Ocean Park

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 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.

     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 'absence.' 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.

     [p. 4] My second site will be less familiar . . . in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, this site is seeming unspectacular . . . The conventional "presence" of museum culture-legitimation and memorial-is absent. That which was at this site in February 1966, the "Artist's Tower of Protest," of "Peace Tower," at the junction of La Cienega and Sunset Blvd.'s, 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 neocolonialist ambitions were mirrored by injustices and oppressions at home.

     [p. 5]  . . .

     [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 Feo, 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 Artforum, then with its offices above the Ferus Gallery. Other visitors included Ken Kesey and his "Merry Pranksters" with their Day-Glo bus traveling 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."]

     [p. 7] Three broad aims of the book: 1) to consider some of the collective projects marginalized in dominant histories, by institutionalized processes of legitimation [collective critiques of institutional power and their institutional suppression . . .] 2) To consider some of the contradictions and paradoxes within the "art left" based in Los Angeles from the early and mid 1960s, and New York from the mid to late 1960s. 3) My third broad aim is to add to the existing archaeology of knowledge of the period with a research methodology informed by a range of interdisciplinary emphases: oral histories, archival histories, personal recollections, public records, newspapers, journals and magazines.

     "From one point of view this book is a series of detailed discussions of tangled moments and events. The texture of that detail is crucial if generalizations and the ironing our of paradoxes and contradictions are to be avoided. From another point of view, the chapters of this book constitute an anthology of texts, of theorized recoveries of aspects of the 1960s. In that sense they are examples of methodologies with a base, a starting point, in the social histories of art. As a work of history, selections and emphases are both the limits and the transgressions that make [p. 8] contributions to knowledge possible . . . My interests are rooted in marginalisation, in the products of dislocation and the construction of identities through the interchange of official ideologies and the demands of subcultural contingencies.

     "The four case studies that constitute the main sections of this book are inseparable from reconsiderations of the processes of memory and loss, the historical roots of paradox and contradiction in the 1960s seemingly severed by the draw of dominant spectacular commodities in the 1990s. Remembering, recalling, narrating are processes with responsibilities both in the past and to the present. The responsibilities include care in reclaiming, in rubbing the grime from, the textured grain of "then" as distinct from official representations: memorials codified, pristine and normalized (6)

     [p. 6] . . . In different ways the work of Noam Chomsky, James Young and James Clifford has addressed the effects of erasure in normalized histories . . .

     [p. 8] . . .

     [p. 10] . . . [Times Square, New York, April, 1994] . . . the name NIXON blurs past . . . Medical bulletins on the former President Nixon, terminally ill, mixed with the other headlines from Bosnia. Nixon conjures up a number of references: he has been an anti-Communist hawk in the late 1940s, and [p. 11] 1950s as supporter of the political right and then as Vice President during the early Cold War years of the 1950s he made his name in the Alger Hiss case, pursuing a demolition of a mixture of class status and political otherness; was narrowly defeated by John F. Kennedy in 1960; elected as President in 1968 but was forced to resign in 1974, the first president to do so, in the wake of evidence of corruption known as the Watergate scandal. He was also responsible for the escalation of the Vietnam War with the bombing of Cambodia in 1970 and presided over attacks aimed both at the television networks, for their news reports on anti-war events, and at student protestors, most infamously the killing by the National Guard of four students demonstrating at Kent State University against United States action in Vietnam and Cambodia in April 1970.

     ". . .

     [p. 12] . . . In 1969 in the wake of Woodstock, many in both the "silent majority" and the "counter-culture" had forgotten Nixon's early Cold War participation. Yet, hawkish anti-communism and an antipathy to all he regarded as inconsistent with "American ideals and principles" made him a particular figure within the haunted memories of those in the Old Left who recalled in 1969 and [p. 13] 1970 the legacy of McCarthyism.

     In 1994, in Times Square that memory too was potentially obscured, distracted by the spectacular site and the imminent recovery of "President Nixon" in the obituaries and the eulogy by President Clinton . . .

Chapter 1: '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, LaLaLand, 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 characterize 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 characterize 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.

     My aim . . . is to excavate part of the art community's past in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. 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 organized 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.

The Persistence of Memory

     At noon on Saturday 26 February, 1966, the Artist's Tower of Protest, or Peace Tower, at the junction of La Cienega and Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, was dedicated with speeches by the artist Irving Petlin, ex-Green-Beret-Master-Sergeant Donald Duncan, writer Susan Sontag, and [p. 17] the release by young children of six white doves to symbolize peace. The Tower, designed and built under the direction of the sculptor Mark di Suvero and the architect Kenneth H. Dillon, was a steel octahedron, tetrahedron, and double tetrahedron tensional configuration painted yellow and purple. It was 58 feet 4 inches high and surrounded by 418 two-foot-square works by individual artists. These were attached four-deep high above the ground on a continuous hundred-foot billboard wall, which stretched either side and in a U shape behind the Tower: and may have included: Elaine de Kooning, Herbert Ferber, Sam Francis, Judy Gerowitz, Lloyd Hamrol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Lee Mullican, Ad Reinhardt, Larry Rivers, Jim Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, George Segal, Jack Zajac, Philip Evergood, George Sugarman, Claes Oldenburg, Cesar, Karel Appel, Jean Helion, Leon Golub. Organized by the Artists' Protest Committee, the specific site, structure, installation and relationship between elements constituted the "work" which no longer exists except in fragments; mostly contemporary visual and verbal representations and the accounts of participants. The definition of what constituted the "work" was and is contentious. For many participants, the production and duration of display of the Artist's Tower of Protest was an "event," with the Tower and all of the 418 panels representing the antithesis of conventional notions of "art" and its commodification.

     After three months of protecting the Tower, twenty-four hours a day, against attacks and counter-protests, the Artists' Protest Committee had to contend with the landlord of the rented site refusing to renew the lease . . . [Possible relocation sites included:] Pasadena Art Museum, Walter Hopps, acting Director, Pasadena Art Museum; Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara; The Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, D.C.]      

     [p. 18] It was decided to break the Tower up.

    "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 organized the United States exhibition for the Pasadena Museum chosen to represent the country. Petlin also recalls the complex efforts to secure an alternative site, including plans to airlift the Tower by helicopter to Pasadena or to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Santa Barbara, Hopps and the collector Ed Janss being instrumental. Hopps was also in negotiations with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, a relatively left-wing "think tank". Eventually, the frame of the tower was cut up into one-foot pieces, their ends clipped and then compressed into individual "pillows" for those present at the dismantling. The two-foot-square panels were wrapped in brown paper and sold anonymously in a lottery organized by the Los Angeles Peace Center, raising about $12,000.

     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 dominent 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 realized 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 signaled, 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.

     The Tower, the activities of the Artists' Protest committee and many parallel events on the the East Coast, have become marginalized, made absent even, in many texts that purport to offer an alternative to conventional histories . . . One [possible reason] . . . is the product of a contradictory strata in the political, social and cultural life of many American intellectuals on the left . . .

[p. 20] The Formation of the Artists' Protest Committee and the origins of the Tower

     First news of the project was made public in a letter to the Los Angeles Free Press, on 26 November 1965, from Irving Petlin: "The need to discover some unique distinctive manner in which we as artists could express our protest against the drift of American foreign policy in Vietnam has been a primary source of discussion since the formation of the Artists' Protest Committee . . . Two months later, the project and its confirmed location were reported as part of Grace Glueck's Art Notes in the The York Times (30 January 1966) . . . Glueck . . . named di Suvero as the designer of the Tower, and quoted Petlin, "We expect hostility and are warning artists that their work may be destroyed . . . "

     [p. 21] Within weeks of Petlin's letter in the Los Angeles Free Press, there appeared a . . . poster,  A Call From the Artists of Los Angeles, produced by Hardy Hanson . . . The top half . . . an image of a Vietnamese family-followed by "a partial list of supporting artists." [This list included artists, writers, critics, curators and gallery owners.][30]

Footnote 30: p. 50

John Altoon; Rudolf Baranik; Larry Bell; Paul Brach; Helen Breger; Arnaldo Coen; Allen d'Arcangelo; Elaine de Kooning; Dijon Dillon; Ken Dillon; Mark di Suervo; Bella T. Feldman; Herbert Ferber; Llyn Foulkes; Sam Francis; Judy Gerowitz; Leon Golub; Leonel Gongora; Lloyd Hamerol; Hardy Hanson; Francisco Icaza; Donald Judd; Wolf Kahn; Howie Kanowitz; Richard Klix; Max Kozloff; Roy Liechtenstein; Phil Leider; Ivan Majdrakoff; Robert Mallory; Charles Mattox; Robert McChesney; Arnold Mesches; Robert Motherwell; Lee Mulligan; Rolf Nelson; Frank O'Hara; Miguel Hernandez Orben; Jacques Overhoff; Julia Pearl; Irving Petlin; Patrick Proctor; Byron Randall; Ad Reinhardt; Mario Orozco Rivera; Larry Rivers; Jim Rosenquist; Mark Rothko; Frank Stella; Hassel Smith; Arthur Secunda; George Segal; Artemio Sepulveda; George Sugarman; Maurice Tuchman; John Weber; Charles White; Jim Wines; Adja Yunkers, Jack Zajac.

[p. 21] . . . "We, as artists consider the construction of the Tower Against the War in Vietnam as the most appropriate method to register our protest against the continuing senseless slaughter in Vietnam. This action will make our voice heard as no debate, no demonstration, no newspaper advertisement could. Here we speak in a manner native to us as artists."

     . . .

     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, organized by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and including Women Strike for Peace, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and several Civil Rights organizations . . . 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 . . .

     [p. 24] . . .

     . . . sufficient support was received to go ahead with the second "Artist Protest" in the New York Times [Sunday, 27 June 1966], 579 signatures . . .

     [p. 25] [25 July 1966, a full-page rebuttal] the neoconservative institution Freedom House, based in New York. The Silent Center Must Speak Up! . . . claimed the list contained names of avowed Communists and others who were not Communists but while they believed they were working for peace had allowed themselves to be used in an insidious propaganda campaign . . .

     The invitation to participate in the Tower suggested that the voice of artists could not be heard effectively in such newspaper advertisements. It also suggested that "debate" and "demonstration" were similarly limited in effect. Again, this was based on recent experiences. 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 mobilize 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 organized political activity, at least not in comparison to European cities and not even to that which characterized New York. San Francisco was marginally different, wtih 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 politicized 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 spinoff become 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 politicized 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 scuptures 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 skeptical 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.

     The meeting was called on 2 May with, according to the Los Angeles Free Press, seventy-five artists attending and an organizing "committee including Charles Mattox, Mike Steiner, Craig Kaufman, Larry Bell, Richard Klix, Ervin Petlin and Dejon Dillon . . .

     A second meeting was called for the following Wednesday at the Dwan Gallery . . . could barely contain the several hundred artists, art students and related persons who attended . . .

     [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 behavior?

     " . . .

"We Dissent": "Stop Escalation"

     In the same issue of the Los Angeles Free Press, the Artists' Protest Committee placed a double-page advertisement with 174 signatories [Footnote 63]

Footnote 63: p. 51-52 Los Angeles Free Press, 2:20 (14 May 1965), 6-7 The signatories were: Peter Alexander; John Altoon; Sam Amato; Hans Ashauer; Ralph F. Ashauer; Ruth Baker; John Barbour; Molly Barnes; Walt Batterton; Larry Bell; Steven Belzman; Patricia Berger; Charles Brittin; Barbara Brittin; John Bryson; Robert Borsodi; Dr. Robert Bone; Sherry Brody; Edward Brooks; William H. Brown; Dorothy Ann Brown; Gilbert Brown; Barclay Brown; Wm. Brun; Susan Brustman; F.W. Butts; John Caruthers; James Childs; Robert Cheuy; James Church; Jean Clark; Bernard Cohen; W. Pachaic Cooper; Ron Cooper; John Coplans; Emily W. Cordova; Raymon J. Cordova; Tamara Cotiauox; Barbie Cowling; Claire Deland; Annette del Zoppo; Jackson Dillard; Kenneth H. Dillon; Dejon Dillon; Morton Dimondstein; Paul Donin; Peter Douvos; Gilbert Draper; Harold Dreyfus; Maurice Ehrlich; Boyd Elder; Elliot Elgart; Herb Elsky; Evan Engber; Mark Freedman; Lola Feiner; Lilly R. Fenichel; Bruria Finkel; Max Finkelstein; Richard Frazier; Judy Friedman; Gene Frumkin; Frank O. Gehry; Milton Gershgoren; M. Gochenouer; Marvin Grayson; Edith & Lou Gross; Carol Hampton; Norman Hartwig; Clythe Hatch; Claude W. Hayward; Maryanne Heiman; Arleen Hendler; Maxwell Hendler; Ro Hineser; Robin Hirsch; Marvin Hughes; Charles A. Jaeger; Wallace Johnson; Pat Ishii; Ben Kalka; Craig Kauffman; Paul R. Kaufman; Debbie Kazor; Eugene Kazor; Julie Keeler; Carol Kerlan; Stanley Kiesel; Jane Klein; Peter L. Kleinart; Eugene Klix; Richard Klix; Burt Kopelow; William Kosting; Art Kunkin; Ronald Kriss; Mary Kutila; Sandra Laemmle; Gladys Leider; Philip Leider; Arthur Levin; Joann Lopez; Lorraine Lubner; Marvin Lyons; John Maguire; Peter & Kat Marin; Lawrence Martin; Charles Mattox; Sharon McLaglen; Parke Meek; Arnold Mesches; Deena Metzger; C. McCome; Selma Moskowitz; Lee Mullican; Coliene Murphy; Tanya Neufeld; Anais Nin; James Olngy; Felicia Pappernow; Mallory Pearce; Edward M. Pearl; Sarah Petlin; Irving Petlin; Anna Purcell; Lavonne Regehr; Robert Regehr; Myrna Riseman; Paul Jay Robbins; Trina Robbins; Sandra Roch; Allen Ruppersberg; Claire Russell; Marion Sampler; Anne Saville; Ruth Saturensky; Joyce Schiller; Thomas Sevel; Al Shean; Charlotte Sherman; Stanley Miles Shugarman; Bernice Silberman; Herbert Silberman; Jerry Simon; Rick Soltz; Joan Spevack; Mike Steiner; Deborah Sussman; Michael Zebulon Swartz; Galya Tarmu; Richard Taylor; Edmund Teske; Matthew Thomas; Carol Tolin; David Tolin; Frederick A. Usher; Al Villalotu; Cliff Vaughhs; John Watson; Carole Westberg; Martial Westberg; John Weber; Richard Weston; Doug Wheeler; Nanci Wheeler; Sylvia Wolf; Ken Wynsma; Mary Yeomans; Colin Young; Curtis Zahn; Sid Zaro; Jill Zimmer.

     [p. 29] . . . We hereby commit ourselves to a foreign policy which will remove our troops from Vietnam and Dominican Republic now. Six "Realities" [assumptions] follow . . . 1) that the constant use of force cannot be used to stop the process of transition and turmoil throughout the world nations; 2) that we support the right of all people to express popular demand by revolution, as in the origins of the United States republic; 3) that the actions of the United States were destroying the United Nations and Organizations of American States, created to settle disputes and to keep the peace; 4) that the responsibilities for world peace must be discharged through the United Nations; 5) that the struggle for freedom "at home" is weakened and made hypocritical by irresponsible tactics abroad; 6) that military intervention is "evil, immoral and illegal . . . a betrayal of our own ideals" . . .

     [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 signaled 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 "Teachouts" 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.

     " . . .

     [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 civilization," 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 Kauffmann, 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 analyzed 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 organization anywhere else in the world, the RAND Corporation has become internationally famous and controversial, for bring 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 skeptics, 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 program 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 publicize 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 organizations 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.

     However, Petlin had an inside source who discussed with him less publicized activities and deliberations. He had met Roman Kolkowucz a member of the RAND Social Science Department and specialist in Soviet politics, at a party. Kolkowicz, from a family shattered by the Holocaust, was a refugee from Eastern Europe and from totalitarian Communism, which he abhorred. However, when hired by RAND, he was greatly concerned not only by the escalation of the war in southeast Asia but [p. 36] also with the parallels between the Holocaust and the threat of genocide in Vietnam. He was prepared to share information with Petlin so as to aid the broader protest against United States foreign policy. They met secretly and never in the same place twice. Knowing this, Petlin and other members of the picket were aware of the necessity for their own secrecy and organized the event without the use of telephone contact. By this time the Artists' Protest Committee believed that it had been infiltrated or at least listened to. Postcards were handed to trusted people with details of time and instructions for each group from different areas of the city to meet at John Weber's apartment before going on to surround the RAND building. Weber was an important member of the initial group and his apartment, near Santa Monica Pier, was a well-known place for artists to gather. However, at a meeting, Weber's door was smashed down by two Los Angeles policemen from the "Red" squad: one hit Petlin in the chest and another photographed him and others illegally. Despite the picket's care, the police and the RAND Corporation knew they were coming. This knowledge may have been the reason for the Artists' Protest Committee to announce its demonstration, which appeared in the the Los Angeles Free Press on the day before the protest, on 26 June, when leaflets entitled "Why the RAND Corporation?" were handed out. . . .

     The artists and their friends were to meet by the well-known Merry-Go-Round on the Santa Monica Pier, followed by an orderly march to the RAND Corporation with the possibility of a rally in front of the building, with Linus Pauling, Nobel laureate, as one of the speakers, if a loudspeaker permit could be obtained. Alarmed and upset by the event, representatives of the Corporation invited a delegation from the picket into the building and offered them a future discussion, a closed debate. Petlin knew the possible strategy of the Corporation, which had been made aware of the potential protest, as had the Pentagon, by police activity. His source at RAND had given him a copy of a TWX (Scrambling machine) communication from Robert McNamara, then Secretary of State for Defense, saying "engage them," by all means find out what these people think. Get some sense of their criticism of the War, milk [p. 37] them for information. We need to plan ahead to nullify public opposition and to handle the public relations aspects. Knowing of this communication, Petlin was confident that the RAND Corporation would respond positively to a proposal for an open meeting . . . 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). On 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 inRamparts 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 recognizing 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."

 . . .

     It is, therefore, not surprising that a request for a closed and a public dialogue was agreed by the RAND representatives. Petlin knew that this would be so. [Petlin recalls those in the closed debate were Larry Bell, Harold Dreyfus, a businessman, Robert Duncan, the poet, Leon Golub, Lloyd Hamrol, and Craig Kauffman, Max Kozloff, the critic, Michael McClure, the playwright, Annette Michelson, critic and soon to be contributing editor on Artforum, Irving Petlin; Golub's recollection adds Rolf Nelson, gallery owner, Jim Henderson, photographer.] Footnote 99.

     [p. 54, Footnote 99] The RAND Staff invited were: Bernard Brodie, Social Science Department, history and strategy; Edward C. De Land, Computer Science Department, mathematical models of blood chemistry; functions of organs, etc.; Alton Frye, Social Science Department, politics of space, etc.; Brownlee Haydon, Assistant to the President, Communications; Amron Katz, Electronics Department, physicist, reconnaissance specialist, attendee of Pugwash Conferences, etc.; Roman Kolkowicz, Social Science Department, specialist in Soviet politics; Leon Lipson, Social Science Department (Consultant), Professor of Law, Yale University; Guy Pauder, Social Science Department, a specialist in southeast Asia; Robert Wolfson, Logistics Department, economist. Brodie, in particular, was "a pioneer of modern strategic studies in the nuclear era, who work has powerfully influenced generations of strategists and decision makers. [Introduction, in Kolkowicz (ed.), The Logic of Nuclear Terror, p. 3] Brodie was an intellectual, a civilian theorist, whose work on strategic deterrence policy from 1946 onward led to the evolution of the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD).

      . . . [p. 39] Security was such that when artists visited the bathroom a guard accompanied them to, and stood by, the urinals.

The Dialogue on Vietnam was held at 8:00 pm on August 3 at the Warner Playhouse [capacity 400] on North La Cienega Boulevard. Twice the capacity showed up. . . The Free Press reporter, Albert Mall, doubted whether any had won, since no one had sought compromise positions on southeast Asia. Dr. Judd Marmor, UCLA, Psychiatry, moderated. The artists' side, Dreyfus, Golub, Kozloff and Petlin thought they had won both the closed and public debate. Bernard Brodie, Guy Pauker and [Charlie] Dollard represented RAND, opening with "we are not here to defend government policy," and proceeded to do just that. The artists were accused of failing to condemn acts of violence on both sides of the conflict, B52 bombs and Third World guerrilla warfare.

     [p. 40] " . . . on the substance of what the United States was doing in Vietnam, including the methods employed and their origins an the RAND's defense of the military, there was no difference between the two debates. The artists attributed United States methods and their origins to historical Fascist methods of state terror, with technology being used as a new potential method of genocide either through indifference and inattention or through intent and focus: technological made either possible. The RAND representatives argued that different technologies and methods were essentially down to the nature of the difference between the two societies in the conflict: each fought with what was best for itself. For the artists the relative effects a B-52 bombers and Third-World guerrilla warfare was ignored by RAND's ideological defense of the United States in Vietnam. A basic moral gulf that separated the two sides was the artists' disbelief that these intelligent RAND people could feel so positive about continuing such an unequal policy against a peasant society. A basic historical and political gulf centered on the role of the United Staes as an imperialist power since the late 1940s, particularly in southeast Asia. Clearly Petlin's source in RAND shows that there were dissenters in the Corporation. The dissenters, and those at other think-tanks, expressed their views publicly only in 1969 when the Artists' Protest Committee's predictions about escalation, including the presence of 540,000 American service personnel in Vietnam had been proved. The Hudson Institute, headed by former RAND theorist Herman Kahn, put forward radical reductions in United States presence . . . Then in a letter to the New York Times by six members of the RAND Corporation, including Ellsberg, urging the United States to make a unilateral withdrawal of its troops from Vietnam within a year . . .

[p. 41] You can call it cultural diplomacy

     In the midst of the Artists' Protest Committee's activities wtih RAND, a report appeared in the New York Times drawing attention to the role of art and culture within the official apparatus of the state . . . An Andy Warhol and works by Joseph Albers, Karl Zerbe, Larry Rivers and Alexander Calder adorned the walls of the American Embassy in Madrid. Works were lent through the Art in Embassies program, begun in 1963 . . . An Andy Warhol and works by Joseph Albers, Karl Zerbe, Larry Rivers and Alexander Calder adorned the walls of the American Embassy in Madrid.

     At the same time, the United States Information Agency (USIA) was, through the State Department, involved in its own "cultural diplomacy" by planning the promotion of the United States at the VIII Bienal de Sao Paulo, Brazil, held from 2 September to 28 November. In the 1960s these events involved big money. Walter Hopps, chosen to organize the [p. 42] the exhibition in 1965, remembers that it was normally around half a million dollars; at least $400,000 for Sao Paulo. Hopps recalls the highly charged political context of these exhibitions and places them in the light of the complexities of his own left-of-center commitments, his history of avant-gardist activity at the Ferus Gallery and his involvement with a high school classmate of Barbara Rose, Helen Goldberg, who he describes as having an "extreme political radicalism." According to Hopps, under Johnson's administration huge amounts of money were put at the disposal of the USIA to allow participation in the various biennials, including Venice in even years and Sao Paulo in odd years. Requests for participation in exhibitions would go to a cultural affairs officer at the State Department-"usually they were political hacks"-and then to the USIA, "a major propaganda arm, and it's an interesting cover for all sorts of CIA operatives . . . I have friends in the agency now and have had to deal with some. I've even used them for art errands." Whoever was chosen to be a State Department Commissioner to run an exhibition would be subject to the USIA's rules of the game, but a huge budget would be provided. Prior to this period, the State Department usually passed on such a job to MoMA or the Whitney.

     [p. 42 ] Hopps recalls that Lois Bingham was "the op inside the Washington USIA branch and there were USIS [United States Information Service] field offices all over, usually connected with embassies and consulates and just full of CIA ops under cultural affairs cover with lots of money to help you get anything done." Significantly, Hopps states that there was no heavy interference with respect to the type of art, just an attitude by officials that "Now is the time to have big, high visibility, American presence." The way that Commissioners were chosen demonstrates how a particular intellectual patronage was perpetuated. The Commissioners from Sao Paulo in 1963, Martin Friedman, nominated around three people for the Venice job in 1964 and the USIA chose one of them. In 1964, Alan Solomon was selected to select contemporary art in New York, which was "an extraordinary show of Rauschenberg, Johns, Dine, Oldenburg on the one hand; and Morris Louis, Ken Noland, Frank Stella . . . John Chamberland, on the other. A blockbuster for Venice in '64." Hopps had helped out at Venice and was one of those nominated by Solomon. On his being chosen for Sao Paulo in 1965 ops came out from USIA, [to] creep around the [Pasadena] museum, chat with trustees, and so on . . . They made a real production of it." Hopps worked on the exhibition in late 1964 and early 1965 at a time when he was back into the drug culture he had been into in the 1950s, in Los Angeles. He recalls himself and his old friend Dennis Hopper being stoned out of their minds at one event and describes the contradictory aspects of "almost everything going on then."

     [p. 43]' "I have an absolutely extreme-leftist girlfriend, and I'm working with colleagues at the IPS [Institute for Policy Studies). On the other hand I'm working on this big show in Brazil where every third person is a CIA undercover . . . the whole operation is a cover for all kinds of miserable agency activity and operations. So it was a terrible strain . . . I was first in Brazil just after the tanks had rolled and the generals put out . . . their socialist president . . . I ended up on three kinds of shit lists for signing anti-Franco petitions."

     [p. 43] . . . Cultural image was clearly important for the foreign policy of the state, whether in embassies or in exhibitions. The State Department was tolerant of artists' radical statements as long as they could be contextualized by well-packaged "American" art. Hopps suggests that this art did not have to be connected to the "new American painting," though in the Sao Paulo in 1965 this a major thread. Paintings by Newman, an "Abstract Expressionist," were placed at the center of an exhibition of largely abstract works that provided the anodyne symbols of American individualism: work by Bell, Bengston and Irwin from Los Angeles, along with Judd, Poons and Stella from the East Coast. Concurrently with the USIA's activities and the Art in Embassies program abroad, the Johnson administration was concerned with its public image at home. The legacy of the 1950s and the dissuasive processes of the CIA abroad and the agencies of the state at home were at the forefront of the thoughts of the Artists' Protest Committee. Even with a Democratic administration, which had a relatively progressive domestic reform program, dissenters risked a great deal. To ask Linus Pauling to address the RAND picket was to recall not only the strength of the previous protest but also an awareness of the potential for reprisals against those who dissented from the war . . .

[p. 43] Watts as Signifier

     By the end of 1965, the Artists' Protest Committee realized that none of the newspaper advertisements, debates, or demonstrations had made its voice heard as effectively as had been hoped. How could it take the weakness . . . [p. 44] of its position-the lack of institutional support and the minimal media coverage of their previous activities -and turn it into a strength? How could it do this urgently to represent their abhorrence at the activities of their leaders. In looking back to the Dialogue on Vietnam with the RAND Corporation on 3 August, artists from Los Angeles and southern California had much to be troubled about. Not only had the war in Vietnam greatly escalated but an internal war characterized by oppression, poverty and racism re-erupted. A week after the Dialogue on Vietnam, the Watts area of Los Angeles saw one of the largest uprisings that the nation had ever known. This 2.5-square mile core of south-central Los Angeles housed around half a million African-Americans, a number swelled by migrants from the rural south, in an urban slum. On 11 August 11 1965, the residents of Watts believed that a routine arrest was marked by the police's use of unnecessary force and the beating of a woman. This event lit a fuse. Years of police oppression and forceful repression coupled with poverty and an inadequate urban infrastructure exploded into six days of riots, looting and burning; Thirty-four people died, 1032 were wounded, 3952 were arrested and an estimated $40 million worth of damage was caused. The lead on the front page of the Los Angeles Free Press on 20 August, "The Negroes have voted," represented a widely held view in the community that normal democratic processes, were ineffective for a large section of Los Angeles. For them, oppression, deprivation and the white power structure were root causes of the event. The editor of the Los Angeles Free Press, Art Kunkin, observed that anyone who criticized the city administration or Chief of Police Parker for their role in the disturbances "is called a Communist or a supporter of criminal elements. It is actually very dangerous in Los Angeles today to enter reasonable objections to the sensationalistic reporting and ridiculous charges of conspiracies. Protestors against the US war in Vietnam had similar experiences in the legacy of McCarthyite condemnation of opposition as Communist, or criminal or conspiratorial or all three.

     [p. 44] . . . Ramparts . . . In the editorial of the June [1965] and 1966, the effects of "white power" in the denial of justice and voting rights to "millions of Negro Americans" for centuries is placed in the context of Selma, Alabama, and subsequent protest. But if justice was now on the agenda at home, the editorial asked how this could be reconciled with "the injustice for another people" with the United States' obstruction of elections in Vietnam . . .

     [p. 45] "American neo-colonialist ambitions" could not entertain the possibility that free elections would lead . . . to election of the communists . . . the conscience of "white America," which was aroused by the Civil Rights movement is relevant to the Vietnamese struggle." Two months later, in Watts, Los Angeles the conscience of "white America" was given another reminder of domestic neo-colonialism.

     "One symbol of the Watts area remained untouched. The three Watts Towers (99, 97 and 55 feet high) had been built over a thirty-three-year period by Sabatino (called Simon or Sam) Rodia, an Italian immigrant who earned his living as a tilesetter, as a butcher, as a laborer. When they were completed in 1954, Rodia left the property to a neighbor never to return. Made out of broken plates and bottles, shells and tiles on an armature of iron and concrete the towers were variously valued as, for example, folk art; symbols of independence, outside institutional confines; a public site with an assemblage of everyday, ephemeral recycled materials. Rodia died on 16 July 1965, a month before the riots. Within Watts, his Towers reminded inhabitants of the financial and social place of immigrant labour within the urban city geared to technology, entertainment and the car. The postwar Californian state master-plan, designed to build multi-million-dollar freeways within four miles of every metropolitan house, served only white car commuters and those able to afford airline tickets in the enormous expansion of the use of the city's airports. The once efficient interurban transit service of the early 1900s was replaced by car dependency and creation of an underclass reliant on an overburdened and inadequate bus system. Arguably, Rodia's Towers were symbols of a Watts underclass. However, this did not prevent the works being appropriated differently within the "art world." For many of the artists of the region, the Towers signified the culturally resistant elements of assemblage, utilized as much in the subcultures of hotrod [p. 46] racing as in the Dadaist collages and tableaux of those in the centre and the periphery of Beat Culture. In many respects the emphases on collage and assemblage were characteristic of differences between West Coast artists and those in the East. However, the Towers also became appropriated within the Museum high culture. In 1961, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition, The Art of Assemblage, including the work of Bruce Conner, Ed Kienholz and Robert Rauschenberg, which served to legitimate "assemblage" as an art form within the canon. The catalogue by William Seitz included a positive discussion of the Watts Towers, including a statement by Rodia.

     In the October 1965 issue of Artforum there was a reference to Watts. As the journal was not published in July and August, October was the first month that any practical inclusion of a response to the events of August could have been made (the copy deadline for September's issue would have passed.) But the reference did not include any mention of the causes, events or implications of the uprising. Instead, Artforum published a four-page article, mostly photographs of the Watts Towers with a two-column text consisting of a letter by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Director of Museum Collections at MoMA, to Kate Steinitz, the archivist of the Watts Towers Committee. Rodia's death, in July, prompted Artforum to use Barr's letter written after his five-day visit to Los Angeles in July 1965, accompanied by Dorothy Miller, also from MoMA: "Homage to Sam: Alfred H. Barr Jr. Describes His Responses to the Towers at Watts." Barr recalls being driven "through a flat, forlorn and endless cityscape,"the area called Watts, and draws a parallel between Rodia "and another idealistic immigrant Bartolomeo Vanzetti . . . Their agony was their triumph the one in death, the other in his Towers, his marvelous evidence of things unseen." This romanticized view of both Rodia and Vanzetti (executed in Boston in 1927, amidst protests that he and Nico Sacco had been tried more for their ethnic identity and anarchist beliefs than for any civil crime) is complemented by his reference to Steinitz's discussion of Rodia in The Art of Assemblage. In his use of the Barr letter and photographs of Rodia's Towers, Artforum demonstrated that its representation of "Watts" and its recent history, would not be within the realm of socio-cultural politics but be firmly indexed to a particular perspective on art and museum aesthetics.

      . . . . [p. 47]

     For many members of the Artists' Protest Committee the escalation of both aggressive foreign policy, in Vietnam, and heightened Civil Rights tension, in the aftermath of Watts, were in contrast to the public face of the mainstream art world, even in its radical form at Artforum. In retrospect, there were palpable contradictions evidenced, for example, by Hopps talking about his experiences in mid-1965, by Leider on the one hand writing about demonstrations in Frontier while on the other editing issues ofArtforum that focus on the Watts Towers with no mention of the "Watts riot." It was in what is called the "alternative" or "underground" press, such as the Los Angeles Free Press, or in the activities of artists' situationist politics to use Petlin's phrase, that signs of the contradictions erupt. With its letter of announcement, in November 1965, the Artists' Protest Committee attempted to repoliticize the meaning of the Tower, to signify a politics in the midst of a specific Los Angeles experience. Their Tower evoking not only Rodia but also Tatlin, was produced in the practical and contingent space between utopia and dissent. By the time Hardy Hanson produced a poster, A Call From the Artists of Los Angeles, the Artists' Protest Committee had decided that this space had a particular rhetoric: "Here we speak in a manner native to us as artists."

Chapter: There and Here: Then and Now

[p. 98] Ft. Note 22 Petlin's Typed and Uncorrected and Incomplete List of Tower contributors: Gilles Ailland; S. Aitkin; Tom Allen; Karl Appel; Vincent Arcillisi; Sam Armoto; Francois Arnal; Sardo Aronson; Arroyo; Elsie Asher; Helen Avalon; 

Walter Baker; Rudolf Baranik; Will Barnett; Gianfranco Baruchello; Walter Bayer; Edward Beberman (Biberman?); Belzono; Karl Benjamin; Jean Benoit; Anthony Berlant; Berman; Annette Bird; Biras; Patrick Blackwell; Nell Blaine; Camille Blaire; Bleckman; Margit Bleek; Allen Boutin; Bob Bolles; Edward Botts; Paul Brach; J. Brill;  James Brooks; Milton Bowin; Charles Brittin; I. Bromfromel; James Brooks; M. Brown; Ray Brown; Vladamire Bubalo; Jacques Busse; Freeman Butts; 

Jim Cajori; Camacho; Victor Candell; Martin Canin; J. Cannon; Cardenas; Cesar; Vija Celmins; Roberto Chavez; Chemay; Sam Clayburger; Clutie; G. Cohen; Jan Colbern; Jess Collins; John Coleman; E. Contino; William Copley; Rollin Crampton; Cremonini; Emilio Cruz; Cueco; Ron Curtis; 

Allen D'Archangelo; Robert Dash; Jay De Feo; Storm De Hirsch; Marie de Noailles; Jean Dewasne; Richard Diebenkorn; Dejon Dillon; Dominich Di Meo; Dimetrakas; Dimitrienko; Morton Dimondstein; Robert Donley; Frazer Dougherty; Peter Dovvos; 

Elliot Elgard; Ilse Erythrope; Mariano Erythrope; Tom Etherton; Mariano Eunese; D. Evans; Philip Evergood; 

Bella Feldman; Joaquin Ferrer; Tully Filmus; Keith Finch; Perle Fine; Max Finkelstein; Sidro Flomelbalch; Rachel Formica; Sally Francis; Antonio Frasconi; Elias Freedonsohn; Mary Fuller; 

Jose Garcia; Al Gebhardt; Anne Gelber; Chaves Gerardo; M. Gershgoren; Ruth Gikow; Hugo Gilbert; Loreno Gilchriest; James Gill; George Gillson; Julio Girona; Leon Golden; P. Golpinopoulas; Leon Golub; Sydney Goodman; Gordan; Stephen Goswell; Marvin Grayson; Balcomb Greene; Cynthia Greene; S. Greene; Lowell Greenough; Philip Guston; Walter Gutman; Gwathmey; 

Carol Hairer; Theodore Halkin; Bert Hanson; Hardy Hanson; Marvin Hardin; Kay Harris; David Hatch; Jean Helion; Eva Hesse; Hielihia; Joseph Hirsh; Peter Holbrook; Etheleym Honig; Budd Hopkins; Anna Hornisher; W. Hubbard; H. Hui; J. Hulpberg; Richard Hunt; 

Angelo Ippolito; 

Nora Jaffee; Ward Jakoson; W. Joffey; Ives Johnson; Richard Juke; Adja Junkers; 

Katherine Kadell; Kadish; W. Kahn; Howard Kantowitz; S. Kaplan; Theodore Kapsalio; Kassay; Herbert Katzman; Jane Kaufman; Raymond King; Chaim Kippelman; William Kishing; Jane Kline; Richard Klix; Dorothy Koppelman; Angela Kosta; Sue Koster; Max Kozloff; Jane Kraicke; Harry Kramer; N. Krof; 

Gabriel Laderman; David Lawless; Michael Lawrence; June Leap; Phillipe Leroy; Jack Levin; Kim Levin;  Si Lewen; Roy Lichtenstein; Diane Liebowitz; Linda Lindaberg; John Little; Lee Lublin; Lorraine Lubner; David Lunk; Marvin Lyons; J.S. Lysowski; 

Anthony Maggi; D. Main; Ivan Majdrakoff; Mardin Marcus; Joseph Martiner; Matta; Herbert Matter; Mercedes Matter; Charles Mattox; Henry Maurice; Robert McChesney; Eine McKnight; Joan McNee; Margaret Melliken; James Mellon; Mercado; R. Merz; Arnold Mesches; Miller; Robert Moesle; Monoru; Robert Motherwell; Joe Mugnaimie; 

Lowell Nesbitt; Tanya Neufeld; Louise Nevelson; 

Douglas Ohlson; Gerald Oster; 

Abilio Padron; Dominick Palestino; Freda Paris; Harold Paris; Keith Parker; Ray Parker; Michael Parre; Peter Passirntino; L. Pazzi; Judith Pearl; Philip Pearlstein; R. Pedreguera; Gina Pellon; Christina Pessillo; Irving Petlin; Bernard Pfriem; Lil Picard; Jorry Pinsler; Piqueras; Robert Pittenger; Sam Pollack; Harold Presonello;

Joe Raffaele; Ramon; Bernard Rancillac; Sonya Rapoport; Ad Reinhardt; Philip Reisman; Marsha Rich; Alice Richenheiumerk; Falio Rieti; Jay Rivkin; Niki Robert; Robert Rockless; Richard Roff; Pauline Rooney; Sylvia Rosenbein; Irwin Rosenhouse; Jim Rosenquist; Seymour Rosofasky; Richard Rubens; Charlotte Russ;

Betye Saar; Joop Sanders; Meyer Schapiro; Roy Schnackenberg; Ellen Schwartz; Arthur Secunda; Jason Seley; Serisawa; C. Sherman; S. Sherman; Ellen Simon; A.H. Sonberg; Josh Sonenberg; Rick Sotz; Moses Soyer; Rudolf Soyer; George Spaventa; Spero; Nora Speyer; Joe Stefanelli; Hedda Sterne; May Stevens; Michelle Stewart; Sugarman; George Sugarman; Shol Swartz; Alina Szapocznikow; 

Yasse Tabuchi; Acne Talachnik; Susanna Tauger; Constantine Tavoularis; Nerve Telemaque; David Teschout; Paul Thek; Mike Todd; Anthony Toney; Wm. Tunberg; Lois Tytell; 

Reva Urban; 

Helene Valentin; S. Van Veer; Estaban Vicente; Richard Vincent; Don Vlack; Jan Voss; 

Charles Walters; Larry Watlin; Alicia Weal; Ellen Weber; Tom Wesselmann; Charles White; Robert Wiegand; James Wines; Witherspoon; Sara Wolf; 

Alice Yamii; H. Yeargans; 

Jack Zajac; Sid Zaro; Allen Zaslove.

[p. 99] Ft. Note 23 The New York Times Artists' Protest Tower in Los Angeles [These were NY Artists: Out of some 400 contributions to the Tower]: 

Susie Aitkin; Elise Asher; Helen Daphnis Avlon; 

Tony Balzano; Rudolf Baranik; Walter Barker; Will Barnet; Baruchello; Margit Beck; Milton Berwin; Edward Betts; Nell Blaine; R.O. Blechman; Bob Bolles; Paul Brach; L. Bronfman; James Brooks; 

Charles Cajori; Victor Candel; Martin Canin; Herman Cherry; George Cohen; Cply; Emilio Cruz; Robert Corless; Ron Curtis; 

Allan D'Archangelo; Robert Dash; Storm De Hirsch; Elaine de Kooning; Fraser Dougherty; Georfe Dworzan; 

Isle Erythropel; D. Evans; Phillip Evergood; 

Tully Filmus; Perle Fine; Rachel Formica; Elias Friedenshohn; Sideo Fromboluti; 

Ruth Gikow; Lorenzo Gilchrist; George Gillson; Julio Girona; Leon Golden; Peter Golfinopoul; Leon Golub; Ron Gorchov; Balcomb Greene; Cynthia Greene; Stephen Greene; Philip Guston; Walter Gutman; Robert Gwathney;

Carol Haerer; Kay Harris; Burt Hasen; John Heliker; Eva Hesse; Joseph Hirsch; Budd Hopkins; Helene Hui; John Hultberg; Robert Huot; 

Angelo Ippolito; 

 Ward Jackson; Nora Jaffee; William Jeffrey; Donald Judd;

Reuban Kadish; Wolf Kahn; Howard Kanowitz; Bernard Kassoy; Herbert Katzman; Jane Kaufman; Chaim Kopplelman; Dorothy Koppelman; Max Kozloff; Harry Kramer; 

Gabriel Laderman; Jacob Landau; David Lawless; June Leaf; Kim Levin; Jack Levine; Si Lewen; Roy Lichtenstein; Linda Linderberg; John Little; David Lund; 

Manuel Manga; Ernest Marciano; Marcia Marcus; Emily Mason; Herbert Matter; Mercedes Matter; Eline McKnight; James Mellon; Jack Mercado; Margart Milliken; Robert Motherwell; 

Bob Natkin; Alice Neel; Lowell Nesbitt; Louise Nevelson; 

Doug Ohlson; Gerald Oster; 

Ray Parker; Peter Passantino; Philip Pearlstein; R. Pedreguera; Christina Pesirillo; Harold Pesirillo; Bernard Pfriem; Lil Picard; Bob Pittinger; Lucio Pozzi; 

Andre Racz; Joe Raffaele; Ad Reinhardt; Philip Reisman; Pauline Roony; Irwin Rosenhouse; James Rosenquist; Richard Rubens; 

Joop Sanders; Jason Seeley; Meyer Schapiro; Sarai Sherman; Burt Silverman; Ellen Simonl; Jack Sonenberg; Phoebe Sonenberg; Moses Soyer; Raphael Soyer; George Spanventa; Nancy Spero; Nora Speyer; Joe Stefanelli; Hedda Sterne; May Stevens; Sahl Swarz; Michelle Stuart; George Sugarman; 

Suzanne Tanger; Paul Thek; Mike Todd; Anthony Toney; Louis Tytell; 

Reva Urban; 

Helene Valentin; Stuyvesant Van Veen; Esteban Vicente; Richard Vincent; Don Vlack; 

Ellen Weber; Tom Wesselman; Robert Wiegarnd; John Willenbacher; James [p. 100] Wines; Sara Wolf; 

Alice Yamin; Heartwell Yeargens; Adja Yunkers

[p. 100] Ft.note 24: Arnold Mesches, Chair, Fund-raising Committee, Artist's Tower Los Angeles, Partial List, Invited Financial Contributors, UC Department, Special Collections, Collection 50, A Collection of Underground, Alternative and Extremist Literature, Box 36, Folder Artist's Tower Los Angeles] Karel Appel, Cesar, Elaine de Kooning, Philip Evergood, Herbert Ferber, Sam Francis, Judy Gerowitz [Judy Chicago], Leon Golub, Lloyd Hamrol, Jean Helion, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Lee Mullican, Claes Oldenburg, Ad Reinhardt, Larry Rivers, Jim Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, George Segel, Frank Stella, George Sugarman, Jack Zajac,

Bibliography:

The Art of Assemblage,

Artforum, 1965

Frontier, 1965

The Los Angeles Free Press, 1966, 1965, 1964

Ramparts, 1965

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