Francis Frascina Art, politics and dissent: Aspects of the art left in sixties America, Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York, 1999, 248 pp., 1999, 1997, 1965, 1964, 1960s, 1948
Introduction: researching alternative histories of the art left
[p. 1] . . .
[p. 2] Specific images of two sites signify major aspects of the research for the book. . . . The first image, familiar to many art historians, is the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, on the outskirts of Los Angeles . . .
The museum, including the research center, is one of seven programmes of the John Paul Getty Trust, a private operating foundation devoted to the visual arts. It has enormous financial backing . . . [filled with objécts]. High Security, a booking systems for visits and all of the idyllic control of cultural selection confirming its status within the paradoxical character of modern museums. A new much larger Getty Center for the History and the Humanities and a museum, twice the size of the present one, [p. 3] opened in 1997, just down the freeway . . . the research institute was described in the Getty Calendar (Winter, 1995) as a "think tank that gathers researchers from different disciplines and stimulates them to communicate with each other by ways they otherwise wouldn't." The phrase "think tank" has often been used to describe the RAND (Research ANd Development) Corporation, a research institution, a few miles down the coast in Santa Monica, with similarly high levels of financial backing and security. Here since 1948 when RAND became a corporation with the help of various sources of funding including a grant of $1 million from the nascent Ford Foundation, researchers from different disciplines have been provided to stimulate them to communicate with each other and provide theoretical models on many different topics . . .
With a major influence on stategic military planning since the Second World War and particularly during the sixties, the RAND Corporation's role in the escalation of United States action in Southeast Asia led artists to picket the Corporation's building in 1964 . . . In Los Angeles the institutions of "culture" have long been connected to those other institutions in southern California that, in various ways, serve the industrial militiary complex of the United States.
The museum as an archive, repository, container, guardian of the canon of critical approval is one of the conventional sites for art and design history. The museum is, for many researchers, a site of abundance, of plentitude, of pleasure. It provides an array of objects for study, interpretation and explanation. From a variety of specializing perspectives, it is a confirmation of 'presence' with more than enough potential for cultural historians to provide critical texts on 'absense.' With the John Paul Getty Museum we have intimate relationships between corporate capital, the oil business, the power of family dynasties in the United States, possessive individualism and obsessive accumulation. This . . . is . . . not many miles away from . . . the district of Watts, a heartland of economic deprivation and racist oppression in central Los Angeles. In August 1965, a few years before the Getty re-creation was begun, Watts was in flames, in protest; an urban parallel to the rural centers of 'Civil Rights campaigns in the South. This was less than two months after the Artists' Protest Committee in Los Angeles had targeted the RAND Corporation, the recently opened Los Angeles County Art Museum and "art gallery row" on North La Cienega Boulevard, in a series of portraits primarily against United States military action in Vietnam.