. Rose, in “On the Barricades,” explains that the new show was supposed to open on Independence Day for symbolic reasons but was delayed.
34. Women Students and Artists for Black Liberation was cofounded by Faith Ring-gold and her daughters Michele and Barbara Wallace. Also included were Tom Lloyd and several students from the School of Visual Arts. According to Ringgold, the catalyst for WSABAL’s formation was her hearing of the fact that the “liberated Venice Biennale” exhibition did not intend to include any black or women artists. After this incident, WSABAL continued to agitate for inclusion of minorities in exhibitions. In 1970, for example, the group collaborated with the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee to protest the Whitney Annual’s lack of women in its exhibition. This protest led to the exhibition of works by Betye Saar and Barbara Chase-Riboud, the first black artists exhibited in the Whitney.
35. See Julie Ault, ed., Alternative Art New York, 1965–1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 21. Ault notes that Museum was subsequently beset by considerable philosophical disagreement among its three hundred or so members. She explains that “some members wanted formal exhibition and administrative structures; others wanted a looser art association with exhibitions, events, forums, and services; and still others wanted a completely unrestricted artists’ space. A steering committee was formed to seek state funds for exhibition programs and to organize drawing classes and a print workshop. Museum was also used as a meeting hall for groups such as the Art Workers’ Coalition. All exhibitions were group shows with no criteria restricting subject matter or access; the schedule was determined on a first-come, first-serve basis. . . . Museum ceased its activities in 1971.” Barbara Rose noted at the time that this was the first open exhibition in New York to be held in fifty years, since the annual exhibition held by the Society of Independent Artists in the first decades of the twentieth century. This show is best-known for its 1917 refusal of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.
36. Handler, “Art of Activism,” 386.
37. Berger, Labyrinths, 113.
38. From June 9 through July 1.
39. For example, the first proceeds were given to 1970 election candidates “committed to ending the war.”
40. From Print Portfolio 1, no. 60, viewed at the Daedalus Foundation, New York.
41. For more on conceptual art’s political implications, the complexities, successes, and failures therein, and its connections to AWC and the New Left, see Handler, “Art of Activism,” 212; Alex Alberro, “Deprivileging Art: Seth Siegelaub and the Politics of Conceptual Art” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1996); and Malcolm Blake Stimson, “A Theory of the Neo-Avant-Garde” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1998). Additionally, see Blake Stimson, “The Promise of Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), xxviii–lii.
42. Lippard, “Dreams, Demands, and Desires,” 7.
43. Jeanne Siegel, “An Interview: Hans Haacke by Jeanne Siegel,” Arts Magazine, vol. 45, no. 7 (1971), 18–21.
44. Rockefeller was specifically on the board from 1932 to 1979 (as president from 1939 to 1941; as chairman from 1957 to 1958). See Handler, “Art of Activism,” 329. See also Brian Wallis, ed., Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 86–87; and Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 111.
45. Hans Haacke, Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Deutsche, and Walter Grasskamp, Hans Haacke: For Real (Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2007), 254.
46. Emily Genauer quoted in Alberro and Stimson, Conceptual Art.
47. Haacke, Buchloh, Deutsche, and Grasskamp, Hans Haacke, 255. A reflection of his belief of artists’ lack of power was his comment that it would have “been naïve to assume that this poll-taking could affect the outcome of the 1970 gubernatorial elections, in which Nelson Rockefeller enjoyed solid conservative support.”
48. Hilton Kramer, “‘Miracles,’ ‘Information,’ ‘Recommended Reading,’” New York Times, July 12, 1970, 87.
49. See Gregory Battcock, “Informative Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art,” Arts, Summer 1970, 24–27.
50. Bryan-Wilson explains, “Battcock’s notion of accommodating versus adversarial art drew from his engagement at the time with the writings of Marcuse, and he saw the exhibit as a clear example of repressive tolerance. Because the works in Information responded to the site of the museum but [did] not interrupt its daily functioning, according to Battcock, they [were] not abusive enough to their context. Instead the potential of a negative confrontation is wasted. . . . In an unmistakable (yet unattributed) reference to Marcuse, he states that art should ‘widen the gap and that already exists between that which is and a vision of what can be.’ This directly echoes Marcuse’s vision for an art that sustains ‘a dialectical unity between what is and what can (and ought) to be.’ While he maintained that the Information show fell short of the mark, Battcock did in other instances embrace the radical negation of conceptualism, particularly as it instanced its own de-commodification. Haacke’s knowledge management in theMOMA-Pollsuffered under Battcock’s loose Marcusian reading, as it concerned itself with unmasking present conditions rather than offering a ‘prefigurative’ vision of a utopian world, to use Marcuse’s phrase.” Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 195. See also R. W. Marx’s The Meaning of Marcuse (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970).
51. See Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. See Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, 69.
2. See Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, 456.
3. Kissinger had begun meeting with Le Duc Tho to discuss a peace agreement on February 21, 1970. See Karnow, Vietnam, 646.
4. This is not to imply that bombing operations had not been in place for the duration of the war. Since Flaming Dart they had followed almost without interruption, so that by the end of 1972, the United States had dropped on Vietnam—an area the size of Texas—triple the bomb tonnage dropped on Europe, Asia, and Africa during World War II.
5. Karnow, Vietnam, 667
6. American Posters of Protest received a rare favorable review from New York Times critic John Canaday.
7. The march was organized by the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice and the National Peace Action Coalition.
8. Lippard, A Different War, 29.
9. See Levi-Strauss, “Where the Camera Cannot Go,” 55.
10. See Marzorati, Painter of Darkness, 26.
11. Ibid.
12. Fahlström created sculpture, prints, films and performances, Happenings, lengthy manifestos, scripts for stage, screen, and radio, a five-hour audio-phonic novel, and his invented “variable pictures.” During his lifetime, Fahlström enjoyed worldwide recognition—high points were his solo exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art (which traveled to various locations in the United States but was never shown at MoMA) and his representation of Sweden at the 1966 Venice Biennale. In the past few years, Fahlström’s work has been the subject of critical reappraisal. He was included in Daniel Birnbaum’s 2009 Venice Biennale exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni,Fare Mondi/Making Worlds, and his work was the subject of a retrospective exhibition in Barcelona, which traveled to Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France between 2000 and 2002. Among the reasons proposed for his mainstream dismissal until now—and here I refer in part to Mike Kelley’s 1995 essay “Myth Science” on Fahlström—has been his complex nationality. He was born in Brazil to Swedish and Norwegian parents, then sent back to Sweden; then he lived in Italy and France; and then finally New York, where he had his most productive years—though he was still always traveling. According to Kelley, what also worked against Fahlström were his politics, which were very topical compared with other pop artists who did not engage with politics. He was also interested in narrative; his compositions were busy; and finally, his graphic style and use of color were common in the craft (not the art) world. Kelley additionally mentions that Fahlström’s practice was more conceptual than pop. See Mike Kelly, “Myth Science: On Öyvind Fahlström,” in Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism. Ed. John C. Welchman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 158–177.
13. Öyvind Fahlström, “Historical Painting,” Flash Art, vol. 43 (December 1973–January 1974), 14
14. In later works, such as Seven Elements from S.O.M.B.A. (1974), Fahlström’s blobs broke “free to drift independently, or congeal in little clumps of cartoonish matter floating on a white ground.” See Susan Tallman, “Pop Politics: Öyvind Fahlström’s Variables,” Arts, vol. 65, no. 4 (1990), 16.
15. Fahlström, “Historical Painting.”
16. Tallman, “Pop Politics,” 15. See also Fahlström, “Description of Five Paintings,” in Manuel Borja Villel, JeanFrancois Chevrier, Immanuel Wallerstein, Octavi Rofes, Suely Rolnik, and Öyvind Fahlström, Öyvind Fahlström: Another Space for Painting (Barcelona: Museu D’Art Contemporani De Barcelona and Actar, 1990), 258; and Raphael Rubenstein, “Fahlström Afresh,” Art in America, vol. 89, no. 7 (2001), 69.
17. Quoted from Rubenstein, “Fahlström Afresh,” 69.
18. See Fahlström, “Description of Five Paintings,” in Borja Villel et al., Öyvind Fahlström, 258.
19. Quoted directly from World Map.
20. See Fahlström, “Historical Painting.”
21. See Borja Villel et al., Öyvind Fahlström, 269.
22. Donald Kuspit, “Oyvind Fahlström’s Political Puzzles,” Art in America, vol. 70, no. 4 (1982), 107.
CONCLUSION
1. In her notes on the manuscript, Lippard commented that she was out of town when they came up with the idea.
2. The registry has been housed at 55 Mercer Street, A.I.R. Gallery, and Artists Space during its history. Since 1994 it has been housed at the Mabel Smith Douglass Library at Rutgers University.
3. See Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 153, 160, 161, for a discussion of Lippard’s perspective on feminism’s place in AWC. Michael Aulich specifically sees feminism’s “deliberate circumvention of conventional forms of representation in art and the media” to be indebted to the actions of those involved in AWC. See “Vietnam, Fine Art, and the Culture Industry,” 76.
4. Yet on the whole, members have argued that the group was ineffective. Leon Golub explained at the time that AMCC functioned more as meetings for cultural change, rather than doing anything further.
5. It must be said here that Ault’s 1996 exhibition Cultural Economies: Histories from the Alternative Arts Movement, NYC, in the Drawing Center, and the vast catalog/book of the exhibition, Alternative Art, New York, 1965–1985: A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), introduced the subject of New York alternative art spaces, places, and voices to a significant audience (including myself). Ault explained in the catalog that such an exhibition was extremely necessary, for in her experience, she found “existing documentation of New York City’s highly influential alternative art culture of the 1970s and 1980s [to be] ephemeral, and its circulation . . . restricted.” She explained further that any significant writing about alternative art spaces and groups was limited to local newspapers, reviews for art journals, or self-published books that usually focus on individual institutions rather than contextualizing them within a larger field. As such, she said that the goal of her book was to ensure that alternative activities are not written out of the cultural histories of the recent past.
6. See Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980–1989 (New York: Random House, 1989), 385.
7. See “Editorial,” Art and Artists, January 1984, 2.
8. Ibid., 4.
9. Ibid.
10. Lucy Lippard, “Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Re presentation. Ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 341–358.
11. Martin, Theatre Is in the Street, 162.
12. Ara Merjian, “Diminishing Returns: Wartime Art Practices,” Modern Painters, April 2008, 54–61.
13. See press release for the Peter Blum exhibition, accessed at http://www.peterblumgallery.com/exhibitions/2008/fransisco-de-goya-los-desastres-de-la-guerra/press-release.
14. Since 2003, the group has held seven exhibitions of its work. The book documenting this work is simply titled Yo! What Happened to Peace? (Los Angeles: Yo! What Happened to Peace? 2007).
15. See Rakowitz’s website, http://michaelrakowitz.com/projects/return/.