Michael Palmer Active boundaries; selected essays and talks, New Directions, 2008, 1966, 1965
Irving Petlin:
I lived in France during the years of the Algerian War of Independence. I had seen France transformed by that colonial war and had suffered along with many other people in Paris during the demonstrations. Having witnessed all the methods the French government used to try to suppress dissent against the war, I saw the same thing coming in the United States with Vietnam. I left Paris in 1964 and got to Los Angeles the following year. The Vietnam War was really beginning to heat up. I knew America was headed in exactly the same direction as France.
I was at UCLA, with Richard Diebenkorn, as a visiting artist. I came to realize that LA was a very conservative place, that the artists there seemed generally apolitical. I said, "Let's do an experiment. Let's call Craig Kauffman,"who was the most nonpolitical person I could think of in Los Angeles," and let's call Ed Kienholz, and see how they feel about some form of coordinated political activism." So I called Kauffman and he said, "Yeah, I would be interested in joining that," and we were stunned. And then we called Kienholz and he said, "You guys are letting our troops down." And I said to myself, You know something? It's impossible to predict what's going to happen here. So I thought, Let's call a meeting and see.
I called a meeting at the Dwan Gallery. About sixty people showed up, artists and others, including Phil Leider, who was then just beginning his editorship at Artforum, Walter Hopps, several dealers, and our host, John Weber, who was the gallery director. This was very much a group effort and a wide variety of artists from LA were also very involved, among them Lloyd Hamrol, Eric Orr, Tanya Neufeld, Twila Wilner, Harold Dreyfus, and Melvin Edwards. We had an open meeting to discuss the possibility of organizing events that would begin to challenge the war, and we decided to call ourselves the Artists' Protest Committee. We quickly adopted a symbol, which was a diminishing ladder-larger at the bottom than at the top. At the bottom it said STOP, and at the top it said, in smaller letters, ESCALATION. It was a simple logo, but it got all over Los Angeles in various forms. We organized several small events, all of which built up a kind of momentum. Meanwhile, the press ignored us. And some of the people in the group got frustrated because we were having an effect locally, but none outside of Los Angeles. So we decided to do something more spectacular and at the same time more specifically targeted at policymakers involved directly in the Vietnam War.
At that time, the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica was known as a wonderful place where nice liberal academics were doing research, going to the galleries and buying art, supporting all the liberal causes, civil rights, and so on. But unbeknownst to most people, all these RAND researchers were planning the most horrible things going on in Vietnam. The company was under contract with the Department of Defense and was developing the protected-hamlet concept, in which soldiers rounded up Vietnamese peasants, put them behind barbed wire, and declared the rest of the countryside a free-fire zone. We decided to organize a picket of the RAND Corporation. A lot of artists showed up at John Weber's place and we thought we had done everything possible to keep the meeting confidential-we didn't use the telephone, we communicated only by word of mouth and written notes. But just as we were about to leave for the RAND headquarters, the door burst open and the LA cops were upon us in John's apartment, photographing us as they came in. I got pushed to the floor. We don't know how they found out-maybe somebody among us was a plant. But when they left, we decided to march anyway. We went to the RAND Corporation and circled the building, carrying signs accusing the nice liberal academics of genocide and of planning the "safe hamlet" policy. And they came rushing out and said, "But there must be some mistake!" We said, "No, we know who you are and what you're doing."
The company was very embarrassed, obviously. The president of RAND came out and asked to speak to me and said, "We would like to hash out these issues with you. Create a committee and come and debate us inside the RAND Corporation, and we'll record it and make a tape available for you." And so I said, "Yes, we'll do that, but you have to debate us in public." We had already contacted the Warner Theater on La Cienega Boulevard, which had agreed to let us use its space if we could get RAND in an open debate. So the RAND people went back inside and came out again and said, "We accept." A source I had inside RAND told me that, while the discussions were going on, RAND got a telegram-actually a coded message-from Robert McNamara, then secretary of defense, telling the company to go ahead with the debate because the Johnson administration wanted to know what Americans who might become critical of the war might be thinking six months from now. And when we demanded a public forum, McNamara apparently sent back a cable saying, "Accept it. It's still more valuable than not having the debate." We were the radar, and they wanted to know what the radar was thinking. The Warner Theater had seats for four hundred people, but eight hundred showed up. We set up a loudspeaker system in the courtyard and people stayed, sitting outside or leaning against the wall, listening in. It was a really tumultuous occasion.
Despite all this, we still got no press, no larger resonance in the public's awareness of the widening war. That's when we decided to build something in a prominent spot-something physical that couldn't be avoided, that would be itself a kind of beacon for attention . . .
" . . .
(Frascina)