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
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. . . February 1966, the Artist's Tower of Protest, of Peace Tower, at the junction of La Cienega and Sunset Blvds. was dedicated with speeches by the artist Irving Petlin, ex-Green-Beret Master-Sergeant Donald Duncan, writer Susan Sontag, and the releasing by children of doves . . . Including work by 418 artists, this collective memorial had to be defended night and day against attacks by those who regarded such manifestations as un-American and at best a collusion with the "Communist menace," in Vietnam . . . Several of the defenders of the Tower were young men from Watts . . . In June 1965, two months before the outburst of dissent in Watts, the journal Ramparts observed that American neo-colonialist ambitions were mirrored by injustices and oppressions at home.
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[p. 6] There were thousands of visitors to the Artist's Tower of Protest which was significantly 'other' both to art institutions, such as the Los Angeles County Art Museum, and to the creative institutions of corporate capital, such as the RAND Corporation. Some visitors drove up from the galleries along La Cienega Boulevard having seen recent exhibitions of artists active in the Tower project, for example Mark di Suvero, Irving Petlin and Judy Gerowitz (Judy Chicago). Others came to see what artists associated with the radical Ferus Gallery and "Beat Culture," such as Wallace Berman, Jess (Collins) and Jay de Fero, were doing with Abstract Expressionists, Pop Artists and realists from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) era of the 1930s. Some of them were recipients of Wallace Berman's Semina, an alternative manifestation to the world of art journals such as Art Forum, then with its offices above the Ferus Gallery. Other visitors included Ken Kesey and his "Merry Pranksters" with their Day-Glo bus travelling around the West Coast conducting public "acid-tests," accompanied by amplified rock music, strobe lights and free-form dance. Yet others were Marines from San Diego wanting to smash the whole thing down. [When Ed Kienholz's retrospective [opened] at the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art with large controversies about pornography, sedition and censorship, the debate never included the threatened Tower of Protest. Similarly artist's protests in New York over the next few years have failed to be represented in the canonical processes of journals, museums, galleries, critics and art dealers. This book seeks to redress these failures and to examine "reconstruction" and "memory."]
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