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
. . . With a major influence on strategic 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 military complex of the United States.
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"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.
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Chapter: 'We Dissent': the Artists' Protest Committee and representation in/of Los Angeles
Introduction
The mythical status of Los Angeles has been in constant production and transformation. For many it is Lotusland, LaLa Land, a city which the visual arts are governed by a "sunshine muse," a pursuit of hedonistic indifference to politics and social injustice. Reliance on the urban freeway and monadic insularity of the all-consuming and polluting car has, further, led writers to refer to the city as the "ecology of evil." In 1972 Peter Plagens used this latter phrase to characterise the substance of the city often conventionally represented by the images of succulent palm trees and glistening chrome. His incisive article in the pages of Artforum, based in New York since June 1967 but first published in the San Francisco in 1962 and then in Los Angeles from October 1965 provided a necessary corrective to the image of Los Angeles as the unproblematic product of a 1960s boom; an image of a consumerist dream come true, in which artists, art patrons and new museums constructed the elements of a rival center to New York-a centre of "pop-chic"and technological bravura.
Plagen's Ecology of Evil was an important landmark, with arguments and analyses which were further developed by Mike Davis in his City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, published in 1990. However, two years after his socio-cultural critique of Los Angeles and representations of it, Plagens published Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast, which is a more conventional history of the visual culture of that city. Although Plagens, a Los-Angeles-based critic in the 1960s, provides a first hand account of art and artists, Sunshine Muse is devoid of the perspectives and methodology that characterise his earlier article. Not only are examples of events and works produced by, for instance, the Artist's Protest Committee in 1965 and 1966 absent, but also the politics of both recent and contemporary counter-culture and the activist side of Los Angeles visual culture are neglected. The difference between Plagens' article and his book is not an unexpected paradox. It is, rather, a significant characteristic of transformations and developments in intellectual activity in the United States since the Second World [p. 16] War. A parallel on the East Coast . . . Both in Los Angeles and New York, artists and intellectuals engaged with relationships between art, culture and politics in paradoxical, if not, contradictory ways.
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. . . In 1965, in the midst of the Johnson administration's first hundred days, legislation for the progressive reforms of the "Great Society" was being passed at home while abroad there was a major escalation of the war in Vietnam and United States interventions variously pursued in the Dominican Republic and Indonesia. Consumerist expectations, increasing affluence for some groups and support for progressive legislation was matched by a growing collective dissent, most intensely focused on U.S. foreign policy and interventions. The year 1965 was also a major one for Civil Rights in which the interconnections between racism, economic oppression and social inequalities produced struggles and protests with one urban irruption in the heart of Los Angeles itself: the "Watts Riots" in the August of that year. The range of critical responses to these contemporary events demonstrate the difficulties and problems of articulating political consciousness within a post-McCarthyite culture hostile to such utterances. Artists and intellectuals were, like many other groups, caught up in the dilemmas of these situations and in finding ways of combining a broad historical understanding of postwar developments with effective responses to new developments with which they disagreed. Their dissent was manifest both through the "non-compliance" of members of a burgeoning counter culture at odds with the moral, social, sexual and political norms of Cold War America and through organised interventions by artists, writers, and intellectuals who called for Americans "to end your silence." It is an example of the latter which I want to examine as a specific instance the work of the Artist's Protest Committee, a large collective formed in 1965 and active throughout that year in a variety of projects, the most spectacular completed in early 1966.
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In 1966, Hopps was struggling with the Pasadena trustees' discomfort with his radical reputation first forged as founder of the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1957 and then as a curator of innovative exhibitions at the [Pasadena Art] Museum. In 1965, too, he had been embroiled in the complications of the activities of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in promoting United States values through the exhibition of the work of national artists at the VIII Bienal de Sao Paulo, Brazil. Hopps selected and organised the United States exhibition for the Pasadena Museum chosen to represent the country . . .
The history of the production and the reception of the Tower is significant not least because of its status as a collective work, as a "monument" and as an interventionist "event." However, in dominant accounts and institutions of "modern art" such aspects make the Tower of marginal interest: it no longer exists to be curated, conserved and exhibited; it was prompted by political protest, even "tendency;" its collective production remainders paradigmatic issues of authenticity and authorship; its first context was a "counter-culture" which was critical of those institutions dedicated to the preservation of official and consensual cultural values. In 1966, it was these very areas of "marginal interest" that provided the bases of alternative, even oppositional possibilities. Then, measures of the sign value of the Tower included the relative effectiveness, the appropriateness, the creative power of the "work" as a representation of artists' and intellectuals' response to currently pressing social and political issues. Importantly, in the early Cold War it was the first and, on this scale, only time when artists in Los Angeles realised the power of political co-operation in the production of art. Prior to 1965, the various strands of artistic activity in southern California were apolitical with respect to the conventional institutions and traditions of political activity. There did exist a small, highly influential social and cultural nexus of artists and poets in Los Angeles and San Francisco, in the 1950s and early 1960s, whose politics were rooted in the legacies of bohemia and [p. 19] the avant-garde of Dada and Surrealism and transformed by a specific counter-cultural formation. These artists are often associated with what has been called "Beat Culture." Recent historical and political recovery of such artists' work can be signalled, initially, by citing the title of a publication, from 1992, Wallace Berman: Support the Revolution, which is part of a larger body of recent literature on the period. Some of the "Beat Culture" artists, including Berman, participated in the Tower partly because for them the "dissent" it represented was not determined by institutional or careerist interests. This was important for such artists, who regarded this manner of collective dissent as crucial both to the anti-war movement and to a critique of the capitalist fascination with the cult of artistic persona characteristic of the gallery and the museum system.
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Two groups, with major roots in New York, had been formed more or less at the same time, in early 1965, to discuss the possibilities of collective protest against the war in Vietnam . . . [They] sponsored a large-format protest statement in The New York Times entitled End Your Silence, and signed by 407 writers and artists . . . The prime movers were writers linked to The Nation, in particular Denise Levertov and the novelist Mitchell Goodman . . . A group of painters, including Rudolf Baranik, [p. 23], Elaine de Kooning, Ad Reinhardt and Anthony Toney, who were also preparing their own statement, joined the protest. End Your Silence was placed by The New York Times below a report on The C.I.A. and How It Grew, detailing some of the Agency's covert activities. Two pages later . . . 16,916 Protestant Clergymen Say- Initiate Negotiations Now . . . the front page of the same edition of the New York Times, Johnson Refuses to Halt Bombings; Again Asks Talks . . . on the base of the page 15,000 White House Pickets Denounce Vietnam War . . . reporting a picket of the White House on 17 April, organised by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and including Women Strike for Peace, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and several Civil Rights organisations . . . two reasons for the second protest letter so soon after the first . . . the United States' invasion of the Dominican Republic and signals of an impending escalation of action in Vietnam . . .
. . . Irving Petlin, like Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, had lived in Paris in the late 1950s and 1960s when intellectuals needed to find ways to circumvent institutional failures to protest effectively against French colonialism. Petlin had, for example, witnessed the drafting in the back of a Parisian art gallery, of the Manifesto of 121 signed by French intellectuals in 1960 advocating "insubordination" to France's colonial war in Algeria. In 1965, Petlin, then teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), attempted to mobilise artists in protest against what he, and others, regarded as the early stages of an immoral, dirty and shameful United States parallel to French activity in Algeria and, prior to 1954, Indochina. Los Angeles had traditionally been a city without organised political activity, at least not in comparison to European cities and not even to that which characterised New York. San Francisco was marginally different, with protests against the Un-American Activities Committee of the United States Congress, but it was, arguably, the small bohemian community of California that fostered values of liberty and dissent taken up by the New Left in the 1960s. On the other hand, there was a politicised character to the postwar economy of southern California which was military and [p. 26] science-based. California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) in Pasadena provided a focus that produced the Los Angeles aerospace industry. As Mike Davis (City of Quartz) argues:
"Nowhere else in the country did there develop such a seamless continuum between the corporation, laboratory and classroom as in Los Angeles, where Cal Tech via continuous cloning and spinoffs became the hub of a vast wheel of public-private research and development that eventually included the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Hughes Aircraft (the world center of airborne electronics), the Air Force's Space Technology Laboratory, Aerojet General (a spinoff of the latter), TRW, the Rand Institute and so on."
Ferus and the politics of the Los Angeles art community
Two major observations loomed large in Petlin's conversations with like-minded artists, poets, playwrights and intellectuals about protests against United States involvement in Vietnam in the heartland of military and profit-driven southern California. First, there was no institutional support for protest or for the use and display of visual culture in a critical and political way. Second, high culture was an important activity, process and pleasure for its participants and collectors, many of whom were in the military and science-based corporations and institutes. Could artists subject this high culture to a shudder, or even more fundamentally remove it from its lovers? Petlin was aware that one way of finding out whether Los Angeles artists were prepared to engage in such debate and potential action was to test the attitudes of those who had been associated with the Ferus Gallery. Opened by Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps in 1957 on La Cienega Boulevard, it was regarded in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the avant-garde artists' gallery of the West Coast. Within a year and a half of opening, Hopps found a new partner, Irving Blum, with commercial experience, and moved the gallery to "a perfectly designed Beverly Hills setting, "across the street." In 1962 Hopps became curator and soon acting director of the small Pasadena Museum of Art, where he held DuChamp's first museum retrospective in October 1963. Hopps had cultivated the Arensbergs, collectors of Cubist, Dadaist and Surrealist works and major patrons of Duchamp, who had a home in the Hollywood Hills. With the Ferus Gallery he provided a base for the mix of such commercial and collecting interests with the work and social networks of Beat Culture, particularly the circle around Wallace Berman. The Ferus Gallery provided Berman's public debut, in 1957, resulting in his conviction and fine for obscenity. In July 1962, it had given Warhol his first major exhibition. The artists around the Ferus Gallery, who were committed to a variety of modernist traditions and subcultures (ranging from Beat to hot rod, motorcycle and deer hunting), included John Altoon, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz, [p. 27] Craig Kauffman, Allen Lynch, John Mason, Ed Moses, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha and Peter Voulkos. For those linked to the Beat movement, around Wallace Berman, an open, interracial and sexually libertarian culture was advocated. This was distinct from the community who saw themselves more self-consciously as professional artists and, therefore, as part of a "Ferus group." These arts were described by the poet David Meltzer, who knew both circles well, as "lumberjacks" because of their shirts and personas:
"They were much more the professional artists . . . Male display and male competition. They would be the contingency in the lumberjack shirts, and then you'd have the Berman contingency, the ethereal, exotic creatures . . . There was a great giving of work to each other in the [Berman] group. There was much more cross-pollination than in the lumberjack camps-they rubbed shoulders but they were into cars, talking paint-clean some brushes, get back to work."
Blum, too, recalls the effects of the macho artists obsessed by motorcycling and surfing. By mid-1965, Los Angeles artists from the Ferus Gallery singled out for promotion were Bell, Bengston and Irwin. They, along with Judd, Newman, Poons, and Stella, had been chosen by Hopps for the USIA exhibition at the VIII Bienal de Sao Paulo . . . Kienholz showed in both the Ferus and Dwan Galleries. Petlin recalls that, in conversation with Craig Kauffman, in spring 1965, it was decided to call a meeting of artists to discuss the war in Vietnam. The venue was to be the Dwan Gallery, which had opened in Westwood in 1960 with John Weber joining it in 1962. Although there were no way of predicting who would turn up, it was thought that the views of two of the various types of Los-Angeles-based artists, connected to the Ferus Gallery and with links to the Dwan Gallery network, would be a good indication: Ed Kienholz and Larry Bell. The former was regarded as a potential supporter because of the apparently politicised nature of his work. In 1963 (June-July), the Dwan Gallery included in its Kienholz exhibition The Illegal Operation (1962), on the subject of back-street abortion, and National Banjo on the Knee Week (1963), with ambiguous national references including the United States flag. In 1964 (September-October), the Dwan Gallery showed his Three Tableaux (The Birthday, While Visions of Sugar Plums Danced in their Heads, and Back Seat Dodge-'38, all 1964, with strong sexual and social signifiers. [p. 28] Kienholz was also known as a ferocious and strong-minded character-one of the Ferus group "Lumberjacks." Larry Bell, on the other hand, produced abstract sculptures that became associated with emphases on materials, shapes, and structure in early Minimalist and systems work. He was also regarded as a more "ethereal" personality whose career had developed rapidly in the previous year. Petlin phoned both to test the potential response to the call for a meeting of artists. Kienholz was adamantly negative and pro-war, mainly as a solidarity with blue-collar Marines; it was not until later in the 1960s with for example The Portable War Memorial and The Eleventh Hour Final (both 1968) that Kienholz's view of the war changed. Although this was something of a surprise to Petlin, as Walter Hopps recalls: "Kienholz . . . was a kind of libertarian anarchist: he wasn't in any sense leftwing, and he was totally sceptical of any political party. Irving Blum recalls Kienholz's works as having "an excessively moral edge and overtone" and his personality as 'a kind of fascist temperament influenced by his frontier and hunting background, leading him to have "a complete arsenal wherever he has lived. He's had rifles, shotguns, pistols, hand grenades, one thing or another." Kienholz has talked about his Republican background, his love for his country, and claimed that "I'm probably apolitical because I think that politics stink."
He also recalls not talking about politics much in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Los Angeles. Larry Bell, on the other hand, was very positive and supportive of the proposals.
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[p. 29] La Cienega Boulevard provided a particular street culture; in the late 1950s and early 1960s the area was a tenderloin district full of prostitutes, gay bars and the signifiers of a Los Angeles art boom with galleries for both tyro and experienced collectors and spectators. The art boom was an emergent phenomena that could be targeted. What if this high-culture presence could be taken away as a vivid protest? Could the denial of cultural pleasure draw attention to the realities of political and military behaviour?
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[p. 31] . . . Cultural managers in Los Angeles were fancying that the city was capable of challenging New York as a polar alternative art centre on the West Coast. The Monday night art walk with the galleries lit and open to the hundreds and thousands of visitors was an important signifier of the city's cultural aspirations, which were signalled also by the recent opening of the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with the then largest gallery floor space in the country . . . This weekend, like earlier ones, also saw other major protests in Los Angeles, mostly "Teach-Ins" and "Teach-outs" at colleges and universities.
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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[p. 33] The phrase "ladder of escalation" had a particular currency at the time. Although "escalation," using the metaphor of the escalator, had been used in the late 1950s to mean the "controlled exchange of ever larger weapons in war, leading to the destruction of civilisation," the "ladder of escalation" was first coined in 1962 by Herman Kahn in Thinking the Unthinkable. He used it to convey a process of conflict between two powers:
"Each side may take certain positive steps either to bring the other to the bargaining table or to apply pressure during the negotiations. Sometimes these pressures tend to decrease with time or with a temporary solution to the problem at hand. At other times there is a tendency for each side to counter the other pressure with a somewhat stronger one of its own. This increasing pressure step by step is called "escalation."
William Kaufmann, writing in The McNamara Strategy (1964), indicates that the phrase had become current usage in the strategic studies community, including at the RAND Corporation. The highly influential military strategist Bernard Brodie had already analysed the concept of "escalation" in a RAND Working Paper (September 1962), and went on to publish an important work, in 1966, with "escalation" in its title, as Herman Kahn (also a RAND analyst) had done in 1965. Kahn proposed a careful graduation from rung one to rung 44, which had a "powerful impact upon decision-makers and strategists alike." The artist's use of the "ladder of escalation," in their three-fold demonstration, was a specific reference to the dangers of a change from a limited to a general war and one in which nuclear capabilities might eventually figure. They also saw that the phrase was being used to [p. 34] mean strategic escalation of war fighting by a technologically superior nation on a technologically inferior country . . .
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 organisation anywhere else in the world, the RAND Corporation has become internationally famous and controversial, for bringing 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; strategies 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-story, 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 organisations 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.
. . . 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]
[p. 54, Footnote 87] One of them was Dr. Daniel Ellsberg, who was a national security expert and "hawk" at RAND from 1959 to 1964. He was one of the RAND members drafted by McNamara to work in the Department of Defense where he worked until 1967 when he returned to RAND and worked on McNamara's History of U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam Policy (later known as the "Pentagon Papers."] The total number of RAND analysts working on this forty-seven-volume report was second only to the number of government employees in the team of thirty-five military and civilian analysts. Ellsberg's views on the war began to change after his visits to Vietnam [1964-1967] and before leaving to join MIT in 1970 he smuggled out a copy of the Pentagon Papers [of the four legitimate copies of the report permitted outside of government, two were given to RAND for reference). One of his supporters was Anthony J. Russo, another ex-RAND analyst.
[p. 37] With the "McNamara revolution" in the Pentagon, which began at the start of the Kennedy administration, it was claimed by J.R. Goldstein (RAND Vice-president and with the corporation since its inception.) that "McNamara's techniques were RAND's techniques," Their extensive influence was felt in the Bureau of Budget, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and elsewhere. RAND employees were also used on commissions, committees, task forces and planning groups: "The 1966 RAND Annual Report, for example, stated that some ninety staff members were holding down 269 advisory posts, with groups serving such entities as the White House, Department of Defense, Commerce Department, and the National Science Foundation. In February 1967 Sol Stern published an incisive essay in Ramparts on the "McNamara revolution," which he argued was born of changes in the technology and economics of modern warfare and by America's emergence as a self-appointed policeman for the world. The revolution was brought about by those professional defense intellectuals-many of them RAND alumni . . . a revolution carried through by the most unlikely of revolutionaries: a business executive named Robert Strange McNamara. Stern, quoting the new president of RAND Corporation, demonstrates that McNamara's "hired intellectuals"-regarded the war in Vietnam "as merely a "problem" instead of recognising it as a crisis in American ideology and values-a crisis which demands that some questions be asked because decent values demand them, and that some solutions be rejected not because they are invalid but because they are wrong."
For McNamara, the roles of intellectuals within, and as outside critics of, government were historically in transformation. RAND provided him with a great resource of "defense intellectuals," one of the new intellectual elites in the United States. Many ideas and philosophies, for example, about nuclear weapons and their use, theories of deterrence and limited [p. 38] war were generated by civilians, by intellectuals, working independently from the military. Crucially, too, as Kolkowicz argues, these new intellectual elites became "managers of the defense establishment, of vast budgetary resources, and of scientific-military establishments. Theodore H. White, the eminent historian of the American establishment, wrote in Life magazine, in 1967, that there is a "new power system in American life, a new priesthood unique to this country and this time, of American action-intellectuals. In the past decade, this brotherhood of scholars has become the most provocative and propelling influence on all American government and politics, and their ideas are shaping our defense and guiding our foreign policy. He went on the single out RAND as one of the "best investments" made by the United States government and "if Rand did not exist today there would be a most compelling reason for creating it."
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