Michael Palmer Active boundaries: selected essays and talks, New Directions, 2008, 1966, 1965
Irving Petlin:
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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. As it happened, Mark di Suvero was having a show at the Dwan Gallery in LA, and he got on board and agreed to design and make the tower. We signed a lease on an empty lot at the intersection of La Cienega and Sunset Boulevard and began fencing it in and assembling the tower. We sent out a printed letter, "A Call from the Artists of Los Angeles." We sent it in five languages to artists all over the world, not just the United States, asking for contributions of work, small panels. The tower started to go up and paintings began to come in, but they all had to be mounted inside the fence, because everything outside was being attacked. The fence was very quickly painted to say ARTISTS PROTEST VIETNAM WAR in big letters and people tried to burn it down, people from the local military bases. We were already getting visited by groups who were hostile, people driving by and swearing and cursing. And eventually it turned into physical attacks, so we got guys from Watts to help defend the tower, day and night. They understood what they were doing. They weren't being paid; they just knew and they came and they helped. And they were tough. For the opening, I invited Susan Sontag to speak, and Master Sergeant Donald Duncan, who was a Green Beret, a Special Forces man who came out against the war. I spoke. We opened the tower and we released white doves. Hundreds of people came to the opening and continued to visit over the three months the tower was up.
" . . . we finally broke through the news blackout-we were on television practically nightly in LA, though the coverage was very critical and hostile. But at least it was being reported, and people were finding out about it. For example, one night I was attacked and was defending myself with a broken lightbulb and the end was sparking as somebody came at me. Anyway, Frank Stella heard about this and sent a check for a thousand bucks, writing, "Anybody who puts their life on the line defending a work of art of mine, I'm going to send a thousand bucks to." There were all kinds of crazy stories like that. And in the end, of the 418 pictures we received from around the world, not a single one was damaged or destroyed, even though we were attacked almost nightly. At the conclusion of the project, the works were auctioned, and the money was used to continue fighting against the war.
Michael Palmer:
I found out about the new project when Mark called me in Paris recently-we had lost track of each other. He said, "We've got to get you involved. Would you come to New York?" and I agreed. I mean, we're in a worse situation now than we were then, in that we've lost the art of the communal protest-the capacity, which you see with Mark and Rirkrit, to submerge one's ego and join a project like this. And it's different this time around. Back then, we were operating in an atmosphere of total hostility that was just unrelenting. A number of our people were seriously injured defending the tower. One of our guards, a young artist by the name of Haggerty, had his eardrums punctured by a vicious kick from a policeman. We had our victims, but nothing like what was being done to the Vietnamese people, and similarly nothing like what is now being done to the people of Iraq. But that was then and this is now. I hope the new tower will be just as controversial as the old one was back then. Because, you know, indifference is almost worse than hostility.
Mark di Suvero:
The first Peace Tower was Arnold Mesches' and Irving Petlin's idea. They asked me to build something. I didn't really understand the impact at the time. I was living in New York and very much occupied with my sculpture. But I had one of these polyhedrons that I had built in New York, and I said that I could make it into a tower.
Once I got to LA, everybody worked on it-people like Judy Chicago and Lloyd Hamrol; Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters stopped by. There were artists who would come and work for days or hours, and the amount of support was incredible. There must have been several hundred artists who sent in uniform-size paintings. The building of the tower itself was pretty straightforward, except the city said it was structurally unsound. We proved the strength of the tower by picking up a car inside it-a big Buick. But their problem with us was really political. The police beat us up; the Marines attacked us. There was a real sense of war there.
The Peace Tower showed the will of many artists to fight against the war-against the gunning down and napalming of women and children in Vietnam. If you were an artist at the time, you were a radical. As for my work, people were very threatened by abstract art. I believed that the ability to think abstractly necessarily led one to refuse the reactionary attitudes that were so prevalent then. And I don't think most artists today are fooled by the neocons either. The whole thing that's happened with the art market has certainly changed the attitude of a lot of artists. But the response of artists to the new Peace Tower has already been immense, and I think it's just going to grow by unifying all of the people who want peace and who would be willing to act. You know, six million people around the world marched against the Iraq War just before the invasion. The artists who built the original Peace Tower saw what was going to happen. Now, even somebody like Robert McNamara, who ordered the carpet bombing and killing of civilians, totally accepting the idea of killing innocents in order to achieve American policy goals, has moved away from that kind of thinking.
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