Francis Frascina Art, politics and dissent: Aspects of the art left in sixties America, Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York, 1999, 248 pp., 1965
"We Dissent": "Stop Escalation"
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As the Los Angeles Free Press reported, the threefold event was "an unprecedented protest of the Los Angeles community with "more than a thousand artists and their friends participating. . . . People and the Free Press were surprised by the lack of main stream media coverage. Felix Landau and David Stuart Galleries, among others, [p. 32] covered art work in white paper, and "Stop Escalation" symbols added.] . . . Not all artists supported the event. For example, Billy Al Bengston was opposed to the Ferus Gallery participating, saying that with the war going on all the people in Orange County had money to buy his art. Orange County was a conservative area with people making money from military-related industries in southern California.
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RAND: Artist Protest
This action was continued in 1965 in parallel to the statements by the Artists' Protest Committee in The New York Times with a demonstration at the RAND Corporation. The latter was one site of concern because of the contractual links between the State Department and the RAND Corporation and the latter's involvement in American foreign policy in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. In an article in 1963 Saul Friedman described the RAND Corporation as
"The paramilitary academy of United States strategic thinking . . . [which] does the basic thinking behind the weapons systems, the procurement policies, and the global strategy of the United States. Unlike any strategic research organization anywhere else in the world, the RAND Corporation has become internationally famous and controversial, for bring a new mode of thought to problems of cold war strategy."
Its origins, though, are rooted in the military and ideological concerns of the early Cold War. In late 1945, without Congressional approval and without taking bids, General H.H. "Hap" Arnold, Commanding General of the Army Air Forces, signed a contract for the creation of an experimental institution linking the Douglas Aircraft Company and the Air Force. Known as "Project RAND," it was set up as a department of Douglas under an initial $10 million contract with the Air Force, which was one of the most unusual and long-term contracts between the government and a private institution. It allowed RAND extensive freedom to initiate research and eventually to extend its clients to various elements of the Pentagon, the Atomic Energy Commission and NASA. In 1948 RAND became a Corporation, independent of Douglas, with the help of various sources of funding including a grant of $1 million from the nascent Ford Foundation.
Two of the RAND Corporation's major objectives were to advance techniques of intercontinental warfare and to combat Communism, particularly in an atmosphere of Cold War partisanship. Although it was a research haven, all scholars within it had to relate their work to military applications and warfare with the knowledge that views and publications [p. 35] could end up in the White House or Pentagon. RAND's output was huge-thousands of books and reports as well as memoranda, briefings and communications, with about half of its annual work labeled secret. It maintained enormous security and secrecy, with all of its analysts required to have top-secret security clearances. Such an institution drew differing views. To those who viewed it positively RAND enabled the United States military to maintain a sophisticated, efficient and technological superpower status. To sceptics, mostly in the early 1960s on the political left, RAND was regarded as "a vital brain centre for the military-industrial complex, inspiring costly new weapons, mapping out counter-insurgency plans and computing kill ratios and "megadeaths." RAND strategists invented the words "overkill" and "megadeaths" in their massive reliance on computer predictions in assessing ICBM (Intercontinental Continental Ballistic Missile) programmes.
Through sources in the RAND Corporation, information on its theoretical proposals for action in Vietnam were made known. For example: proposals for a programme of systematic uprooting of communities and of hamlet relocation; the diversion of rivers to dry up deltas; the drying up of the sea to locate fish in strategically enclosed and guarded villages; stategies of ethnic or population cleansing; the use of concentration camps. The overall RAND-derived policy was to make the country a "freefire" zone to unleash the full effects of American technological warfare on the "Vietcong." It was decided to picket the RAND Corporation to publicise its secret "think tank" proposals. Its base, built in 1953 with assistance from the Ford Foundation, was a two storey, two-million dollar, palm-studded building overlooking the beach at the end of Santa Monica Pier. A five-story building, providing more office space, was added in 1961. By 1962, RAND was earning about $3.5 million a year and its two subsidiaries Analytic Services (ANSER) and Systems Development Corporation (SDC) earning $1 million and $20 million a year respectively. All were non-profit organizations reinvesting resources for research and equipment. Staff in 1963 amounted to 1100, of whom about 730 were researchers, mostly post-doctoral, recruited through a scouting system from the science and university centers of the West Coast and Northeast. Members of the Corporation had established a community of intellectuals in the city, especially in Santa Monica, many of them young art collectors and patrons of galleries, with a public reputation for progressive research.
However, Petlin had an inside source who discussed with him less publicized activities and deliberations. He had met Roman Kolkowicz, a member of the RAND Social Science Department and specialist in Soviet politics, at a party. Kolkowicz, from a family shattered by the Holocaust, was a refugee from Eastern Europe and from totalitarian Communism, which he abhorred. However, when hired by RAND, he wa greatly concerned not only by the escalation of the war in southeast Asia but [p. 36] also with the parallels between the Holocaust and the threat of genocide in Vietnam. He was prepared to share information with Petlin so as to aid the broader protest against United States foreign policy. They met secretly and never in the same place twice. Knowing this, Petlin and other members of the picket were aware of the necessity for their own secrecy and organized the event without the use of telephone contact. By this time the Artists' Protest Committee believed that it had been infiltrated or at least listened to. Postcards were handed to trusted people with details of time and instructions for each group from different areas of the city to meet at John Weber's apartment before going on to surround the RAND building. Weber was an important member of the initial group and his apartment, near Santa Monica Pier, was a well-known place for artists to gather. However, at a meeting, Weber's door was smashed down by two Los Angeles policemen from the "Red" squad: one hit Petlin in the chest and another photographed him and others illegally. Despite the picket's care, the police and the RAND Corporation knew they were coming. This knowledge may have been the reason for the Artists' Protest Committee to announce its demonstration, which appeared in the the Los Angeles Free Press on the day before the protest, on 26 June, when leaflets entitled "Why the RAND Corporation?" were handed out . . .
The artists and their friends were to meet by the well-known Merry-Go-Round on the Santa Monica Pier, followed by an orderly march to the RAND Corporation with the possibility of a rally in front of the building, with Linus Pauling, Nobel laureate, as one of the speakers, if a loudspeaker permit could be obtained. Alarmed and upset by the event, representatives of the Corporation invited a delegation from the picket into the building and offered them a future discussion, a closed debate. Petlin knew the possible strategy of the Corporation, which had been made aware of the potential protest, as had the Pentagon, by police activity. His source at RAND had given him a copy of a TWX (Scrambling machine) communication from Robert McNamara, then Secretary of State for Defense, saying "engage them," by all means find out what these people think. Get some sense of their criticism of the War, milk [p. 37] them for information. We need to plan ahead to nullify public opposition and to handle the public relations aspects. Knowing of this communication, Petlin was confident that the RAND Corporation would respond positively to a proposal for an open meeting . . . The spring and summer of 1965 was a time when the Johnson administration was very nervous about and sensitive to protests, wishing both to pacify, by sending out speakers, to university campuses and the like, and to secure more information about the opposition. RAND was also heavily involved in Southeast Asia and provided a large number of the elite group brought in by McNamara to run the Pentagon. [Footnote 87]
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"It is, therefore, not surprising that a request for a closed and a public dialogue was agreed by the RAND representatives. Petlin knew that this would be so. [Peltlin recalls those in the closed debate were Larry Bell, Harold Dreyfus, a businessman, Robert Duncan, the poet, Leon Golub, Lloyd Hamrol, and Craig Kauffman, Max Kozloff, the critic, Michael McClure, the playwirght, Annette Michelson, critic and soon to be contributing editor on Artforum, Irving Petlin; Golub's recollection adds Rolf Nelson, gallery owner, Jim Henderson, photographer.] Footnote 99.
[p. 54, Footnote 99] The RAND Staff invited were: Bernard Brodie, Social Science Department, history and strategy; Edward C. De Land, Computer Science Department, mathematical models of blood chemistry; functions of organs, etc.; Alton Frye, Social Science Department, politics of space, etc.; Brownlee Haydon, Assistant to the President, Communications; Amron Katz, Electronics Department, physicist, reconnaissance specialist, attendee of Pugwash Conferences, etc.; Roman Kolkowicz, Social Science Department, specialist in Soviet politics; Leon Lipson, Social Science Department (Consultant), Professor of Law, Yale University; Guy Pauder, Social Science Department, a specialist in southeast Asia; Robert Wolfson, Logistics Department, economist. Brodie, in particular, was "a pioneer of modern strategic studies in the nuclear era, whose work has powerfully influenced generations of strategists and decision makers. [Introduction, in Kolkowicz (ed.), The Logic of Nuclear Terror, p. 3] Brodie was an intellectual, a civilian theorist, whose work on strategic deterrence policy from 1946 onward led to the evolution of the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD).
. . . [p. 39] Security was such that when artists visited the bathroom a guard accompanied them to, and stood by, the urinals.
The Dialogue on Vietnam was held at 8:00 pm on August 3 at the Warner Playhouse [capacity 400] on North La Cienega Boulevard. Twice the capacity showed up . . . The Free Press reporter, Albert Mall, doubted whether any had won, since do one had sought compromise positions on southeast Asia. Dr. Judd Marmor, UCLA, Psychiatry, moderated. The artists' side, Dreyfus, Golub, Kozloff and Petlin thought they had won both the closed and public debate. Bernard Brodie, Guy Pauker and [Charlie] Dollard represented RAND, opening with "we are not here to defend government policy," and proceeded to do just that. The artists were accused of failing to condemn acts of violence on both sides of the conflict, B52 bombs and Third World guerilla warfare.
[p. 40] ". . . on the substance of what the United States was doing in Vietnam, including the methods employed and their origins in the RAND's defense of the military, there was no difference between the two debates. The artists attributed United States methods and their origins to historical Fascist methods of state terror, with technology being used as a new potential method of genocide either through indifference and inattention or through intent and focus: technological made either possible. The RAND representatives argued that different technologies and methods were essentially down to the nature of the difference between the two societies in the conflict: each fought with what was best for itself. For the artists the relative effects a B-52 bombers and Third-World guerrilla warfare was ignored by RAND's ideological defense of the United States in Vietnam. A basic moral gulf that separated the two sides was the artists' disbelief that these intelligent RAND people could feel so positive about continuing such an unequal policy against a peasant society. A basic historical and political gulf centered on the role of the United States as an imperialist power since the late 1940s, particularly in southeast Asia. Clearly Petlin's source in RAND shows that there were dissenters in the Corporation. The dissenters, and those at other think-tanks, expressed their views publicly only in 1969 when the Artists' Protest Committee's predictions about escalation, including the presence of 540,000 American service personnel in Vietnam had been proved. The Hudson Institute, headed by former RAND theorist Herman Kahn, put forward radical reductions in United Sttates presence . . . Then in a letter to the New York Times by six members of the RAND Corporation, including Ellsberg, urging the United States to make a unilateral withdrawal of its troops from Vietnam within a year . . .
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In the same issue of the Los Angeles Free Press, the Artists' Protest Committee placed a double-page advertisement with 174 signatories [Footnote 63]
Footnote 63: p. 51-52 Los Angeles Free Press, 2:20 (14 May 1965), 6-7 The signatories were: Peter Alexander; John Altoon; Sam Amato; Hans Ashauer; Ralph F. Ashauer; Ruth Baker; John Barbour; Molly Barnes; Walt Batterton; Larry Bell; Steven Belzman; Patricia Berger; Charles Brittin; Barbara Brittin; John Bryson; Robert Borsodi; Dr. Robert Bone; Sherry Brody; Edward Brooks; William H. Brown; Dorothy Ann Brown; Gilbert Brown; Barcaly Brown; Wm. Brun; Susan Brustman; F.W. Butts; John Caruthers; James Childs; Robert Cheuy; James Church; Jean Clark; Bernard Cohen; W. Pachaic Cooper; Ron Cooper; John Coplans; Emily W. Cordova; Raymond J. Cordova; Tamara Cotiauox; Barbie Cowling; Claire Deland; Annette del Zoppo; Jackson Dillard; Kenneth H. Dillon; Dejon Dillon; Morton Dimondstein; Paul Donin; Peter Douvos; Gilbert Draper; Draper; Harold Dreyfus; Maurice Ehrlich; Boyd Elder; Elliot Elgart; Herb Elsky; Evan Engber; Mark Freedman; Lola Feiner; Lilly R. Fenichel; Bruria Finkel; Max Finkelstein; Richard Frazier; Judy Friedman; Gene Frumkin; Frank O. Gehry; Milton Gershgoren; M. Gochenouer; Marvin Grayson; Edith & Lou Gross; Carol Hampton; Norman Hartwig; Clythe Hatch; Claude W. Hayward; Maryanne Heiman; Arleen Hendler; Maxwell Hendler; Ro Hineser; Robin Hirsch; Marvin Hughes; Charles A. Jaeger; Wallace Johnson; Pat Ishii; Ben Kalka; Craig Kauffman; Paul R. Kaufman; Debbie Kazor; Eugene Kazor; Julie Keeler; Carol Kerlan; Stanley Kiesel; Jane Klein; Peter L. Kleinart; Eugene Klix; Richard Klix; Burt Kopelow; William Kosting; Art Kunkin; Ronald Kriss; Mary Kutila; Sandra Laemmle; Gladys Leider; Philip Leider; Arthur Levin; Joann Lopez; Lorraine Lubner; Marvin Lyons; John Maguire; Peter & Kat Marin; Lawrence Martin; Charles Mattox; Sharon McLaglen; Parke Meek; Arnold Mesches; Deena Metzger; C. McCome; Selma Moskowitz; Lee Mullican; Coliene Murphy; Tanya Neufeld; Anais Nin; James Olngy; Felicia Pappernow; Mallory Pearce; Edward M. Pearl; Sarah Petlin; Irving Petlin; Anna Purcell; Lavonne Regehr; Robert Reghr; Myrna Riseman; Paul Jay Robbins; Trina Robbins; Sandra Roch; Allen Ruppersberg; Claire Russell; Marion Sampler; Anne Saville; Ruth Saturensky; Joyce Schiller; Thomas Sevel; Al Shean; Charlotte Sherman; Stanley Miles Shugarman; Bernice Silberman; Herbert Silberman; Jerry Simon; Rick Soltz; Joan Spevack; Mike Steiner; Deborah Sussman; Michael Zebulon Swartz; Galya Tarmu; Richard Taylor; Edmund Teske; Matthew Thomas; Carol Tolin; David Tolin; Frederick A. Usher; Al Villalotu; Cliff Vaughhs; John Watson; Carole Westberg; Martial Westberg; John Weber; Richard Weston; Doug Wheeler; Nanci Wheeler; Sylvia Wolf; Ken Wynsma; Mary Yeomans; Colin Young; Curtis Zahn; Sid Zaro; Jill Zimmer.
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p. 41] You can call it cultural diplomancy
In the midst of the Artists' Protest Committee's activities wtih RAND, a report appeared in the New York Times drawing attention to the role of art and culture within the official apparatus of the state . . . An Andy Warhol and works by Joseph Albers, Karl Zerbe, Larry Rivers and Alexander Calder adorned the walls of the American Embassy in Madrid. Works were lent through the Art in Embassies programme, begun in 1963 . . . An Andy Warhol and works by Joseph Albers, Karl Zerbe, Larry Rivers and Alexander Calder adorned the walls of the American Embassy in Madrid.
At the same time, the United States Information Agency (USIA) was, through the State Department, involved in its own "cultural diplomacy" by planning the promotion of the United States at the VIII Bienal de Sao Paulo, Brazil, held from 2 September to 28 November. In the 1960s these events involved big money. Walter Hopps, chosen to organize [p. 42] the exhibition in 1965, remembers that it was normally around half a million dollars; at least $400,000 for Sao Paulo. Hopps recalls the highly charged political context of these exhibitions and places them in the light of the complexities of his own left-of-center commitments, his history of avant-gardist activity at the Ferus Gallery and his involvement with a high school classmate of Barbara Rose, Helen Goldberg, who he describes as having an "extreme political radicalism." According to Hopps, under Johnson's administration huge amounts of money were put at the disposal of the USIA to allow participation in the various biennials, including Venice in even years and Sao Paulo in odd years. Requests for participation in exhibitions would go to a cultural affairs officer at the State Department-"usually they were political hacks"-and then to the USIA, "a major propaganda arm, and it's an interesting cover for all sorts of CIA operatives . . . I have friends in the agency now and have had to deal with some. I've even used them for art errands." Whoever was chosen to be a State Department Commissioner to run an exhibition would be subject to the USIA's rules of the game, but a huge budget would be provided. Prior to this period, the State Department usually passed on such a job to MoMA or the Whitney.
[p. 42 ] Hopps recalls that Lois Bingham was "the op inside the Washington USIA branch and there were USIS [United States Information Service] field offices all over, usually connected with embassies and consulates and just full of CIA ops under cultural affairs cover with lots of money to help you get anything done." Significantly, Hopps states that there was no heavy interference with respect to the type of art, just an attitude by officials that "Now is the time to have big, high visibility, American presence." The way that Commissioners were chosen demonstrates how a particular intellectual patronage was perpetuated. The Commissioners from Sao Paulo in 1963, Martin Friedman, nominated around three people for the Venice job in 1964 and the USIA chose one of them. In 1964, Alan Solomon was selected to select contemporary art in New York, which was "an extraordinary show of Rauschenberg, Johns, Dine, Oldenburg on the one hand; and Morris Louis, Ken Noland, Frank Stella . . . John Chamberland, on the other. A blockbuster for Venice in '64." Hopps had helped out at Venice and was one of those nominated by Solomon. On his being chosen for Sao Paulo in 1965 ops came out from USIA, [to] creep around the [Pasadana] museum, chat with trustees, and so on . . . They made a real production of it." Hopps worked on the exhibition in late 1964 and early 1965 at a time when he was back into the drug culture he had been into in the 1950s, in Los Angeles. He recalls himself and his old friend Dennis Hopper being stoned out of their minds at one event and describes the contradictory aspects of "almost everything going on then."
[p. 43]' "I have an absolutely extreme-leftist girlfriend, and I'm working with colleagues at the IPS [Institute for Policy Studies). On the other hand I'm working on this big show in Brazil where every third person is a CIA undercover . . . the whole operation is a cover for all kinds of miserable agency activity and operations. So it was a terrible strain . . . I was first in Brazil just after the tanks had rolled and the generals put out . . . their socialist president . . . I ended up on three kinds of shit lists for signing anti-Franco petitions."
[p. 43] . . . Cultural image was clearly important for the foreign policy of the state, whether in embassies or in exhibitions. The State Department was tolerant of artists' radical statements as long as they could be contextualized by well-packaged "American" art. Hopps suggests that this art did not have to be connected to the "new American painting," though in the Sao Paulo in 1965 this was a major thread. Paintings by Newman, an "Abstract Expressionist," were placed at the center of an exhibiton of largely abstract works that provided the anodyne symbols of American individualism: work by Bell, Bengston and Irwin from Los Angeles, along with Judd, Poons and Stella from the East Coast. Concurrently with the USIA's activities and the Art in Embassies programme abroad, the Johnson administration was concerned with its public image at home. The legacy of the 1950s and the dissuasive processes of the CIA abroad and the agencies of the state at home were at the forefront of the thoughts of the Artists' Protest Committee. Even with a Democratic administration, which had a relatively progressive domestic reform program, dissenters risked a great deal. To ask Linu Pauling to address the RAND picket was to recall not only the strength of the previous protest but also an awareness of the potential for reprisals against those who dissented from the war . . .
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[p. 43] Watts as Signifier
By the end of 1965, the Artists' Protest Committee realised that none of the newspaper advertisements, debates, or demonstrations had made its voice heard as effectively as had been hoped. How could it take the weakness . . . [p. 44] of its position-the lack of institutional support and the minimal media coverage of their previous activities -and turn it into a strength? How could it do this urgently to represent their abhorrence at the activities of their leaders. In looking back to the Dialogue on Vietnam with the RAND Corporation on 3 August, artists from Los Angeles and southern California had much to be troubled about. Not only had the war in Vietnam greatly escalated but an internal war characterised by oppression, poverty and racism re-erupted. A week after the Dialogue on Vietnam, the Watts area of Los Angeles saw one of the largest uprisings that the nation had ever known. This 2.5-square mile core of south-central Los Angeles housed around half a million African-Americans, a number swelled by migrants from the rural south, in an urban slum. On 11 August 11 1965, the residents of Watts believed that a routine arrest was marked by the police's use of unnecessary force and the beating of a woman. This event lit a fuse. Years of police oppression and forceful repression coupled with poverty and an inadequate urban infrastructure exploded into six days of riots, looting and burning. Thirty-four people died, 1032 were wounded, 3952 were arrested and an estimated $40 million worth of damage was caused. The lead on the front page of the Los Angeles Free Press on 20 August, "The Negroes have voted," represented a widely held view in the commnity that normal democratic processes were ineffective for a large section of Los Angeles. For them, oppression, deprivation and the white power structure were root causes of the event. The editor of the Los Angeles Free Press, Art Kunkin, observed that anyone who criticized the city administration or Chief of Police Parker for their role in the disturbances "is called a Communist or a supporter of criminal elements. It is actually very dangerous in Los Angeles today to enter reasonable objections to the sensationalistic reporting and ridiculous charges of conspiracies. Protestors against the US war in Vietnam had similiar experiences in the legacy of McCarthyite condemnation of opposition as Communist, or criminal or conspiratorial or all three.
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"One symbol of the Watts area remained untouched. The three Watts Towers (99, 97 and 55 feet high) had been built over a thirty-three-year period by Sabatino (called Simon or Sam) Rodia, an Italian immigrant who earned his living as a tilesetter, as a butcher, as a labourer. When they were completed in 1954, Rodia left the property to a neighbour never to return. Made out of broken plates and bottles, shells and tiles on an armature of iron and concrete the towers were variously valued as, for example, folk art; symbols of independence, outside institutional confines; a public site with an assemblage of everyday, ephemeral recycled materials. Rodia died on 16 July 1965, a month before the riots. Within Watts, his Towers reminded inhabitants of the financial and social place of immigrant labour within the urban city geared to technology, entertainment and the car. The postwar Californian state master-plan, designed to build multi-million-dollar freeways within four miles of every metropolitan house, served only white car commuters and those able to afford airline ticketes in the enormous expansion of the use of the city's airports. The once efficient interurban transit service of the early 1900s was replaced by car dependency and creation of an underclass reliant on an overburdened and inadequate bus system. Arguably, Rodia's Towers were symbols of a Watts underclass. However, this did not prevent the works being appropriated differently within the "art world." For many of the artists of the region, the Towers signified the culturally resistant elements of assemblage, utilized as much in the subcultures of hot rod [p. 46] racing as in the Dadaist collages and tableaux of those in the centre and the periphery of Beat Culture. In many respects the emphases on collage and assemblage were characteristic of differences between West Coast artists and those in the East. However, the Towers also became appropriated within the Museum high culture. In 1961, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition, The Art of Assemblage, including the work of Bruce Conner, Ed Kienholz and Robert Rauschenberg, which served to legitimate assemblage as an art form within the canon. The catalogue by William Seitz included a positive discussion of the Watts Towers, including a statement by Rodia.
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