ART OF ENGAGEMENT

U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A P R E S S Berkeley Los Angeles London SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART

Peter Selz with an essay by Susan Landauer

ART OF ENGAGEMENT
Visual Politics in California and Beyond

THE PUBLISHER GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES THE FOLLOWING INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANIZATIONS FOR THEIR GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THIS BOOK:

benefactors
Paule Anglim Hans G. and Thordis W. Burkhardt Foundation Frayda and Ronald Feldman Harold Parker Jack Rutberg Fine Arts Stephen M. Silberstein

directors circle of the university of california press foundation

John M. and Jola Anderson Robert and Alice Bridges Foundation Earl and June Cheit Lloyd Cotsen Sonia H. Evers Thomas C. Given Orville and Ellina Golub Leo and Florence Helzel Mrs. Charles Henri Hine Mead and Nancy Kibbey Fred Levin and Nancy Livingston / Shenson Foundation David and Sheila Littlejohn James and Susan McClatchy Jack and Jacqueline Miles Thormund A. and Barbara Miller Elvira E. Nishkian Ruth A. Solie

TO DORE ASHTON

It is difcult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

william carlos williams

CONTENTS

Foreword daniel t. keegan / xi An Overview Countering Cultures: The California Context susan landauer / 1 Prologue: A Personal View of the Interaction of Politics and Art / 25 Introduction: Paths to Engagement / 29
1 2 3 4

Against War and Violence / 35 Countercultural Trends / 87 On Racism, Discrimination, and Identity Politics / 129 Toward a Sustainable Earth / 223 Postscript / 247 Acknowledgments / 251 Notes / 253 Selected Bibliography / 273 Index / 281

FOREWORD

art with a causethough not always appreciated or given the visibility it deserves (the antisocialist and anti-Communist backlash of the forties and fties kept political art out of the galleries)has always been about the human condition. Distinct from mere propaganda art, examples of which are legion and almost always about legions of one form or another, Peter Selzs book Art of Engagement establishes a littleknown factthat many artists of the past sixty years have been at the forefront of social causes in America. Artists of earlier times sampled popular culture, providing a voyeurs look for wealthy patrons into everyday life and the commoners struggle. These artists traded, if you will, on the gap between the haves and the have-nots, heightening an appreciation in their patrons for what it means to have it all. A sea change in Western art occurred about the time of the industrial revolution, when artists shifted their attention from art about the elite to art for the masses. Artists championed the causes of the common indi-

vidual not because of a pent-up demand for these subjects by collectors, but because artists were themselves commoners seeking to tell the truth. From Courbet and the French Realist movement of the mid-nineteenth century to modern social realism and contemporary art today, artists have felt empowered to speak on behalf of important social causes and issuessometimes at their own peril and at the expense of their careers. The mid-twentiethcentury juggernaut of modernism led by critic Clement Greenbergs purist aesthetic and a surging corporate art market purged of content contributed to suppressing art of engagement. For reasons illuminated in this book, some of the most powerful art of the past sixty yearsfrom California in particularhas been charged with the zeal and vibrancy of social and political causes. Though often underappreciated and outside the mainstream art scene in America, this art has never been about salability but believability.
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The art is as diverse in style as the causes it represents. Though the styles do mirror those of the times, ranging from abstract to conceptual, art of engagement is about content. We must acknowledge that for most of the second half of the twentieth century, serious content was absent from much of the contemporary art market. Social injustice, poverty, war, civil rights, and gender bias are hardly the stuff for decorating the corporate board rooms and living rooms of America. It is appropriate that the San Jose Museum of Art has organized the accompanying exhibition, Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement, because the Museum was conceived during the civil rights era of the sixties. That spirit of egalitarianism and community outreach is still central to our mission. Most visitors do not realize that San Jose has been one of the most progressive cities in the country. It was home to Mexican American activist Csar Chvez, president of the United Farm Workers. San Jose had the rst Japanese American mayor of a major American city, Norman Mineta. The rst female mayor of a major American city was San Joses Janet Gray Hayes. It was during Hayess tenure that an unprecedented number of women were elected to the city council, leading the media to call San Jose the feminist capital of the U.S. The San Francisco Bay Area continues to be on the forefront of progressive reform, especially in the area of gay rights and the environment.1 And it is in keeping with this progressive spirit that an important part of the mission of the San Jose Museum of Art has been, from the beginning, to present underrecognized artists alongside the stars. This approach is what keeps the Museums exhibitions fresh and, I believe, leading edge. I especially wish to acknowledge our friend and colleague Peter Selz, who conceived of the project and dedicated his boundless energy to this book. Susan

Landauer, our chief curator, has assembled a companion exhibition of startling power and voice, making a stellar selection from the Museums political art collection, which owes its strength in large part to Museum trustee and collections committee chair Peter Lipman and his wife Beverly. Thanks to Jack Rasmussen, the director and curator of the new Katzen Arts Center at American University in Washington, D.C., Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement will be viewed by audiences on the East Coast. At SJMA we would also like to thank assistant curator Ann Wolfe for helping to coordinate the exhibition and tour, as well as registrar Anamarie Alongi and assistant registrar Chris Alexander for assisting with the details and logistics of the exhibition. For their dedication in conducting research in preparation for this publication, we thank Heather Farkas, Barbara Kutis, Debbie McKeown, and Lindsey Wylie. Our appreciation is also extended to the entire staff at SJMA, who have contributed countless hours to the success of this publication, exhibition, and accompanying programs. Finally, SJMA is proud to partner with the University of California Press on this publication. In presenting Art of Engagement, this exceptional press once again demonstrates its vision, creativity, and conviction to document important histories and tell compelling stories. We extend our special thanks to our colleagues at UC Press, including ne arts editor Deborah Kirshman, project editor Sue Heinemann, and editorial assistant Lynn Meinhardt, with whom we have worked closely for the duration of this project. Thanks to UC Presss participation, the publication will be shared with readers worldwide. Daniel T. Keegan Oshman Executive Director San Jose Museum of Art

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daniel t. keegan

COUNTERING CULTURES: THE CALIFORNIA CONTEXT SUSAN LANDAUER

AN OVERVIEW

it is far from axiomatic that periods of cultural and political ferment produce art effectively addressing that ferment. The relationship between art and politics within the discourse of modernism has been particularly troubled. Kthe Kollwitzs haunting pleas for the working class, Pablo Picassos brutal antiwar protests, and George Groszs venomous satire appear to stand rm within the canon of modern art. Yet there has often been a deep ambivalence about mixing art and politics, even in periods of tremendous turmoil. This was at no time more evident than during the sixties, when New Yorks avant-garde responded to the Vietnam War with what Susan Sontag called an aesthetics of silence.1 The artists dilemma, as the critic Max Kozloff observed in 1967, was that of trying to resolve divergent obligations.2 Morality and art made for uncomfortable bedfellows; to be explicit about politics was to court banality and navetor, put in more extreme terms, to run the risk of preaching in a fancy form.3

In California this ambivalence has been remarkably absent. What we nd instead is a striking conuence of political agitation and passionately engaged art. Californias role in twentieth-century politics is itself extraordinary. It is difcult to ignore the state when considering the peace and social justice movements of the sixties and seventies. The San Francisco Bay Area took the lead nationally with the founding of the free speech movement in 1964 on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, and with the birth of the Beat and hippie countercultures, which catalyzed profound social change across the country.4 While the civil rights and peace movements grew simultaneously in cities nationwide, California played a signicant role in their development. In their wake came the Chicano labor movement in the San Joaquin Valley, the revolutionary Black Panther Party in Oakland, as well as some of the most radical manifestations of gay liberation, Red Power, and environmental activism.
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All of this activity was accompanied by an outpouring of political art unmatched elsewhere in the United States. Indeed, from the fties until the early seventies, one had to look to California to nd signicant numbers of artists seriously engaged in political expression. During the Vietnam War in particular, at a time when many agreed that combining art and politics could only result in well-meaning aesthetic embarrassment, artists on the West Coast found ways of revitalizing the genre of political art.5 They did so by breathing new life into the iconography of protestwhich, as the painter Ad Reinhardt correctly observed, had fallen into a state of exhaustion.6 They also extended the conventions of traditional formats, notably mural and poster art. One of the most intriguing results of the pairing of art and politics in California was a breaking away from conventional art media to produce new vehicles of expression. The desire to critique and circumvent the commercial art establishment led to a variety of avowedly antimaterialist, often inherently uncollectable forms of art, from junk assemblage to performance art, conceptual art, and video. It could be argued that political art is one of Californias more signicant contributions to American art of the twentieth century. Despite the importance of this contribution, the present volume represents the rst broad examination of political art in California after the Second World War.7 The subject is discussed in studies focused narrowly on topics ranging from art created in Japanese American internment camps in the forties to the culture wars of the nineties. In recent years, with the newfound respectability that political art has gained in contemporary discourse, the literature has grown substantially. The revival has precipitated a number of critiques, beginning with the writings of Lucy Lippard, whose books on protest art and identity politicsnotably Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (1984), A Different War: Vietnam in Art (1990), and Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (1990)look well beyond the mainstream to include many of the artists Peter Selz
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discusses in this volume. Lippards inclusive approach is taken up by Thomas Crows The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, 195569 (1996), the rst major text to explore California political art in an international context. According to Crow, the cultures of resistance that appeared on the national-international stage rst emerged on the West Coast. Crow credits the radical counterculture of the Bay Area in the fties with initiating a spirit of protest that had exponential repercussions to come across the rest of the country and the world, although he does not explain why New York produced comparatively little relevant art other than to observe that the political temperature there was markedly cooler.8 Francis Frascinas Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (1999), the other major attempt to survey political art of the sixties, nds the same disparity. Concentrating on Los Angeles and New York, Frascina delineates in scrupulous detail an entrenched formalist orthodoxy operating in league with corporate and government interests to keep political art from making inroads in the East during the late sixties. However, other than identifying fewer restraints in Los Angeles, he does not make a real effort to account for why political art ourished in California. Arguably the best analysis of the subject to date is Richard Cndida Smiths Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (1995). Although Cndida Smiths scope is early for our purposes concentrating primarily on the Truman and Eisenhower erashe explores aspects of the ideological, socioeconomic, and historic roots of both the political ferment of the period and its artistic expression. As Cndida Smith points out, many of the values of liberty and dissent taken up by the New Left were rst articulated by the community of artists and poets in the San Francisco Bay Area who came to be known as the Beats. Essentially, Cndida Smith argues that the fundamental lack of support for contemporary art coupled with a growing opposition to canonical modernism after 1950 resulted in a self-sufcient under-

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ground network of printing presses, artist- and poetrun galleries, and private venues. The sustaining ideology of this strikingly independent community was that of the innocence of the clean slatean almost religious belief in personal experience as the only authentic source of values. Well before question authority became a mantra of the sixties, the artists and poets of this community challengedalbeit quietly, in work that was often never publicly presenteda great many restrictions on freedom of expression in both life and art. Cndida Smith notes that while they contributed little to the civil rights movement or to the critique of poverty, the ideas they expressed through their art, poetry, political activism, and personal example played a vital role in fostering dialogue on issues relating to sexuality and gender construction, capital punishment, ecology, and the Vietnam War. Cndida Smiths study provides useful background for understanding how artistic and political forces specic to California aligned themselves, yet he does not place them in a national context, nor does he explain why those forces were distinct to the region and not found in, say, Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago centers also distant from New Yorks art market. Those cities had their contingent of political artists (Chicago especially), but they were less consequential in terms of both political agitation and artistic response.9 The usual explanation for Californias political activism is the states newness, that is, its recent settlement by European Americans, its consequent lack of entrenched traditions, and its special position on the farthest edge of the New World. According to this view, these distinctive attributes have made California particularly open to breaking conventions and embracing new ideas. Whether this characterization is recognized as reality or potent ction, it is nonetheless routinely trotted out as the source of the states radicalism.10 Stephen Schwartz, in his book From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind (1998), makes this the guiding thesis for his examination of Californias trend-setting contributions to American culture. He argues: California was radical

from the beginning. It was not simply new, it was the newest society ever to have reached full development. . . . Californias role in a series of cutting edge historical developments, in which it always occupied a forward post, its favorable geographical situation, and its instant rise to immense wealth during the Gold Rush have made it unique in the world. All societies undergo periods of radicalization; California has never known anything else.11 Yet almost the precise opposite could be argued. While California played a signicant role in empowering the New Left, it was equally responsible for vitalizing the New Right. Although Schwartz is sound in his assessment of the extent of Californias radicalism, he misses the source of that impulse, as so many cultural historians do. Admittedly, California has been a wellspring of antitraditionalism. It is true that from the early 1900s the seclusion of Southern California from entrenched institutions made it a haven for some of the most radical social experimentation in the country. As we have heard repeatedly, the region spawned mystic cults, nudist colonies, and utopian communities. Writing in 1921, John Steven McGroarty observed that Los Angeles is the most celebrated of all incubators of new creeds, codes of ethics, philosophiesno day passes without the birth of something of this nature never heard of before.12 San Franciscos brand of radicalism was more political and evolved along more established lines. Unlike Los Angeles, which had no real bohemia, San Francisco had developed an avant-garde by the start of the twentieth century, with its North Beach emulating Pariss Montmartre. San Francisco was host to some revolutionary groupsnotably the Industrial Workers of the World, the ragtag organization of anarchists and socialists that the Los Angeles Times nicknamed the Wobblies. As early as the 1900s San Francisco could claim the most powerful labor movement in the United States, a movement that culminated in the Great Strike of 1934, which demonstrated to the country that a union of longshoremen could effectively shut down a city. During the Second World overview: countering cultures
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War, the Bay Area became a center for pacism. As Kenneth Rexroth pointed out, half of the nations camps for conscientious objectors were within hitchhiking distance from the bay.13 Nonetheless, Californias Left has always competed with a formidable strain of conservatism, and during the radical years of the sixties that conservatism was on the rise. Instrumental to the growth of the New Right was the tremendous boom in Californias defense industry, which eventually overtook agribusiness as the engine of the states economy. No other development in California transformed the region more than its strategic positioning as the staging area for the succession of wars in the Pacic.14 In the early years of the cold war the federal government pumped more than $150 billion into arming the American West with the apparatus of massive destruction.15 As the cold war historian Kevin Fernlund has written, the result was a landscape that bristled with airelds, army bases, naval yards, marine camps, missile elds, nuclear test sites, proving grounds, bombing ranges, weapons plants, military reservations, training schools, toxic waste dumps, strategic mines, transportation routes, lines of communication, laboratories, command centers, and arsenals.16 The link between right-wing politics and the defense industry is encapsulated in the extremely conservative enclave of Orange County. By 1964 Orange County produced ninety percent of all advanced communication for the nation, and sixty percent of its employees worked in the aerospace industry.17 The explosive growth of the defense industry, which reached its peak during the height of the Vietnam War, was accompanied by an equally explosive growth in population, as California surpassed New York in 1962 as the most populous state. Advocacy of defense thus became closely allied with bread-and-butter issues of growth and expansion, and Southern California emerged as the center of the military-industrial complex identied by Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1961 presidential farewell address. Allied with this growth of industry and the military in the state was an increased need for
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research, leading the University of California to rapidly multiply its campuses, eventually becoming the largest state university system in the country. During the free speech movement, it would become a heated point of contention that the schools growth was not merely an accommodation of the mushrooming population but was fueled by an infusion of defense research funds.18 Integral to the growth of the Right in California was the intensication of anti-Communism, a natural corollary to the Rights pro-defense patriotism. It is no coincidence that two of the nations most highprole conservativesRichard Nixon and Ronald Reaganrose to the top of Californias political ladder waving anti-Communist, pro-defense banners. Reagans rise is a quintessential California success storyfrom president of the Screen Actors Guild to star witness against his Hollywood colleagues before the House Un-American Activities Committee, to spokesman of General Electric (which played a vital part in the defense industry), to governor of California, and ultimately to the presidency of the United States.19 The anti-Communist crusade was, of course, a national development most identied with the senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. The McCarthy era in American history has come to denote a time of conformity and suppressionin essence, a domestic cold war of internal containment. But the narrowing of politically and socially acceptable behavior was particularly restrictive in California, where the militarys presence was the strongest. As the historian Kevin Starr has argued, conservative efforts to control subversive individualsoften in the form of invasive red-baitingwere particularly rancorous during the reign of California state senator Jack Tenney. The highly publicized investigation of Hollywoods Left in the late forties led to the blacklisting, arrest, and persecution of more than three hundred people in the lm industry. With the imposition of a loyalty oath by the regents of the University of California in 1949, which forced the schools 3,200 professors to choose between their academic freedom

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and their livelihood, the university partnered with the government in what became a wide-ranging attack on the left-wing intellectuals of California.20 In short, California during these critical years was hardly a permissive land of personal expression, innovation, and experimentation that provided a natural cradle for cultural change in America. Rather, the region was characterized by a violent clash of contending forcesbetween a strong and growing political Left and an increasingly powerful Right supported by immense nancial interests. Most important, it was the very friction between those forces that became the essential catalyst for agitation, providing what the art historian Renato Poggioli has called the antagonistic momentor in this case, the series of antagonistic momentsthat typically ignites an avant-garde.21 Because the friction between these forces was especially extreme in California, the rupture was particularly severe. The cold war historian A. Yvette Huginnie might have been describing the situation more generally when she likened the struggle of race relations in the West to an earthquake, produced by tectonic plates rubbing against each other as they slowly jostled for position.22 The rst of these seismic ruptures was, not surprisingly, a reaction to the draconian censorship of Californias intelligentsia for more than a decade. On May 13, 1960, in a confrontation that came to be known as Black Friday, approximately two hundred demonstrators, mostly students from the University of California, Berkeley, sought admission to San Francisco City Hall to protest a hearing by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.23 They modeled their demonstration on the sit-ins that had begun only months before in North Carolina, when several black students refused to move from a Woolworth lunch counter.24 The demonstration in San Francisco, unlike previous altercations, was met with immediate government-sponsored violence. When the students sat down and refused to leave, four hundred policemen reportedly hosed them and beat them with clubs, dragging many down the marble steps by their

feet and hair. The incident was a watershed, nationally and internationally, setting a precedent for radical activism by students throughout the sixties. Black Friday served as a prologue to the free speech movement on the Berkeley campus four years later. The largest instance of campus disobedience in the countrys history to date, the free speech movement not only helped secure First Amendment rights on campuses nationwide, but reafrmed constitutional protection of organized advocacy and freedom of assembly on a broad civilian scale. The free speech movement was also, ultimately, a warmup exercise for the upheaval over the Vietnam War. Although the war was clearly an event of national and international magnitude, Berkeley once again took a leadership role in organizing student dissent. When the radical activist and future Yippie Jerry Rubin decided to organize the Vietnam Day Committee in May 1965, his prospects were bleak, as a former student at Berkeley recounted: At the time pacists, leftists, and independent-minded intellectuals who denounced the Vietnam War were ignored; few Americans objected to the war.25 Although earlier that spring the University of Michigan had organized its landmark antiwar teach-in and the rst major march on Washington, D.C., by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had drawn an estimated 25,000 demonstrators, the event Rubin organized a two-day series of speeches and performances at the Berkeley campus, featuring Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Phil Ochs, and Alan Watts and culminating in a marchrepresented the largest campus opposition to the war to date. The media surrounding these events helped bring to national consciousness the gravity of the war, which had begun its dramatic escalation from 1964 to 1965, when the number of U.S. troops on active duty in Vietnam had increased from 23,000 to 184,314.26 In the next few years, demonstrations swept across the nation with the revelations of atrocities: Operation Rolling Thunder, a policy of saturation bombing that dropped seven million tons of explosives (about twice the total used on Europe overview: countering cultures
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and Asia in World War II), leaving an estimated twenty million bomb craters on a country of 128,400 square miles; Operation Ranch Hand, which sprayed approximately four million gallons of herbicide and defoliant over the countryside; and most wrenching of all, the My Lai massacre of March 1968, in which an American platoon senselessly executed, mutilated, and raped more than three hundred civilian women, children, and elderly men in a South Vietnamese village. The controversy over the Vietnam War was particularly strident in California, not only because the defense industry sharpened the polarity of the states politics, but because of its geographic position as gateway to the Pacic. The war could not simply be ignored when California was the last mainland stop on the way to Vietnam and the rst point of entry from the battleeld. Between 1965 and 1968, 222,750 soldiers passed through the Oakland Army Base alone on their way to the Pacic.27 The return numbers were similar: veterans came ooding back through the states portssome wounded, some former prisoners of war, many of them to stayand so did the dead. A particularly chilling reminder of the wars toll was the participation of Oakland-based World Airways in Operation Babylift, which rescued thousands of orphaned babies and children from Vietnam in 1975.28 California also became home to the largest population of Vietnamese refugees in the world, most settling in San Jose and Orange County. The nal and perhaps most signicant clash between Left and Right in California occurred with the rise of the social movements of the sixties and seventies. Again, Californias experience was part of a widespread national rupture, but one that was especially acute. To begin with, the liberation groups that emerged in California during the Vietnam War had a lot to do with the states participation in that war and the two preceding wars. California already had a long history of discrimination, with its large immigrant labor populations of Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican descent. Californias Alien Land Law, the
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Chinese Exclusion Act, the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, and Operation Wetback are but a few well-known examples of racial prejudice that affected minority groups in the West.29 Yet the groups that had suffered the most in the pastChinese and Japanese Americanswere the least active in the liberation movements of the sixties.30 This made perfect sense in the new socioeconomic climate of the cold war West. Unlike Chicanos and African Americans, who experienced worsening economic and social conditions after the Korean War, Asian Americans tended to benet from militarization. Between 1950 and 1965 Chinese and Japanese American men with training in engineering and science joined the white-collar workforce as they took high-paying jobs in the defense industry and for the rst time enjoyed middle- and upper-middle-class status in appreciable numbers.31 During the sixties Japanese Americans were on the whole better educated than whites, and college deferments kept many from being called into military service.32 This suggests how critical the impact of the cold war was in sparking political unrest in California. The magnitude and speed of the demographic shifts that occurred in the fties and sixties, coupled with the repressive social developments, set the stage for insurrection among the groups in the state who faced the greatest discrimination during those yearsAfrican Americans, Chicanos, and gays. Along with the successes of the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King Jr., the free speech movement and massive antiwar protests inspired emancipatory fervor. In many cases agitation for civil rights combined with antiwar efforts. It is no coincidence that in the summer of 1965, only a few months after President Lyndon Johnson ordered a large increase of combat troops to Vietnam, the Watts riots erupted in South Central Los Angelesone of the largest civil disturbances in American history, with 3,952 arrests and an estimated forty million dollars worth of damage. The 2.5-squaremile area housed half a million African Americans, many of them migrants from the South who had come

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to nd work in the defense industry.33 During World War II African Americans found employment working in the shipping and aircraft industries, but in the fties and sixties the increasingly technical defense jobs went to whites and Asians. The Vietnam War not only tended to reinforce black-white segregation in the workforce, but blacks were also drafted into military service in disproportionate numbers.34 The Black Panther Party leaders in Oakland were among the rst to speak out against the high number of African Americans going to war, asserting solidarity with the nascent Chicano movement.35 The Chicano liberation movement came of age the same year as the Watts riots. In 1965 Csar Chvez organized the Great Delano Grape Strike in the San Joaquin Valley, an event that helped make him the countrys most visible Latino activist and led to his successes in Californias labor movement through the United Farm Workers of America. The conicts that gave rise to the Chicano movement were much the same as those affecting African Americans: a massive immigration during the decade after World War II (between 1944 and 1954, the decade of the wetback, it is estimated that the number of undocumented workers coming from Mexico increased sixtyfold), followed by discriminatory housing, wages, education, anda particularly sore point in the sixties overrepresentation in combat and casualty rolls. In April 1968, the month that King was shot, ten thousand Mexican American students walked out of six East Los Angeles high schools to protest racism. Their disruption of the largest school system in the United States marked the entry of Chicanos into mass social activism, including many protests against the Vietnam War, culminating in 1970 in the march organized by the Chicano Moratorium in East Los Angeles, one of the largest off-campus antiwar demonstrations in the nation. Adding to this tide of protest activity, the womens movement arrived in 1966 with the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW), based in Washington D.C., and gay liberation soon after, fol-

lowing the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969.36 While California did not assume a position of national leadership in the womens movement,37 gay pride ascended to prominence in the state, eventually earning San Francisco the title of the gay capital of America. Like the Chicano and African American movements, the struggle for gay rights in the West was profoundly shaped by the Korean and Vietnam wars and specically catalyzed by conservative efforts at containment. Hostilities began with government and military purges during the fties and sixties. (According to navy records, that branch of the service alone discharged an average of 1,100 sailors a year for homosexuality between 1950 and 1965.)38 As early as 1950 some conservative politicians in California were comparing the gay menace to the threat of Communism. But this harassment only helped the homosexual cause; as Huginnie has noted, An irony of the high-prole persecution of gays and lesbians is that it helped to markdene and advertisethat very identity [and thus] helped to put Los Angeles and San Francisco on the map as West Coast centers for gays and lesbians.39 By the seventies an estimated 200,000 of San Franciscos residents were gay men and at least another 50,000 were lesbians.40 San Francisco was among the rst cities in America in which gays and lesbians gained electoral clout. A historic breakthrough was reached with the election in 1977 of openly homosexual San Francisco county supervisor Harvey Milk, whose assassination less than a year later made him a martyr for the gay cause.41 the remarkable political ferment in California does not in itself explain the artistic response it generated, which formed a striking contrast to the initial near-silence of New Yorks avant-garde. As mentioned earlier, one basic reason for the disparity was that the structure of art production was entirely different in California. In cities across the state, teaching positions rather than art sales provided support for artists, which gave them greater independence from the constraints of commerce.42 Thus conditions in the West overview: countering cultures
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particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, which had few commercially successful art galleries until the early seventieswere conducive to a far greater range of artistic expression. This lack of competitive pressure meant that California artists were not locked into the market-driven orthodoxy that held New York artists in its grip. That orthodoxy can be summed up by the critic Clement Greenbergs dictum that contemporary art should conne itself exclusively to what is given in visual experience, and make no reference to anything given in other orders of experience.43 The writings of Greenberg and the group (as the critics who held sway in those years became known) were highly inuential in promoting an art entirely drained of extra-aesthetic meaning.44 Yet this was an ideology that ran deeper than mere marketing strategy; it had to do with shifting attitudes and alliances among the artists and intellectuals associated with the Old Left. Essentially, the effects of McCarthyism, combined with a growing boom in the art market and its cult of personalities, served to compromiseone might even say de-fangwhatever political aspirations those erstwhile radicals may have had.45 Nonetheless, for the generation that emerged in the thirties nurtured on Marxist debate, abstraction itself had become politicized, standing for freedom and a hard-won triumph over Fascist and Stalinist realism as well as capitalist kitsch.46 They took refuge in the premise that Meyer Schapiro put forth in his landmark essay The Liberating Quality of Avant-garde Art (1957)the idea that rejecting tradition was itself a political act, and that the autonomy of art, as a form of personal liberation, was the only guarantee of political and ethical integrity in an otherwise deterministic world.47 This became an ideological tenet of even the most left-leaning artists of the Abstract Expressionist generation like Ad Reinhardt and David Smith. In the sixties it would continue to serve as a rationale for New Yorks color eld painters, Pop artists, and Minimalists. The Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, a high-prole political activist who belonged to the Art Workers Coalition and
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was among the New Yorkers who participated in the Los Angeles Peace Tower in 1966, echoed the sentiments of some of the Old Left when he insisted that art and politics should remain in separate spheres. But Judd had trouble refuting those still scarce but increasingly vocal political artists like Leon Golub. Golub sounded an ominous warning to formalists in 1969 when he wrote to the editors of Artforum: The abstract sculptures etc., in our cities become grimacing monsters if viewed in political or utopian contexts. . . . Those arts that began with the modernist dream of human freedom may nd they serve technological masters and the American empire.48 By contrast, Californias postwar avant-garde was much more closely allied to New Left thinking and, indeed, as the historian Stewart Burns and others have argued, presaged a number of shifts in American radicalism.49 There were certainly artists in California who followed the formalist imperatives emanating from New York. This was particularly true in early sixties Los Angeles, where a contingent of abstractionists clustered around the Ferus Gallery in West Hollywood, keeping politics at a safe distance from their art. One of the gallerys mainstay artists, Billy Al Bengston, for example, refused to participate in antiwar protests, by one account explaining cynically that with the war going on all the people in Orange County had money to buy his art.50 But Bengston represented a minority view. Far more signicant for the evolving political discourse was the social commentary of the California Beats, a loose-knit, somewhat nomadic association of artists of largely anarchist and libertarian persuasion.51 The Beats formed a true underground in the sense that they functioned almost entirely through such noncommercial means as cooperative galleries and private presses. Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, George Herms, Jess, Ben Talbert, and their literary cohorts Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Stuart Perkoff, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Jack Spicer were among the artists and poets who, as early as the forties, began to reject the formalism that had become

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BEN TALBERT THE ACE, 1963 Assemblage, 96 50 38 in. Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University; Marie Eccles Caine Foundation Gift.

obligatory in New York and to embrace a far more inclusive approach that combined an intense personalism with an uncompromising critique of society specically, of the increasingly conservative culture of cold war America. In their visual art and writings (which were sometimes collaborative), the Beats attacked a wide range of issues, including bigotry, homophobia, xenophobia, consumerism, censorship of all kinds, the destruction of the environment, Americas colonial foreign policyand most of all (not surprisingly, considering they were in California), the growing military-industrial complex, which Ginsberg denounced as Americas Moloch.52 Signicantly, the Beats were not only witnesses to, but also targets of, conservative efforts at social con-

tainment through sanctions both legal and illegal. There are many examples that could be cited, but a few stand out: After publishing a candid essay on homosexuality in 1944, Robert Duncan found himself banned by the literary establishment.53 In the midfties the North Beach police continually harassed the black poet Bob Kaufman for having a white girlfriend; nally an ofcer stamped on Kaufmans foot and broke his toe.54 When the artist Cameron was found living among blacks in Pasadena, a bench warrant was issued for her arrest. Wallace Berman was denied unemployment benets in Los Angeles because of his beard. Any explicit reference to sex was met with police action. The numerous arrests and trials of California artists on obscenity charges became causes clbres overview: countering cultures
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CHARLES BRITTIN ARTHUR RICHER, WALLACE BERMAN, JOHN REED, VICE SQUAD OFFICER, 1957 Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the photographer.

in the art community and beyond. The arrest of Berman for exhibiting a drawing of a couple copulating (it was, in fact, a drawing by Cameron), the attempt by police to close down Edward Kienholzs show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art because of the artists obscene Back Seat Dodge 38 (1964, p. 95), and, most famously, the obscenity trial for Allen Ginsbergs Howl (1955) are just a few of the better-known highly publicized incidents of censorship. In response to this unrelenting antagonism, some Beats withdrew, while others became increasingly bold in their critiques and open about their unconventional lifestyles. Ginsbergs declaration of his homosexuality in the national press in 1959, at a time when same-sex relations were still illegal in most states, Michael McClures deant play The Beard, which scandalized San Francisco in the mid-sixties and Mc10

Clures poem Poisoned Wheat (1965), which laid bare the sins of Americas founding,55 were in an important sense precedents to, if not early manifestations of, the New Lefts activist spirit. With the increasing media focus on the Beats, what had begun as a private underground began to re a collective imagination far exceeding the boundaries of the art and poetry worlds. Ironically, the attempt to render the Beats harmless by a process of Dobey Gillication (that is, making them cute and laughable dropouts) only served to swell the ranks of Californias counterculture, laying the ethical foundation for the student protest movements, the hippies, and the rebellious youth culture that spread across America. Thus, the Beats not only responded to the ferment; they played a major role in catalyzing it. And yet their work has been described as fundamentally apolitical at least in the strict sensein that it was generally designed for a private audience as a kind of personal catharsis shared among like-minded individuals.56 George Hermss Secret Exhibition of 1956, for example, scattered over a series of weed-choked lots in Hermosa Beach in Southern California, was seen by only a very few.57 Wallace Bermans hand-printed magazine Seminaproduced from 1955 to 1964 and containing poems, photographs, and drawingsfrequently dealt with highly charged political issues, from civil rights disturbances in Alabama to the censorship of Lenny Bruce, but its distribution was limited to a small group of friends. His Semina Gallery is yet another example of the Beats disregard for public exposure. Housed in an abandoned rooess boathouse in the Larkspur marshlands, the gallery literally sank into the mud after hosting exhibitions by Bermans friends, each show lasting no more than a few hours. Typical of Beat assemblage, most of the works shown were made of cast-off materials and have long since perished. Such junk sculpture, or Funk Art, as it was later called,58 was itself a political statementa rejection of the consumerist culture of the postwar era and specically of the elitist politics of the art market. While Beat art was in a certain sense anti-elitist,

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its political impulse was never truly populist. This is arguably the deepest ideological divide between the political art of the Beats and that of the subsequent generation. In the sixties populism virtually exploded in California, bringing with it a profusion of political art forms that aimed to reach beyond the art world to a mass audience, mirroring the simultaneous burst of political activism. This tendency was particularly evident in the amboyant counterculture of the Bay Area, where in the mid-sixties Haight-Ashbury entrepreneurs opened free stores that ridiculed consumerism. There was even an anarchist street theater group called the Diggers (named after a seventeenthcentury English sect of religious communists), which gave away or burned money and made free lunches for thousands in the Panhandle.59 This group popularized guerrilla theater in San Francisco, performing impromptu critiques of war, racism, and capitalist excess in the parks and streets of the city.60 Of the artists associated with the Haight-Ashbury counterculture, it was perhaps the psychedelic poster designers who most embodied this populism. Victor Moscoso, who had studied at Yale University with Josef Albers, exemplied the egalitarian spirit when he stopped painting after realizing that for a dollar or two anyone could buy one of his posters.61 In fact, many posters were free. Rock concert impresario Bill Graham recalled tacking up dance posters along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley in 1966, and after nishing four blocks discovering that people were taking them down as fast as he could put them up. After that he gave away posters to all advance ticket purchasers, but ultimately bowed to the inevitable and offered free posters to all who attended.62 While artists like Moscoso, Rick Grifn, Joe McHugh, Stty, and Wes Wilson did not attempt to effect changes at the courthouse or ballot box, they did seek to foster an insurgent consciousness that challenged the consensus values of American culture. With their eye-catching neon colors and turbulent designs, these artists captured the ecstatic revelry of psychedelics and in doing so hoped to change conventional perceptions of

STTY STONE GARDEN, 1966 Lithograph, 35 23 in. East Totem West.

life itselfto make an impact on what R. D. Laing called the politics of experience.63 As an art form that is not only anti-elitist but also inherently public, posters became the obvious medium of choice for a wide spectrum of activists in the sixties and early seventies. During that period thousands of posters were made for various political movements, from Chvezs strikers to the Black Panthers to Vietnam War protesters. Political posters were already a well-established genre in America, having gained particular prominence during World War II, when illustrators such as Norman Rockwell and N. C. Wyeth popularized images of victory and patriotism. The new breed of American poster artist took inspiration from the European avant-garde and transformed the medium from a vehicle of governmentsponsored propaganda to an expression of dissent. overview: countering cultures
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ROBBIE CONAL MONICA LEWINSKY, 1998; HILLARY CLINTON, 1999; BILL CLINTON, 2000 Charcoal on canvas, approximately 22 12 18 12 in. each. San Jose Museum of Art. Gift of James Otis Peaceful Warrior Collection.

Political poster artists often circumvented the commodication system by means of private production and public dissemination. With no funding or institutional support, artists were forced to think, as the Los Angeles painter and activist Irving Petlin remarked, in terms of the disposable and transitory life of the streets.64 Petlin himself helped organize one of the earliest and most dramatic artistic protest events of the Vietnam War erathe Artists Protest Committees White-out of 1965, which plastered the facades of art galleries along La Cienega Boulevard with posters stamped with the groups Stop Escalation logo. Associated primarily with the antiwar protests of the sixties, this kind of guerrilla activity survives today in the poster art of Robbie Conal, who stages art attacks against Republican and Democratic leaders alike in secret midnight blitzes that cover the streets of Los Angeles with his satires.65 Of all movements in California during the sixties and seventies, the Chicano movement gave the greatest prominence to the poster as a tool for political action. As George Lipsitz has observed, Chicano posters functioned as part of the movement itself, as vital forms that performed important work in the struggle for social change.66 The rst graphics were prosusan landauer

duced in the mid-sixties for Chvezs United Farm Workers Organizing Committee to help mobilize its boycotting efforts. With the advent of communitybased collectives, or centros culturales, throughout California in the early seventies, the impetus shifted to a broader range of concerns, from immigration and border politics to police brutality, drug abuse, and gang warfare. In more recent years poster artists such as Ester Hernndez and Richard Duardo have continued to articulate issues of identity and cultural and historical reclamation. If posters reach an audience far greater than that of paintings, sculpture, or even photography, so do murals, the other major art forms that reemerged in the early seventies. Like posters, political murals are hardly unique to California, but they have been especially prevalent in the state and have continued to remain a vital form of contemporary expression. San Francisco has a particularly strong history of political mural production, beginning with the projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration in the thirties, notably the Coit Tower frescoes, which caused considerable controversy for their alleged Communist innuendos. The arrival in that decade of the Mexican muralists known as Los Tres Grandes Diego Rivera in San Francisco and Jos Clemente

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ESTER HERNNDEZ SUN MAD, 1982 Screenprint, 22 17 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros in Los Angeles left a lasting legacy. When mural art experienced a resurgence in the early seventies, many artists turned to Los Tres Grandes for inspiration, positioning themselves in the populist tradition of the Mexicans. Mural painting has proved to be a particularly powerful tool for a variety of social and ethnic movements. In California, African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, women, and gays have all used murals to enhance cultural solidarityan objective clearly enunciated in 1974 by the womens collective Las

Mujeres Muralistas of San Francisco: Our intent as artists is to put art close to where it needs to be. Close to the children; close to the old people; close to everyone who has to walk or ride the buses to get places.67 Not surprisingly, considering the strong Mexican antecedents, the Chicano movement has dominated the mural renaissance. Along with printing posters, the major artistic activity of the centros has continued to be organizing mural projects. Plaza de la Raza in East Los Angeles, founded in 1969, and Galera de la Raza in San Franciscos Mission District, founded overview: countering cultures
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JUDY BACA GREAT WALL OF LOS ANGELES: DIVISION OF THE BARRIOS & CHAVEZ RAVINE; THE BIRTH OF ROCK & ROLL (DETAIL), 1983 Acrylic on cast concrete. SPARC www.sparcmurals.org.

in 1970, were among the rst centros to bring together artists and residents to create murals throughout their neighborhoods. The spirit of collaboration has been crucial to mural making in Chicano communities, as it has for other disenfranchised groups. The Chicano movement is particularly notable for forging alliances not only within its own communities, but with disparate other social groups as well. The muralist Judith Baca, founder of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), an organization dedicated to the documentation and preservation of murals in Southern California, has done the most to foster cross-cultural unication. Bacas halfmile Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976), probably the longest mural in the world, is the creation of more than four hundred multiethnic neighborhood youths (many from rival gangs), forty artists, forty historians, and a support staff of over a hundred. The subject matter is also geared toward racial inclusivity, depicting the construction of the railroads by Chinese workers in the late nineteenth century, the de14

portation of Mexican immigrants in the thirties, scenes of Japanese American internment during World War II, and the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.68 The communitarian impulse evident in Bacas project, as well as in the Chicano mural movement generally, runs through a wide range of political art and, indeed, may be considered one of the dening characteristics of Californias contribution to political art in this country. Instances are as varied as they are numerous: they include street art, performance art, installation art, and other forms that do not t any particular category.69 An early and highly inuential example is the Artists Tower of Protest (also known as the Peace Tower), erected at the juncture of La Cienega and Sunset boulevards in Los Angeles in 1966. Designed and built under the direction of sculptor Mark di Suvero and coordinated by Irving Petlin, the fty-ve-foot tower was decorated with individual antiwar paintings by 418 artistsa virtual whos who of the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York

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art communities.70 Womanhouse (1972) also ranks among the major landmarks of collective art. For this site-specic installation, twenty-one students from Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiros Feminist Art Program at CalArts transformed a condemned mansion in residential Hollywood into a series of fantasy environments, each room exploring the stereotypes and realities of the housewife.71 Bonnie Sherks Crossroads Community (The Farm) (1974, pp. 22829) took populist collectivism to an unprecedented extreme by extending an open invitation to the public to participate in her social sculpture.72 Developed over a period of seven years on four and a half acres of land under a freeway interchange in San Francisco, The Farm consisted of crops and animals, a performance center, and art classes for children, senior citizens, and psychiatric patients. The utopianism of collective political art in California sharply differentiates it from its European antecedents, such as Dada performances in Zurich. The critic Henry Sayre has argued that at least one strain of collective expressionperformance art can be traced to the hippie counterculture in San Francisco, citing the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in 1967 as a seminal event.73 Others have found a potent source in the antihierarchical ideology of the womens movement, particularly among feminist groups in California.74 But these are manifestations rather than causes. The communal urge so prevalent in the American West rst emerged with the beleaguered counterculture of the Beats, stemming from a desire for solidarity, shared experience, and a hybrid, synthetic expression that blurred the boundaries between jazz, poetry, and painting. One of the rst Happenings on the West Coast took place in 1957 (a year before Allan Kaprow coined the term). Billed as an evening of collective expressionism, the event was a collaboration between painters and poets at the 6 Gallery in San Francisco. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac read poetry while members of the audience used an ax to chop up a piano and some of the paintings on display. Ginsbergs legendary reading of Howl at the

same gallery in 1955which incited something like the frenzy of a tribal riteset a precedent for the performative, collective poetry readings that brought fame to San Francisco. The sixties counterculture, bolstered by the spread of collective political action, expanded upon the Beats holistic, communal ideal, so much so that it became a leitmotif of the period, from Ken Keseys massively attended acid tests of 196566rock-and-light shows at which an estimated ten thousand people took LSDto Peoples Park in Berkeley in 1969, and nally to the popular vogue for communal living and group sex. The driving force behind all of these efforts at unity was not merely social innovation or fashion, but ultimately a deeply political yearning to end the rampant divisiveness of the era. In the seventies and eighties the artists who did the most to extend the collaborative tradition in California art tended to be those associated with the overview: countering cultures

SHEILA DE BRETTEVILLE WOMANHOUSE CATALOGUE COVER, 1971 Pictured left to right: Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago. 1971 Through the Flower Archives. Photo: Courtesy of Through the Flower Archives.

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ASCO Left to right: Harry Gamboa Jr., Willie Herrn, Patssi Valdez, Gronk, and Humberto Sandoval in 1974. Photo 1974 Harry Gamboa Jr. Courtesy of Patricia Correia Gallery, Santa Monica, California.

periods emancipatory movements. Initially they did so for practical reasons, as many disenfranchised artists had done before them when they needed strength in numbers, notably modernists early in the twentieth century. Artists cooperatives were particularly vital for artists afliated with social movements in California because they suffered from demographic and geographic marginalization. After 1970 some of the most radical forms of political art were the product of artists collectives that rejected high art by engaging in direct interventions to effect social and political change. The performance group Asco (Spanish for nausea), for example, was born in 1971 out of the art worlds refusal to show the work of its membersHarry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrn, and Patssi Valdez. The groups rst effort was grafti sprayed on the walls of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art protesting a curators stated disinterest in Chicano art. The group went on to perform a range of guerrilla theater pieces, some of which were strikingly prescient in their critique of the conformity of Chicanos within the Chicano movement. They were more than a decade ahead of their time in works such as the Instant Mural (1974), a performance piece that satirized Chicano mural-

ism. Only in the eighties and nineties did the antiassimilation model begin to break down, replaced by a more inclusive identity politics articulating a theory of intersectionality and post-colonial hybridity.75 As the sociologist Todd Gitlin has noted, the ip side of the communal strain of the sixties and seventies was a seemingly opposed but equally powerful libertarian tendency that amounted to a cult of the selfsufcient individual searching for maximum personal freedom.76 This predilection was especially evident in the social liberation movements, or identity movements, as they came to be called for their stress on transcending socially constructed personae. Feminists were among the rst to promote the idea that dening the self was the rst step toward liberation. Faith Wilding, who was on the ground oor of feminist art in California as a student of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro at Fresno State (where the rst feminist art program in America was established in 1970), remembers that the feminist artists slogan from the beginning was The personal is the political.77 She recalls how Chicago and Schapiros program contested the canons of Greenbergian formalism that were the required curricula of art schools: Never in our previous art education had we been asked to make work out of a real life experience, much less one so emotionally loaded. . . . I remember the almost unbearable mixture of excitement, fear, and pain in the room as this raw work burst forth. . . . By fortuitous accident, it seemed, we had stumbled on a way of working: using consciousness-raising to elicit content, we then worked in any medium or mixture of media including performance, roleplaying, conceptual- and text-based art, and other nontraditional toolsto reveal our hidden histories.78 Numerous artists have since used storytelling as a means of reclaiming the pastboth personal and collective. Paralleling the literary explosion of culturally diverse self-narratives, some of the most compelling art of recent years records emotionally charged recollections, from Roger Shimomuras re-

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LONG NGUYEN TALES OF YELLOW SKIN #5, 1992 Oil on canvas, 66 66 in. Courtesy of the artist.

membrance of his third birthday in a Japanese American internment camp to Carmen Lomas Garzas memories of tamale making in her childhood home in Texas. One of the most powerful examples of works in this vein, Long Nguyens series Tales of Yellow Skin (1991 ), bears witness to the artists harrowing experiences as a boy growing up in the midst of war-wracked Vietnam. As Faith Wilding suggests, some of the most intimate disclosures have come from the feminist movement, particularly during the early years, when artists such as Lynn Hershman, Rachel Rosenthal, and Wilding herself addressed formerly untouchable themes, such as menstruation and the female orgasm. In recent years feminists have tended to move away from

body-based subjects but have not abandoned their preoccupation with intimate autobiography. Linda Montanos performances have covered a spectrum of personal topics, from a detailed account of her grief over her husbands accidental death to her own battles with menopause and aging. Gay and lesbian artists have also been confessionally frank in their work. David Hockneys paintings allow a glimpse into the most condential aspects of his love life, while Lari Pittman proclaims his gay sexuality in vast, selfconsciously celebratory canvases. Attempting to expose the simplistic notions of ethnic and gender stereotyping, some artists have taken to fanciful reworkings of identity that go far beyond the mere exploding of myths. Eleanor Antin, overview: countering cultures
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ELEANOR ANTIN MY KINGDOM IS THE RIGHT SIZE, FROM THE KING OF SOLANA BEACH, 1974 Gelatin silver print, 6 9 in. Collection of Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

for example, produced a photographic series casting herself as various outlandish ctional personae, most provocatively as the male King of Solana Beach. In unannounced, spontaneous performances documented by the photographer Phil Steinmetz, Antin donned a beard, hat, and cape and walked along the beach among her unwitting subjects (mostly teenage boys), bestowing greetings, advice, and good wishes.79 Equally provocative gender-bending can be found in the tiny jewel-like paintings of Tino Rodrguez, who takes on the guise of bloodthirsty Saint Sebastians and androgynous mermaids. M. Louise Stanley has created some of the funniest ctional selves in her updated versions of Greek myths. Recognizable in her form-tting capris, striped top, and aming-red hair, Stanley plays a starring role in paintings such as Pygmaliana (1984), in which an Adonis susan landauer

leans out of a canvas to plant a kiss on her lips. Belly Dancer (1993) has her jumping up and down on a prone mans stomach to vent the very real frustrations Stanley feels about the art worlds ongoing sexual discrimination. Stanley belongs to a distinctive line of Bay Area artists who employ wit to reveal painful social and political truths. The regions penchant for political humor dates at least as far back as the early forties, when Clay Spohn painted his Fantastic War Machines, images of Rube Goldberglike contraptions that mocked the militarys boastful visions of technological prowess.80 In the mid-sixties, political satire returned with a vengeance in the eye-stinging canvases of Peter Saul. Using repellent rubbery distortions and lurid colors to shake his viewers out of their complacency, Saul has continued to assail American politics and culture. His

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Vietnam paintings (196572) are particularly shocking, portraying American soldiers raping, sodomizing, and crucifying Vietnamese women. Later paintings expose the hypocrisies of American political leaders with venomous satire. Another arch satirist from the Bay Area is Robert Arneson, whose grotesque caricatures of the seventies placed him alongside Edward Kienholz as one of the foremost California sculptors tackling political subjects. His missile-snouted generals rank among the most searing indictments of the military in American art. Caricatures of political leaders also gure importantly in Arnesons work, the best-known being his bust of George Moscone (1981, see p. 97), which caused an uproar after it was commissioned by the city of San Francisco and then rejected for its disrespectful portrayal of the assassinated mayor. The Bay

Areas tradition of irreverent satire survives in the caricature of Enrique Chagoya, who, like Arneson, began his career as a political cartoonist. Since the mideighties Chagoya has delighted in lampooning public gures, recently casting President George W. Bush and his cabinet in the roles of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Untitled, 2004). The artist who has probably achieved the most attention for his political satire in recent years is Robert Colescott. Although Colescott belongs to the generation of Bay Area painters who emerged in the late sixties and seventiesthe East Bay group around Peter Saul and M. Louise Stanley that the art historian Whitney Chadwick called the Narrative Imagists his work partakes of the contemporary taste for pastiche and appropriation.81 Colescott hit upon his signature approach in the mid-seventies, when he began overview: countering cultures

M. LOUISE STANLEY PYGMALIANA, 1984 Oil on canvas, 24 3212 in. From installation Pompeian Villa. Courtesy of the artist.

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ROBERT COLESCOTT GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER CROSSING THE DELAWARE: PAGE FROM AN AMERICAN HISTORY TEXTBOOK, 1975 Acrylic on canvas, 84 108 in. Collection of Robert and Lois Orchard. Courtesy of the artist and Phyllis Kind Gallery.

a series of parodies of famous paintings. The subject had been a staple of Arneson and his students since the sixties, but Colescott added a distinctive political twist by substituting white protagonists with blacks. George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975), for example, forces viewers to confront the absence of blacks in mainstream history and high culture. Colescotts nomination as the American representative at the Venice Biennale in 1997 coincided with a major reordering of values in the art world, a shifting of terms that led to the embrace of gurative art and its discredited cousin, political satire. Colescott has now been hailed as an important progenitor of contemporary trends. As the art curator Low20

ery Sims observed, his narrative approach has secured him a key position within the history of American art for presaging the revival of guration and the bad manners of Post-modernism.82 The same claims have been made for the art of the Chicano and feminist movements. According to painter and poster designer Rupert Garca, the Chicano artists of the sixties gave rise to the postmodernist disregard for style development with their insistence on expressive representationalism.83 Lucy Lippard credited feminist artists with initiating the sweeping changes of the seventies. In endlessly different ways, she wrote, the best women artists have resisted the treadmill to progress by simply disregarding a history that was not theirs.84 In Lippards estimate, the most revolution-

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ary contribution of feminist art was not its forms, but its contenta reversal of Greenbergian priorities. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe these tendencies as inuential rather than revolutionary. Certainly the rise of identity art movements throughout the United States in the early seventies marked an end of an aesthetics-based avant-garde. As the eighties advanced, it became acceptable once again for artists to address social and political issues without being excluded from the mainstream.85 But this had been the case in California for decades; indeed, in 1964 the curator Paul Mills commented on the complete rejection of the whole power politics of style by ostensibly nonpolitical Bay Area Figurative artists such as David Park,86 who won much admiration among his California colleagues in 1957 when he dared to debunk modernisms obsessive genealogy with the comment that concepts of progress in painting are rather foolish.87 It is this emphasis on individual experience rather than on theory or tradition that has largely been responsible for the comparative abundance of political art in California. The widespread suspicion that formalisms art-for-arts-sake ideal was in fact a ludicrous fantasy, as the artist/poet Jos Montoya put it, has encouraged artists to pursue meaningful subjects in a plurality of styleseven availing themselves of the most discredited forms.88 Only in such an artistic climate could painters like Hans Burkhardt, Irving Norman, and Llyn Foulkes devote decades to political dissent in the traditional medium of oil painting. California has been, if not a haven, certainly an environment where artists have been able to reinvigorate the genre of political art using any means they choose, whether old-fashioned easel painting or the latest forms of new media. With recent signs that the mainstream art world is relinquishing the aesthetics of neutrality that made Duchamp and Warhol the twin idols of the last century, the artists in this volume may strike a particular chord of relevance today reasserting values of commitment to the concerns of the collective heart and mind.

LLYN FOULKES THE CORPORATE KISS, 2001 Oil, acrylic, and mixed media, 31 12 26 14 in. San Jose Museum of Art. Gift of The Lipman Family Foundation. Llyn Foulkes.

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ART OF ENGAGEMENT

A PERSONAL VIEW OF THE INTERACTION OF POLITICS AND ART

PROLOGUE

my interest in the critical relationship between art and politics stems in large part from my personal history. In the mid-1930s in Munich, where I grew up, I witnessed the gigantic spectacles that Hitler organized: Huge oats with sculptures glorifying the Nibelungs and the gods of Valhalla and depicting German medieval knights as descendants of Greek athletes rolled down the ag-bedecked streets in unprecedented pageantry. In 1934 I visited a chamber of horrors, a precursor of the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition and, like it, a virulent attack against the avant-garde, attempting to incite the public against modern art, with its intrinsic questioning of authority, and to rid, in Hitlers words, the German Reich of inuences which are fatal and ruinous to its existence.1 Here I saw paintings by Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, all vilied for political reasons, while the artists themselves were persecuted by the regime and had to ee the country.

More than twenty years later, as a student of the history of art at the University of Chicago, I decided to write my PhD dissertation on German Expressionist painting.2 These artists adherence to their inner vision, their rejection of traditional bourgeois values, and their creation of an art that demanded active participation on the part of the viewer fascinated me. Instead of analyzing the art in a strictly formalist manner, I realized that the movement had to be seen in the context of Wilhelminian and Weimar Germany. The sociopolitical context was key to understanding the import of German Expressionism, which had been marginalized in art historical studies until that time, partly because it did not easily t into a lockstep progression of formalist modernism. Contextual studies became central to the discipline only later, but context also became critical to my perception of the new European and American gurative art in the postWorld War II era. In my second book and exhibition, New Images of Man, I situated this art in
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relation to existentialist thought. Connecting artists like Jean Dubuffet and Francis Bacon to existentialism, I underlined their awareness of the mechanized barbarism of a time which, notwithstanding Buchenwald and Hiroshima, is engaged in the preparation of even greater violence in which the globe is to be the target.3 The connection between politics and art is, of course, far from straightforward. In the early 1960s, at the height of the cold war, the American art community paid almost no attention to the art of Eastern Europe, believing simply that all art from behind the Iron Curtain was propaganda for a dictatorial regime. Yet, when I had the chance to really look at painting in Poland, I discovered a vigorous eforescence, an essentially abstract art related to a Constructivist tradition and to Art Informel, but with its own authentic voice. This art declared its independence from the ofcial line.4 Almost twenty years later Dore Ashton, Peter Nisbet, and I discovered a similarly vibrant, nonconforming art in the German Democratic Republic. Our exhibition Twelve Artists from the German Democratic Republic opened at the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down.5 Obviously, nobody would claim that artists work prompted the monumental bloodless revolution that took place that year in Central and Eastern Europe. The effect of art on the realm of politics cannot be gauged. You cannot prevent war with art, Bernhard Heisig, one of the painters in our exhibition, stated. But I can make a drawing of a hand, which will make everyone feel that this hand must not be destroyed.6 I do not doubt that the artistic and intellectual ferment so evident in the painting and sculpture of the time, as well as in lm, theater, and literature, had an impact on the dismantling of the autocratic regime, even if this cannot be statistically measured. My curiosity about this kind of interaction has continued and underlies the writing of this book. For the sourcebook Theories of Modern Art by Herschel B. Chipp, with contributions by Joshua C. Taylor and me, I
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compiled key documents reecting the relationship between the artist and the social order in the early twentieth century.7 Then, deciding to focus on the interaction of art and politics in a specic time and place, I curated the exhibition German Realism of the Twenties: The Artist as Social Critic for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.8 In their disturbing and at times grotesque pictures, artists like Otto Dix and George Grosz assailed the hypocrisy of the bourgeois establishment. For a brief time a close interweave between art and politics existed, with the socioeconomic situation acting as a catalyst for works of political art. I believe a similar intertwining of art and politics has prevailed in California, especially during and since the 1960s, as I argued in my essay The Art of Political Engagement, written in connection with the exhibition Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 19002000 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.9 The free speech movement, the antiwar actions, and the counterculture of the 1960s have had a deep and lasting effect on the ensuing culture, on ethnic and gender liberations, as well as on the environmental movement. Indeed, one reason I moved from New York to California in 1965 was in response to the free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley, which, together with the civil rights movement, promised a more progressive political climate. Coming to Berkeley made it possible for me to join some of the political actions and to witness the production of art that related quite directly to the broader culture of dissent. With my students, I participated in debates about the culture wars and the interplay between art and life. Some critics and artists have argued that if it is political, it is not art, while others stipulate that if it is art, it is not political. My contention is that not only can artists comment signicantly on politics in their work, but political engagement in specic situations can produce authentic art. As Michael Baxandall pointed out in his incisive social history of quattrocento Italian painting, the artist depends on the beholder to recognize that the

prologue: a personal view

art produced is an integral part of the total culture, of the time, the place, and the social circumstances in which it is made.10 What was true of fteenth-century Florence applies perhaps even more to twentiethcentury California. In choosing the works discussed in this book, I was concerned more with subject matter, with what the artist had to say, than with any particular style or medium. Edward Kienholzs Back Seat Dodge 38 (1964, p. 95) and Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrisons Meditations on the Condition of the Sacramento River . . . (1977, p. 227) may appear quite disparate, but both clearly deal with political problems, whether censorship or the debasement of the environment. It does not matter that Kienholz presents a tableau while the Harrisons employ maps and recitationsthe artists make use of whatever medium seems most appropriate for their message. Indeed, the artists in this book work in a multiplicity of media, from painting and sculpture to photography (including documentary photography) to installation and performance art to art that uses high-tech equipment and art that works with the natural environment. I have chosen, however, not to include lm or video art, which is essentially a cinematic medium. In keeping with my focus on the interface between art and politics, I have avoided classifying works by styles, isms, or art world trends. Instead, I have divided this book into four major sections, in each of which art is viewed in relation to a specic political problem: war and violence, the established social

order and consumerist mentality, ethnic and gender identity, and the environment. The discussion thus ows synchronically rather than chronologically. Some artists appear in more than one section as their work touches on different issues. This book does not pretend to be objective; it is written from a politically progressive point of view. Philosophically, it is dubious that objectivity is an option. As Werner Heisenberg enunciated in 1927, even in the pure sciences there is no absolute certainty but only relative probabilities. Postmodernist theory has further asserted a skeptical attitude toward the concept of Truth, whether in art or in its criticism. The idea that an artwork can be seen as autonomous, separate from its culture, and judged with critical distance seems highly problematic. But even given the bias of my own left-leaning persuasion, I believe it would be difcult to nd forceful political art of a right-wing persuasion. Political art, by my denition, questions authority and is thus an art of dissent. During the years I have been working on this study, a great many artists have come to my attention, but it has been impossible to include all of them. I see this book as a beginning, and I hope it will generate discussion about what political art is and could be. One reader suggested that I might point to future directions of political art in California and beyond. As an art historian, however, I am committed to interpreting the art of the past, and as a critic, I try to arrive at critical responses to the art of the present. I must leave it to the artists of the future to show us new directions. I am sure they will, as they always have.

prologue: a personal view

27

PATHS TO ENGAGEMENT

INTRODUCTION

orthodox marxist critics and theorists maintain that all actions have political implications; thus, all art is political. Against this view, much of traditional Western art criticism has placed art and politics in totally different realms of human endeavor. At the end of the eighteenth century, at the height of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant wrote that the artist must not be subject to external inuences because a work of art, whether literature, music, or painting, is an autonomous object. According to Kants Idealist theory, art is conned to the aesthetic realm as a disinterested kind of discourse, unrelated to the social or political world. This idea gave rise to Romantic notions of genius and the privileged place of pure art, signicant form, or art for arts sake. Readily accepted by avant-garde modernists, this stance was carried to its extreme by Clement Greenberg, the inuential art critic who claimed that the purpose of painting was ultimately nothing but the presentation of a at color surface, since two-

dimensionality is the hallmark of painting. Along the same lines, some critics have contended that the true subject of lm is its cinematic character, or that a print should primarily convey its specic technique, be it woodcut or intaglio. That, I believe, is far too limited a view. Even formalist critics tend to depict modernism as an assault on the dominant bourgeois culture, as a break with convention establishing a tradition of the new1 through experiment and transformation a characterization that, to my mind, clearly makes political art an essential aspect of modernist art. Art at its best, I would argue, does much more than feed on itself and may even be engaged in effecting social transformation. Formalist critics and painters voiced their admiration for how Pablo Picasso and Cubism, the basic idiom of twentieth-century art, broke with the history of illusionist painting. But Picasso himself was no formalist ideologue. Painting, he announced at the end of World War II, is not done to decorate
29

apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.2 And Bertolt Brecht proclaimed, Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.3 Such outspokenness on the interconnections between art and politics, however, became muted in America during the postWorld War II era. Blacklistings and imprisonments resulting from the McCarthy hearings repressed free expression among writers, lmmakers, and artists. Pernicious government censorship, along with an ensuing self-censorship, thwarted art with overt political content, undoubtedly helping to propel the singular emphasis on formalist art and art criticism for several decades. Let us not forget that art is a commodity, bought mainly by wealthy people, who do not want to be reminded of the existence of an unjust world. Art shouting political accusations is unlikely to be featured in museum shows sponsored by corporations or be purchased to decorate the apartments Picasso described. It requires courage and the willingness to take risks to make political art in our culture. Fortunately, in this country and elsewhere, there have always been artists willing to take risks, who agree with the sentiments voiced by Picasso and Brecht, who believe that artists can be vital, active participants in political and cultural change. Examples abound in the rst half of the twentieth century. Consider, for instance, the provocative strategies of the Futurists, who in the early twentieth century produced not only paintings and sculptures, but also manifestos and performances aimed at mass audiences and intended to transform conventional tastes and values. This movement, conceived by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his followers in Milan and announced in Paris, quickly spread throughout Europe and into Russia and America. The Futurists gloried the great discoveries and inventions in science at the time, and their project anticipated art later in the century that worked toward a fusion with science and technology. Inuenced by the voluntarist theories of Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson,
30

as well as the French social philosopher Georges Sorel, who advocated violence as a creative power, the Futurists made dynamism their watchword. They adapted the Cubists formal inventions in their paintings of simultaneous vision, placing the gure into its surrounding environment and adding a new sense of energetic motion and vitality to art. The Futurists founding manifesto of 1909 declared their commitment to courage, daring and rebellion and proclaimed their vision of art as violent onslaught and their wish to glorify War . . . militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist.4 Indeed, when war broke out in 1914, they propagandized for Italys intervention on the side of the Allies against Habsburg Austria and produced powerful paintings and collages for that purpose. Later, Marinetti would lend support to Benito Mussolini and the Fascist party. But it was during the years preceding the Great War that the Futurists most strongly inuenced modern art movements. After Marinettis visit to Moscow in 1914, the Soviet avant-garde began employing some of the Futurists propagandistic methods. Expanding on the innovations of Cubism and Futurism, Russian artistsNeo-Primitives, Cubo-Futurists, Rayonists, Suprematists, Constructivistsbroke radically with traditional painting, moving toward total abstraction. In 1915 Kazimir Malevich took the crucial nal step, placing a red and a black square on a white ground. By the time of the October Revolution in 1917, many avant-garde artists felt that their own revolution had preceded the political upheaval. Indeed, at rst Lenin and the political powers supported the vanguard artists, allowing for a brief time an unparalleled apparent fusion of new art and new politics. Wassily Kandinsky came back to his homeland to draft a new plan for art education throughout the Soviet Union. Marc Chagall was put in charge of the important art school in Vitebsk. Women artists, including Lyubov Popova, Alexandra Exter, and Olga Rozsanova, held equal status with male artists. Artists created agitprop, decorating trains, streets, and boats with revolutionary slogans. El Lissitzky designed the red ag. Vladimir

introduction: paths to engagement

Tatlin was commissioned to design the Monument to the Third International. This utopia, however, was short-lived. In the late 1920s the Soviet regime, under Joseph Stalins domination, felt that avant-garde art had little effect on the workers and peasants and established the more accessible style of Socialist Realism, which soon became the sole permissible style of art in the Soviet Union. Modernist art, denounced as cosmopolitan, was no longer allowed. Socialist Realism aimed to politicize all art for the purpose of glorifying the Soviet system. In Germany the Nazis devised a similar, but even more extreme, program. Aware of modernisms subversive potency, they pronounced all modernist artists degenerate and ordered them imprisoned or castrated. Art had to pay tribute to the Thousand Year Reich. In their celebrations, spectacles, and pageants, they constructed a fantasy world of victorious Aryan heroes. The Nazis reacted against the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a style employing social and political criticism that had been prevalent during the Weimar Republic. Artists as different as Kthe Kollwitz, George Grosz, Otto Dix, and John Hearteld created graphics, paintings, and collages critiquing the capitalist system. Having witnessed the horrors of the Great War, these artists wanted to document reality and penetrate its appearance, no matter how grim. They felt, as Grosz stated, Art was to be my arm and my sword. . . . Pens that draw without purpose are like empty straws.5 In Weimar Germany, as in revolutionary Russia, art was intimately interwoven with the sociopolitical framework. It is no surprise that the Nazis strangled this progressive stance in favor of glorifying blood and soil, combining sentimentality with chauvinism. Europe was not the only place where art and politics aligned during the 1920s. In Mexico a progressive government pursued a program of education and support for the arts, sponsoring the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, which revived fresco painting, often with a revolutionary bent. Jos Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro

Siqueirosknown as Los Tres Grandes covered the walls of many institutions in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and elsewhere with murals that fused the indigenous pre-Columbian culture, contemporary political themes, and modernist painting. Theirs was a monumental art responding to a new political situation. Their modern history painting addressed the largely illiterate masses, who in turn understood and supported it. The government, which commissioned the paintings, granted complete freedom to the artists as long as they adhered to Mexican subjects; it did not dictate a particular style. Los Tres Grandes also received commissions in the United States, which had an enormous impact on American artists. Orozcos mural Prometheus at Pomona College in Claremont, California, was called the most important twentieth-century painting by Jackson Pollock, who came to see it in 1930, soon after its completion. The next year, in 1931, Pollock observed Orozco painting his murals at the New School for Social Research in New York, and he briey assisted during Siqueiross Experimental Workshop in New York in 1936. There Pollock may have seen the Mexican painters spraying Duco enamel and nitrocellular lacquers onto canvas, inuencing his own pouring technique. These artists afrmation of Native themes was also important to the young American painter, even if he was less interested in their socialist themes. In 1932 Siqueiros was asked to paint several murals in California, including Tropical America, on Olvera Street in the old Mexican section of Los Angeles. Commissioned for a beer garden, it was supposed to display an idyllic view of Native Americans working in tropical bliss. Instead, Siqueiros, dedicating the work to the Mexican working class of Los Angeles, depicted a Mexican Indian strapped to a wooden cross with a triumphant American bald eagle above his head. The city whitewashed the mural, and soon thereafter Siqueiros, an active member of the Communist Party in Mexico, was expelled from the United States. The Mexican community, however, did not forget this introduction: paths to engagement
31

mural, and today, some seventy years later, the Getty Conservation Institute is working on its preservation. A much larger controversy, garnering international publicity, ensued in 1933 when Diego Riveras mural Man at the Crossroads, commissioned for the new Rockefeller Center in New York, was destroyed. Rivera, a Communist like Siqueiros, had painted a portrait of Lenin at a prominent place in the fresco and insisted that it stay there. Rivera fared better in San Francisco, where he painted three signicant murals between 1931 and 1940, greatly inuencing California mural painting and political art in general. Artists in San Francisco, an old union town, were eager to express social, political, and economic concerns. In 1934 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at the suggestion of his Harvard classmate, painter George Biddle, established the Public Works of Art Program (PWAP), which soon merged with the Works Progress Administration (WPA). This idea of public patronage for the arts derived largely from the success of public art in Mexico. The rst important PWAP project in San Francisco was the commissioning of murals to decorate the newly erected Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. Twenty-six well-known painters collaborated on this harmonious cycle of murals, under the general supervision of Victor Arnautoff, who had studied with Rivera, and Bernard Zakheim, who, together with Kenneth Rexroth, organized the leftwing Artists and Writers Union in San Francisco. Extending from the lobby to the top of the stairwell, these murals represented one of the largest projects accomplished under the PWAP. The theme was California: its agriculture, its industrial production, and its city life. A few details had a clearly radical left-wing character, so, as the Great Depression worsened and the city faced a general strike, the conservative press lashed out against the murals and threatened their destruction. The art establishment, including the San Francisco Chronicles art critic Alfred Frankenstein and museum directors Walter Heil, Thomas Carr Howe, and Grace McCann Morley, defended the murals, and the murals remained in place. (For years,
32

however, they were closed to the public; nally restored in 1979, they were declared a city landmark.) Anthony W. Lee, in his study of the project, points out that San Francisco experienced a historical moment, peculiar and uncommon until the 1930s, when painting and politics could have a close, explicit relationship; when artpublic art, no less could pursue socially and politically revolutionary ambitions; and when painters could think of themselves as workers who could make art part of a momentous historical transformation.6 The year 1934 in Californiathe subject of the Coit Tower muralsbrought not only San Franciscos General Strike but also the California Democratic Partys nomination of the socialist writer Upton Sinclair for governor. Sinclair (who did not get elected) denounced the capitalist system for its exploitation of workers and its adversarial effect on culture and education. It was around this time that photographers such as Dorothea Lange, working for the New Deals Farm Security Administration, and the German emigr John Gutman, turned their lenses on the plight of Californias rural and urban poor. Throughout the Great Depression and into the 1940s, in California and throughout the United States, Social Realist artists, believing that art could bring about social change, portrayed the daily struggles of the poor, the disparity between classes, Jim Crow practices, and miscarriages of justice. Arnautoff, Zakheim, John Langley Howard, and other Coit Tower muralists continued to produce paintings of social protest, as did Emmy Lou Packard, who had worked with Rivera on his mural Pan-American Unity, made for the 1939 Worlds Fair on Treasure Island. Hassel Smith, later a leader of Abstract Expressionism in the Bay Area, documented the plight of the dispossessed and the disenfranchised in drawings from the early 1940s. When the New York painter Anton Refregier was chosen in 1940 to paint murals depicting the history of California in the newly built Rincon Annex post ofce in San Francisco, he did not picture some glorious El Dorado past. Instead, Refregiers twenty-

introduction: paths to engagement

seven panels interpreted Californias history through a series of struggles, including the San Francisco General Strike of 1934. Again, the artwork stirred controversy. Taking up the call of protesting American Legionnaires, Richard Nixon, then a congressman, stated: I believe a committee should make a thorough investigation of this type of art in government buildings, with the view to obtaining the removal of all that is found to be inconsistent with American ideals and principles.7 The House Committee on Public Works debated the murals fate, but the paintings were saved. California political art during the preWorld War II period was not conned to the Bay Area. In Los Angeles the young painter Reuben Kadish, who had assisted Siqueiros on the Olvera Street mural, and his friend Philip Guston (then known as Goldstein), whose 1930 painting Conspirators had condemned the lynchings by Ku Klux Klansmen, collaborated on murals for the John Reed Club and other sites; they also went to Mexico, where they worked on a large mural titled The Struggle against War and Fascism. Millard Sheets pointed out the difculties facing the working class in such paintings as Tenement Flats (1928) and Angels Flight (1931). Soon thereafter, however, he joined the conservative American Scene painters, or RegionalistsThomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, John Stuart Curry, and otherswho depicted a nostalgic, romanticized vision of a bygone America. Imbued with chauvinism, they emphatically rejected modernist art. As Benton put it: I wallowed in every cockeyed ism that came along and it took me ten years to get all that modernist dirt out of my system.8 World War II shattered all these canons of belief. For the American Regionalists, the politics of isolation became highly problematic. For the Social Realists, many of whom subscribed to Marxist politics, disillusionment set in with the defeat of the Spanish Republic and especially the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. Seeing the failure of attempts to socialize society, intellectuals and artists turned increasingly toward individual internalization, suggesting that alienation

from the community might actually liberate the artist toward free expression. Moreover, the presence of many Surrealists in New York during the war encouraged American artists to search the unconscious as a rich source of artistic expression. By the early 1950s Abstract Expressionism, with its apolitical stance, became the dominant mode in American art. Still, there were artists who continued to assert their political beliefs in their works. When the far-left California Labor School in San Francisco was closed as a result of the McCarthy era, members of its faculty founded the Graphic Arts Workshop in 1952, an artists cooperative that produced subversive graphics that were strongly pro union and frequently Marxist in content. But in the 1950s the violent attacks on free speech and artistic expression by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, as well as the loyalty oaths demanded by institutions of higher learning, such as the University of California, created a climate of fear, helping to curtail the production of political art. All this changed, however, in the turmoil of the 1960s. The civil rights movement, antiwar protests, and a vibrant counterculture invited artists to take a stand. A multiplicity of art forms emergedfrom Pop Art and Happenings to Earth Art and Actionism. The distinction between high and low art blurred, ending the reign of a stylistic avant-garde. The photographer and theorist Allan Sekula (see pp. 6869), in his 1978 essay Dismantling Modernism, claried the challenge for a new, more political art:
Suppose we regard art as a mode of human communication, as a discourse anchored in concrete social relations, rather than as a mystied, vaporous and ahistorical realm of purely affective expression and experience. Art, like speech, is both symbolic exchange and material practice, involving the production of both meaning and physical presence. Meaning, as an understanding to that presence, emerges from an interpretive act. . . . The meaning of an artwork ought to be regarded,

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33

then, as contingent, rather than as immanent, universally given, or xed. . . . I am arguing, then, for an art that documents monopoly capitalisms inability to deliver the conditions of a fully human life, for an art that recalls Benjamins remark that There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. 9 Against violence directed at the human body, at the environment, at working peoples ability to control their own lives, we need to counterpose an active resistance, simultaneously political and symbolic, to monopoly capitalisms increasing power

and arrogance, a resistance aimed ultimately at socialist transformation. A nave faith in both the privileged subjectivity of the artist, at the one extreme, and the fundamental objectivity of photographic realism, at the other, can only be overcome in a recognition of cultural work as a praxis.10

Sekulas words articulate my intention in this book. My interest lies in art that is both engaged with this world and aims to make a difference. In the past fty years California artists have shown again and again just how such an art is possible.

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introduction: paths to engagement

AGAINST WAR AND VIOLENCE

CHAPTER 1

war has been a major subject of western art and poetry since before the time of Homer. Most representations of war have gloried the heroes of battle, lionizing the warriors who, we are told, gave their lives for their countries and ignoring the reality that those countries armies took the lives of mostly reluctant, involuntary victims. Yet other voices have always been heard, including those of Aristophanes and Virgil, who were rather ambiguous about lauding war. By the end of the rst century a.d., the Roman poet Lucretius explicitly described war as destructive rather than glorious. Under the patronage of kings and princes, however, most artists continued to exalt battles and victories. Only toward the end of the Renaissance do we nd strong antiwar images by artists such as Pieter Brueghel and Jacques Callot, constructions that reached a culmination in Francisco de Goyas powerful depictions of the horrors of war. Explicit antiwar paintings and prints became prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-

turies. We immediately think of Honor Daumier, followed by Kthe Kollwitz, George Grosz, Otto Dix, John Hearteld, and Frans Masereel, as well as Pablo Picasso and Americans such as Ben Shahn, Leonard Baskin, and Leon Golub. The saturation bombing of World War II, culminating with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by Vietnam, the Persian Gulf wars, and the physical and psychological destruction of whole populationsall have mobilized opposition toward military slaughter, an attitude that has been mirrored and advanced in the visual arts.

AFTER THE HOLOCAUST

In the aftermath of World War II, confronted by the atrocities of the German death camps and the devastation of the atomic bomb, many artists, writers, and critics wondered how art could possibly deal with these monstrous acts. The cultural critic Theodor Adorno famously declared that it would be bar35

barous to write poetry after the Holocaust.1 But artists were not silent. Paul Celan, himself a Jew, wrote perhaps the nest German poetry of the postwar years, dealing quite directly with the Holocaust. In the world of painting the New Figuration, or the New Image of Man, emerged, with artists taking the human situation, indeed the human predicament, rather than formal structure as their starting point. California, at the time still far removed from the art centers, was no exception. There, a number of individuals, mostly foreign born, engaged in political art in the postwar years. Artists like Rico Lebrun, Hans Burkhardt, and Harold Paris knew, as Albert Camus wrote, that only the cry of anguish can bring us to life.2 Lebrun (19001964) combined a virtuoso talent for drawing, profound intelligence, and passionate emotion in his dramatic works. Born in Naples, he learned about art in this tumultuous baroque city. In 1924 he left Fascist Italy for New York and arrived in California in 1937. He brought with him a deep knowledge of the European tradition, from Francesco Trainis frescoes of the Triumph of Death in Pisa (ca. 1350) and Matthias Grnewalds Isenheim Altarpiece (1515) to the more modern works of Goya and Picasso. From 1947 to 1950 he made many drawings for his Crucixion triptych. It took extraordinary courage to approach a subject as sacrosanct, as heavily weighted with tradition, as the Crucixion, but the Italian American painter did so with profound understanding, envisaging this biblical event as a metaphor for mans blindness to inhumanity,3 which seemed so prevalent in the war years. From 1955 to 1958 Lebrun concentrated on nding a visual equivalent of the torture and murder of inmates at Dachau and Buchenwald. In the last canvas of his Holocaust series, Study for Dachau Chamber (1958), he placed the bodies of the dead in centrifugal motion. With a mid-twentieth-century conception of time, he used cinematic devices to link the thrusting and pushing limbs into a fragmentized whole. A grid of strong black lines on the right indi36

cates the furnace of cremation. This, the boldest painting of the group, is also the most abstract, the most distanced from the photographs of piles of bodies Lebrun had seen. The painter chose an almost monochromatic palette of mostly browns, grays, and black to convey the tragedy. Immersing himself in the unspeakable horrors, Lebrun wanted, in his own words, to nd out for myself that pain has a geometry of its own; and . . . my being, through a revulsion against all tolerable and manageable skills, wanted to speak out with a single shout.4 Lebruns work, however, is not without hope. As the critic Henry Seldis has pointed out, there is an underlying conviction that whatever physical, psychological and moral tortures are inicted on the human form, its innate dignity and the unfullled promise of the human spirit cannot be annihilated.5 In his mural Genesis (1967), painted at Pomona College in Claremont, California, in the same building that houses Jos Clemente Orozcos great Prometheus fresco (1930), Lebrun articulated his personal vision of the Creation, transforming the ancient myth into contemporary form, referring to the horrors of World War II and the death camps. In 1964, at Lebruns memorial service, the sculptor Leonard Baskin proclaimed: This prodigious man, this child of Grnewald, laid bare the heart of man; revealed the lineaments of mans body, its wisdom and honor. . . . Rico is for all times kin to Goya. And see the grandeur of Genesis here, before you, making of a wall a shrine. Rico, like his Noah, was a giant in his generation.6 Hans Burkhardt (19041994), another immigrant artist, also responded intensely to the events of his time with great empathy for the victims of war and poverty. Born in Basel, he came to New York in 1924, where he studied with Arshile Gorky and became friends with Willem de Kooning. In 1937 he moved to Los Angeles and, in subsequent years, motivated by the Spanish Civil War, produced several paintings of gures in agony, culminating in War, Agony in Death (193940). In this work a shrieking head occupies a central position, with macabre bones on the

against war and violence

RICO LEBRUN STUDY FOR DACHAU CHAMBER, 1958 Oil on canvas, 79 85 in. Courtesy of The Jewish Museum, NY / Art Resource, NY; the Estate of Rico Lebrun; and Koplin Del Rio Gallery, West Hollywood, California.

HANS BURKHARDT CONCENTRATION CAMP, 1942 Oil on canvas, 20 26 in. Hans G. and Thordis W. Burkhardt Foundation. Courtesy of Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles.

right and a profusion of crosses, perhaps alluding to mass graves, on the left. A group of ghostlike gures, set against the sunset, accentuates the mood of despair. Burkhardts war paintings serve as precursors to his horric death camp paintings, such as Concentration Camp (1942). A screeching skeletal mother, with blood coming out of her mouth, clutches the scorched head of her child in one hand while her other hand large, gray, and bonyreaches toward the sky in a futile gesture. In its apocalyptic despair this painting calls to mind Goyas Black Paintings, which also had a great impact on Rico Lebrun. Belonging to a younger generation, the New York born Harold Paris (19291979) was deeply affected by seeing the dead bodies at Buchenwald, and he created
38

prints and then ceramic sculpture of moral outrage and compassion. After serving in the U.S. Army, this self-taught artist began a series of graphic works, the Hosanna Suite (195271), exploring different techniques to locate images of unrelenting despair and private nightmares that reveal his knowledge of such predecessors as Hieronymus Bosch, Odilon Redon, and Georges Rouault. In 1960 Paris settled in Berkeley, where he would be impressed by Peter Voulkoss audacious ceramic work, which subverted the prevailing purist attitude that restricted clay to the making of useful objects. Inspired by this new approach to the ancient medium, Paris translated the Hosanna Suite (196062) into powerful, energetic clay reliefs, creating monumental ceramic walls, each made of many

against war and violence

joined sections. He named these impressive structures Walls for Mem, after the thirteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, three M places where he had lived (Majorca, Madrid, and Munich), and Malachi (Hebrew for the Angel of Death). In both their imagery and the way they are made, the Walls express his feelings about the Holocaust. Improvising with the heavy clay, Paris built it up, scooped and gouged it, and in a theatrical manner battled it with sword and machete. At times he created groupings only to break them apart later, reassembling them in different ways. He might pile the clay up from the oor, but then push part of it onto the ground and into the viewers space. He truly identied with the clay, saying, We are clay. . . . My hand and every mark in the clay is a sign that I am here nowat this instantand this clay is what I am and will be.7 Working on the Walls, Paris showed amazing technical facility as well as rich fantasy. After molding the individual sections, he red them and then joined them together. The biomorphic forms suggest human faces and body parts, agitation, and vitality. Executed with exuberant passion, they convey what Jackson Pollock may have meant when he spoke of energy made visible in art. The critic Jerome Tarshis concluded, More allusive than realistic, Pariss walls offer hints of ruined structures and fragmented bodies. Paris managed to bring together the Surrealists interest in psychology and their imaginative treatment of the human body, the concern of postwar European artists to reect the horrors of war, and the Abstract Expressionists freedom of design.8 In the years to come other California artists would focus on the unprecedented destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the nuclear explosions instantly killed tens of thousands of people and attened several square miles of cityscape. For many of these artists, the horrors of the bombings in Japan made it all the more urgent to put a stop to the postwar arms race and the ongoing threat of nuclear weapons (see below).

PROTESTING AGAINST WAR, FROM VIETNAM TO IRAQ

The Vietnam War and Its Aftermath

Art protesting war reached an unprecedented level of intensity with the Vietnam War. The American intervention in Vietnam, which ultimately killed over 55,000 Americans and more than two million Southeast Asians, divided the American population into sharply opposing camps and unleashed a storm of protest. Artists joined activists in their outcry not just against the atrocities of war but also against the questionable motives for the war. The U.S. governments involvement in Vietnam began to grow in the 1950s. It rst supported the French army in its attempt to retain its colonies in Southeast Asia, but after the French defeat and division of Vietnam in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower began sending military advisers to bolster the South Vietnamese army in its ght against the Communist North. The professed fear was that if the Communists won in Vietnam, the rest of Southeast Asia would fall, in a domino effect. Military aid to the Saigon government steadily increased, and direct military action was authorized with the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which the Senate passed based on an alleged torpedo attack on a U.S. destroyer. The Senate never ofcially declared war, however, even though by 1968 some 500,000 U.S. soldiers and sailors were ghting in Vietnam. U.S. commanders spoke of the light at the end of the tunnel as the American people watched the killing on their television sets. In 1968 the Vietcong won a major military victory in the Tet Offensive, and President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not stand for reelection. His successor, Richard Nixon, while promising peace, intensied the bombing, devastating much of Vietnam. The war reached fever pitch with the American incursion into neighboring Cambodia in 1970, resulting in great casualties on both sides. By that time the public had learned of the massacre at My Lai, where American soldiers murdered unarmed civilians, including against war and violence
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WALLY HEDRICK ANGER, 195963 Oil on canvas, 72 72 in. San Jose Museum of Art. Museum purchase with funds contributed by the Museums Collections Committee. The Wally Hedrick Trust.

women and children. The protest movement grew, but it was not until January 1973 that an armistice was signed and American troops were forced to withdraw. Government-sponsored propaganda art and patriotic clichs, so prevalent in previous wars, were virtually absent in this war, largely because the vivid images on the nations TV screens belied them. These same images spurred American artists to respond with great force, protesting against the graphically shown killings. One of the rst American artists to oppose U.S. intervention in South Vietnam was the San Francisco artist Wally Hedrick (19282003).9 Hedrick had attended art school in Los Angeles and fought in the Korean War before enrolling in the San Francisco Art Institute on the GI Bill. In 1963 he painted Anger. Under a black circle we read Madam Nhu Blows Chiang, referring to the sister-in-law of South Viet40

nam president Ng Dinh Dim and Chiang Kaishek, the Chinese Nationalist leader who was driven out of China by Mao Tse-tung and established his own semidictatorship on the island of Taiwan. On the right side of the painting, occupying the viewers main attention, Hedrick presents a huge penis, forcefully penetrating an organ that can be read either as a vagina or a heart. In another 1963 painting, Madame Nhus Bar-B-Qs, Hedrick called attention to the selfimmolation of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, who was protesting the South Vietnam regimes repressive treatment of Buddhists. After some fellow monks had poured gasoline over his body, Quang Duc lit a match and burned to death in a public square in Saigon. When Madame Nhu, the de facto rst lady of South Vietnam, learned of this event, she brusquely commented that she was willing to provide the gasoline for the next barbeque. Like many

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others, Hedrick was appalled by the horrendous photographs of the burning that appeared in the international press. As Timothy Burgard, curator of American art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, has stated:
In historical perspective, these graphic images revealed the medias power to shape American public opinion regarding the conict in Vietnam. . . . Originally intended as a protest against the Diem governments repression of Buddhists, Quang Ducs selfsacrice increasingly was interpreted, not only as a plea for freedom of religion, but as a larger protest against the U.S.-backed Diem regime and even the Vietnam War itself. 10

TED STRESHINSKY BRING OUR MEN HOME, 1966 Gelatin silver print. Ted Streshinsky / Corbis.

Soon after painting these and similar works, Hedrick produced a series of all-black or dark monochrome paintings called the Vietnam Series, including Black Room, a group of four eleven-by-elevenfoot black canvases, each lling a wall of the room. In the early 1970s Hedrick was dismissed from his teaching job at the San Francisco Art Institute for encouraging his students to join antiwar demonstrations. Many years later, in 2003, with new American aggression taking place in the Persian Gulf, Hedrick returned to making all-black paintings. Some of the earliest large demonstrations against the Vietnam War took place at the University of California, Berkeley, where activist students had already spoken out for free speech (see chapter 2) and civil rights. The photograph Bring Our Men Home (1966) by Ted Streshinsky (19232003) documents an early march of women students, led by the radical activist Bettina Aptheker, with large placards calling for the men ghting in Vietnam to be sent home. Other protests, against the draft, met with violence from the notoriously tough Oakland police, as can be seen in various photographers views of Stop the Draft Week in October 1967. Nacio Jan Brown (b. 1943) captured marchers on their way to the Oakland Induction Center in a lens-ash photograph, shooting the picture at sunrise directly into the sun to create a reected

NACIO JAN BROWN SUNRISE AT THE OAKLAND INDUCTION CENTER, STOP THE DRAFT WEEK, 1967 Gelatin silver print. Nacio Jan Brown.

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NACIO JAN BROWN DRAFT CARD BURNING OUTSIDE THE FEDERAL BUILDING, STOP THE DRAFT WEEK, SAN FRANCISCO, 1967 Gelatin silver print. Nacio Jan Brown.

JEFFREY BLANKFORT STOP THE DRAFT WEEK, OAKLAND, 1967 Gelatin silver print. Jeffrey Blankfort, 1967.

JEFFREY BLANKFORT ANTIWAR MARCH, GEARY STREET, SAN FRANCISCO, 1971 Gelatin silver print. Jeffrey Blankfort, 1971.

circle. Brown also took a poignant picture of a young man in the process of publicly burning his draft card. Jeffrey Blankfort (b. 1943) seized the instant in which Oakland policemen brutally pushed a billy club against the neck of a young male protester to stop him on his way to the induction center. Later, in 1971, Blankfort was able to document many thousands of antiwar demonstrators in San Francisco, all protesting the slaughter in Southeast Asia. Documentary photographs, however personal, present themselves as a factual record of a specic event in time and place. The political poster, in contrast, makes no claim to objectivity, but rather aggressively voices its opinion. Political posters date back to the broadsides made soon after the invention of the printing press. More recently, during World Wars I and II, the U.S. government issued posters as propaganda for war. The late 1960s, however, brought an outburst of posters against war, with an estimated 100,000 designs produced by mostly anonymous artists in hundreds of workshops and political centers throughout the country, but especially in California. The majority of these posters were made using the silkscreen process, which requires little equipment, is cheap, and is easy to learn. The new poster designers were certainly inuenced by Pop Art as well as the television screens, billboards, and advertising that had come to dominate the American visual landscapewhat Jean Baudrillard called the obscene delirium of communication.11 Trying to make an impact, the poster designers adopted bright colors and eliminated metaphor. Like the Pop artists, they made abundant use of images of American consumer goods and often made reference to the American ag. But whereas Jasper Johns had generally used the ag like a map, emphasizing its at, two-dimensional surface,12 these poster artists saw the ag as a symbol of misguided patriotism, American imperialism, and military aggression. In their hands its iconic message was imbued with a sense of irony. One of the rst antiwar posters was created by Wes Wilson, known for his psychedelic poster designs (see

WES WILSON ARE WE NEXT? 1965 Lithograph, 21 1 1 38 in. Wes Wilson, 1965. Photo: Michael Erlewine, ClassicPosters.com.

p. 104). In Are We Next? (1965) Wilson arranged the American stars in the shape of a blue swastika, which he set on top of red and white stripes, with the phrase Are We Next? lettered above and Be Aware below. Other poster makers turned the ags stars into bombs falling from the sky, graveyard markers, skulls, and dollar signs. George Maciunas, a leading pioneer of the international Fluxus association, in his genocide ag (1966) substituted skulls and crossbones for the stars, replacing the stripes with text stating that the United States had surpassed Kublai Khan, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler in the number of people (South Vietnamese, American Indians) it had eliminated.13 against war and violence
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GEORGE MACIUNAS U.S.A. SURPASSES ALL THE GENOCIDE RECORDS! C. 1967 Offset on paper, 21 12 34 12 in. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit. Photo: R. H. Hensleigh.

LOREN REHBOCK PEACE, 1967 Lithograph, 20 26 in. Courtesy of the artist.

In a totally different mood is the gentle and rather sweet but memorable 1967 poster by Loren Rehbock (b. 1941), Peace. It is an image of a young girl whose hair emerges from a large initial P, for Peace, in Art Nouveau lettering colored light blue. In yet another vein is Jay Bellolis 1970 poster Amerika Is Devouring Its Children, made after the National Guard shot and killed student protesters at Kent State University in Ohio and at Jackson State University in Mississippi. At the time Belloli (who would become a museum curator) was a student of art history at the University of California, Berkeley. The obvious reference for this frightening poster is Goyas mon44

strous vision Saturn Devouring One of His Children (182122).14 Fuera de Indochina! (Get Out of Indochina!) by the Chicano activist Rupert Garca shows just how powerful political poster art can be. It was printed by the San Francisco Poster Workshop for the 1970 antiVietnam War march organized by the Chicano Moratorium (Garca donated the entire edition to this effort). The orange, screaming face in this silkscreen is both engulfed and penetrated by a deep black color, while below yellow letters cry out, Fuera de Indochina! Born in Californias Central Valley in 1944, Garca had actually served in Vietnam and Laos, where

against war and violence

he guarded napalm bombs, before going on to study painting at San Francisco State College (now University). After participating in the 1968 student strike, organized by the Third World Liberation Front, and antiwar demonstrations, and becoming more and more aware of the artists role as a social activist, he shifted from easel painting to devising striking silkscreen images dealing with a variety of political concerns, including racism, the Chicano movement, the struggle of the immigrant farmworker, and the poisoning of the environment. In this he was inuenced by Goya, Picasso, and such Mexican artists as Jos Guadalupe Posada and Los Tres Grandes, as well as

the emerging mural movement in California (see chapter 3). Like the Pop artists, Garca didnt hesitate to use ready-made imagery (when relevant), but he transformed its message. Pronouncing Andy Warhols works provocative, but passionless, leading to emotional sterility, Garca wrote: My art is committed to the paradox that in using mass-media I am using a source which I despise and with which I am at war. In using the images of mass-media I am taking an art form whose motives are debased, exploitative, and indifferent to human welfare, and setting it into a totally new moral context. I am, so to speak, reversing the process by which mass-media betray the masses, against war and violence

JAY BELLOLI AMERIKA IS DEVOURING ITS CHILDREN, 1970 Silkscreen, 21 12 15 in. Center for the Study of Political Graphics.

RUPERT GARCA FUERA DE INDOCHINA! 1970 Silkscreen, 24 18 in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Marcus. Courtesy of the artist and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco.

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FRAZIER DOUGHERTY, JON HENDRICKS, AND IRVING PETLIN Q: AND BABIES? A: AND BABIES, 1970 Lithograph, 25 38 in. Center for the Study of Political Graphics. Photo: Ron L. Haeberle.

and betraying the images of mass-media for which they are designed: the art of social protest.15 Perhaps the most compelling and memorable antiwar poster of the Vietnam era is Q: And Babies? A: And Babies, produced jointly by Frazier Dougherty, Jon Hendricks, and Irving Petlin, and based on a photograph of the My Lai massacre taken by the army combat photographer Ron Haeberle. The words superimposed over this image are from an interview by Mike Wallace with a My Lai participant who had killed dozens of Vietnamese civilians.16 The Art Workers Coalition, an antiwar activist group, decided that the poster, which shows children lying dead on a dirt road, should be widely distributed to counter news reports that generally followed the U.S. militarys ofcial line. In November 1969 AWC members met with representatives of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who approved a proposal by Petlin to distribute the poster and show that this Museumits staff, all the artists who contribute to its greatnessis outraged by the massacre at My Lai.17 The AWC encountered resistance from members of the printers union while having the poster printed, but eventually it was delivered to the museum, only to be vetoed by trustees William S. Paley against war and violence

and Nelson Rockefeller, who asserted that the museum could not commit to any position on any matter not directly related to a specic function of the museum.18 Nonetheless, 500,000 copies of the poster were printed and distributed worldwide; some were given out by the AWC in front of Picassos Guernica (1937) at the Museum of Modern Art. Petlin had been a central gure in the group of artists who formed the Artists Protest Committee, which was responsible for erecting the Peace Tower on a vacant lot at the corner of Sunset and La Cienaga boulevards in Los Angeles in 1966, very close to the lively art galleries of the time: Eugenia Butler, Ferus, Felix Landau, Esther Robles, David Stuart, and Nicholas Wilder. The project was rst announced in the Los Angeles Free Press in a letter from Petlin.19 Then came the difcult process of securing the site and obtaining a building permit and safety approval for the fty-ve-foot-high tower, a tensional conguration of an octahedron and two tetrahedrons designed by Mark di Suvero (see below), and eventually built under his and the architect Kenneth H. Dillons direction. Arnold Mesches (see pp. 9798), head of the fund-raising committee, wrote to politically committed European artists like Karel Appel, Csar, and Jean Helion as well as stylistically diverse American artists to secure the project funding. Various Los Angeles artists and dealers, including Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, and John Weber (then director of the Dwan Gallery), also assisted in the enterprise. Artists from all over the world were asked to send small paintings to be mounted on a hundred-foot-long billboard at the foot of the tower. More than four hundred panels were received from artists of many generations and stylistic persuasions, including Rudolf Baranik, Paul Brach, James Brooks, Philip Evergood, Judy Gerowitz (now Judy Chicago), Leon Golub, Philip Guston, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, June Leaf, Jack Levine, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Philip Pearlstein, Ad Reinhardt, James Rosenquist, Moses Soyer, Raphael Soyer, Nancy Spero, Hedda Sterne, George Sugarman, and

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Adja Yunkers. Petlin, Susan Sontag, and the former Green Beret Donald Duncan spoke at the towers dedication. Telegrams were dispatched by Jean-Paul Sartre, Andr Masson, and Matta. Speaking of the tower, Petlin commented, The idea of an offering like this in a public place drew every kind of right wing maniac to try to destroy it. We defended the tower night and day against attacks, and were helped by a rotating gang of young men from Watts. The tower stood; not a single panel was damaged.20 The tower also attracted attention from unexpected individuals, such as Ken Kesey, who visited it with his Merry Pranksters in their Day-Glo bus. When the four-month lease on the lot ran out, the organizers hoped to relocate the tower by helicopter to the garden of the Pasadena Art Museum. The museums director, Walter Hopps, supported the idea, but the museums trustees were opposed. There was also discussion of moving it to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara. But nothing materialized, and the tower had to be scrapped. The artists panels were wrapped in brown paper and sold by lottery, raising about twelve thousand dollars to benet the Artists Protest Committee. Among other photographers, Paul Karlstrom, the former West Coast director of the Archives of American Art, documented the Peace Tower. Although the project was mentioned in the New York Times and the Nation,21 ve years passed before Art in America nally featured it on the cover of the November December 1971 issue, when public opposition to the war made the editors feel such prominence was safe. Even as late as 1996, in The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, 195569, the mainstream postmodern art historian Thomas Crow failed to mention the Peace Tower. A thorough discussion of the Peace Tower and its importance in the antiwar movement had to wait until 1999, for the informative book Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America by Francis Frascina.22 A few years later, in the Bay Area, Mark di Suvero built another antiwar tower, Mother Peace (196970),

more than forty feet high and made of steel I-beams, painted red. Born of Italian parentage in Shanghai in 1933, di Suvero came with his parents to San Francisco in 1941. The rst thing he recalls seeing when their ship reached San Francisco was the Golden Gate Bridge. Its soaring arches, breathtaking cable suspension and bolted steel girders, as graceful as they are tough, became an indelible memory, recollected over and over in his mature work.23 Di Suvero studied philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, but seeing a painting by Jackson Pollock helped him decide to become an artist. He moved to New York and began making large sculptures, assembled

MARK DI SUVERO ET AL. PEACE TOWER, 1966 Steel and mixed media, 55 ft. high. Los Angeles. Photos: Paul Karlstom.

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MARK DI SUVERO MOTHER PEACE, 196970 Painted steel, 41 ft. 8 in. 49 ft. 5 in. 44 ft. 3 in. Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York, Gift of the Ralph E. Ogden Foundation, Inc. Photo: Jerry L. Thompson.

from wooden beams he found in the streets. In 1960, after a near-fatal accident, he was told that he would be paralyzed for life. By sheer determination he has, however, managed to create monumental sculptures, made with huge steel I-beams, which are put in place by large cranes and often jut into space with a precarious equilibrium. Mother Peace was originally installed near an entrance to the Alameda County courthouse in Oakland, but a judge, so offended by the peace sign that di Suvero had painted on one of the I-beams, transformed himself into an art judge and insisted on its removal. The work is now beautifully installed at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, north of New York City. Di Suvero himself moved to Europe in 1970 in protest against the war in Vietnam, returning to the United States in 1974. It would be difcult to conceive of a greater contrast in style than that between Mark di Suvero and Edward Kienholz (see also chapter 2). Whereas di Suveros open, abstract sculptures impress us with their spatial energy, Kienholzs super-realistic tableaux stun us with their social and political revelations. Irving Petlin recalls, however, that when Kienholz was approached to join the production of the Peace Tower, he refused to do so, identifying, as many did, with the working-class macho G.I.24 Two years later, however, Kienholz produced two signicant antiwar installations, The Eleventh Hour Final and the monumental Portable War Memorial. The latter narrative tableau measures thirty-two feet across. In the left part of the tableau we encounter a variety of war messages: standing inside a trash can and reminding us of the characters in Samuel Becketts Endgame, written some ten years earlier, is an image of Kate Smith, famed for her singing of God Bless America; a World War I poster of Uncle Sam beckons I Want You; a cross commemorates V-Day; and a replica of Felix de Weldons Iwo Jima monument shows the U.S. Marines raising the American ag (an image based on a posed photograph). On a blackboard appear the names of 475 nations that no longer existed in 1968. In contrast, the right side of the installation against war and violence

presents business as usual, with a young couple at a hot dog stand, ordinary tables and chairs, a Coke machine, a clock marking the time, and a tombstone as a memento mori indicating mankinds nuclear predictability and responsibility, as Kienholz later wrote in a letter to Artforum. I would never insult this country as I love it perhaps as well as you do, he afrmed. I would, however, in many ways, presume to change it.25 Even the title of the other 1968 installation, The Eleventh Hour Final, clearly calls for a change in American awareness. We see a middle-class living room with wood paneling, a table lamp, a coffee table, and a television set with a remote control (although the station cannot be changed). The mute TV screen displays the body counts of American dead, American

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EDWARD KIENHOLZ THE PORTABLE WAR MEMORIAL, 1968 Mixed-media installation, 114 384 96 in. Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, California.

EDWARD KIENHOLZ THE ELEVENTH HOUR FINAL, 1968 Mixed-media installation, 144 168 in. Sammlung Reinhard Onnasch, Berlin. Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, California. Photo: Friedrich Rosenstiel.

wounded, Enemy dead, and Enemy wounded. The dismembered head of an Asian child with ominous glass eyes stares out of the console, which, made of concrete, resembles a tombstone. Shocking in their realism, Kienholzs tableaux are reminiscent of Luis Buuels lms in their scathing confrontations of accepted clichs and social apathy. It is worth noting that both these antiwar pieces have left the United States and are now in German collections.

A much earlier antiwar canvas is Evelyn Glaubmans Hot Damn Vietnam (1963). Glaubman, born in Brooklyn, moved to California in 1951, later graduating from the California College of Arts and Crafts. Working in the Abstract Expressionist vein of the period, she was motivated to turn to political art by the American invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. She proceeded to produce a number of paintings on the theme of a bloodied American ag. In against war and violence
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EVELYN GLAUBMAN HOT DAMN VIETNAM, 1963 Mixed media, 54 48 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Hot Damn Vietnam a mere fragment of the ag ies over three black gas masks, mounted against a textured ochre ground. The work, like other paintings by Glaubman of the time, is an ominous signal of an undeclared war in which an estimated 50,000 Americans and close to 150,000 Vietnamese would lose their lives. Skulls rather than gas masks are incorporated into Hans Burkhardts deeply disturbing My Lai (1968). Burkhardt, already known for his agitative paintings in response to the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi death camps (see above), felt compelled to protest the slaughter in Southeast Asia. In My Lai, showing both his anger and his despair, he loaded his brush to create a potent gray surface, which he covered with a heavy scuffed and clotted impasto applied with the impulsion of Abstract Expressionism. Into this textured eld, Burkhardt then embedded parts of human skulls. In an essay on Burkhardts paintings of catastrophes, Donald Kuspit argued that these images
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are among the greatest war paintings, summarizing the brutality and inhumanity, not only of the Vietnam war, but also of the twentieth century as a whole.26 Another artist of Burkhardts generation who brought his long-standing antiwar perspective to bear against the Vietnam conict was Irving Norman (19061989). Born as Irving Noachowitz near Vilna (then under Russian control; now Vilnius, Lithuania), Norman came to New York in 1923 and moved to California in 1936. In 1938 he enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to ght in Spain against the Fascist forces of Francisco Franco. This became a dening experience in his life. He decided to become a painter and soon became known for his rather bitter commentaries on war and society shattered by war.27 In the 1950s he painted mostly very large, meticulously detailed canvases, often in dissonant colors, crowded with oppressed human beings. Alienated masses huddle in narrow canyons between enormous high-rise buildings, conveying a message of humanity trapped by capitalisms tools, of the exploitation and the dehumanization of people in the urban environment. Although Norman was inuenced by Reginald Marsh early in his career, he replaced Marshs Rubenesque women and robust derelicts with cadaverous gures, cramped between stone and steel walls. He admired the solemn and agitated works of Bosch, Brueghel, and Grnewald, as well as the biting grotesqueries of Otto Dix. As the Vietnam conict garnered headlines, Norman started work on a monumental triptych, War and Peace (196567), with a central panel depicting two crazed warriors. In 1970 he painted Rebellions and Revolutions (p. 52), which probably refers to the students killed at Kent State University. In the center of the large canvas, an outstretched corpse is held aloft by four dark arms and covered by a red ag that contains a system of blood vessels. Flames about to burn the red cloth are mirrored in a great re erupting in the background. A crowd of people fortied with threatening machine guns and holding vicious ser-

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pents, which spew poison onto the helpless masses, surges against a structure of steel I-beams. When Norman died in Half Moon Bay, his large canvases, reproaching the worlds inhumanity and painted in his own brand of social realism, had long been neglected. A very different tradition of antiwar painting is evident in Summer 1967: In Memory of James Budd Dixon (1967) by Frank Lobdell (b. 1921), who at the time was teaching at Stanford University. Based on prints Lobdell made at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, the painting is dedicated to his friend James Budd Dixon, an Abstract Expressionist painter who died in 1967. As Lobdell pointed out, however, it is a statement against war. Lobdells

father had served in World War I, and he himself had served in World War II, as an infantry lieutenant in the Battle of the Bulge, coming home with horrendous memories of the burned and mutilated bodies of death camp victims in Germany. His own son had been sent to ght in Vietnam. As a young art student in Minneapolis, Lobdell had driven to Chicago with some fellow students to see Picassos Guernica when it was on view at the Art Institute in 1940. Twenty-seven years later he would emulate Picassos perception of painting as a political act in his own antiwar works such as Summer 1967.28 Picassos work is done in black and grays; Lobdells is also subdued in color, painted on a chalky white against war and violence

HANS BURKHARDT MY LAI, 1968 Oil and skulls on canvas, 77 115 in. Hans G. and Thordis W. Burkhardt Foundation. Courtesy of Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles.

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IRVING NORMAN REBELLIONS AND REVOLUTIONS, 1970 Oil on canvas, 90 96 in. San Jose Museum of Art. Gift of Hela Norman with additional support from the Museums Collections Committee, in honor of the San Jose Museum of Arts 35th anniversary. The Norman Trust.

FRANK LOBDELL SUMMER 1967: IN MEMORY OF JAMES BUDD DIXON, 1967 Oil on canvas, 90 12 173 12 in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Judson, Heather, and Charlotte Lobdell.

PETER SAUL SAIGON, 1967 Oil on canvas, 92 34 142 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Purchase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Sheldan C. Collins.

ground. Inuenced by Clyfford Still and the Abstract Expressionists, Lobdells style is more abstract and more gestural than Picassos. Dismembered and scrambled human limbs appear on the left of the tripartite composition, while a gure on the upper right, with its dot pattern and claws, seems caught in a spiral web. In the center, heavy black shapes twist and churn against a blue eld, crossing each other and creating an anxious, fearful form. The critic Thomas Albright ttingly interpreted Lobdells paintings as images of ponderous existential uncertainty.29 Peter Saul offers yet another approach to the cruelty of war, making use of the vernacular (as did the Pop artists) and putting images of consumer items such as Coke bottles and comic strip characters like Mickey Mouse in his paintings. Born in San Francisco in 1934, Saul studied art in California before spending eight years in Europe, where he was discovered by the eminent Surrealist Matta. In 1964, after returning to the Bay Area, he became an active partici-

pant in antiwar protest rallies and began exposing the violence, the torture, and all the madness of war in his paintings. He does not equivocate. Saul discovered the appropriate medium for his visual polemics in Day-Glo paint, using this lurid pigment to great effect in paintings such as Saigon (1967). His shrill pictures, full of pornographic imagery and salacious inscriptions, are meant to scandalize the anesthetized viewernot an easy task, but one attempted by many of the protest artists. Enraged by American atrocities, Saul declared, My idea of a soldier is a dirty freak . . . his object is to get around the enemy, to sneak into his camp, rape his women, commit perversions on children. . . . In my view [war is] a lthy perverts game.30 Robert Colescott also responded to the endish conict in Southeast Asia with biting irony. Born in 1925 in Oakland, Colescott, whose parents were both musicians, was rst introduced to the visual arts by the sculptor Sargent Johnson and got a chance to watch against war and violence
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Diego Rivera paint his mural Pan-American Unity for the 1939 Worlds Fair on Treasure Island in San Francisco. After serving in the army during World War II and attending the University of California, Berkeley, Colescott studied in Paris with Fernand Lger, whose ability to fuse the formal values of Cubism with his Communist sympathies in his carefully structured paintings of workers and modern buildings certainly informed Colescotts mature paintings. Anger at deceit and injustice took the place of hope for black artists of Colescotts generation, however (see also p. 150). In Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie (1971) Colescotts acidic sense of humor is directed at the war situation. Here his blonde Miss America is nude, with only a piece of pie, cut out of the pie over her head, covering her pubic area. In a lower register we see a black GI dressed in army fatigues, his rie at the ready for his conjectured attack on the map of South and North Vietnam.

ROBERT COLESCOTT BYE, BYE, MISS AMERICAN PIE, 1971 Acrylic on canvas, 78 78 59 18 in. Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Museum Acquisition Fund.

Sauls and Colescotts paintings may raucously declare their convictions, but its also possible to emphasize ones point with understatement, as in the austere canvas TV (1964) by Vija Celmins. Celmins was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1938a short time before her country was occupied by the Russians. Her family ed to the West when she was ten, eventually settling in Indianapolis. After studying at Yale University, she traveled to Europe, where she was deeply moved by the grays and blacks in Diego Velzquezs paintings. In 1962 she moved to Los Angeles. Her rst solo show there was noted for its paintings of everyday objects, but her subjects looked very different from those painted by Johns and Warhol in New York or Ed Ruscha and Wayne Thiebaud in California. Celminss canvases, based on photographs and painted in blacks and grays, may appear to be objective, but on close examination they are not as cool as they seem. TV is more than a simple picture of a television set surrounded by a gray background. She may have told Chuck Close, I dont look at work from any kind of political standpoint, but at the same time she admitted, I was totally crazed about [the Vietnam War], as many of us werethe world seemed so violent.31 Her work, in contrast to that of such older artists as Hans Burkhardt or Irving Norman, is lowkeyed and restrained, but it is just as potent. Critics have often compared Celminss early paintings with those of Giorgio Morandi, whom she admires, but her work is rarely as balanced and calm as that of the Italian master. Instead, the television screen in TV shows a violent airplane battle. The paintings dull haze reects the passive apathy with which Americans watched such deadly battles on the evening news, the daily viewing making it so familiar that the horror seemed quite acceptable. Similarly aware of the desensitizing effects of the media, Martha Rosler sometimes used photomontage as part of a seemingly neutral strategy to make the viewer a witness to the atrocities in Vietnam. Born in Brooklyn in 1943, Rosler decided to make art that comments on political and social matters, and over

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against war and violence

VIJA CELMINS TV, 1964 Oil on canvas, 26 12 36 in. Collection of Jamie and Steve Tisch. Courtesy of McKee Gallery, New York.

MARTHA ROSLER VACATION GETAWAY, FROM BRINGING THE WAR HOME: HOUSE BEAUTIFUL, 196772 Photomontage, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist.

BEN SAKOGUCHI NAPALM BRAND, 1979 Acrylic on canvas, 10 11 in. Courtesy of Jan Sakoguchi.

the years her work has addressed a variety of issues, including feminism, the urban landscape, NAFTA, and the commodity display/consumer gaze. While doing graduate work at the University of California, San Diego, she became part of an avant-garde group that included Eleanor and David Antin, Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, Linda Montano, and Moira Roth, among others. Before moving back to New York, Rosler created a series of cogent photomontages entitled Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (196972), taking photographs of opulent homes from House Beautiful magazine and superimposing documentary photos of the slaughter in Vietnam. Vacation Getaway shows an expensive vacation home, but its window, instead of looking out on a swimming pool or golf course, faces a bloody war scene, suggesting that even the afuent cannot get away from the grim reality on the other side of the globe. Inuenced by the writings of Bertolt Brecht and Herbert
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Marcuse, Rosler uses the photograph not as a high art form but as a means of wide communication of a subversive message. Recently, after working in video, installation, and performance, as well as writing critical essays on art and culture, Rosler has returned to the photomontagethis time addressing the war in Iraq (see p. 73).32 Equally subversive is the art of Ben Sakoguchi, who was born in San Bernardino, California, in 1938 and spent the dening years of his childhood in an internment camp for Japanese Americans. After their connement, his parents opened a grocery store in Los Angeles, where he noticed that the orange crates all carried bright, cheerful labels glorifying this quintessential product of California sunshine. Instead of simply appropriating these images of popular culture, as was done by Pop artists, he employed black humor to subvert his source material, recontextualizing the labels in a series of ten-by-eleven-inch paintings, in-

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ARIEL NIXON BEHEMOTH, 1976 Oil on wood, 6 9 ft. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Paul Mahder, Blue Room Gallery.

cluding Napalm Brand (1979). This picture advertises the Golden States product, but it also takes aim at Californias protable military industry. The top of the small canvas is occupied by a U.S. bomber with the word napalm written above it in bold graphics; below it we see the ames from the bursting bomb it has just delivered. In the foreground is an image appropriated from the well-known 1973 photograph by Huynh Cong Ut of a naked Vietnamese girl running down a highway, screaming in pain, after her village had been doused with napalm. Sakoguchis image exposes the emptiness of Richard Nixons 1968 presidential campaign promise to bring peace with honor in Vietnam. Instead, Nixon initiated saturation bombing, destroying much of North Vietnam, and invaded Cambodia in 1970 and Laos in 1971, before reaching a ceasere accord in 1973. At the same time, domestically, he reversed many of the economic and social reforms of the Kennedy-

Johnson era. The monstrousness of his administration, culminating in the Watergate affair and Nixons forced resignation in 1974, serves as the subject of Ariels Nixon Behemoth (1976). Born in 1926 in Oakland and educated in both California and Europe, Ariel is known for paintings that are political or visionary, or sometimes both. In Nixon Behemoth a mask of the presidents head is held by a skull riding the legendary beast of monstrous power. On his shoulders are epaulettesbadges of honor for both the president and the death head. A red cord or cordon dangling belowthe only color in the grisaille worksignies both military decoration and the blood that goes with it. In the lower register we see the masks of Melvin Laird, Nixons secretary of defense, who facilitated the Cambodian incursion; Spiro Agnew, who was forced to resign the vice presidency on charges of corruption; FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, looking like a toad; and nally the presidents vassals against war and violence
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TERRY ALLEN TREATMENT (ANGEL LEAVING DIRTY TRACKS), FROM YOUTH IN ASIA, 1988 Mixed-media installation with sound, 81 32 12 32 12 in. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Paule Anglim.

H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, both convicted in 1975 for their involvement in the Watergate scandal. The heads are clearly delineated, with suggestions of sucking undersea animals and indeterminate organic forms in the background. Ariels behemotha creature described in the Book of Job as having bones as strong as bars of iron and a tail like a cedarspreads its limbs all over the threepaneled picture. Signicantly, this monster holds a missile in its hand. The work as a whole is painted in many layers on a dark ground, with the artists brush, inging the paint quickly, producing animate ecks and a mottled surface. Striations created with a comb give a sensation of vibration to the painting. Similar in some ways to the work of Rico Lebrun, who also often eschewed color, Ariels expressionist form conveys her deeply felt humanist social concern. The impact of the Vietnam War did not end when
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American soldiers came home, as Terry Allen revealed in some ingenious multimedia installations about the wrenching memories and problems, including hostility, Vietnam veterans encountered on their return. Allen, who was born in 1943 in Wichita, Kansas, but went to Los Angeles schools and graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute, became known early on as an assemblage and installation artist, often dealing with the issues of dislocation and cultural fragmentation. His most important work in this context is probably his Youth in Asia series, which occupied him from 1982 to 1988. A musician as well as a visual artist, he was commissioned by a German studio to work on the sound track for a documentary about Amerasian children who remained in Indochina or went to live in Thailand. He began conceiving his Youth in Asia assemblages when he went to Thailand for this project. These multidimensional explorations include sculpture, pictures, texts (both poetry and narration), and sound effects ranging from gunre and the noise of helicopter blades to rock and roll, Vietnamese songs, Thai music, and more. One of more than sixty works in the series, Treatment (Angel Leaving Dirty Tracks) (1988) is a large red robot, based on a kachina doll, with an old typewriter for its head.33 It stands on a raised platform in a brightly illuminated spaceperhaps it has just landed there. An audio element plays Torsos Hell, telling the surreal tale of a soldier who is now only a torso, as his limbs have been attached to another survivor from hell. Like Otto Dixs horric paintings of cripples, made after World War I, Allens piece conveys betrayal, deception, and abandonment. As Allen said to the critic Dave Hickey: Youth in Asia is about a . . . culture that betrays its children. You dont have to be a veteran of some war to understand that.34 A somewhat different perspective comes from Vietnam-born artists who arrived in the United States as refugees at a young age. It is not surprising that they took stock of their feelings about the foreign invasion of their country and its disastrous consequences for their land and its people. Long Nguyen (b. 1958) re-

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calls the horrors of the war in his native Vietnam and the personal tribulations he and his family suffered. After his hazardous departure from South Vietnam at the age of seventeen, Nguyen was lost at sea for several days and then transported to a refugee camp, nally arriving in the United States in 1975. He studied painting at San Jose State University, developing a personal style that was both informed by his Asian roots and inuenced by various European and American artists, from Titian, Grnewald, Brueghel, and van Gogh to Philip Guston, Nathan Oliveira, and Frank Lobdell. In 1991, when he was cast in a minor role in Oliver Stones lm Heaven and Earth (lmed in Thailand), Nguyen paid a visit to his homeland, viewing the changes with adult eyes. Upon returning to California, he produced a series of paintings, which he

called Tales of Yellow Skin, to afrm his ethnic identity. Some depict victims of American napalm bombs. Nguyens Refugee Christ (1992) is a deeply felt, selfreective painting. Its title refers to Nguyens experience as a student in a Catholic seminary in Vietnam. The crosses, suggesting Calvary, rise from a sampan (a small boat often used in Vietnam). In the center, in the place of Christ on the Cross, is a disembodied head, riddled with bullet holes. The head on the cross at the left and the foot on the cross at the right reveal stigmata. The background, painted green and yellow, signies the sea. Nguyen depicts human efgies mutilated beyond existence, interlocking image and paint to produce works of troubling power. The slaughter in Vietnam and Cambodia has also preoccupied Dinh Q. L, who was born in 1968 in a
LONG NGUYEN REFUGEE CHRIST, 1992 Oil on canvas, 66 84 in. Courtesy of the artist.

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DINH Q. L RUSSIAN ROULETTE, 2002 C-print and linen tape, 39 12 59 12 in. Courtesy of Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, Oregon.

small town close to the Cambodian border of what was South Vietnam. After the takeover by the North Vietnamese, Ls family ed to Thailand and immigrated to California in 1979. After studying in California and New York, L returned to Vietnam for the rst time in 1992, and since 1998 he has lived mostly in Ho Chi Minh City, although he spends part of each year in California. During the 1990s L developed a technique of weaving together strips cut from photographs, based on the craft of weaving straw for grass mats he had learned from an aunt. He effectively uses this collaging technique to convey the horror of Pol Pots killing elds, where more than 12,500 people were slaughtered during the Cambodian terror, in the series Cambodian Splendor and Darkness (1988). The overall images in this series are based on photographs of boys staring ahead, about to be executed, but woven into these mosaic-like images are photographs of Angkor Wat, helicopters, wounded soldiers, or American riemen. The boys all have numbers on their
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chests, showing that the Khmer Rouge, like the Nazis, were methodical in their killing. Ls choice of deadly green or gray colors and his burning of the edges of these works heighten the sense of trauma. In 1999 L produced a huge quilt, Mot Coi Di Ve (True Journeys Return), measuring ten by twenty feet and composed of hundreds of photographs and texts from everyday people in Cambodia and Vietnam. Too young to remember much of the war itself, L obtains his knowledge from visits to war-torn places, from family stories, from the war photographs by Eddie Adams, and from lms such as Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, Indochine, and The Deer Hunter. His large painting Russian Roulette (2002) plays on the terrifying scene in The Deer Hunter in which an American soldier, played by John Savage, has been captured by the Vietcong and is forced to hold a gun that may be loaded to his own head. (L relates that kids in his class in Los Angeles used this gesture to denigrate the young immigrant from Viet-

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nam.) L shows his mastery of visual counterpoint in Russian Roulette, his crisscrossing of different and often opposing views. Interwoven with the geometric pattern of the Deer Hunter scene is the iconic image of a South Vietnamese general shooting a Vietcong youth, whose identity emerges slowly. On March 13, 2003, shortly before the American attack on Iraq, L wrote to the art historian Moira Roth: This is a crazy time we are living in. I am currently in California and cant wait to get back to Vietnam. It seems so strange to think that Vietnam today is a place that can offer a refuge from the madness of war that America is heading into. I also think it speaks a great deal about Americans inability to learn anything since the Vietnam war.35
The Threat of Nuclear Weapons

In addition to delineating the horrors of specic wars, like that in Vietnam, artists have tried, since World War II, to warn their viewers of the devastation of nuclear warfare, made all the more threatening by an ongoing arms race. For instance, San Francisco artist Judy Hiramoto, who was born in Hawaii in the 1950s, has made a series of installation pieces directing attention to the disaster of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as to the consequences of nuclear tests in the Pacic Ocean and the Nevada desert. Oppenheimers Sink (1998) features a sink whose faucet gushes water that has been dyed red, reminding the viewer of Robert Oppenheimers statement to President Harry S. Truman: I have blood on my hands. Bars of white soap on the white wall are imprinted with words about death in the atomic age disintegration, incineration, vaporization along with rationalizations: defense, security, even democracy. On a white towel above the sink, we can read the names of some of the Japanese, Korean, and American victims of the atomic bombs. The names are also chanted on a tape recording that is an integral part of this stark installation. How can we keep on building such deadly bombs? That is the question asked by Chris Burden, whose

work is known for probing the established institutions of the art world and examining his own physical and psychological person. Born in Boston in 1946, Burden grew up in France, Italy, and Switzerland before moving to California, where he studied at Pomona College and the University of California, Irvine. In 1971 he began a series of extreme actions, testing the limits of pain, violence, vulnerability, and selfdestruction. In Trans-Fixed (1974), for example, while standing on the rear bumper of a car with his arms stretched over the roof, he had nails driven through the palms of his hands and then had the car pushed halfway out into a speedway with the engine turned on. In other actions he deliberately implicated the spectators, who had the responsibility of saving his life in works where he literally took the risk of being killed. Then around 1975 he shifted the thrust of his work from personal exposure to danger to public issues, such as the perils of the weapons industry. In 1979 he created a large installation evocative of the Minimalist sculpture of the time, The Reason for

JUDY HIRAMOTO OPPENHEIMERS SINK, 1998 Mixed-media installation, 71 79 17 in. Courtesy of the artist.

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CHRIS BURDEN THE REASON FOR THE NEUTRON BOMB, 1979 Fifty thousand nickels and matchsticks and signage, variable dimensions. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, museum purchase. Chris Burden, 1979. Photo: Philipp Scholz Rittermann.

the Neutron Bomb. This work, measuring 514 square feet, is composed of 50,000 nickels and matchsticks arranged in a regular grid. The reason for the neutron bomb, the artist explained in an accompanying text, is that as part of the strategy of deterrence, the United States built a number of thermonuclear weapons of nearly 10,000 warheads, each one more destructive than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, because the Soviets had about 50,000 highly sophisticated tanks massed in Eastern Europe. Each nickel and matchstick represents one Russian tank.36 The work is simply a visual statement of a factual situaagainst war and violence

tion revealed in an ordered grid; Burden leaves it up to viewers to draw their own conclusions. A great deal less objective than The Reason for the Neutron Bomb are the lacerating images of nuclear warheads by Robert Arneson (19301992). In his earlier work Arneson had helped redene ceramics, elevating it from a traditional craft to the realm of ne art. Yet after his commissioned bust of the murdered mayor George Moscone was rejected in 1981 by San Francisco city ofcials (see p. 97), he realized just how much impact artwork could have on social and political issues and turned to political sculpture as a major theme. He created bronzes such as Minuteman (1983) to describe the effects of nuclear fallout on human beings. In this work a battered head is skewered on a cross, imprinted with a semblance of a nuclear missile. A target mark is stamped on the head, which is patinated green, while the cross is black. On the pedestal, in a nearly obliterated text, Arneson has inscribed the details of the effects of radiation. In this and other pieces Arneson pursued a narrative mode to confront the unspeakable. Of these works, Donald Kuspit has written: By forcing us to face the unpleasant truth of the likelihoods and human consequences of nuclear disaster, [Arneson] brings us to the verge of active social protest, of raising our own voices in expressionist plainspeakingrealist speech. For him, personal and social activism are inseparable.37 Another artist who interweaves personal and social activism is Helne Aylon, born in Brooklyn in 1931, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Central Europe. Brought up in the Orthodox faith, she married a rabbi at eighteen, had her rst child at nineteen, but was widowed at age thirty and went to study art at Brooklyn College, where Ad Reinhardt inspired her. She then taught at San Francisco State University and in the womens studies program at Antioch College West. This bicoastal artist began to question the preciousness of art with Paintings That Change in Time (197478) and a series from 197879 in which liquid sacs lled with linseed oil would burst apart. In 1980 Aylon heard a lecture by the progressive

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antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott, who told the audience to do whatever they could to stop the deadly arms race. Aylon closed her studio temporarily to pursue meaningful actions. In Sand Carrying (1980), she gathered sand from the Pacic Ocean and brought it to the San Francisco Womens Building, where ve hundred people, accompanied by music by the composer Pauline Oliveros, carried it out of the building. For Stone Carrying (1981), performed in Israel, she invited Arab and Jewish women to work together carrying stones, substances that know no political boundaries. Aylon then turned her focus directly on the threat of nuclear weapons to human life and the environment. In 1983, for her action Terrestri: Rescued Earth, a group of women carried pillowcases in which they collected earth from numerous weapon sites from coast to coast. Traveling in Aylons Earth Ambulance, they left from the University of Californias Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where much nuclear research was performed, and stopped

at various Strategic Air Command (SAC) sites on their way to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza at the United Nations in New York. There they emptied their pillowcases into large transparent boxes, creating an earth painting whose colors and textures varied depending on the area the material came from.38 In 1995, on the ftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in her piece Bridge of Knots, Aylon hung pillowcases collected from the United States, the former Soviet Union, and Japan in knotted lines from the concrete walls of the Berkeley Art Museum. In appearance the piece recalled Eva Hesses mute modular berglass units, but Aylons Postminimal art intervened directly in the political landscape. Underlining a dilemma many politically involved artists feel, Aylon has said, I have never felt totally accepted in the political world, the work seemed too arty; in the art world it seemed too political. 39 But that has not kept her from continuing to produce political art. against war and violence

ROBERT ARNESON MINUTEMAN, 1983 Bronze, 48 31 15 in. Di Rosa Foundation and Preserve, Napa, California. Estate of Robert Arneson / Licensed by VAGA, New York. Photo: Lee Fatherree. Courtesy of George Adams Gallery, New York, and Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco.

HELNE AYLON BRIDGE OF KNOTS, 1995 Pillowcases and ink installation. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum. Helne Aylon / Licensed by VAGA, New York. Photo: Pat Craig.

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Intervention in Central America and the Iran-Contra Affair

During the 1980s artists in New York took to the streets to protest the U.S. governments intervention in the politics of El Salvador and Nicaragua. Several California artists also joined in this outcry against the Reagan administrations policies in Central America, among them Enrique Chagoya. Born in Mexico City in 1953, Chagoya visited nearby Teotihuacan as well as the citys museums as a child, and he brings a thorough knowledge of pre-Columbian culture, including ancient codices, to his work. In 1968, at age fteen, he came to a keen political awareness when he witnessed the Mexican police killing as many as ve hundred students during a protest. After studying political economy at the University of Mexico, Chagoya moved to California in 1977 and began working as a graphic artist. In 1984, after enrolling in the San Francisco Art Institute, he helped organize an exhibition in conjunction with the national movement Artists Call Against Intervention in Central America, which brought artists from various elds together to express their outrage over the current government policies, propaganda, and murder and to say, among other things, Central America is not for sale.40 Chagoya made a series of etchings satirizing President Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, and others, nding inspiration in the work of Goya, as well as Posada, Daumier, Kollwitz, and Hearteld. For a large drawing of this time, Their Freedom of Expression . . . The Recovery of Their Economy (1984), Chagoya appropriated Mickey Mouse, who might be described as the most prominent ambassador of American popular culture. Chagoyas oversized cartoon features Reagan, sporting big Mouse ears, painting the words Ruskies and Cubans out of Central America on the wall in red. He has obviously loaded his brush from the receptacle of blood held by his other arma bucket with a dismembered foot sticking out. For good measure, a small gure of Mickey Mouse as Dr. Henry Kissinger appears in the lower left corner. He, too,
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holds a bucket of blood and writes the message: By the way, keep art out of politics. Irony governs Chagoyas comment here, as it does his title for this work. Whose freedom of expression is being supported, and who is recovering the Central American economy? The artist and political activist Robbie Conal, who leaves very few political controversies untouched, produced a series of posters denouncing the IranContra affair, in which the U.S. governmentin the persons of John Poindexter, Reagans national security advisor, and Colonel Oliver North of the Marine Corpsdirected a clandestine operation that sold arms to Iran, used the proceeds illegally to fund American-trained freedom ghters attempting to overthrow the left-wing government of Nicaragua, and then ew narcotics from Central America back to the United States for illegal distribution. (Both Poindexter and North were later indicted for these activities but were pardoned by President George H. W. Bush just before he left ofce in 1992 and in the early 2000s were reappointed to critical government positions by President George W. Bush.) A red diaper baby, Conal was born in New York in 1944 to parents who were both union organizers. They sent him to see the New York museums, where he was rst affected by the political prints of Goya and Daumier, and a little later by those of the radical artists of the Weimar Republic. John Heartelds photomontages served as a paradigm for Conals own work. In 1963 Conal moved to California, studying at San Francisco State University and Stanford University before moving south to Venice, California, where he has lived since 1984. Initially he painted pictures in the Abstract Expressionist mode, but soon his work took a political turn. He encountered the strongly polemical art of Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, who encouraged the younger artist. Feeling that the social signicance of simply painting canvases was limited, Conal entered upon a career of agitprop poster making. Like other California artists such as Rupert Garca, Erika Rothenberg, and Ben Sakoguchi, Conal uses

against war and violence

ENRIQUE CHAGOYA THEIR FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION. . . . THE RECOVERY OF THEIR ECONOMY, 1984 Charcoal and pastel on paper, 80 80 in. San Jose Museum of Art. Gift of Enrique Chagoya with additional support from the Museums Collections Committee, in honor of the San Jose Museum of Arts 35th anniversary.

ROBBIE CONAL CONTRA DICTION, 1988 Oil on canvas, 53 40 in. Collection of David Arquette. Also done as poster and postcard.

ROBBIE CONAL CONTRA COCAINE, 1988 Oil on canvas, 53 40 in. Collection of Charlie Sheen. Also done as poster and postcard.

popular media such as postcards and photographs, as well as posters, to render his work accessible to a wide audience. Since the early 1980s he has organized political action groups for his art attacks to provide for mass distribution of his irreverent and biting pieces, which expose the corruption of the system. Over the years Conal has created a rogues gallery of portraits, with few individuals in public affairs remaining safe from his attacks. He often begins by slinging paint on canvas in the gestural approach of his Abstract Expressionist period; he then superimposes gures, faces, and objects, producing trenchant canvases that he photographs and prints in multiple copies as posters. Armed with wallpaper glue and big brushes, Conal and his helpers set out at night and plaster the posters on surfaces throughout the city whether Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C., or someplace elseto surprise, shock, and delight people on their way to work the next morning. Outraged by news of the Iran-Contra affair, Conal cogently satirized this complex and messy operation in such works as Contra Diction (1988) and Contra Cocaine (1988). In the rst, a stinging hyperrealist portrait, President Reagan opens his mouth to speak: The simple truth is, I dont rememberperiod, Conal quotes him as saying on the back of the postcard version of this image. In the second, a ghastly skull cannot be hidden by a camouage background or pinstripe suit and tie. No matter how hard we tried to disprove the rumors about the contras and drugs, the stories never went away, Oliver North confesses on the back of the postcard version. Conal did not end his vigilance against government corruption and the spoils of war with the IranContra affair. In 1994 he was commissioned to contribute a weekly poster and accompanying text for the Los Angeles Weekly, that citys premier free paper. Called Artburns, these drawings of corrupt individuals in public affairs provoke and attack the establishment that nourishes them. They are, Conal says, just one way of turning anger, disappoint66

ment, sometimes utter disbelief at the unconscionable doings of our political and cultural leaders into a silly-satirical joyful resistance.41
Operation Desert Storm

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 may have ended the cold war, but it did not bring an end to military actions. The United States, as the remaining superpower, could deploy its military might virtually unopposed in other venues. In 1990 Iraqs ruthless dictator, Saddam Hussein, whom the U.S. government had supported with arms and economic aid in his war against Iran, invaded the small, oil-rich country of Kuwait. In response, President George H. W. Bush formed a coalition that unleashed its military strength against Iraq in Operation Desert Storm. During six days of massive aerial bombardment, the citizens of Iraq suffered innumerable losses of life. Hans Burkhardt (see p. 36), now in his eighties, once more turned from his abstract painting to produce a series of works protesting the suffering wrought by war. In a creative surge, he made a large number of paintings in which the American ag appears as a symbol of death, its stripes starkly painted in black and white or obliterated altogether in a gestural eld of pigment. In one disturbing canvas, Tar Pit (1991), the ags upper-left eld, normally occupied by stars, is covered by a frazzled piece of burlap painted dark gray. Red paint, simulating blood, soaks through the layers of cloth and paint. In the center of the painting a wooden cross rises like a tombstone above a second, larger piece of tattered burlap. It is a compelling homage to those killed in the Gulf Waror in any war. Llyn Foulkes also deployed his art to protest the Gulf War, but in a sardonic mode, one that ts the anti-establishment thrust of much of his work. Born in Yakima, Washington, in 1934, Foulkes, like Burkhardt, did not have an easy childhoodhis father abandoned the family when Llyn was a small child, and his mother had to go to work in a cannery. Unlike Burkhardt, however, Foulkes belongs to a cooler, more restrained generation of artists who ap-

against war and violence

HANS BURKHARDT TAR PIT, 1991 Oil and assemblage on canvas, 60 48 in. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Museum purchase with funds provided by the Collectors Council and the 20thCentury Art Acquisition Fund. Hans G. and Thordis W. Burkhardt Foundation. Courtesy of Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles.

proach their art in a less openly emotional manner. After graduating from the Chouinard Art Institute in 1959, Foulkes worked briey in an Abstract Expressionist style and then experimented with Pop Art, which he found too simple and arid: Pop Art almost killed painting, he later said. Believe me. I was there.42 His subsequent work shows the impact of the gutsy painting of Picasso and de Kooning, the political criticism of the Berlin Dadaists Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hch, and the use of light in paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt.43 Often intensely realistic, it is concerned with real-life horrors and with a per-

ception of present danger in the body politic. In particular, Foulkes has come to satirize popular culture, revealing its effect on Californias landscape and people. Mickey Mouse, for example, makes frequent appearances in Foulkess work, reecting his belief that the Walt Disney Company has ruined Los Angeles with its cartoon mentality and squeaky-clean, sanitizing presentations. In the mordantly sardonic work Where Did I Go Wrong? (1991), we see Clark Kent dressed in a black business suit. Beneath the formal dress, he wears his Superman outt, a motif Foulkes has used frequently against war and violence
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LLYN FOULKES WHERE DID I GO WRONG? 1991 Mixed media, 71 54 in. Llyn Foulkes. Courtesy of Tom Patchett.

in his work. The Kent gure is seated on a rock in an eerily lit, desolate landscape dominated by a large, threatening boulder that recalls the artists disquieting images of a lifeless American landscape in his Post Card series of the 1960s. He is reading The Outlook, a newspaper that bears the banner headline WAR! and shows a picture of George H. W. Bush. The subhead reads: Pre-Dawn Raids Pound Baghdad and Kuwait. Bush Vows Liberation. The front page goes on to proclaim (presciently, in light of the second Gulf War): Rumsfeld Vows to Crush Foes. To the left of the helpless Superman, we see a bare bush and a quail by his feet (the inept Dan Quayle was vice president in the rst Bush administration). A bubble shows Supermans thought: Where did I go wrong? One answer to Supermans question can be found in Allan Sekulas photonovel War without Bodies (1991), created in response to the rst Gulf War. Born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1951, Sekula moved to San
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Pedro, California, and studied at the University of California, San Diego, when its art department was pioneering new concepts and art forms. His principal teachers there were John Baldessari in art and Herbert Marcuse in philosophy. Sekula read Marx, Brecht, Kafka, Sartre, Freud, Barthes, and Foucault, becoming engrossed with semiotics and theory and increasingly aware of the workings of the late capitalist system and its effect on ordinary people. At the time, San Diego was an active military center, sending air and naval forces to Southeast Asia. Sekula, like many students, became active in the antiwar movement. He soon came to feel that his early activities as a sculptor and performance artist were foolishly romantic, self-aggrandizing, and remote, and embarked on a dual career as a photographer and a critic, fusing praxis and theory. Taking up photography did not keep Sekula from writing extensively against the privileging of photography as high art. With Martha Rosler, he called for a reconstruction of documentary photography, proposing a reecting documentation with text as an integral part of the work to form photonovels. Sekula would agree with Bertolt Brechts oftencited observation that a photograph of the Krupp factory tells us next to nothing about the institution.44 Unlike many strictly documentary photographers, Sekula often combines his images with texts to scrutinize American (that is, Western) economic, social, and political systems and their meanings, as in Against the Grain (197283), Fish Story (199597), Dismal Science (198992), and Titanics Wake (2002). War without Bodies includes a photograph of a victory celebration at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Santa Ana, California, on April 28, 1991, in which men and boys touch the gun barrels at the snout of an aircraft that has just returned from Operation Desert Storm. In the accompanying text, Sekula writes about the repetitive TV images and press stories detailing the speed and range of military planes and the cost of their payloads, and about the characterization of modern warfare as simply pitting

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ALLAN SEKULA BOMB, VICTORY CELEBRATION, TORO MARINE CORPS AIR STATION, SANTA ANA, CALIFORNIA, 28 APRIL 1991, FROM WAR WITHOUT BODIES, 1991 Cibachrome, 24 30 in. Courtesy of Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica; Allan Sekula; and Generali Foundation, Vienna.

steel against the enemy. The illusion of a war without bodies is exposed in Sekulas comment: The mix of tactile caution and blunt aggression that one detects in this gun-touching becomes all the more ominous when we learn that these cannon re armorpiercing shells made of depleted uranium, the radioactive material now suspected of being one cause of the mysterious bundle of afictions known as Gulf War Syndrome. Robert Arneson also addressed Operation Desert Storm. In 1991 he produced Oily Bush, a rather ghastly image of President George H. W. Bush, who went to war ostensibly to protect Kuwait from invasion by Iraq but mostly to keep oil owing to America. Using a heavy black oil stick, Arneson almost literally made the oil ooze over his likeness of the commander in chief, whose green necktie is decorated with red dollar signs.
Operation Iraqi Freedom and the War on Terror

ROBERT ARNESON OILY BUSH, 1991 Conte, oil stick, and plastic enamel on paper, 47 12 31 34 in. Estate of Robert Arneson/Licensed by VAGA, New York. Photo: Lee Fatherree. Courtesy of George Adams Gallery, New York, and Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco.

In 2003 antiwar activists took to the streets again, in California and elsewhere, as a second Gulf War threatened. On a single dayFebruary 19, 2003an estiagainst war and violence
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JULES GREENBERG SKATEBOARDER AND GANDHI AGAINST THE WAR, JANUARY 18, 2003 Archival pigment print, 8 12 11 in. Courtesy of the photographer.

mated ten million people demonstrated worldwide against the pending preemptive invasion of Iraq by the United States. The demonstrators protested doubtful claims made by the administration of George W. Bush that weapons of mass destruction lay at the ready in Iraq, that Saddam Hussein had purchased uranium from Niger, and that he was connected to Al Qaedas attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. The loudness of the cry no war comes across in poignant photographs taken at demonstrations in San Francisco by Jules Greenberg (b. 1966), who studied photography in Rome and Berkeley. Originally drawn to photography by seeing the work of the 1930s Farm Security Administration photographers, Greenberg has carried her commitment to socially relevant photography into action, participating in FotoVision, an organization that offers workshops in documentary photography. Her Skateboarder and Gandhi against the War (2003) attests to the new forms of political expression and participation being developed by San Franciscos ethnically diverse youth. As she explains, I was struck by this young man

marching so deantly, yet so joyously, down the middle of Market Street, proudly displaying, not a cardboard sign, but the underside of a skateboard, a longtime symbol and favored mode of transport for rebellious youth, now an oddly compelling placard for peace.45 Indeed, skateboards have been the object of contention in many cities, with some municipalities banning their use or subjecting it to curfew, perceiving them as unruly and in the way. Skateboard owners, however, tend to make their attitudes known, often decorating their boards with grafti or underground cartoons. It is in just such a contentious stance that Greenberg has caught the spectacled young man with the white head of Gandhi on his T-shirt. Jaw set, standing against a wall painted maroon, he holds up his board at a tilt, causing it to resonate with the vertical repetition of dry standpipes on the left. The power of visual street theater is caught in Kat Wades highly evocative 2003 photograph of the blackclad Mourning Mothers who regularly appeared at San Francisco antiwar demonstrations. In Wades image there is no escape from these imploring women, with their huge, expressive masks and their outstretched arms, bearing what look like the remains of their children. Wade (b. 1947), a San Francisco Chronicle staff photographer who studied journalism and photography at San Francisco State University and then backpacked around the world for two years, has also focused her camera on the homeless and individuals of mixed race. The massive worldwide demonstrations did not, however, stop the Bush administration from attacking Iraq, in what was euphemistically called Operation Iraqi Freedom. When, under the guise of liberation, Saddam Hussein was quickly toppled by American troops, Iraqis called insurgents continued to ght against the occupation of their country, At the time of this writing, two years after Bush declared victory, the United States remains mired in a low-intensity guerrilla war, with no end in sight. The number of Americans killed keeps rising, and the U.S. military does not even report all the Iraqi casualties.

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against war and violence

As Mark Danner, a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, has written: It will be an increasingly obvious irony that the United States acted in Iraq in a way that not only gave the world the specter, for the rst time, of what untrammeled American unilateralism would look like but that demonstrated, at the same time, the stark limits of American power. For the expedition in Iraq has revealed again an America that is a strange hybrida military giant yoked uncomfortably to a political dwarf.46 In spring 2004 photographs taken in Abu Ghraib prison surfaced, showing American troops resorting to the humiliation and unspeakable torture of Iraqi suspects, in direct contradiction of the Geneva Convention. At times this abuse even led to death, as former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis reported: The Army has admitted that at least thirtynine prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan died, and some of them died while being interrogated.47 The image of a hooded Iraqi man with electrodes tied to his hands has for many people around the world replaced the Statue of Liberty as the symbol of what the United States stands for. The San Francisco novelist Robert Mailer Anderson and his cousin Zack, also a writer, made posters showing this hooded man in front of the American ag, along with the caption Got democracy? They then placed these posters on walls and buildings all over the city and in other locations. In Los Angeles two politically committed artists, who work anonymously under the name Forkscrew Graphics, appropriated Apples trendy iPod billboards, with their gures silhouetted against uorescent backgrounds, and reminded people of the Abu Ghraib atrocities with their own silkscreened iRaq posters, displaying the hooded prisoner all wired up. Forkscrew Graphics plastered their posters not only all over Los Angeles, but also in New York and other parts of the country as well as Europe. When the image was printed in the 2004 election issue of the Nation, Forkscrew Graphics stated: We want to show that no against war and violence

KAT WADE MOURNING MOTHERS, 2003 Color photograph. San Francisco Chronicle.

FORKSCREW GRAPHICS IRAQ, 2004 Silkscreen, 24 36 in. Courtesy of the artists.

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CLINTON FEIN WHO WOULD JESUS TORTURE? 2004 Digital archival ink jet print, 35 26 in. Courtesy of the artist.

matter how manipulated the media sphere becomes, and no matter how many tons of messages the marketing world dumps on the public, there are ways to take the symbols of marketing and use them to disrupt the barrage of commercial communication.48 Like Forkscrew Graphics, Clinton Fein (b. 1964) has used the iconic image of the hooded prisoner, multiplying it fty times to stand in for the stars in the American ag in his print Like Apple Fucking Pie (2004). The ags stripes are replaced with the ofcial text of the Abu Ghraib report, in red ink between white intervals. This image, along with another by Fein, was shredded and destroyed by a high-tech Silicon Valley printing rm, which claimed the work vi-

olated company policy against depicting torture and disparaging religion. Fein is no stranger to censorship. Earlier, he established a provocative website, www .annoy.com, in response to the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which made it illegal to send indecent communications over the Internet. He went so far as to sue Attorney General Janet Reno over the law, winning a partial victory in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1999. Born in Johannesburg, where he witnessed the effects of apartheid, Fein studied industrial psychology before moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s and later settling in San Francisco. His art ranges over a variety of political issues, from urban blight to the masochistic and homoerotic implications of life in the military to the ongoing war on terror and erosion of American civil liberties. A 2004 exhibit in San Francisco was explicitly intended to make viewers aware of the nightmarish rollbacks of the Constitution by an Administration that has done more to kill civil liberties than Osama bin Laden could ever have wished for in his wettest dreams.49 Typical of Feins ongoing attack on the Bush administrations policies is a 2001 photocollage titled Blood-Spangled Banner. Here bin Ladens head replaces that of Miss Liberty, while the right arm of the statue holds Bushs dismembered head aloft, instead of the great torch of freedom. The work is accompanied by a verse that begins:
Oh, say can you feel by the dusks fading light How so sadly we mourn our constitution is screaming?50

In another image, titled Better Be the Last (2004) and modeled on Leonardo da Vincis Last Supper, Fein shows the president and his cronies seated around a table with almost no food left on it. Continuing the religious theme, the digital print Who Would Jesus Torture? (2004) depicts Bush on the cross in place of the Savior. (The original version of this image was also destroyed by the printer.) A phallic missile, equipped
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with the American ag, emerges from Bushs loincloth. Bin Laden sits above. From one arm of the cross hangs the icon of the hooded man, while below the other arm, on an electric chair, sits Private Lindy English, the soldier photographed taming naked prisoners with a dog leash. Below English, we see John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld strapping Saddam Hussein to a chair, while Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz (the chief architect of the Iraq invasion) appear on the lower right. Several of these gures dangle toy elephantsalluding not only to the Republican Party logo but also to Thomas Edisons demonstration of the strength of the electric chair (his own invention, though this fact is rarely mentioned) by shocking an elephant to death. Who invented this torture? we might also ask. The war in Iraq motivated Martha Rosler (pp. 54 56) to once more counterpose the reality of war with frivolous life on the home front. In Photo-Op (2004) she shows us a digitally duplicated girl in a sexy garment admiring herself in a camera phone, while two war wounded are seated in modern chairs in the glitzy living room, with a photograph from the deadly battleeld in the background. In reviewing Roslers show in New York, Holland Cotter observed that socially engaged art is out of favor with the New York art industry at present and urged viewers not to overlook Roslers art: Its caustic but cool, infuriated but funny,

and it has the visual zap of rock music hooks.51 Using advanced technology, the visual and performance artist Paul DeMarinis, has also responded to the Iraq war, producing antiwar statements that fuse the visual and the verbal, recalling a tradition that stretches back to Wassily Kandinskys color-tone composition The Yellow Sound (1911) and Marcel Duchamps Erratum Musical (1913). DeMarinis, born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1948, studied at Mills College in Oakland in the early 1970s, at a time when innovative work in synthetic movement, fusing the aural and the visual, occurred at that school. In The Edison Effect (1999) he combined laser technology with two of Thomas Edisons inventions, the record player and the incandescent light bulb. In 2004 the artist turned to political statements. He exhibited his Firebirds series, which takes advantage of the way gas ames conduct sound in a 360-degree radius. Through high-tech means, he gives visibility to the voices of prominent men, which emerge from torches in contraptions that look like bird cages. We hear Adolf Hitler screaming with vituperative sputters, Joseph Stalin voicing patriotic slogans, Benito Mussolini sounding brash and deant, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaking in a reassuring tone. Another piece in the same exhibition, Tongues of Fire, uses manometric ame photography, a phonological device for recording and viewing the patterns of speech on a screen. DeMarinis applied against war and violence

MARTHA ROSLER PHOTO-OP, FROM BRINGING THE WAR HOME: HOUSE BEAUTIFUL, SECOND SERIES, 2004 Photomontage, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist.

PAUL DEMARINIS TONGUES OF FIRE #10, 2004 Photograph of manometric ame in lightbox, 3 12 32 1 12 in. Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco. Courtesy of the artist.

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this technology to excerpts of speeches by President George W. Bush, such as Do not destroy the oil wells, a source of wealth for the Iraqi people, The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein, and No more prison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. These words are made visible in the work, each excerpt appearing inside an individual lightbox in the form of a backlit image of ames. The critic Kenneth Baker explains: DeMarinis recorded the ames ripples with a slit-lens camera, producing long, narrow images that suggest distant horizons ablaze at night.52 In Tongues of Fire viewers can compare the messages of world leaders by listening to their voices and actually seeing the sound patterns they produce.

VOICES AGAINST IMPERIALIST INTERVENTION

In weighing in against war, artists have often critiqued the underlying imperialist tendencies, as can be seen implicitly in Robert Colescotts Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie and Ben Sakoguchis Napalm Brand, or more explicitly in Enrique Chagoyas Their Freedom of Expression . . . The Recovery of Their Economy. It can thus be instructive to look specically at how certain artists call attention to the dangers of imperialism and the violence it provokes. Some artists draw on their own cultures experience of past conquest or oppression to make their comments on current government policy all the more incisive. Manuel Ocampo was born in the Philippines in 1965 to parents who were both journalists. He was sent to Catholic schools, and his rst artworks, done under the supervision of priests, were facsimiles of Spanish colonial folk paintings, or ex-votos, scraped and weathered to look authentic and then sold to tourists. Although Ocampo has traveled widely and is frequently on the move, during the 1990s and early 2000s he lived and worked in California. He is known for his apocalyptic visions, painted with a vigorous brush, which transform horror into a quality Andr
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Breton would have described as sublime beauty. His visual repertoire overows with hooded Klansmen, devils, skeletons, rats, swords, roaches, crosses, swastikas, instruments of torture, and words in many languages. One nds echoes of the anxious vision and violence in paintings by such Surrealists as Max Ernst and Andr Masson, as well as inuences from Filipino folk art, the Spanish Baroque and Goya, and older contemporaries such as Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke, and the Viennese Actionists. Ocampos paintings reect a Philippine history in which three hundred years of Spanish oppression were followed by the U.S. occupation in 1898. In President William McKinleys words, the U.S. mission was to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.53 When the Filipinos revolted against this new effort to Christianize them, an estimated half million were killed in the lengthy guerrilla war. It is Christianity that comes under re in many of Ocampos paintings. In his 1994 series Stations of the Cross, for instance, Catholic iconography is turned upside down, with heaven becoming hell. Twelfth Station, the culmination of the series, shows a large cockroach with a crown of thorns and halo presiding in triumph on an altar. Very much the iconoclast, Ocampo tried to demystify the sanctity of art in several exhibitions by carpeting the oor with his paintings so the visitor had to step on them. On the walls, where one would expect to see paintings, Ocampo displayed his correspondence with dealers, collectors, and curators, showing the true business of the art world and demonstrating Jean Baudrillards notion that global capitalist society is based on the circulation of signs. One of Ocampos strongest and most typical works, Untitled (Burnt-out Europe) (1992), conveys multiple messages. Its strange mixture of images strikes the viewer both viscerally and intellectually. A Christ with spread-eagled wings and birds claws presides over a city square, whichteeming with skulls and crossbones and devils preparing for massacres refers both to the Spanish Inquisition and to the Nazi

against war and violence

MANUEL OCAMPO UNTITLED (BURNT-OUT EUROPE), 1992 Oil and decal on canvas, 72 108 in. San Jose Museum of Art. Museum purchase with funds contributed by the Museums Collections Committee. Photo: Douglas Sandberg.

death camps. In the foreground a young woman testies to the auto-da-f of the Inquisitors, and two large Nazi swastikas dominate the front of the Saviors large black wings.54 This work stands as a powerful indictment of the malevolence of organized religion and the fascist imperial state. Like Ocampo, Scott MacLeod avoids a logical, narrative approach in favor of a disjunctive array of arbitrary images, coupling irreconcilable realities. MacLeod, who was born in 1956 in a small rural town in Virginia, traveled as a child to such places as Indonesia and Venezuela because his father was in the American Foreign Service. His early impressions of the social and psychological dynamics of colonialism are reected in his adult work. He went to high school in Paris during a period of social and cultural turmoil, then returned to the United States in 1973, did construction work in Colorado, hitchhiked around the country, and ended up in San Francisco in 1976.

Since receiving a degree in interdisciplinary studies from San Francisco State University, MacLeod has become an international political activist, working as a writer of avant-garde ction, poetry, and drama, as well as a performance artist, actor, lmmaker, installation artist, and painter. In the 1980s and early 1990s MacLeod performed site-specic, interactive pieces that depended on both the place and the audience. His seemingly meaningless, mostly silent actions, reminiscent of the Theatre of the Absurd, were often symbolic and ritualistic in nature. In 1994 he began painting seriously. Soon the house was lled with paintings and the question became, what on earth will I do with them? . . . I invited everyone I knew, had an excellent turnout, and gave the paintings away for free, one per customer, rst-asking-rst-served. . . . Later in 1995 I sold them each for $37.50 (a price low enough that some consider this also as a political act).55 against war and violence
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SCOTT MACLEOD AMERICAN POP! 2002 Varnish, spray paint, and collage on canvas, 60 48 in. Courtesy of the artist.

MacLeods paintings are usually assemblages with a rich multiplicity of images, some of them emblematic and delving into the imaginative. American Pop! (2002), made with many layers of spar varnish, paint thinner, spray enamel, and microchips, is a good example of the complexity MacLeod creates. Most of the space is taken up by a giant inated bubble painted in a sonorous red. Embedded in the bubble are a leaping stallion, a crashing airplane, an armed soldier, a woman holding a child and wearing a hood with the word escape on it, and military reports. We also see the rock star Kurt Cobain, who committed suicide, and the tennis star Monica Seles, who was stabbed by a fan of another player. A map of the United Sates lies on its side, while on the bottom ve young girls, dressed in gray cocoons, blow bubble gum (an image taken from a photograph the artist found). MacLeod painted this picture in response to September 11, with the great bubble standing for the psychological bubble of fear that was creating a suicidal move toward war.
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Ann Chamberlain (b. 1951) approaches political issues more directly. Educated at Smith College and the San Francisco Art Institute (where she later taught), she served as the program director of the Headlands Center for the Arts, an institution near San Francisco that supports artists who explore new directions. Primarily an installation artist, Chamberlain has worked on various public art commissions, including a collaboration with Ann Hamilton in 1996 for the newly built San Francisco Public Library. Assisted by two hundred volunteers, the two artists took fty thousand discarded library catalogue cards, which had been annotated in numerous languages over many years, and afxed them onto three levels of the librarys walls, making library patrons aware of the shift from ngering handheld cards to tapping a keyboard for cyberinformation. Chamberlain has also collaborated with Victor Mario Zaballa, who was born in 1959 in Mexico City and grew up in Cuernevaca, where he apprenticed in the workshop of David Alfaro Siqueiros. He worked in Mexico with some of the outstanding secondgeneration muralists there before coming to live in San Francisco in 1988. Chamberlain and Zaballa rst worked together on a 1991 exhibition at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco to commemorate the ve thousand Native Americans who had died at Mission Dolores. In 2002 Chamberlain and Zaballa collaborated on an altar for a Da de los Muertos exhibition at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. Their installation was entitled Evil Empire, in response to President George W. Bushs recently delivered State of the Union address, in which he stigmatized Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an axis of evil. The artists explained: Evil Empire is based on Aztec architecturelike the Mesoamerican temples, this pyramid is decorated with skulls. Beneath each drawing of a skull was a photographic image of Bush. Inside the pyramid was a whitewashed map of the world on which only the United States was visible and from which radiated circles of soldiers: the military force of the United States

against war and violence

imposing its will and protecting itself from the rest of the world. The pyramid was topped with a red ashing light of the kind commonly used on police cars, while the interior contained a rotating disco ball.

CALLS FOR PEACE

Two California artists who have produced work that holds out hope for peace are Ariel (see p. 57) and Bruce Hasson. In 1986 the fashion model, socialite, and writer Pat Montandon commissioned Ariel to design a large banner to serve as a pledge for peace. The resulting work, Banner of Hope (198687), is some

two miles of silk, dyed red, black, and white and imprinted with images of white doves emerging from red ames. It also carries the names of thousands of places where the child victims of war have met their deaths: London, Coventry, Berlin, Leningrad, BergenBelsen, Treblinka, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and so on. For two years calligraphers, printers, stitchers, and thousands of children in twenty countries worked to nish the banner, which was completed in 1988 and rst displayed in Moscow, where it was carried by young children at a peace conference, moving President Mikhail Gorbachev to tears. It was then taken to the Great Cemetery in Leningrad and to the Berlin Wall at the time of its breach, to Belfast, to Hiroshima, and, despite disapproval by authorities, to the Great Wall of China. Often it was displayed in childrens processions. The banner eventually came back to the San Francisco Bay Area, where it was displayed in the nave of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and installed for two months in the then-new Oakland Federal Building. There, in Oakland, the names of the children became powerful signiers, both as a memorial to their tragedy and as a symbol of truth and hope, as they were literally pulled upward one hundred feet in the glass-domed building. Light radiating through the silk made one think of stained glass in cathedrals. In July 1998, not long after the banners display, the building received a TOBY (The Ofce Building of the Year) award, which stated in part: Among the many factors which play a role in this award are community involvement and public outreach. Your moving Banner of Hope certainly impressed the judges. Its real contribution, however, remains the heightening of public awareness of the horrible price our world pays for violence.56 Bruce Hasson, born in Los Angeles in 1954 and trained at the academies of Florence and Carrara, Italy, has built great bells to call for peace. The bell has been an almost universal symbol of communication for as long as mankind has known how to cast metal. The most ancient bells have been found in Babylonia, and against war and violence

ANN CHAMBERLAIN AND VICTOR MARIO ZABALLA EVIL EMPIRE, 2002 Mixed-media installation, 6 8 8 ft. South of Market Cultural Center. Courtesy of the artists.

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ARIEL BANNER OF HOPE, 198687 Silk, 2 miles long. Courtesy of Pat Montandon, Children as the Peacemakers Foundation.

bells or gongs have been an essential part of ceremonial events in Assyria and Egypt, China and Japan, India and Burma, and throughout Western Christendom. In Europe bells were placed on the spires of churches or in belfries and campaniles. Bells strike the hours; they can be tuned to sound as delicate chimes or carillons, or to ring loudly as sonorous instruments. They summon worshippers to church and soldiers to war; they can also be struck for peace. The great German Romantic poet Friedrich von Schiller concluded his famous moralistic poem The Lay of the Bell, written in 1799 during the French Revolutionary Wars: May the rst sound be hallowed to peace. In 1995, to commemorate the ftieth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, Hasson made a carbon steel bell from melted weapons collected by the police, a metaphoric casting of swords into plowshares. Titled U.N. Bell, the work was installed in the lobby of the San Francisco War Memorial Building, where the United Nations charter was signed. At a celebratory event, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and President Bill Clinton stood by the bell and Attorney General Janet Reno struck the side of it. Also in 1995 Hasson erected the Childrens Bell Tower in Bodega Bay, north of San Francisco, where 140 bells of different sizes commemorate a boy killed in Calabria, Italy, by bandits (the bells were sent by Italians in gratitude to the boys parents, who publicly donated his organs, thereby encouraging other organ donations for children). In 1999 the artist created his huge Millennia bell, also cast in carbon steel from melted weapons and weighing 1,700 pounds. Intended as a monument to inaugurate the third millennium, this bell was rst displayed at the United Nations Plaza in San Francisco and then was installed for six months in the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, where Mikhail Gorbachev struck it at its dedication. It is now installed in the holy city of Assisi. The shape of the Millennia bell is unorthodox: its lower part looks like a traditional bell, but its upper portion is streamlined and recalls the shape of a missile. The ambiguity of the bells strucagainst war and violence

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AGAINST CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT

ture is in itself a poignant comment on destiny. The sides are carefully patinated and embellished with reliefs relating to the imagery and geometry of early cartographers. The artist has written that the sounding of the bell is a call to forge a peaceful future among all nations. The artwork is intended to inspire humanitys search to restore the planets environment and to develop greater efforts toward global peace. The sounding of Millennia also offers participants a chance to join in the world celebration marking the passage to the next millennium. In ancient mythology, the artist points out, bells served as charms against the forces of destruction.

Protests against violence are not limited to protests against war. Activists have also called for an end to the violent treatment of prisoners, whether through torture or the death penalty. Although most democratic countries have abolished capital punishment, the United States continues to kill its own citizens, at times executing innocent individuals wrongly accused of capital crimes. In 1972 the Supreme Court brought a halt to the executions, but in 1976 the Court reinstated the constitutionality of the death penalty, ruling that it does not entail cruel and unusual punishment. Since then almost a thousand people have been executed in the United States, more than a third of them in Texas. Even before the Supreme Court debates on the death penalty, protests arose against this brutal practice. One death penalty case that provoked a worldwide outcry was that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. On June 19, 1953, millions of people here and abroad protested against their execution.57 The Rosenbergs had been arrested in 1950 and indicted on an espionage charge for allegedly having transmitted data on nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union. The questionable evidence came from Ethel Rosenbergs brother, a confessed spy, who had plea-bargained with the prosecution to avoid the same fate. Judge Irving R. Kaufman, who sentenced the Rosenbergs to death, claimed that the secrets that Julius Rosenberg supposedly obtained from his brother-in-law provided the key that enabled the Soviets to build an atomic bomb. Scientists, however, do not believe that the transmitted information would have been of much value. The trial, which took only fourteen days, coincided with the crest of McCarthyism, and a fair trial for the Rosenbergs, who were close to the Communist Party, would have been difcult to obtain at the time. Playwright Arthur Miller recalled, The sheer heat of the anti-Communist feeling in the country should have warned a cool judge away from, not against war and violence

BRUCE HASSON MILLENNIA: MAYOR FRANCESCO RUTELLI AND MIKHAIL GORBACHEV STRIKE BELL IN THE CAMPIDOGLIO, ROME, 2000 Bell: cast melted rearms, carbon steel, with steel structure, 13 8 8 ft. Now located in front of the Museum of Art and St. Peters Church, Assisi, Italy. Photo: Courtesy of the Comune di Roma 2000.

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KIM ABELES OTHER (IN MEMORY OF ETHEL AND JULIUS ROSENBERG), 1987 Assemblage, 37 25 19 in. Collection of Doug Simay. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Daniel J. Martinez.

toward, the death penalty, and when you have a brother as one of the main supports of the prosecutions case against the sisters husband, you have to take long thought before believing him. There is no hatred on earth, no resentment as coruscating as that between related people, as all civil wars display.58 No U.S. civilians had ever before suffered the death penalty for treason, but the Rosenbergs were sentenced to the electric chair in Sing Sing. A number of well-known artists protested the execution, including Picasso, who issued a limited edition of portrait lithographs to raise money for the Rosenbergs defense, and Lger, who created a poster showing their portraits with the words Libert, Paix, Solidarit. The Dutch CoBrA painter Karel Appel made a painting of anger and despair, while the leading Italian Realist painter Renato Gutusso created a poster of the couple that was shown all over Italy. In the United States Arnold Mesches was among those who produced poignant paintings. In 1988 a book was published and a national exhibition was mounted
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in memory of the Rosenbergs. The book included a memoir by Arthur Miller; poems by Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Mike Gold, among others; excerpts from E. L. Doctorows The Book of Daniel; and Full Disclosure, an essay I wrote. The book and exhibition contained art made at the time of the execution, as well as new works, including pieces by such California artists as Robert Arneson, Rupert Garca, Martha Rosler, and Kim Abeles. In her work Abeles reects not just on the Rosenbergs, but also on assumptions made about anyone who is different. Born in 1952 in Richmond Heights, Missouri, Abeles became interested in Buddhism when she was sixteen, as an American Field Service student in Japan. In 1978 she moved to California, studied at the University of California, Irvine, and then settled in Los Angeles, where she began exhibiting her innovative, multifaceted work, much of it in a Dada or conceptual vein. In the 1980s she produced room-size installations and made assemblages based on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the tarot, and Saint Bernadettes shrine in Lourdes, France. As time went on she also made objects dealing with the Los Angeles smog. Between 1984 and 1991 she produced the series Biographical Portraits, which includes the 1987 piece Other (In Memory of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg). In this work Abeles used commonplace objects in unexpected formulations, covering an old desk chair with passport photographs of unnamed people of color (The Other). The slats to which they are afxed suggest prison bars, while the chairs burnt arms and afxed copper coils hint at the electric chair. The old typewriter beneath the seat may refer to the reporting and recording of the Rosenbergs story and points to the power of language. The death penalty in California in particular was strongly condemned by Bruce Conner, who was born in McPherson, Kansas, in 1933 and arrived in San Francisco in 1957 via Wichita, Brooklyn, and Lincoln, Nebraska. Conners art is at times forcefully political. In his rst of many collage lms, A Movie (1958), he appropriated lm footage from newsreels, westerns,

against war and violence

girly lms, German propaganda, and other sources and then assembled these images (including scenes of the atomic blast at Bikini Atoll) in a way that causes viewers to apprehend the speed, violence, and lust for power embedded in our culture. Conner was outraged at the death sentence given to Caryl Chessman, who had been arrested in Los Angeles for rape and robbery, but who claimed that the confession he signed was the product of police brutality. (Despite worldwide protest, Chessman was eventually executed in 1960.) To protest this decision, Conner collected scavenged materials to create the assemblage THE CHILD (1959), which presents a shrunken, grotesquely gnarled, and mutilated manchild modeled in wax. The gure is wrapped in nylon hosiery and tied to a high chair; a horrendous cry seems to come from the hole that has taken the place of a mouth. Here Conner revealed the death penalty as a relic of barbarism that mocks societys claim to civilized status. To encounter THE CHILD in its original shape elicited a great frisson. The Museum

of Modern Art, realizing its import, acquired it soon after it was made, but found this mordant sculpture so disturbing that it has almost never been on view. Unfortunately, it is now in a state of great disrepair.59 Edward Kienholz also expressed outrage against Chessmans execution, in The Psycho-Vendetta Case (1960). The title is a pun on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, an earlier politically motivated miscarriage of justice. As Kienholz described the work: Its just a box that swings open . . . and when you open it, its Chessman shackled with just his ass exposed . . . and it says, If you believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, stick your tongue out.60 Peter Saul added his vitriolic comment on Chessmans execution with Man in Electric Chair (1966), an obnoxious-looking three-dimensional piece made of Styrofoam and coated with many jarring colors. Just what it means to kill another person comes through in the work of Richard Kamler (b. 1935). In the 1960s Kamler, having studied architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, went to New York to apprentice with Frederick Kiesler, the visionary architect, stage designer, and sculptor. When the young Kamler heard Kieslers remark that through art we can change the laws of the world, he knew that this was what he wanted to do with his life. He was also deeply affected by Joseph Beuyss social sculptures. After returning to San Francisco, Kamler completed an important installation, Out of the Holocaust (1976), in which he reconstructed part of a barrack at Auschwitz, lling the inmates bunks with slaughterhouse bones. In the 1980s Kamler worked as artist in residence at the San Quentin prison and became increasingly concerned about the United States killing of its own citizens. In 1996 he made an astonishing piece, Table of Voices. A long, narrow table of black lead and gold leaf is bisected by a vertical sheet of safety glass, signaling the separation of visitors from inmates, victims from perpetrators. The seats on each side of the table are equipped with telephones. The visitor who picks up a phone is able to listen to the real voices of incarcerated criminals or those of close relatives of against war and violence

BRUCE CONNER THE CHILD, 1959 Wax gure with nylon, cloth, metal, and twine in high chair, 3458 17 1612 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Philip Johnson. Bruce Conner.

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murdered victims in recordings that range from rage to pain to compassion. First installed at Alcatraz in 199596 for visitors to view at the conclusion of their tour of the former prisons facilities, the work has since traveled to other venues. For Kamler, the lead and gold of the table are particularly important, for their alchemical properties suggest the possibility of transforming the cruelty of prisoners punishment. Believing that art, rather than religion, politics, or education, has the potential to create change on an elemental level, Kamler has continued to work with the theme of the cruelty of the death penalty. In 1998 2000 he created The Waiting Room, simulating a cell on death row in San Quentin. It consists of ordinary plastic chairs and signs with prison rules and warnings on the wall. A clock ticks away the passing minutes, and there is also the sound of a heartbeat, which rst speeds up, then comes to a stunning stop. The installation was shown in Huntsville, Texas, the capital punishment center of the United States, where at the time more than two hundred prisoners had been killed by lethal injection, over half of them during George W. Bushs rst ve years as governor. The death penalty stands at an extreme, but there are other forms of punishment that are equally abhorrent. Hung Liu has looked at the cruelty of torture with great empathy. Born in China in 1948 and brought up during the Cultural Revolution, she went through reeducation before arriving in California in 1984. Her work deals with memories and with the problems of being an immigrant, a woman, and an artist in a foreign land. At times she uses old photographs, adopting postmodern strategies of appropriation, but also acknowledging the Chinese tradition of the scholar-painter, who is able to recapture the spirit and form of older art. Trained at the Central Academy of Art in Beijing, where Social Realism held sway, she has never stopped working in a realist vein, but she uses this approach to critique historical and political issues. When she came to the United States, Liu studied at the University of California, San Diego, with Allan Kaprow, who
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would ask his students what it means to be an artist rather than reiterating facts about techniques or composition. She unlearned much of her original training and entered into the cultural discourse with pieces dealing with her family, migration, and immigration. In one series of paintings, based on old Chinese books, she looked at the position of prostitutes; in another she denounced the cruelty of breaking and infantilizing womens feet in order to make them powerless sex objects. Much of her work examines oppression, or even torture, as in her painting Yoke (1997). In an interview conducted the year this poignant painting was done, Liu explained: Yoke depicts a Tibetan criminal wearing a wooden headboard around his neck, a pretty heavy board and a strong punishment. He will be in this situation for ve years. The board was so big that his hands couldnt reach his mouth, so he couldnt feed himself, and he had to depend upon the mercy of monks. I think the reason I probably decided to paint it was because I felt the board was very much like a canvas.61 Two contemporary Los Angeles artists offer a more cynical perspective on the death penalty and incarceration. Erika Rothenberg, born in New York, educated at the University of Chicago, and now living and working in Los Angeles, is an artist of amazing versatility. A feminist, a conceptual artist, and a social satirist, she uses her talent and mordant wit to critique the political and economic establishment as well as traditional attitudes toward religion, race, and sex. Having worked as an art director for the advertising rm McCann-Erickson, Rothenberg is familiar with media tricks and strategies for inuencing the public mind and uses them to her advantage, combining words and images to attack patriotic clichs. At the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York she created Have You Attacked America Today? (1989)a title that she might not get away with in the postSeptember 11, world. This window display featured the Stars and Stripes, together with a ag-burning kit and a freedom of expression drug. (Not too surprisingly, the window was vandalized during the

against war and violence

RICHARD KAMLER TABLE OF VOICES, 1996 Mixed media with sound, 6 54 10 ft. Courtesy of the artist.

HUNG LIU YOKE, 1997 Oil on canvas, 80 80 in. Collection of Esther Weissman. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Ben Blackwell.

ERIKA ROTHENBERG GOD / DEATH PENALTY / AMUSEMENT, 1988 Acrylic on canvas, 67 34 28 14 in. Courtesy of the artist.

course of the installation, in what may be regarded as censorship from below.) In her piece God/Death Penalty/Amusement (1988) the upper register indicates the pious American praying to God, and the lower register, with its roller coaster, accounts for public amusement. In the center hangs a noose, signifying Americans willingness to kill black people. With mordant wit, Rothenberg comments on the banality of tragedy. A similar sardonic attitude prevails in a series of paintings of correctional facilities that Sandow Birk visited and painted in 2000. Birk, born in Detroit in 1962 and educated in Los Angeles, England, and Paris,
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came to public attention with the series Gates of Hell: Los Angeles Landscapes of 1992, the ongoing suite Great Battle of San Francisco (1996), and the series The War of the Californians (19952000). These ironic narrative paintings trace the history of the rivalry between Los Angeles and San Francisco, appropriating famous history paintings in Western art (by Albrecht Altdorfer, Diego Velzquez, Jacques-Louis David, Francisco de Goya, Thodore Gricault, Eugne Delacroix) as well as war photographs, comic books, and political propaganda posterseach work offering a great visual travesty of the glories of warfare and bloody victory. In 2000 Birk turned his attention to the prison system, making an extensive cycle of what he calls improvisations. The sheer number of incarcerated persons in the United States is shocking: more than two million in 2003, most of them imprisoned for nonviolent crimes. More than one of every two hundred residents of California is in prison or jail, with twelve percent of African Americans between the ages of twenty and thirty-four behind bars. The cost of their incarceration is estimated at over twenty thousand dollars per prisoner per year. Birk set out to paint the thirty-three penitentiaries in the California system, driving close to each facility, taking photographs, and then making paintings that evoke the idyllic Romantic landscapes of artists such as Frederic Church, Thomas Moran, and Alfred Bierstadt. In his unreal landscapes Birk manages to conceal his prisons in bucolic splendor, creating an ironic disjunction of nostalgia and grim reality. In San Quentin State Prison (2000) Californias oldest and most infamous penitentiary, where the state executes its death-row prisoners, is barely visible behind craggy rocks, a cave, a small stretch of sandy beach, and a vast sky, where rays of the sun (or blinding searchlights?) pierce through dark storm clouds. The picture is based on Bierstadts Passing Storm over the Sierra (1870), but the epic grandeur sets the stage not for an Arcadian idyll but for a hidden prison. The other paintings in this series offer a similar

against war and violence

SANDOW BIRK SAN QUENTIN STATE PRISON, SAN QUENTIN, CA, 2000 Oil and acrylic on canvas, 66 90 in. San Jose Museum of Art. Gift of The Lipman Family Foundation.

contrast. In California State Prison in Centinela (2000) the penitentiary is barely visible behind an enormous cactus in a large and tranquil desertexcept for its looming high-tension towers and glaring searchlight. The California Institute for Men in Chino (2000) presents a pastoral landscape with large trees set against the San Gabriel Mountains. Only a few discarded shopping carts thrown into the river in the foreground and the electric power lines with a barely visible prison in the background make the viewer aware of the twenty-rst-century reality. Much like a railroad or smokestack in an Impressionist painting, the intervening hand of man is the subtext of the painting. In his work Sandow Birk takes issue with the

myth of California as Eden, as the miraculous destination of the westward course of empire. As Joan Didion has noted, In 1995 . . . California spent more on its prison system than on its two university systems, the ten campuses of the University of California and the twenty-four campuses of the California State University.62 Birk is quite aware of the horrors of incarceration as well as the ourishing prison industry, where all California automobile license plates are manufactured and where the exploitation of convict labor allows favorable competition with foreign imports. It must be added that none of these penitentiaries should be confused with the country club prisons reserved for convicted CEOs and politicians.

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COUNTERCULTURAL TRENDS

CHAPTER 2

in the years following world war ii the United States, and especially California, experienced an almost unprecedented economic boom and national plenitude. Time and Life announced the onset of the American Century. The United States had become a world leader, not only in economic and political affairs, but also with its music (jazz, bebop), its art (Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art), and, of course, its Hollywood movies. Consumerism ourished, and suburbs sprouted across the land. California promised ranch houses of comfort and joyous living for all, in tidy tracts connected by freeways for mobility. To many, it seemed an era of calm and prosperity. But it was far from paradise. In Los Angeles the freeways began to stretch beyond the horizon as developers built endless subdivisions and malls, destroying both the natural environment and the fabric of community life. The individual little homes contributed to the atomization of society, and the proliferation of TV sets added to the cultural desert

of suburbia. Disney created a gargantuan amusement park for the multitudes, selling a fabulous faux fantasy that many could ill afford. The possibility of nuclear destruction cast a shadow on the 1950s. All over the country people built fallout shelters and schoolchildren practiced duck and cover during air-raid drills. The Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional, and in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give her bus seat to a white man. Fissures also appeared in the condence of the younger generation. The times were a-changing, as Bob Dylan, the balladeer of the Age of Aquarius, would later sing. Fast-moving automobiles helped to liberate the young from parental authority and stuffy morals. Teenagers rocked and rolled to Elvis Presleys sexual beat. A few Hollywood lms popularized alternative models: The Wild One (1953), with Marlon Brando disrupting a typical American small town, and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), in which James Dean epitomizes youth alienated from smug
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consumer parents and rebelling for the sake of rebellingan existential act ending in absurdity. The real rebels in the 1950s were the Beats, and they perhaps signaled the countercultural revolution that would shake California, as well as the rest of the country, in the 1960s. This turbulent decade underwent what Friedrich Nietzsche called a transvaluation of values. It was an era in which many people challenged and rejected received canons and attitudes.

A NONCONFORMIST LIFESTYLE

The Beats had their start in New York in 1944, when Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs met at Columbia University. Ginsberg and Kerouac had studied in the English Department, which counted Jacques Barzun, Mark Van Doren, and Lionel Trilling among its distinguished faculty. The young men went on the road (as Kerouac would describe in his classic tale), moving west, to San Franciscos North Beach, which became the center of this bohemian culture. Setting out to break all the taboos of conventional morality and cultural consensus, the Beats and their renegade friends openly declared their disdain for established norms and values. For them, as for the Abstract Expressionist painters, art meant action. Like the Surrealists, the Beats believed that drugs inducing hallucinogenic states and visions expanded the artists consciousness. They were in search of mystical experience. They preached love and were open to sexual adventure, regardless of their partners gender. In their journeys toward the inner world, they predicted New Age dreams of self-realization. They embraced Eastern thought, spoke in semi-Buddhist language, and searched for Zen-enlightened consciousness. They believed in attaining harmony with the earth and were aware of its vulnerability, foreseeing some of the environmental concerns of the next generation. In addition, they shared with their existentialist contemporaries a feeling of alienation and an insistence on the importance of acting in the face of the absurd. Although not primarily political, the
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Beats can be seen as revolutionaries in kinship with the Utopian Socialists of the nineteenth century. The Beat writers and poets came to life in the act of writing and produced some of the most original and compelling American literature of the second half of the twentieth century. Ginsbergs Howl (published in 1956) and Kerouacs On the Road (1957) entered the canon of Beat literature almost immediately; in fact, they were co-opted by a sensation-hungry press. Much as they derided most traditional literature, the Beats admired earlier avant-garde poets, such as Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Kenneth Rexroth. Rexroth, minence grise of the Old Left, provided a link between old radical action and the new Beat culture: in 1933 he had helped found the left-wing Artists and Writers Union, and in 1955 he presided over the reading of Howl at the 6 Gallery, an artists cooperative started by San Francisco Art Institute students, which became a focal point for countercultural art and poetry. Although political action was not their immediate purpose, the Beats, realizing the alienation of their generation, advocated a kind of moral, metaphysical, as well as political rebellion that is implicit in Ginsbergs exhilarating poem Howl:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry x, angel head hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery at night.1

Wounded and angry as it was, the Beat generation refused to be destroyed. It responded in its own manner, living on the edge in anarchic nonconformity. And it made its voice heard. The Beats restored the public reading of poetry, making this an action that had consequences in the world.

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A number of young, avant-garde visual artists formed close ties with the Beat poets in San Francisco. The artist who was probably the most closely associated with Beat culture was Jess (born Burgess Collins, 19232004; see also p. 211). He was the partner of Robert Duncan, and together they opened the King Ubu Gallery in 1952, one of the rst spaces where dissenting artists exhibited. There Jess showed his paste-ups, collages that fused the classical with the surreal, the marvelous with the pedestrian in a celebration of absurd dissociations. Jess and Duncans gallery was one of a succession of underground galleries in San Francisco, mostly artist-run, which were of very short duration as they did almost no business, but which served as the gathering places of the counterculture tribe. In addition to the King Ubu Gallery (195253), there were the Metart Gallery (194950), the 6 Gallery (195458), the Spatsa Gallery (195861), and the Batman Gallery (196065), which was inaugurated with a Bruce Conner exhibition. In addition to Jess, the seminal visual artists in the 1950s California counterculture included Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo, and Bruce Conner in San Francisco and Wallace Berman and George Herms in Los Angeles. None of them liked being called Beats and they especially abhorred the label Beatniks, a sobriquet of disparagement coined by San Franciscos famed columnist Herb Caen. Conner stated: I dont know any artist that would call himself a beat artist. . . . If someone did, youd consider him a fake, a fraud running a scam.2 Instead, Conner established the Rat Bastard Protective Society, whose acronym, RBP, referred tongue-in-cheek to the PRB, the pious Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Victorian England. It was for people who were making things with the detritus of society, who themselves were ostracized or alienated from full involvement with the society.3 Conner himself fashioned sculptural assemblages that combine mystery with horror. As we saw with THE CHILD (1959; see p. 81), his response to Caryl Chessmans death sentence, he at times used materials with erotic associations, such as nylon, to high-

light a disturbing and often brutal metamorphosis, conveying the hypocrisy of American culture. Herms (b. 1935) also fabricated assemblages from discarded objects, endowing them with aesthetic beauty and accentuating surreal contradictions to create what he liked to call furniture of the soul. Hermss work, however, is less overtly political than that of some of his colleagues. Hedrick, for one, was most outspoken about his political beliefs (see pp. 4041). He also became a leader of the San Francisco Art Institutes famous jazz band and introduced Jerry Garcia to acoustic blues and to Kerouacs On the Road. Hedrick, known as an idea artist long before the label conceptual art entered the art world, experimented with light machines and with the innovative use of language, at times resorting to puns. He turned to almost anything to go against authority, shunning public exhibitions and supporting himself with a home repair shop. Even when he and DeFeo, his wife at the time, were selected for the prestigious Sixteen Americans exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1959,4 they did not bother to attend the opening or even to see the show. Distancing himself from the mainstream of art, Hedrick declared that artists such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell were too rmly rooted in formal traditions. Instead, he asserted, Youve got to have a deep sense of the human and you have to have a political stance. Painting is not above politics. Anything that has to do with the soul also has to do with the stomach.5 Hedrick was later accused of stealing paintings, including a canvas by Clyfford Still, from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was teaching, and painting his own iconoclastic pictures over them. In Los Angeles Walter Hopps opened the citys rst alternative space, the Syndell Studio, in 1955, before organizing the ambitious Action exhibition in the Merry-Go-Round Building at the Santa Monica Pier a year later and then opening the trenchant Ferus Gallery, which featured avant-garde artists from both Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 1957 Hopps and his countercultural trends
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partner in the Ferus Gallery, the artist Edward Kienholz (see chapter 1), were able to persuade the idiosyncratic Wallace Berman (19261976) to show in their space. Carefully avoiding the mainstream, Berman was an artists artist who had a major impact on the development of painting, assemblage, and lm. Dennis Hopper, who became his friend, claimed that Berman would eventually be seen as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.6 The art critic John Coplans wrote that the California Assemblage movement stems from one artist, Wallace Berman,7 and, indeed, both Bruce Conner and George Herms were indebted to Berman, as were the lmmakers Stan Brakhage and Jordan Belson. In his Ferus Gallery exhibition Berman presented a sculpture that was an homage to Hermann Hesse. It also included the large Cross, an assemblage with

CHARLES BRITTIN CROSS, BY WALLACE BERMAN, AT THE FERUS GALLERY, LOS ANGELES, 1967 Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the photographer.

genuine spiritual overtones tempered by existential wit. From one of the arms, a sign with Hebrew letters was suspended; on the other arm was a box carrying the maxim Art is Love is God, which soon became a slogan for the counterculture. Bermans show, however, was raided by the Los Angeles police departments vice squad, which brought charges of obscenity against him after nding an issue of his magazine Semina there (see p. 10). In this little magazine, which he put out between 1955 and 1964, Berman published new translations of poems by Hermann Hesse, Jean Cocteau, Charles Baudelaire, and Paul Valry, as well as verse by his friends Michael McClure and David Meltzer and texts suggesting that taking psychoactive drugs led to visionary insights. Although the publication, directed toward a small, esoteric community, never exceeded three hundred copies per issue and was distributed without charge, it had its effect in subverting the puritan sexual mores, antidrug bias, consumerism, and materialist pragmatics of societys generally accepted status quo. After his brush with the LA police, Berman moved to Larkspur, near San Francisco, in 1960, but two years later he returned to Los Angeles, to a small, ramshackle house in Topanga Canyon. In the mid-1960s he began his series of Verifax collages, artifacts made with primitive photocopiers. In these collages a right hand (the hand of the earth? the hand of God?) holds a small transistor radio in which the speaker has been replaced by recycled photographs. Sometimes he embellished these collages, as well as mysterious boxes and stones, with Hebrew letters, revealing his fascination with the mysticism of the Kabbalah and its inquiry into the occult relationship of numbers and letters, leading toward the comprehension of the divine. Berman was killed in an automobile accident on his ftieth birthday, the day he had always predicted he would die. The impact of the alternative discourse presented by his work has been highlighted by Christopher Knight, art critic of the Los Angeles Times: In the new post-industrial bohemia, [Bermans] instant artifacts are Dead Sea Scrolls for the burgeoning

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countercultural trends

JOAN BROWN FUR RAT, 1962 Wood, chicken wire, plaster, string, nails, and raccoon fur, 20 12 54 14 in. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, Gift of the artist. Courtesy of George Adams Gallery, New York, and Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco. Photo: Benjamin Blackwell.

counterculture tribe.8 This experimental and deeply personal work, through its original form and mystical content, confronted established authority. Berman is also remembered for his photographs of Jay DeFeo (19291989) and her painting The Rose (195866), one of the great icons of the Beat era. With this work, which was more than seven years in the making and resembles a great sunburst or a mythic mandala, DeFeo deed artistic conventions of the time, piling on literally a ton of pigment until the painting became almost sculpture. Also offering a challenge to the status quo was Joan Brown (1938 1990; see also pp. 2034), a precocious artist who was showing her paintings at the 6 Gallery and Spatsa by the time she was twenty. In 1962, in reference to the Rat Bastard Protective Society, as well as a strangely erotic dream, she produced Fur Rat, which looks like a scarily oversized rodent and is hardly pleasant to touch, as its raccoon fur is studded with nails. Certainly, this funky piece seems a refutation of the establishment, as does her withdrawal from the gallery scene after her early success as a painter and teacher.

Browns Fur Rat was exhibited some ve years after it was made in the Funk exhibition at the University Art Museum in Berkeley. This show took cognizance of a Bay Area phenomenon that was saliently anti-art. Knowing that their art was hardly seen and had little chance of being sold, as an art market scarcely existed in San Francisco at the time, the participants made objects of worthless materials, often assembled from junk. Contrasting Funk with Minimal or Pop Art, which were mainstream at the time, I wrote: Funk art is hot rather than cool; it is committed rather than disengaged; it is bizarre rather than formal; it is sensuous; and frequently it is quite ugly and ungainly . . . and irreverent in attitude.9

THE SHADOW OF CENSORSHIP

The Beat artists offered an alternative to mainstream popular culture, but in doing so they came under the censorious scrutiny of self-proclaimed upholders of American values. Freedom to create according to ones vision and to share this vision without intercountercultural trends
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HANS BURKHARDT REAGANBLOOD MONEY, 1945 Oil on canvas, 29 22 in. Hans G. and Thordis W. Burkhardt Foundation. Courtesy of Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles.

ference is essential to artists integrity. Government and commercial censorship, as well as the pernicious and corrupting menace of self-censorship, destroys the probity of art. Yet since colonial times censorship of art has consistently been part of American culture. At times it has been malignant and overt, and at other times inconspicuous but nonetheless insidious and potent. It is usually overseen or transacted by individuals or institutions who purport to act in the name of the people to protect those same people from subversive political ideas or prurient indecencies that might violate puritan morals. countercultural trends

In America, censorship of visual art has never extended as far as it did under Adolf Hitler, who labeled modern art degenerate and threatened to incarcerate or castrate its practitioners, or Josef Stalin, who attacked modern art as formalist, decadent, and capitalist, banishing it in the Soviet Union (even though innovative art had been at the forefront of the Soviet revolution). But in the United States in 1949, early in the McCarthy era, Republican Congressman George A. Dondero of Michigan, addressing Congress, fulminated against modern art as foreign and Communist, denouncing it as an instrument and weapon of destruction. . . . Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder. . . . Futurism aims to destroy by the machine myth. . . . Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule. . . . Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane. . . . Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorm. . . . Surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason. . . . The artists of the isms change their designations as often and as readily as the Communist front organizations.10 In California all contemporary artboth realist and abstractwas subject to the censors scrutiny. The government-sponsored murals at Coit Tower and the Rincon Annex post ofce in San Francisco were changed in response to allegations that they were left-wing propaganda. The antiwar painting One Way Road (1945) by Hans Burkhardt (see chapter 1) also fell under the censors hammer. Although this painting protesting the cruelty of war received a 1945 Purchase Award from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a year later it was taken off the museums walls because its red road and sky could be taken as Communist signals. Burkhardt actually critiqued the dangers of overzealous anti-Communism in a series focused on the actions of Ronald Reagan, at that time head of the Screen Actors Guild, who turned against his union, becoming a lackey of management, and attempted to get rid of any suspected Communists working for Hollywood. ReaganBlood Money (1945) shows an actor collapsing between two blank buildings, with blood owing from his heart. As Burkhardt

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later recalled, Reagan claimed that the unions were inltrated by reds. Even if you were a Democrat they condemned you as a Communist back then.11 Reagans insidious actions foreshadowed the witch hunt begun in 1947 by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which eventually blacklisted a group of screenwriters and directors, known as the Hollywood Ten, who insisted on the Bill of Rights and refused to testify before Congress about their beliefs. In postwar Los Angeles the ultra-conservative group Sanity in Art concurred with Congressman Donderos tenet that abstract art is subversive, with the result that the artist Knud Merrid was accused of hiding maps and secret information about fortications in his Abstract Expressionist drip paintings. As a further result of Sanity in Arts activities, the Expressionist painter Rex Brandt was charged in 1951 by the Los Angeles City Council with concealing a hammer and sickle in one of his landscapes. At roughly the same time, the city council alleged that the numbers and emblems another artist had placed on the sail of a yacht were secret Soviet code ciphers. When the sculptor Bernard Rosenthal completed his 1954 bronze American Family for the Los Angeles Police Administrative Building (the Parker Center), the city council threatened to have it melted down because the sculptors semiabstract gures, whose generalized faces did not show clearly dened eyes, ears, and noses, failed to properly glorify the police who had died in the line of duty. Throughout the 1950s Los Angeles culture commissars also went on the warpath against work they considered to be pornographic. When the citys vice squad raided Wallace Bermans Ferus Gallery exhibition, they took no works by Berman but conscated the issue of Semina they found because it contained a drawing they deemed offensive. Though the drawing was by another artist, they arrested Berman for possessing it. The drawing was judged pornographic by the court and Berman was found guilty of obscenity. Although Berman only paid a ne and was not imprisoned, after the trial he

withdrew from the art world and from public involvement in general. The artist Connor Everts, a founder of the Exodus Gallery in San Pedro (the Port of Los Angeles), challenged the censorship of the Los Angeles city government by showing the work of Berman as early as 1956, but Everts himself would later be subjected to police brutality and tried for obscenity. Born in Bellingham, Washington, in 1928 and raised in San Pedro, Everts served in the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II, studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, and then worked as a longshoreman, which had been his fathers occupation. In 1952 he traveled to Mexico, where he worked on a mural with David Alfaro Siqueiros, and from 1959 to 1961 he resided in Chile, where he became friends with Salvador Allende, then the presidential candidate of

CONNOR EVERTS CRY FROM THE WOMB, FROM STUDIES IN DESPERATION, 1964 Charcoal on paper, 40 26 in. San Jose Museum of Art. Gift of Dr. Peter Selz and Carole Selz.

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Chiles Socialist Party. His own battle with the censors began in 1964, when he exhibited a series of lithographs, Studies in Desperation, at the Zora Gallery in Los Angeles. Although the images of Studies in Desperation, such as Cry from the Womb (1964), were widely acknowledged as eloquent and highly original works of art, Everts was arrested for violating the states anti-obscenity laws. The series, he recalled, was about [an] inability to differentiate between three acts: the assassination of Kennedy, Rubys murder of Oswald and the sovereign state of Texass wish to execute Ruby. The image used was a face peering out of the vaginal orice from time to time to see if the world was a safe place to be born into. I was arrested and suffered between two trials before being exonerated.12 In a later interview Everts stated that the series concerned itself with the notion of birth, that if one had an a priori concept of how difcult life is, that one would perhaps . . . choose not to be born. . . . The idea [is] that assassination is the ultimate censorshipand it seems kind of tting that I should become involved in censorship then . . . where the persons existence is so dangerous, is so frightening, that you must take that persons life.13 During Evertss trials the California art world came to his defense. Henry Seldis, the art critic of the Los Angeles Times, Henry Hopkins, then curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, June Wayne, founder and director of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, and the eminent collector Richard Sherwood all supported his case. The prosecution brought in witnesses from the California Portrait Painters Society and the California Landscape Painters Society, as well as from Catholic and Protestant church groups. Even though Everts was exonerated, he was red from his teaching position at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).14 Although he continued to make paintings and collages, his work became less political and more introspective. Not long after the Everts case, the Los Angeles censors came down on Edward Kienholz and his tableau Back Seat Dodge 38 (1964), among other works. A self94

taught artist, Kienholz (19271994) was born in a small farming town in the state of Washington and spent his young adult years roaming the country. He sold cars, led a dance band, and worked as a carpenter and as a handyman. In 1952 he moved to Los Angeles and started arranging art exhibitions of his own work and that of friends in alternative spaces, eventually opening the vanguard Ferus Gallery with Walter Hopps in 1957. After making wall reliefs, he began to produce highly original, politically charged assemblages such as the one relating to Caryl Chessmans execution (see p. 81). In 1961 Kienholz received national attention with his construction of Roxys, a human-scale room that re-creates a Las Vegas brothel during World War II. A portrait of General Douglas MacArthur giving a salute hangs on the wall above grotesque and mangled mannequins, both dressed and bare, representing the brothels madam and the prostitutes. Kienholz proceeded to make tableaux attacking and dramatizing racism, prostitution, youthful fornication, the art world, religion, patriotism, the ban on abortion, the prison system, the despondency of old age and dying, and Nazism. In the spring of 1966 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounted a major solo exhibition of Kienholzs work, including Back Seat Dodge 38, which consists of a truncated old Dodge surrounded by empty bottles thrown out upon swatches of Astroturf. The door is open, revealing two lovers, constructed of chicken wire and cast body parts, making love on the back seat. Their single, shared, caged head embodies the loss of individuality in mutual orgasms. Although such activity was hardly unusual then (or now) among American youth, its public display enraged Warren Dorn, a member of the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors. Dorn insisted on the immediate closure of the show, which also included Roxys and The Illegal Operation (1962, p. 207), displaying the horrible conditions under which abortions were taking place. During the ensuing controversy, Dorn was widely ridiculed in the press for his memorable remark at a press conference: My wife knows about art.

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RON BOISE BOUND OF THE TIGER (KAMA SUTRA), 1969 Steel, 14 11 6 in. Collection of Lars Speyer. Photo: Lars Speyer.

EDWARD KIENHOLZ BACK SEAT DODGE 38, 1964 Mixed media, 66 240 144 in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art Museum Council Fund. Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, California. Photo 2005 Museum Associates/LACMA.

I know pornography. When Kenneth Donahue, the museums director, refused to close the exhibition, the Board of Supervisors threatened to withdraw nancial support for the museum.15 The controversy concluded with a mind-boggling compromise: the car door was to be shown closed and opened only by a guard to persons over eighteen years of age.16 Although San Francisco was less conservative than its Southern California counterpart, it, too, experienced censorship of art the police considered to be pornographic. Ron Boise (19311966), a sculptor from Colorado then living in Death Valley, who mostly used automobile hoods and fenders, created a series of erotic works based on the Kama Sutra (p. 95). In 1964 some of the works were shown at San Franciscos Vorpal Gallery, where they aroused the interest of the police, who arrested gallery owner Muldoon Elder and a salesman and conscated the sculptures. Only the expert testimony of art historians Walter Horn and Catherine Caldwell and philosopher Alan Watts persuaded the court to exonerate the defendants. Wattss testimony concluded, We rarely have an opportunity to see this kind of art form except as grafti in public conveniences. Very rarely, unless we are familiar with Hindu sculpture or Tibetan painting, can we see anything like this done with superb mastery.17 Michael McClure, one of the youngest of the Beat poets, emphasized the biological and sensual in much of his work. Breaking rules and taboos, he dealt with sex very frankly in his play The Beard (1965), portraying an encounter between the sex goddess Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid, who signies the forces of raw nature. At the end of the play the Kid performs oral sex on Harlow. As Richard Cndida Smith has observed, The action [in The Beard] serves primarily to expose sexual passions within the audiences and allows them to experience a form of completion.18 The play premiered at the Actors Workshop in San Francisco in 1965 to a favorable review and was produced before a much larger crowd in 1966 at the Fillmore Auditorium, accompanied by a light show and live rock music. But when a repeat performance was
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held at The Committee, a club that specialized in political comedy, the San Francisco police interrupted the play and arrested the actors, who were charged with lewd and dissolute conduct in a public space. The case went through many prosecutions and appeals, and charges were eventually dismissed by the California Supreme Court in 1967. Nevertheless, when the play was performed in 1968 in Los Angeles, with a poster by Wallace Berman advertising it, McClure was physically assaulted and the play was closed by the police, who arrested both the actors and the playwright. Again, they had to be released, but the censorious action had a pernicious effect, contributing to a climate of self-censorship of art with sexual or political assertions. Unfortunately, censorship did not disappear in the wake of the free speech movement or the rebellion of the later 1960s (described later in this chapter). Even as celebrated an artist as Robert Arneson (19301992), a leader in the vital transformation of ceramics from craft to sculpture, was not immune to its shadow. Arneson, who had studied ceramics at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of Arts) and Mills College in Oakland and began his distinguished teaching career in 1962, became the exemplary Funk artist in the early 1960s, creating outrageous clay toilets and typewriters, the latter with their keys converted into highly polished red ngernails, signifying woman as a writing machine. He also became known for his self-deprecating self-portraits and irreverent likenesses of friends (such as Peter Voulkos) and art world paradigms (such as Picasso and Pollock). In 1981 he was invited by San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein to submit a proposal for a commemorative bust of former mayor George Moscone, who had been assassinated by Dan White after the latter lost his bid for reelection as a city supervisor, an outcome he blamed on Moscone and the openly gay supervisor Harvey Milk (whom White also killed). White was tried for murder, but the jury convicted him only of manslaughter by reason of temporary insanity, supposedly caused by his consump-

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tion of the sugary snack food Hostess Twinkies. (A riot broke out in San Francisco after the verdict was announced.) Arneson, who was known for his works of political satire, created a cartoonish bust of Moscone, typical of his zany portraits, atop a large pedestal that memorialized the unique facts of Moscones killing with the etched imprint of a gun, a phallic Twinkie, and other inscriptions related to the mayors life and career. The pedestals crude, grafti-like style displeased San Franciscos establishment, including Feinstein, who characterized the work as inappropriate for a city named after Saint Francis. Arneson was ordered to replace at least the pedestal, if not the entire work. He refused to do so, returned the citys money, and withdrew his censored work. Arneson actually attributed the strong political nature of his later sculpture (see p. 63) to his experience with censorship. It hasnt just been city governments that have interfered with free expression. Through its policies and budgetary decisions, the National Endowment for the Arts has frequently fostered de facto censorship of the arts in California and elsewhere in the nation. Even during its most expansive days, the federal government was stingy in its support for the creative arts, spending sixty-four cents per capita per year for the arts, compared to sixty-four dollars in Canada and France. In 1984, for example, the NEA eliminated grants to art critics from its budget, on the grounds that American critics were practicing Marxist agitprop. In 1989 Jesse Helms, North Carolinas ultraconservative Republican senator, fulminated against the NEA for its support of exhibitions of Robert Mapplethorpes photographs of gay men and Andres Serranos photograph Piss Christ (1987). Some years later, in 1994, House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Majority Leader Dick Armey tried to eliminate the NEA entirely, describing it as an affront to the American taxpayer. Under the able leadership of actress Jane Alexander, the NEA survived that legislative assault, albeit crippled by punitive budget cuts. Senator Helms insisted, however, on the elimination of all

ROBERT ARNESON PORTRAIT OF GEORGE [MOSCONE], 1981 Glazed ceramic, 94 29 29 in. Collection of Joyce Cooper. Estate of Robert Arneson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo: Lee Fatherree. Courtesy of George Adams Gallery, New York, and Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco.

projects involving sexual and excretory activities or any projects that might be deemed offensive to adherents of a particular religion. Helmss antipathy to the free exchange of ideas, although profoundly distressing to most artists and critics, was supported by the neoconservative art critic Hilton Kramer. A Mapplethorpe exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was canceled in an act of self-censorship by the museum. The unintentional result of this action and the ensuing publicity was that just as in the past, when banned in Boston movies attracted huge attendance records elsewhere, large numbers of people learned of Mapplethorpe and Serrano and attended their exhibitions, greatly increasing the commercial value of their work. As an appropriate nale to this series of events, the countercultural trends
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JOS SANCES PISS HELMS, 1989 Screenprint, 48 36 in. Courtesy of the artist.

artist Jos Sances contributed a large six-color serigraph called Piss Helms (1989) to an exhibition entitled Artists Respond to Censorship. The show, rst mounted at the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery in 1989, was, signicantly, sent on to Charlotte, North Carolina, the senators home territory. Piss Helms shows the gure of a naked man with outstretched arms and legs, taken from a Mapplethorpe photograph. The man is urinating not on Christ, but on the disembodied head of Senator Helms. Sancess caustic political art grows out of his life experiences. Born in 1952 to a working-class Sicilian family in Boston, he served in the navy during the Vietnam War but went AWOL to protest the war and was sent to
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jail. Later he taught art in the San Francisco County Jail system. These experiences radicalized Sances, who had begun as an Abstract Expressionist painter, but now decided he needed to make art that would communicate more directly and turned to printmaking. He moved to San Franciscos Mission District in 1976 and joined the workshop Mission Graca. In addition to attacking censorship, Sancess works, with their strong sense of satire and often outrage, have provoked censorship. In 2002 Sances took on Americas most commercially successful artist, Thomas Kinkade, whose work is traded on Wall Street. For Roll On (2004) Sances created a computer-generated simulacrum of one of Kinkades syrupy landscapes, adding ghter planes and tanks. Little door/windows in the painting open onto boxes containing politically charged messages, such as a picture of a naked woman in front of a Confederate ag, with a cross covering her crotch. When Sancess work was exhibited in the city-sponsored Fetterly Gallery in Vallejo, California, this piece, with its hidden images, greatly distressed Vallejos mayor as well as a local Baptist minister, Mike Trimble, who stated: I nd it very offensive to Christians and offensive to Americans as a whole. The exhibit is against the government now and patriotism.19 The gallery, however, didnt cave in to calls for removing the work. Sances was delighted with the e-mails he received: Nine out of ten of them were in favor, but the ones that werent accused me of being unpatriotic and said I should go and live in Afghanistan.20 With its war on terrorism, the administration of President George W. Bush has brought about an infringement of civil liberties that echoes the McCarthy era of the 1950s. All the increased government surveillance and harassment under the pretext of protecting national security after September 11, 2001, prompted Arnold Mesches to produce a series of collages, The FBI Files (2002). Mesches, who has consistently produced paintings of political signicance since 1945, was born in 1923 in the Bronx to an immigrant family and came to Los Angeles in 1945 on a

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scholarship to the Art Center School. There he studied with Lorser Feitelson, who instilled in the young artist a respect for the masters. Over the years Meschess work has been informed by painters ranging from Giotto to Robert Rauschenberg; his greatest admiration is for artists of social conscience, such as Pieter Brueghel, Francisco de Goya, Honor Daumier, Kthe Kollwitz, Ben Shahn, and Jos Clemente Orozco. Political activism has been an essential part of Meschess life. In 1946, when he was working as a set designer in Hollywood, he joined the almost yearlong Hollywood strike, marching on the picket line. He recalls, The Hollywood strike and its aftermath, the blacklist, taught me who really controlled American culture. I came out of that strike politically aware, determined, more than ever, to make socially relevant art.21 In the 1950s he painted pictures of survivors of the Holocaust and World War II, as well as works concerning the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. In 1966 he actively participated in the Los Angeles Peace Tower project. In 1984 he returned to New York and began creating paintings that touch on the grotesque and disasters such as war. While quoting famous works by Jacques-Louis David, Thodore Gricault, Eugne Delacroix, and Edouard Manet, he portrayed contemporary gures, painted in vivid colors, against monochrome backgrounds. The unexpected juxtapositions in these works make for a very personal pictorial surrealism. The slightly later Anomie series (198994) describes, in Meschess words, a condition of society marked by the absence of moral standards.22 Here, reecting on historic and current events, he mixes reality and fantasy into disparate kaleidoscopic visions where a great cyclops reigns supreme. In his paintings Mesches achieves a dialectic synthesis of seeming opposites, combining his narrative subject matter with gestural brushstrokes that create a vital surface, similar to that of action painting. In this respect his work relates to Willem de Koonings paintings of women and Philip Gustons late, stunning gurative canvases.

As its title suggests, the FBI Files series documents the les the FBI kept on Mesches beginning in the 1940s. Mesches was upset by the 2001 Patriot Act, under which the government has authorized ofcial monitoring of attorney-client conversations, wideranging secret searches and wiretaps, the collection of Internet and e-mail addressing data, spying on religious services and the meetings of political groups, and the collection of library and other business records.23 Moreover, through a program called Total Information Awareness (now ended), criticism of the government could be decreed a felony and suspicious individuals could be closely tracked by sophisticated Internet scanning and digital records.24 Mesches responded by using some of the 760 le pages the FBI had accumulated on him to make relevant political comments. We learn that Mesches was suspected of being a Communist because he showed Czech lms to his class and because he was dressed in blue denim like a Communist. Against these documents he juxtaposes a variety of collaged images, including Hollywood actors, the Ku Klux Klan, witches, Hitler, President Richard Nixon, Senator Joseph McCarthy pointing to cells of Communist inltration, and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev facing the famous Hollywood signboard.

ARNOLD MESCHES THE FBI FILES, #41, 2002 Acrylic on paper transfer on Plexiglas on canvas, 14 22 in. Courtesy of the artist.

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One example, The FBI Files, #41 (2002), presents a page from Meschess le with almost everything blacked out. This ofcial text is framed by a owered border, as if it were a medieval manuscript page. To the right Mesches juxtaposes a picture of a sexy woman from Playboy magazine and ads for Winston cigarettes and Cutty Sark scotch. When he combines unlikely images in this way, Mesches likes to refer to Pieter Brueghel, who would put the ight of Icarus and a Flemish farmer plowing his eld in the same picture. Like the Flemish painter, Mesches places disparate events in the same picture to allow viewers to arrive at their own associations.
LON WILSON STUDENTS IN SPROUL PLAZA SURROUNDING POLICE CAR, MARIO SAVIO SPEAKING FROM ROOF OF CAR, 1964 Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

THE FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT

Outrage at censorship and limits on the free expression of ideas helped spark a youthful rebellion on college campuses in the 1960sa revolt that essentially began on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. A taxing sense of alienation had been growing not just among the Beats but among a variety of

young people, who felt a need for positive acts of volition, what existentialist writers called authentic experience. In his 2001 book, The Dying Animal, Philip Roth reected, There were two strains to the turbulence [in the 1960s]; there was the libertarianism extending orgiastic permission to the individual and opposed to the traditional interests of the community, but with it, often wedded to it, there was the communal rigorousness about civil rights and against the war, the disobedience whose moral prestige drives through Thoreau.25 By the beginning of the 1960s there were indeed serious causes for action. In 1960 the House UnAmerican Activities Committee held hearings into alleged subversive activities in the Bay Area at San Francisco City Hall. When students demonstrated against the committees activities, they were doused with high-power water hoses, clubbed, and kicked by the police. The burgeoning struggle for civil rights (see chapter 3) further energized these activists. Students ocked to Bay Area demonstrations in 1963 in support of the Birmingham protests led by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The newly formed Berkeley chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized protests against discrimination in the workplace. Mario Savio [who would become a key gure in the free speech movement] exemplied the straight line many students walked from the Civil Rights Movement to the FSM, feminist writer Jo Freeman remembers.26 Arrested with 166 other demonstrators at a 1963 sitin at the Sheraton Palace Hotel, he heard of the Freedom Summer project in Mississippi while he was in jail and decided to join it.27 Savio and other student volunteers were attacked by the Ku Klux Klan as nigger lovers but continued to register black voters anyway. When he returned to Berkeley in the fall of 1964, he became aware that the restrictions on freedom of speech at the university paralleled the disenfranchisement in the South. Or, as the art critic Robert Hughes explained in an interview for Time: In Mississippi an autocratic and powerful minority rules,

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through organized violence, to suppress the virtually powerless majority. In California the privileged minority manipulates University bureaucracy to suppress the students political expression. That respectable bureaucrat masks the nancial plutocrats: that impersonal bureaucracy is the efcient enemy in a Brave New World.28 For several months in the fall of 1964 the Berkeley campus was in uproar as students, eventually supported by faculty, fought for First Amendment rights on campus. The struggle for academic freedom had a long history at Berkeley. Back in 1949, two years after President Harry S. Truman ordered federal employees to declare their loyalty to the country, the university required its faculty to sign its own notorious loyalty oath, swearing that they did not belong to subversive groups. Those professors who maintained their independence were dismissed from the university (some were reinstated at a later time, when the odious oath was abolished). The free speech controversy of 1964 erupted when, in deance of a ban on political advocacy, students distributed political leaets on campus, and campus police handed out citations. On October 1, Jack Weinberg, who had dropped out of the University of California to become an organizer for CORE, set up a table in Sproul Plaza to distribute CORE information. University administrators ordered police to arrest him. Weinberg went limp in the police car, while hundreds of agitated students offered passive resistance and surrounded the car. Hundreds of police reinforcements arrived, but thousands of students gathered, offering passive resistance and immobilizing the police as well as the administration. Savio climbed on top of the car and gave a memorable speech to the crowd, an exciting moment photographed by Lon Wilson, a photojournalist for the Oakland Tribune. A month and a half later, on November 20, journalist Don Kechely documented students massive free speech march to a meeting of the universitys regents. Twelve days later, the magnetic folk singer Joan Baez was photographed strumming We Shall Overcome countercultural trends

DON KECHELY THOUSANDS OF STUDENTS MARCH TO UC REGENTS MEETING, 1964 Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

ANONYMOUS JOAN BAEZ ON SPROUL HALL STEPS, IRA SANDPERL AT RIGHT, 1964 Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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NACIO JAN BROWN MARIO SAVIO ON SPROUL HALL STEPS, 1964 Gelatin silver print. Nacio Jan Brown.

as students took over the administration building, Sproul Hall. (Baez was a bridge between the political activists in Berkeley and the denizens of the counterculture in San Francisco.) The next day more than eight hundred students were hauled off to the Santa Rita Jailat the time the largest mass arrest in American history. Although by 1966 the students had won on the major free speech issues, the regents and the administration were still intent on restrictive bureaucratic regulations. Mario Savio spoke again on the steps of Sproul Hall, calling for no further infringements on students hard-won rights. An image by the press photographer Nacio Jan Brown (see pp. 4143) discloses Savios magnetic personality, his complete dedication to his task, and the excitement he created in a powerful record of this decisive moment. In 1988 a group of Berkeley faculty members decided that the approaching twenty-fth anniversary of the free speech movement called for a work of art to commemorate the event. The Berkeley Art Project,
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as it was known, was soon supported by more than a hundred faculty members, many of whom also helped fund it. A two-stage competition was announced: A jury of nationally prominent artists and art experts selected ve nalists from among 275 entries, after which the winner was chosen by a committee representative of the students, faculty, staff, and alumni of the university (including Savio), and of the city. The winning entry was a conceptual work by Mark Brest van Kempen, who, like Maya Lin at the time of the Vietnam Memorial competition, was still a graduate student. Brest van Kempen, born in Salt Lake City in 1962, studied at the University of Utah and then did his graduate work at the San Francisco Art Institute. The work for the Berkeley campus, Column of Earth and Air (Free Speech Monument) (1991), is simply a round granite slab, approximately ve feet in diameter, with a six-inch hole lled with earth in the center. Around the circumference the artist inscribed This soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entitys jurisdiction . Installed at Sproul Plaza directly in front of the administration building, it is located where most free speech movement actions (and later antiwar protests) took place. Unlike Minimalist sculpture, which tends to dominate any public space with its self-importance, this work has no physical presence. It deals, however, with the most fundamental issues of freedom and dissent versus authority, essentially what the free speech movement was all about. The process of creating this anti-monument was by no means without problems. After the winner was announced, the universitys chancellor, I. Michael Heyman, determined that, although free speech was ne, it did not extend to proponents of the free speech movement, which was not, in 1964 or in the campus community today, a universally shared value. For many, perhaps most, 1964 was a time of agony.29 The free speech movement, however, had its way. The work was installed and dedicated in September 1993, after being accepted by a new, perhaps more

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MARK BREST VAN KEMPEN COLUMN OF EARTH AND AIR (FREE SPEECH MONUMENT), 1991 Granite and soil with laws, 72 in. (diameter). Shown before installation (left) and in Sproul Plaza, University of California, Berkeley. Courtesy of the artist.

enlightened chancellor, Chang-Lin Tien. In 2000 a further commemoration took place when Stephen Silberstein, a University of California alumnus, funded the Free Speech Movement Cafe in the Moftt Undergraduate Library. The walls of the cafe are covered with photos of that critical occurrence, along with statements by Mario Savio. Mark Brest van Kempens subsequent art has focused increasingly on the environment. In 1998, in connection with an exhibition entitled Spaces of Nature at the Richmond Art Center, he lived in a wilderness area in Colusa County for thirty days, brought no food, and subsisted directly on what he found within a ve-mile area. Like the Earth artists described in chapter 4, Brest van Kempen inverted the genre of landscape painting, dwelling inside rather than standing outside nature. He went further than artists such as Robert Smithson or Walter De Maria, however, by actually surviving on the land. This experience, he said, helped me to realize a little more that our species (humans) [is] not the center of the world.30 He has since been engaged in photographic projects that visualize areas of San Francisco in their pristine condition, prior to the impact of civilization, and in working on the restoration of creeks and waterways.

In October 2004 the university honored the fortieth anniversary of the free speech movement with a week-long celebration comprising fty events. The San Francisco Chronicle headlined its report on the festivities: UCs Change of HeartCelebrating the Transformation of a Pariah [Mario Savio?] into an Icon.31 countercultural trends
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CELEBRATING LOVE, NOT WAR

While the Berkeley campus was erupting, the countercultural scene was shifting across the bay, in San Francisco, as the hippies began to succeed the Beats as the protagonists of an alternative lifestyle. The locale moved from North Beach to the Haight-Ashbury district. This new bohemian fringe did not produce the astonishing poetry and art of the Beat generation, but in their rebellion against the straight-laced and upwardly mobile attitude of the previous generation, the hippies offered a fundamentally different lifestyle. Their slogan Make love, not war pointed to a more humane way of living. Often apolitical and lacking a coherent vision of the future, they sought a utopia, which, as is the nature of all utopias, could never be attained. A lot was happening, both onstage and in the streets in San Francisco, in the 1960s. At the Hungry i nightclub Lenny Bruce held forth on the hypocrisy of establishment culture with four-letter words. In 1964 Ken Kesey, already known for his One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest (1962), took off with his Merry Pranksters in a multicolored bus (driven by Neal Cassady), which announced further as its destination. As they made their way across the country to New Yorks Worlds Fair, the group staged acid tests, offering participants a taste of California music, psychedelic lighting, and sometimes LSD. (Their journey was chronicled in Tom Wolfes Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test [1968].) Prankster Stewart Brand, who later published the Whole Earth Catalog (196871), organized the Trips Festival, a multimedia acid test event held over three days in San Franciscos Longshoremans Hall in January 1966. Meanwhile the San Francisco Mime Troupe, founded by Ronnie Davis in 1959, took theater outdoors, into city parks, performing political plays of an anarchic bent in which ribald humor commented on the climate of social change, as in their controversial Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel (1965), directed by Peter Coyote. When city ofcials rejected the Mime Troupes and
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other artists input into a new cultural center, the Artists Liberation Front formed, with the goals of mutual support and creating an art for the people, in the neighborhoods. In the fall of 1966 they sponsored a series of free fairs, community-based celebrations of the arts. At the same time the anarchist guerrilla theater group called the Diggers came into being in Haight-Ashbury, advocating an end to private property and setting up free food distribution as well as free stores. The San Francisco Oracle, a multicolored weekly lled with Beat poetry, ction, and psychedelic art, as well as countercultural news, began publishing. It was all very communal, although gurus emerged, such as Timothy Leary, the king of psychedelia. The hubs of hippie activity were the rock concerts

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WES WILSON THE BYRDS, 1967 Lithograph, 22 12 13 34 in. Courtesy of the artist. Wes Wilson 1967. wolfgangsvault.com.

ALTON KELLEY AND STANLEY MOUSE GRATEFUL DEAD, OXFORD CIRCLE AT AVALON BALLROOM, SAN FRANCISCO, 1966 Lithograph, 20 14 in. Courtesy of the artists. Chet Helms DBA Family Dog. Photo: Michael Erlewine, ClassicPosters.com.

VICTOR MOSCOSO FLOWER POT, 1967 Lithograph, 20 14 in. Courtesy of the artist. Chet Helms DBA Family Dog. Photo: Michael Erlewine, ClassicPosters.com.

with light shows and dancing at the Fillmore Auditorium, the Avalon Ballroom, and Winterland. Impresario Bill Graham featured groups like the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Poets and artists, singers, dancers, actors and mimes, dropouts, and mystics came together in large crowds. Protected from intruders by the Hells Angels, they created a tangible experience of synesthesia. All the senses came alive with the ear-shattering rock and roll, the fragrance of cannabis, the close touch of the dancers, and the stroboscopic lights playing over walls and ceilingwith added amazement from uid psychedelic slide projections (the projector at times operated by Bruce Conner). The events were advertised and promoted in psychedelic posters. Young designers like Wes Wilson, Rick Grifn, Victor Moscoso, Alton Kelley, and Stan-

ley Mouse discarded the traditional function of the poster: legibility. The hippie poster is complex and convoluted in form and difcult to read for those not initiated into the popular cult. Its form and appearance recall n-de-sicle Art Nouveau posters, and, in fact, the designers themselves acknowledged their admiration of that periods opulence and decadence. They looked at the work of the Belgian designers (Jan Toorop, Henry van de Velde) and French poster artists (Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jules Chret) who had helped erase the distinction between high and low art. They felt an afnity with Art Nouveaus fusion of architecture, the graphic arts, and craftsindeed, all aspects of the man-made environmenttoward a unied ambience. The hippie poster, like its Art Nouveau predecessor, employed at space, a decorative, sinuous linear pattern, and a positive-negative relationship whereby countercultural trends
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gure and ground became almost interchangeable, causing a dynamic reversibility of images. Hippie poster designs generally covered the sheet completely and tended to aunt intense colors. It didnt matter if they were hard to read; they captured the atmosphere of the psychedelic dance hall. Flower children quickly assimilated the wild typography, the bright and uid complementary colors, and the revolving patterns used in many of the posters, which became a sort of secret code for the in group. The poster was an integral part of this tribal counterculture, which attempted to nd an answer to anxiety and alienation through mind-expanding and often hallucinatory experiences. Wes Wilsons Byrds (1967) was made for a rock event at Winterland. The red-orange letters on the blue ground, both colors held at primary intensity, give a vibrancy to the image, which is dominated by the sweeping upward ow of the exuberant bird. Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse collaborated on Grateful Dead (1966) for the Avalon, using a gruesome skeleton, with its literary allusion to going to the ball and the medieval motif of the danse macabre. Victor Moscoso, born in Spain in 1936, an artist who painted expressionist canvases early on and studied with Josef Albers at Yale University, used Alberss lessons in the pulsating contrast of colors in his Flower Pot poster (1967), for an Avalon event. The vibrating Op Art hues rendered the performers names, such as Blue Cheer, as well as the date and place, very difcult to make out. But then, this was the purpose. When I asked Moscoso why he preferred to make posters rather than painting, he replied that painters had to wait a long time, and sometimes in vain, to expose their work to relatively few people, whereas poster designers could see their work displayed and sold cheaply almost at once.32 Instant gratication was an important aspect of the psychedelic culture. Although the psychedelic posters were aimed at a distinct subculture, their style soon inuenced the design of album covers as well as advertising, department-store window displays, and other mainstream cultural artifacts.
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Beyond the dance hall events, there were largescale outdoor gatherings. Haight and Ashbury Streets soon became identied with the hippie movement, scheduled in as a photo-stop opportunity for visiting tourists. Nearby, on the great green meadows of Golden Gate Park, the ower children congregated, communed, and played. Some fty thousand people came together for the Human Be-In, originally called A Gathering of the Tribe, in January 1967. Peter Coyote described the action:
Paisley banners and ags stenciled with marijuana leaves uttered in the balmy winds that seemed to be blessing the fty thousand people assembled before a single stage crowded with celebrities and Haight Independent Proprietors (HIPs). Jerry Rubin was representing the political aspect of the counterculture, while Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert represented the expanded consciousness and bliss. There were also a few genuine seers and artists like Gary Snyder, back from ten years of studying Zen in Japan; his old crony, Allen Ginsberg; and Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, abbot of the nearby San Francisco Zen Center, solid as a rock, smiling and enjoying himself. Fifty thousand people took drugs, danced, painted their faces, dressed in outrageous costumes, crawled into the bushes and made love, red up barbecues, pitched tents, and sold wares crystals, tie-dyes, hash pipes, earrings, hair ties, and political tracts. Fifty thousand people played utes, guitars, tambourines, tablas, bongos, congas, sitars, and saxophones, and sang, harmonized, and reveled in their number and variety, aware that they were an emergent social force.33

Among the photographers documenting the events was Michelle Vignes (b. 1926; see also p. 143), who caught Allen Ginsberg wearing his love beads and speaking to the troops with a benevolent expression. Photojournalist Ted Streshinsky (19232003), who did many photo essays on major political, social, and cultural issues, including the United Farm Workers strug-

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gle, photographed the Be-In through a soap bubble, revealing the evanescence of these utopian events. A similar transience comes across in Gene Anthonys After the Be-In (1967), in which a loving couple is watched by a woolly dog as the crowds disperse. Anthony (b. 1932), perhaps the chief chronicler of hippie life in Haight-Ashbury and during the 1967 Summer of Love, captured the zany optimism of the era in his images, photographing subjects such as a cluster of rock musicians owing out onto the street from an upright Victorian, a cosmic car, and revelers like Michael McClure and Richard Brautigan sauntering down a street as a trumpet blares. It was a time that promised, as a press release for the Be-In proclaimed, [a] Renaissance of compassion, awareness and love of the Revolution [and] the unity of all mankind. This hardly happened. America was still sending troops to their death in Southeast Asia (see chapter 1). And, after the acme of the counterculture during the Summer of Love and at Woodstock on the East Coast, the denouement came in December 1969 at Altamont Speedway, east of San Francisco, where a vast crowd gathered for an all-star concert, where turmoil and violence replaced brotherhood, and where one of the attendees was killed. Perhaps a harbinger of the end of the sixties was the conict that had erupted several months earlier, in the spring of 1969, in Berkeley. It was just four years

after the struggle for freedom of speech. The powers that be now contested a small parcel of land near the campus that had become a dumping ground after the university had razed houses that once stood there. A number of students and community members set out to convert it into a small urban park, named Peoples Park, and attempted to revive the euphoria of the Summer of Love. They fertilized the land, planted owers and vegetables, and built a stage for free speech and free music. But the university, maintaining its property rights, fenced off the land. In angry response, the students and community members proceeded to tear down the chain-link fence. A battle ensued. Ronald Reagan, governor of the state at the time, called upon the National Guard, and more than two thousand bayoneted guardsmen came to support the local police forces. Helicopters teargassed the campus area, as documented in Nacio Jan Browns photograph in which a helicopters propeller blade cuts across the steeple of the Campanile. Today we can get an impression of just what it was like to be there from some ne documentary photographs. Working in the tradition of aesthetic realism, documentary photographers do more than just give us the facts; like all image makers, they are subjective in their approach, interpreting what they see. Ted Streshinsky, who gave up a career in political science to become a photojournalist, often working with countercultural trends

MICHELLE VIGNES ALLEN GINSBERG AT BE-IN IN GOLDEN GATE PARK, SAN FRANCISCO, 1967 Gelatin silver print. Michelle Vignes.

TED STRESHINSKY LOVE-IN, GOLDEN GATE PARK, SAN FRANCISCO: FLOWER CHILDREN BLOWING BUBBLE, 1967 Gelatin silver print. Ted Streshinsky 1967.

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GENE ANTHONY Photographs clockwise from top left. ALL THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA ROCK BANDS ON THE STEPS OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD HOUSE AT 710 ASHBURY, 1967 AFTER THE BE-IN, 1967 NOW DAY, WITH MICHAEL MCCLURE AND RICHARD BRAUTIGAN, 1967 COSMIC CAR, 1967 All gelatin silver prints. All Gene Anthony.

NACIO JAN BROWN AERIAL TEARGASSING OF UC CAMPUS DURING PEOPLES PARK INCIDENT, BERKELEY, 1969 Gelatin silver print. Nacio Jan Brown.

TED STRESHINSKY PEOPLES PARK RIOTS, NATIONAL GUARD AND PROTESTER, 1969 Gelatin silver print. Ted Streshinsky 1969.

NACIO JAN BROWN MORTALLY WOUNDED JAMES RECTOR, PEOPLES PARK PROTEST, 1969 Gelatin silver print. Nacio Jan Brown.

HAROLD PARIS SOUL ON TELEGRAPH AVENUE (#12), 1970 Mixed media and cast resin, 10 8 2 in. Private collection.

such writers as Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, is no exception. His extraordinary photograph Peoples Park Riots, National Guard and Protester (1969) clearly depicts the power structure. A threatening mass of steelhelmeted soldiers, bayonets drawn, advances on a young girl, who simply stands there, with her hair in a headband, clutching her newspaper. Walt Whitman once dened the role of poetry in the modern world as the vivication of facts, and that certainly applies to this image of force against innocence. No staging could have produced what Streshinsky saw at this decisive moment in his camera lens. As time went on, things got nasty. Low-ying helicopters spread more tear gas as the police opened re on demonstrators. James Rector, an innocent bystander who was watching the turmoil from the roof of a nearby building, was killed by a gunshot. This event was documented by Nacio Jan Brown, whose photograph shows us the face of the mortally wounded man. The murder was never prosecuted. The slaying of James Rector impelled Harold Paris to make his Soul on Telegraph Avenue (1970). After producing his ceramic Walls for Mem (see chapter 1), he worked for some time casting everyday objects, such as chairs, into bronze and experimented with countercultural trends

vacuum-forming to create abstract vinyl sculptures that serve as light-reecting dreamscapes. In the late 1960s, using silicon gel, he began making small, vulnerable, mysterious works, which he called Souls. Robert Hughes reported that the like [of these pieces] has not been seen in America since Joseph Cornells Boxes.34 In Soul on Telegraph Avenue a quivering slab of silicon, analogous to human esh, is the ground for a gray substance, which resembles a spilled brain. A tiny red cross has been infused into the resilient gel. This small commemorative work serves as a tragic nale to a historic moment lled with hope, both exuberant and nave. Kris Kristofferson epitomized this feeling in a line from his song Me and Bobby McGee, also recorded by hippie siren Janis Joplin: Freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose. Still, however ephemeral its lovefests and however hazardous its successes, the sixties counterculture created far-reaching changes. As the historian Leon Litwak noted: For many young people, self-expression lay not in politics but in personal transformation

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through ecstatic non-conformity. They substituted the be-in and the love-in for the protest meeting, and in signicant ways the changes generated by the counterculture were more enduring than the changes the Movement managed to effect in American politics.35

FROM UNDERGROUND TO FOREGROUND: SUNSHINE/NOIR

Instead of healing the wound, we were rubbing salt into the wound, remarked the artist J. C. Garrett, an active participant in the punk movement, which succeeded the Beat and hippie eras.36 In the 1970s, as the art historian Kristine Stiles has noted, mounting anger over corporate and government collusion in the nuclear weapons industry gave rise to the widespread anxiety most vividly displayed by the punk movement.37 This subculture produced a recognizable style in music, words, and visual images a style that was anti-establishment and enraged. It sprang up simultaneously in Los Angeles and San Francisco, in garages, ill-lit basements, abandoned synagogues, insolent Filipino nightclubs, and biker bars.38 A major inuence was the music of the Sex Pistols, whose Anarchy in the U.K. (1976) launched a transformation of pop music all over the world, according to the cultural critic Greil Marcus.39 As Marcus points out, this British groups stance of anarchic provocation and total negation owed much to the Situationists in France in the 1960s and the Dadaists in Berlin in 1920. In January 1978 the Sex Pistols came to San Francisco, where they gave their last concert (they broke up afterward). When they played at the Winterland, their show was opened by the Nuns and the Avengers, two local bands who were regulars at Mabuhay Gardens, a Filipino nightclub in North Beach at the center of the punk scene. (Bruce Conner also frequented Mabuhay Gardens, linking the new punk culture back to earlier Beat activity.) Other San Francisco punk bands with connotative names included the Screamers, the Weirdos, the Skulls, the Dead Kennedys, and the Residents. The latter pub-

lished a satirical cover and poster for their album The Third Reich n Roll (1976), showing a smiling young man in a Nazi uniform with multiple pictures of Hitler clowning in the clouds. A 1981 Dead Kennedys album cover (with artwork by Winston Smith) depicts Christ crucied on a dollar bill with In God We Trust, Inc. inscribed aboveall set against a vibrating Op Art background. The punk aesthetic could be found at alternative spaces like Interweave, A-Hole Gallery, and Club Foot, which featured cabarets with music, art, poetry, and performance. At the San Francisco Art Institute students started punk groups like Romeo Void, Pearl Harbor, and the Explosions, just as two decades earlier, their predecessors played in the Studio 13 Jazz Band. In Los Angeles X emerged as the great garage band of the time, along with groups like Germ, Fear, Catholic Discipline, and Black Flag. Black Flag was launched by Greg Ginn, whose brother Raymond (Ginn) Pettibone (b. 1959) became an unofcial incountercultural trends

DEAD KENNEDYS IN GOD WE TRUST, INC., 1981 Montage by Winston Smith. Courtesy of Decay Music.

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SLASH (VOL. 1, NO. 1), COVER FEATURING DAVE VANIAN OF THE DAMNED, 1977 Photograph by Melanie Nissen. In Hardcore California: A History of Punk and New Wave, by Peter Belsito and Bob Davis.

house artist of the LA music scene in the 1970s and 1980s, creating posters, album covers, and other artwork. His drawings were initially distributed in selfpublished photocopied booklets. Revolutionary Sex! (1982), for instance, shows Patty Hearst (Tania) with a snake curled around her body, reminiscent of Franz von Stucks seductive Sin, done some ninety years earlier. Pettibone, however, has equipped the snake with a seven-pronged hydra head. In a 1987 drawing, using ink and watercolor, Pettibone reveals his neo-Dada attitude by placing four men behind a bench with the caption: Lets destroy inferior works of art, and in red: Lets start here. Ad hoc mimeographed or photocopied publications appeared, as well as fanzines like Search and Destroy. In its May Day issue from 1977 Slash magazine displays a womans face on a black ground with the
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letters S-l-a-s-h in blood-red ink running down her white forehead. A year later, in May 1978, the magazine took an explicit political stancesomething punk publications generally avoidedand dedicated its issue to the handful of enrags (French for maniacs, fanatics, crazies), who, ten years ago tried to change life.40 Among the more politically minded artists to emerge from this punk scene was J. C. Garrett (b. 1955), who cofounded Club Foot and participated in other alternative venues in San Francisco. He had come to the Bay Area in 1978 from Albany, New York, where he had been active in a collective of political artists. In San Francisco he produced the amazingly prescient work entitled The Splinter in Your Eye Is the Best Magnifying Glass (1980). The title comes from Theodor Adornos treatise Minima Moralia, a book of epigraphs with fervid accusations against mass culture in all its guises.41 The interface of text and image in Garretts work indicates his familiarity with the Frankfurt School as well as the French Situationists, who, despite their nihilist philosophy and opposition to all forms of sociopolitical organization, took part in the uprisings at Strasbourg University in 1966 and in Paris two years later. In his 1980 piece, using digital technology, Garrett depicted the twin towers of the World Trade Center as symbols of corporate globalization and American hegemony. His prophetic piece of agitprop has acquired new meanings since September 11, 2001. Today the towers have become a symbol of the vulnerability of power, a constant reminder of unabashed hatred by religious fanatics, a pretext for preemptive war, and a real-world reiteration of the violence people enjoy when playing video games. At their site, a new Freedom Tower promises to reach to the topmost point of the Manhattan skyline. In the late 1970s an extreme form of alternative art, mocking the think tanks, called itself Survival Research Laboratories. Founded by Mark Pauline (b. 1950) and working with artists and engineers, SRL created performances and installations using machinery

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they designed, sometimes incorporating sophisticated surplus equipment from the U.S. military. A huge ame thrower, for example, might be powered by a jet engine. With enormous automated anthropomorphic robots and motorized dead animals, they staged erce and dangerous performances accompanied by disorienting music. These pieces served as metaphoric attacks against war, violence, torture, and terror. From performances in various San Francisco parking lots, SRL moved on to actions in other American cities, attracting large crowds for a 1988 performance at the Shea Stadium parking lot in New York. At an SRL event, the author Bruce Sterling explains, everything that industrial society would prefer to forget and ignore and neglect takes on a pitiless Frankenstein vitality. It isnt beautiful, it isnt nice, it isnt spiritually elevating. It casts the darkest kind of

suspicion on the lives we lead and the twisted ingenuity that supports these lives. And it offers us no answers at all.42 Another major artist to emerge from the California punk scene was the performance artist Karen Finley (b. 1956). After graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute and receiving a Guggenheim fellowship, Finley became famous for smearing chocolate on her naked body as a symbol of women being treated like dirt. In 1990 the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, under pressure from conservative legislators, deemed such work pornographic and denied grants to her as well as three other performance artists. As Kristine Stiles notes: The national controversy . . . afrmed how performance art posed fundamental challenges to traditional views of the visual arts . . . in a manner that not only embodied the life experiences of the performers but touched the social experiences of viewers.43 Several anti-establishment artists were included in the 1997 exhibition Sunshine and Noir at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark a show that focused on the LA art scene. In the preface to the catalogue Lars Nittve, the museums director, remarked: Capital of visuality: Helltown or Eden? That was the question [in Los Angeles] as early as the second half of the nineteenth century, when galloping murder statistics failed to sully the marketers promise of ocean groves, small farms, and clear blue desert skies. . . . Helltown or Eden, Sunshine or Noir? That remains the question.44 Two prominent artists in this exhibition were Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley (both born in 1945) men of multifarious talents whose work was maximal at a time when minimal was the leading mode. Working and playing with many media, they viscerally hit the deep underbelly of the sunshine city, a city where the American dream is produced for mass consumption worldwide. Frequently they resorted to scatological images in their performances, installations, videos, drawings, writings, and photographs. Yet their art, in all its grizzly forms, strove for (alcountercultural trends

J. C. GARRETT THE SPLINTER IN YOUR EYE IS THE BEST MAGNIFYING GLASS, 1980 Screenprint, 17 11 in. Courtesy of the artist.

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PAUL MCCARTHY BOSSY BURGER, 1991 Performance, videotape, installation. Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles. Collection of Hauser & Wirth, St. Gallen, Switzerland.

though it may not have achieved) the realm of feelings described by the eighteenth-century British philosopher Edmund Burke as the Sublime.45 The Sublime, according to Burke, is a spiritual state in which the mind is transported beyond the rational toward an overwhelming experience, which, although terrifying, elicits pleasure, as fear turns into delight. Watching an immense cataract during a wild thunderstorm is a frequently given example. Paul McCarthy, born in Salt Lake City, came to Los Angeles in the late 1960s. His visionary, unorthodox, and highly inuential in your face actions and videos have managed to violate any boundaries still extant. For McCarthy, the human body is both subject and medium. His works of overblown brutality are often sexually provocative and horrendously bizarre. They nd their antecedents in punk and, further back, in the bloody performances and agitative experiments of the Vienna Actionists and in the 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium in London, which scandalized the public and led to the repeated arrests of the participating artists. McCarthy was also familiar with the works of self-endangerment countercultural trends

executed by Chris Burden in the early 1970s (see p. 61). McCarthys early work consisted largely of private performances for the video camera, such as Shit Face Painting (1974). In the 1980s and 1990s he did a number of installation/performances that satirized the American way of life. In Bossy Burger (1991) he appropriated the TV sitcom Family Affairs, which entertained families with much sugar and little spice, to create an episode set at a cheap country restaurant named Bossy Burger. After building a stage with lumber from the set of the discontinued show, McCarthy dressed himself as a chef and donned a grimacing mask that made him look like Alfred E. Neuman, the icon of Mad magazine. He dragged in rotten hamburger meat, curdled milk, and empty condiment bottles, and then performed for an hour, splattering ketchup on his white uniform, poking his face through the wall, and behaving like a fool. He could barely peer out of the small eye opening in his maskan experience that relates to the way a viewer peers into Marcel Duchamps Etant donns (194668). In the performance itself McCarthy felt a sense of connement comparable to that experienced by Jackson Pollock when he was lmed by Hans Namuth. When interviewed by Kristine Stiles, McCarthy remarked, In Bossy Burger the Alfred E. Neuman character never leaves the architecture. I envisioned him as an entrapped person. . . . And the house is a trap; the earth is a trap . . . the construct of reality is absurdity.46 In many of his actions McCarthy uses the body to perform unspeakable and totally absurd acts, debased rituals of all kinds: men may hump hamburger meat or a boy may hump a goat; penises may extend fty feet. McCarthys violent performances call up deep subconscious memories, which can be difcult to face. We are aware, however, that the horrendous faces are masks, that the phallus is detachable, the semen is mayonnaise or cold cream, and all that blood comes from the ketchup bottle. On a number of occasions McCarthy has worked in collaboration with Mike Kelley, poking fun at both

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MIKE KELLEY PROPOSAL FOR THE DECORATION OF AN ISLAND OF CONFERENCE ROOMS (WITH COPY ROOM) FOR AN ADVERTISING AGENCY DESIGNED BY FRANK GEHRY, 1991 Multimedia installation, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist.

the culture at large and art world pretensions. In Fresh Acconci (1996), for example, they directly responded to the revival of body art in the 1990s by restaging several of Vito Acconcis performances of the early 1970s. Although they were not able to replay Acconcis famous Seedbed (1971), in which the seminal performance/ process/body artist masturbated below the oor of the Sonnabend Gallery in New York, McCarthy and Kelleys video shows several naked female and male professional actors mimicking soft-core pornography. Kelley, discussing the artists strategy, wrote: Mirroring then-current concerns, Fresh Acconci postulates that the body of today performs the function of a specialized subcultural erotica for the art world despite what could be construed as its deconstructive pretensions.47 Kelley was born in a working-class suburb of De-

troit, and his blue-collar background has remained a motivation, no matter how transgressive his art. After studying at the University of Michigan, he went to CalArts, where he worked with Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Allan Kaprow, and Laurie Anderson, artists who helped formulate that hybridization that came to be called postmodern art. In addition, Kelley admired the satirical work of Robert Crumb, H. C. Westermann, and Peter Saul. His conceptualist orientation toward a taboo-breaking art of scatological content and traumatic imagery is similar to McCarthys, but Kelley often brings in the touch of a homespun craftsman, fabricating dolls and fauxantique furniture. In 1991 Kelley produced his Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank countercultural trends
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BARRY MCGEE UNTITLED #20, 2002 Mixed media on wood panel, 55 20 in. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Paule Anglim.

Gehry. The well-known Los Angeles architect asked a number of artists, including Kelley, to conceive of an artwork for the ofce of an advertising agency.48 Kelley built a model with portholes between ofces; he revealed pipes and ducts in the ceiling in the manner of Brutalist architecture (anathema to Gehry). There were wall murals of animals and jokes of low humor on the walls, with texts like: If assholes could y this place would be an airport. Remember it only takes one prick to get AIDS. Work carefully; wash your hands and use gloves. The ogging will continue until morale improves. Im 51% sweetheart and 49% bitch, dont push it in. The project was not built cancelled for nancial reasons but the work was transformed into a countercultural trends

sculpture and included in the Helter Skelter exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1992. Paul Schimmel, the shows curator, pointed out: The piece concretely addresses how corporations do business and how people interact. Kelleys art embraces the psychoanalytic and the psychosocial. Although founded on Conceptualist principles, his work explores belief systems, the codes that people live by, poetry and religionall areas eschewed by the generation of Conceptual artists that form Kelleys parentage and the generation of NeoConceptualists in which he lives.49 The art system, best exemplied by Greenbergian formalism, was further challenged by grafti artists such as Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen in San Francisco. Grafti has a long history, going back to ancient Egypt and the walls of Pompeii. In modern art, grafti can be seen as early as 1902 in Giacomo Ballas well-known painting Bankrupt and in the remarkable photographs of Brassa in Paris and Aaron Siskind in Chicago. Jean Dubuffet admired grafti as a kind of Art Brut (Outsider Art), providing direct access to psychic states, and Cy Twombly transformed grafti-like marks into diaristic elegance. More closely related to the California markers, New Yorkers Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring transported grafti from obscurity to high esteem in the art world. Grafti is an expression of the disenfranchised, who mark and claim their territory with their tags (names) and various signs and symbols, often understood solely by initiates. Grafti artists use spray paint, felt-tipped markers, even lipstick to cover any available urban surface, from empty walls in alleyways to subway cars, often risking nes and even arrest. The authorities have felt the need to take action against this apparent defacing of property, which in its own way is a political act of deance. In 1995 the mayor of Philadelphia announced, One of the worst problems facing this city is grafti. While it cant kill or maim, grafti is a more insidious problem. It can kill morale.50 Philadelphia began spending three

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million dollars a year to ght grafti and threatened grafti artists with nes of ten thousand dollars and up to ve years in jail. Barry McGee, on the other hand, has asserted: Theres a lot of talk about how damaging grafti is and destruction that happens with grafti, but theres actually no damage. It can all be painted over with a roller.51 Like Mike Kelley, McGee comes from a workingclass family. His father repaired and repainted old Chevrolets in San Francisco, where McGee was born in 1966. In his late teens McGee began writing on the walls of the city streets, especially in the Mission District, San Franciscos Latino area. Adopting the moniker Twist, he enjoyed the energy and freedom of making art in the public sphere without asking for permission to do so. He speaks of the inuence of punk groups like The Residents and The Dead Kennedys, but more than anything there was a really strong political climate. It was the Reagan years and there were always organized protests.52 There was also Mark Pauline and the Survival Research Laboratories. These guys, McGee has said, really do whatever they want, dangerous things that have huge visual impact with all the public standing around those machines that ght until completely destroyed.53 McGee did obtain more traditional training as an artist, earning a BFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991. He then lived in Brazil for a year and soon began exhibiting his paintings and installations in prestigious galleries and shows, including the Venice Biennale in 2001. His indoor pieces are not merely reconstructions of street grafti; they are executed with deliberation, as he does not need to worry about police surveillance. Words, phrases, and cartoonish heads that he calls everymen may be layered on top of a red ground and surrounded by a labyrinth of street objects, such as empty liquor bottles, spray-paint cans, bowling pins, and other discarded objects. These installations carry the vitality of chaos created by a free-spirited artist. Yet theres always the danger of co-optation. In 2002

Barry McGee had a solo exhibition at the fashionable Fondazione Prada in Milan, where visitors had to enter through an overturned truckit seems that street art has become chic. On December 10, 2004, McGee spray-painted Smash the State in bright orange on a landmarked space, the wall of the ofce of the then-president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Matt Gonzalez, with the latters permission.54 McGee was part of a loose group of San Francisco Mission District artists sometimes called the Mission School, which included Chris Johanson, Rigo (see p. 144), and Margaret Kilgallen. Kilgallen, born in Washington, D.C., in 1967, learned letterpress printing at Colorado College in Colorado Springs and moved to San Francisco in 1989, completing her art training at Stanford University. As a book conservator at the San Francisco Public Library, she mended battered books, studying typography as she did so. In 1999 she married McGee, a dedicated surfer like herself. Two years later she died of breast cancer, at the age of thirty-four. Although Kilgallen was not a grafti writer per sethere probably are very few women who have actually marked the walls of abandoned buildingsher work was greatly indebted to grafti artists letters and signs, as well as to underground comics and Beat poetry. Her paintings and installations also show an appreciation for craftsmanship. Like the earlier punk artists, she had no use for the pristine white cube of the art gallery. In 1999, for an exhibition at Deitch Projects in New York, she painted the entire gallery oor as well as the walls. In the six-paneled aquatint Sloe (1998) she offered a folk alternative to conventional sign-making, humorously collaging a placard that tells us to Let it ridesloe. We are left to guess whether sloe refers to the berry that avored homemade gin or is a nave way to spell slow. The lettering signals a movie-style Wild West (tempered by a little bird resting on the L). There is a picture of a tree that looks as if a child might have drawn it; a stubborn mule struggles against its fetter; a fat lady countercultural trends
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MARGARET KILGALLEN SLOE, 1998 Color aquatint etching with chine coll, 3534 2434 in. San Jose Museum of Art. Gift of Paulson Press, Berkeley, California.

holds on to her buttocks; a big-lipped woman looks out. Like Kilgallens installations, this work has a carnivalesque and nostalgic quality. Overall, Kilgallens delightful folk aesthetic can be seen as a reaction against the technological boom that appeared to take command in the 1990s.

ART AND CONSUMER CULTURE

The counterculturefrom students defying restrictive university rules or protesting the war in Southeast Asia, to hippies making love in the park, to punk artists trashing artistic standardswas directed against established authority. Dissenters all, they challenged the American way of life and its economic foundation. An extravagant consumer culture has long been an essential part of the American economy. Already in the late nineteenth century, soon after Mark Twain dened the Gilded Age, the economist Thorstein Veblen analyzed the excessive and wasteful con118

sumption by the leisure class and coined the term conspicuous consumption for the egregious use of luxury goods and services to indicate elite status.55 By the mid-twentieth century, the capitalist economy, which had for a long time determined mass production, magnied mass consumption. Advertising served not so much to call attention to a product as to promote consumption, especially since many products rapidly became obsolete. For some time it was sports that had served to divert the populus from real economic and social issues. Now consumption could serve a similar function. It was promoted to ll a void in almost all aspects of a persons life. The sociologist Daniel Bell wrote in 1976: Despite some continuing use of the language of the Protestant ethic, the fact was that by the 1950s American culture had become primarily hedonistic, concerned with play, fun, display and pleasureand, typical of things in America, in a compulsive way.56 Twelve years later Jean Baudrillard suggested that all life is massaged, climate controlled into the simple activity of perpetual shopping.57 In Arthur Millers play The Price (1968) the old furniture dealer Gregory Solomon complains that Years ago a person, he was unhappy, didnt know what to do with himselfhed go to church, start a revolution something. Today youre unhappy? Cant gure it out? What is the solution? Go shopping.58 The mall has become the central gathering place for the youth to hang out. The American family, once the center of production, has become the center of consumption. After the terrible catastrophe of September 11, 2001, New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, speaking on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, said, I encourage people from all over the country who want to help. I have a great way of helping. Come here and spend money.59 Spend, spend, spend. Wal-Mart, a retail business, has now emerged as the successor to General Motors as the leading corporation in the United States and even the world, with $258 billion in revenues in 2003. As Simon Head has pointed out in the New York Review of Books, however, the phenomenal success of

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this leviathan of consumption has come at a price: The exploitation of the working poor is now central to the business strategy favored by Americas most powerful and, by some criteria, most successful corporation.60 The abundance that is characteristic of American consumer culture was the primary source material for Pop Art, which originated in Britain in the postwar period. After years of war and postwar rationing, young English artists, such as Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, looked with sheer amazement at the ads in slick American magazines, at technical journals and comic books. They were captivated by what the art critic Lawrence Alloway called the aesthetics of plenty, which the architecture critic Reyner Banham referred to as the aesthetics of expendability. Whereas the English artists were by no means enthusiastic about what they saw coming from Hollywood, Detroit, and Madison Avenue, their American counterparts seemed to accept it all with glee. For their subjects Pop artists chose objects from consumer culture such as billboards, comic strips, girlie pinups, and, above all, edibles and drinkables. They also tended to use techniques found in commercial art, such as airbrushing, silkscreen reproduction, and benday dots. Their serial imagery related to the industrial assembly line, and the distinction between high and low art blurred. What Walter Benjamin referred to as the aura of a work made by the artists hand indeed gave way to mechanical reproduction. Unlike previous movements in modern art, which took time to nd acceptance, Pop art achieved popularity almost at once. During the postwar prosperity of the 1950s, art became a commodity depicting commodities. The German painters Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter called it Capitalist Realism, in distinction to the Socialist Realism practiced in Eastern Europe. An exhibition of West Coast Pop Art was curated by Lawrence Alloway at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1963. Called Six More, it comprised the work of Billy Al Bengston, Joe Goode, Phillip Hefferton, Mel Ramos, Ed Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud.

The least-known artist of the group, Hefferton, produced work that was undeniably critical of established values, even though he painted another sort of valuethe dollar.
Money

Phillip Hefferton (b. 1933) grew up in Michigan, played the sax-trombone, and painted in the Abstract Expressionist mode before he turned to depicting dollar bills. Like his fellow artist Robert Dowd, he used a painterly brushstroke, which accentuated the exaggerated size of his depictions (ve and a half feet across in a typical Hefferton painting). Painting money belongs to a tradition in American art that goes back to Raphaelle Peales A Deception, painted in 1802. William Michael Harnett and John Haberle produced trompe loeil paintings of American currency that deceived viewers with their versimilitude. Alfred Frankenstein, in his catalogue The Reality of Appearance, noted, With all the counterfeiting, providing this

PHILLIP HEFFERTON SINKING GEORGE, 1962 Oil on canvas, 90 12 68 14 in. The Menil Collection, Houston; Gift of Betty and Monte Factor. Photo: Neal Sacharow.

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PETER SAUL RONALD REAGAN II, 1984 Acrylic and oil on canvas, 84 72 in. Private collection. Image courtesy of George Adams Gallery, New York.

trompe loeil depiction was actually against the law of the time, but Haberle enjoyed acting against the law.61 Almost a century later, in 1962, Andy Warhol produced a number of silkscreens on the theme of dollar bills. The following year Larry Rivers painted French Money. Robert Morris and Les Levine made conceptual pieces about money, and in 1969 Ed Kienholz (see pp. 9496) contrived Conceptual Tableaux: on identical pieces of paper he stamped amounts, ranging from $1 to $998, which priced the artwork. It certainly confused both the primary and secondary art markets. Heffertons currency appeared in various denominations, as indicated by his titles: Winkin Lincoln countercultural trends

(1963), Big G. (1963), and Sinking George (1962). In the latter the dollar bills portrait of the rst president is sinking into the ocean, while a small boat, ying the Stars and Stripes, sails on the dark sea above. Rather than our grabbing the president, the president grabs our money in Peter Sauls Ronald Reagan II (1984).62 Saul (see p. 53), who left San Francisco in 1975 and has been teaching at the University of Texas since 1981, has by no means tamed his erce accusations of the American establishment. The outrageous portrait of Americas fortieth president in Ronald Reagan II violates just about every taboo. With a Day-Glo red face and wild eyes, the president greedily devours a sandwich of ve-dollar bills, his equally red hand gripping the toast. The art historian Robert Storr, a champion of abstraction and Minimalism, has written admiringly of Sauls recalcitrant work: Modernism can endure Peter. In fact, it needs him. Badly. After all, I think of the gargoyles on the cathedrals, the grotesques on the pews, and the devils in the prayer books.63 Money, as F. Scott Fitzgerald avowed in The Great Gatsby, is the Great American Dream. In 1998 Kathryn Spence displayed a huge stack of it and simply called it Money Pile. Born in 1963 in Stuttgart, Germany, of American parents, Spence grew up in Colorado and earned an MFA at Mills College in Oakland. She came to public attention by making art out of trash, including pigeons made largely of street debris and mud animals built up from pieces of discarded bathrobes, newspaper magazines, and what she called grunge and then covered with hand-sculpted mud, giving them a weighty character. Slumpy and cuddly, these mud creatures sit on the oor, acquiring a human quality: they look fragile, helpless, as if they had just been scolded. For her phantom Money Pile, Spence used similar refuse materials with the addition of coupons, receipts, play money, and photocopied money. The faux money is neatly stacked and tied into orderly bundles. According to Spence, this piece came out of the physical experience of feeling a wad of one dollar bills in my front apron pocket while waitressing.

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KATHRYN SPENCE MONEY PILE, 1998 Mixed media, newspaper, string, 17 18 21 in. Oakland Museum of California, Gift of the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation. Photo: M. Lee Fatherree.

RAY BELDNER ALL YOU NEED (AFTER ROBERT INDIANAS LOVE, 1966), 2002 Sewn U.S. currency, 12 12 6 in. Courtesy of Ron Casentini, the artist, and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

It became about the process of keeping faith that what I was doing has meaning and seriousness collecting a few dollars at each table to pay for my real job cutting out fake money when I got home.64 It took a great deal of time and energy to accumulate and assemble all this trash into a faux money pilea comment on a society for which the acquisition of money is primary. Where does the value lie? What are we hoarding so carefully? Perhaps, as the art critic Dave Hickey put it, When you trade a piece of green paper with a picture on it, signed by a bureaucrat, for a piece of white paper with a picture on it, signed by an artist, you havent bought anything, since neither piece of paper is worth anything.65 Questions about the value of money/art become explicit in the work of Ray Beldner. Born in San Francisco in 1961 and educated at the San Francisco Art Institute and Mills College, Beldner has created installations, sculptures, and paintings dealing with varied themes, from human control and consumption of the landscape to art as a background for pornographic images (sex deleted). In 1998 he began his Counterfeit series, replicating art from the modern canon with actual dollar bills transforming, for example, Marcel Duchamps Foun-

tain (1917) into Peelavie (1988), Robert Motherwells Elegy for the Spanish Republic (1958) into For a Song (2000), Jasper Johnss Three Flags (1958) into Three More Flags (2000), Claes Oldenburgs Soft Toilet (1966) into Down the Toilet (2000), and Robert Indianas Love (1966) into All You Need (2002). The replicas, exact in size and dimension, are rather startling. Instead of using currency to buy the art, Beldner uses real money to fabricate the artwork, leaving no doubt that art is money.
Food

Food and the plethora of comestibles in consumer culture, a subject that occupied the Pop painters, has also been a dominant subject for California counterculture artists. To be sure, apples and oranges were painted by the Bay Area Figurative artists, by David Park and Richard Diebenkorn, by Paul Wonner and Joan Brown, but their vigorous gestural brushstrokes notwithstanding, they continued a traditional approach to the still-life genre. Raimonds Staprans brought forth geometry and poetry, form and light, in his still lifes, and Wayne Thiebaud approached his depictions of pies, cakes, sandwiches, and various confections from a strong formalist pocountercultural trends
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ROBERT ARNESON SMORGI-BOB, THE COOK, 1971 Glazed earthenware, vinyl tablecloth, and wood table, 73 66 53 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase. Estate of Robert Arneson / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo: Lee Fatherree; courtesy of George Adams Gallery, New York, and Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco.

sition, comparable to Giorgio Morandis sensitive paintings of bottles on their shelves. Thiebaud mixed his pigments and applied his brush to emulate the real texture of his pies, in a way to suggest their delectable tastes and to tempt the viewers palate. None of these artists, however, was in any way critical of Americas almost obscene amassment and consumption of edibles. This critique was left to Peter Saul and Robert Arneson (see earlier). While living in Paris and Rome between 1958 and 1964, Saul remembered the accumulation of food in American refrigerators and produced a series of Ice Box paintings. To slices of meat, cakes, milk bottles, soda bottles, and cartons of frozen food, he added hammers and nails, slingshots and axes, body parts and condoms, Donald Duck and a hide-a-bed. All these objects seem to push against each other and tumble and spin in their restricted space: Excess leads to chaos. Arneson shares a deant sarcasm with Saul, with
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whom he spent time talking and drinking beer in the mid-1960s. In 1967 both artists were featured in the Funk show at the University Art Museum in Berkeley. In 1971 Arneson produced the rst of many selfportraits, Smorgi-Bob, the Cook. Different as his works are, most are part of this artists enduring search for identity. How can an outsider, a craftsman who works in the humble medium of clay, a man who lives out there on the coast, nd his way in the art world? Arnesons sense of humor, his ability to poke fun at himself, has helped him achieve work full of personal iconography that also deals with politically charged issues like the catastrophe of nuclear annihilation or the absurdity of overindulgence. Smorgi-Bob is Arneson, the ceramicist as baker. Here he serves a vast smorgasbord of every imaginable kind of food: a turkey, a ham, cakes, cheeses, nger food, and wine. And theres plenty to eat it with: shiny porcelain plates, knives, and forks. The work appears much larger than its actual dimensions because of strong foreshortening in

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one-point perspective, leading directly to the chef at the head of the table, recalling the device used by Leonardo da Vinci in his Last Supper. But everything is white, without color. We may be able to eat all we want, but what will it taste like?
Shopping and Dumping

The poet Kenneth Rexroth spoke of the immense deadly system of false values.66 The artist Barbara Krugers silkscreen I Shop Therefore I Am (1987) encapsulates the manipulation of behavior to serve the prot motive. Kruger, a graphic designer, photographer, installation and video artist, critic, teacher, curator, and political agitator, was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945. Educated at Syracuse University, Parsons School of Design, and the School of Visual Arts in New York, she is basically a New York artist, but during an important gestation period in her career, in the mid-1970s, she taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts and at the University of California, Berkeley. It was there that she began her extensive reading of the Frankfurt School and postmodern criticism by Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. At Parsons Kruger had studied with Diane Arbus, whom she found compelling. When she turned to photography of her own, however, she chose to aim her camera at the unexpected angles of modern buildings instead of odd people. Later she began using photography as a means to unmask late-capitalist consumerism, as in I Shop Therefore I Am. As with many of her stern slogans, the lettering in this image is in Futura bold italic type; the white letters appear on a red card, held out by a hand and thrown into the viewers face. Other political ads by Kruger from the mid- to late 1980s shout Your body is a battleground, We dont need another hero, Its a small world but not if you have to clean it, and How much money do you make? Her agitprop messages, often strongly feminist, appeared on billboards, subway trains, buses, T-shirts, and shopping bags. Using the syntax of the establishment, she attacked it with

reductive messages, butting through all the clutter of visual and verbal oversaturation. Kruger had experience in design and typography. For almost ten years she had worked for Cond Nast, doing layouts for Mademoiselle and serving as head designer of the magazine from the age of twenty-two. Her slogans, well informed by a knowledge of visual and verbal clichs and stereotypes, have helped bring respectability back to typography in art, a status it enjoyed among Futurists, Constructivists, and the Bauhaus earlier in the century. Since about 1990 Kruger has split her time between New York and Los Angeles, where at different times she has taught at CalArts, UCLA, and the University of California, San Diego, where she has been on the faculty since 2002. In the 1990s she began producing large installations, often covering the gallery oor, walls, and ceilings with her verbal-visual messages. Sound adds to the impact of these gesamtkunstwerke. Occasionally she has ventured into other formats, as in Family, her 1997 painted berglass sculpture of Marilyn Monroe, straddling the shoulders of RFK and countercultural trends

BARBARA KRUGER UNTITLED (I SHOP THEREFORE I AM), 1987 Photographic silkscreen on vinyl, 111 113 in. Private collection. Barbara Kruger. Courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

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MARY SNOWDEN BUY, 2001 Painting on board, 44 64 in. Braunstein/ Quay Gallery, San Francisco. Courtesy of the artist.

JFK, with her skirt ying. In the fall of 1999, at her major multimedia retrospective mounted by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art at its Geffen Contemporary wing, it was clear how she takes words and images from advertisements and reveals their manipulative strategies in an art world context.67 Mary Snowden has dealt with issues of consumerism and feminism in a more modest and personal manner. Born in rural Pennsylvania in 1940, Snowden attended Brown University before studying art at the University of California, Berkeley, and later teaching at the nearby California College of Arts and Crafts. In the 1990s she came across some old sales catalogues, cookbooks, and advertisements, along with an old home-economics textbook, and was struck by how the commercial world focuses on selling all kinds of new home appliances to the homemaker. Using these items as documents and introducing comicstrip personae such as Little Orphan Annie, Dagwood Bumstead, and Little Lulu, she ridicules the message that a womans place is in the home. As a feminist, she looks very critically at all the manufacturers messages that promised the postwar woman bliss if she just acquired the right stuff, from the best kitchen cleaner to the proper family car. Her canvases poke

fun at the whole idea of woman as homemaker. Refrigerator Chase (2000), for example, shows us a refrigerator with a funny face and a chef chasing a woman wearing a white apron over her pink dress, who tries to hold him off. The same aproned housewife, accompanied by her husband and draped in the Stars and Stripes, ies jubilantly over a dreary housing tract in Levittown (2001). Young girls, taken from comic strips, admire a display of television sets that show stills of romantic lovers from the latest soap opera in Window Shopping (2002). In the late 1990s and early 2000s Snowden made a series of paintings shaped like jigsaw-puzzle pieces as metaphors for the bewildering and confusing roles women face as they are constantly encouraged to shop and buy. In Buy (2001), for example, Little Orphan Annie brings dollar bills to two smiling salesmen, who have just supplied her with the latest 1950s-model washing machine, stove, vacuum cleaner, and television set, while signs urging Buy are tagged to various parts of the room. What to do with all this bounty? The Environmental Protection Agency reported in 2003 that the average American discards nearly four and a half pounds of solid waste daily, for a total of 236 million tons of waste, nationwide, per year.68 Several artists have, in a variety of modes, addressed the enormous accumulation of junk that deles the Golden State, as it does all industrialized states. Troubled by overconsumption and waste and the resultant environmental degradation, some of these artists have transformed discarded trashbroken glass, inner tubes and tires, carpet scraps, metal objects of all kinds, paper and cardboard, old videos and bottlecapsinto art. In 1994 the Richmond Art Center in Richmond, California, mounted an exhibition of such art called Living in Balance. This was followed in 1998 by a larger and more ambitious exhibition, Hello Again, at the Oakland Museum of California. The piling up of waste on a colossal scale is the distinctive feature of Nancy Rubinss gigantic assemblages. Rubins, who was born in Naples, Texas, in 1952, attended the Maryland Institute College of Art and

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NANCY RUBINS CHAS STAINLESS STEEL, MARK THOMPSONS AIRPLANE PARTS, ABOUT 1,000 POUNDS OF STAINLESS STEEL WIRE, AND GAGOSIANS BEVERLY HILLS SPACE, 2001 Stainless steel and airplane parts, 25 54 33 ft. Shown at MOCA. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, purchased in honor of Beatrice Gersh with funds provided by the Acquisition and Collection Committee; The Broad Art Foundation; Linda and Bob Gersh; David, Susan, Steven, and Laura Gersh; and Eugenio Lopez. Nancy Rubins. Photo: Erich Ansel Koyama.

then went on to the University of California, Davis, where she studied with Funk masters like Robert Arneson, Roy de Forest, and William T. Wiley. In 1983 she settled in Los Angeles, where she discovered Simon Rodias Watts Towers. These fantastic spires, created between 1921 and 1954, were constructed from broken dishes, bottles, shells, and whatever else was available, becoming a unique creation of inspiring power and beauty, a masterpiece of Assemblage, in the words of William Seitz.69 Describing the poetry of assemblage, Seitz asserted that certain artists have brought a truly magical transformation: from banality and ugliness, dispersion and waste, tawdryness and commercialism, they have created challenging, meaning-

ful, and often beautiful objects ordered by principles inseparable from this century.70 Writing in 1953, he was referring to such works as Jean Tinguelys Homage to New York, which destroyed itself in public at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1960, and to Csars compressions of smashed automobiles and John Chamberlains assemblages of rusty car bodies, which looked like Abstract Expressionist sculptures. This tradition of junk sculpture nds new energy in Rubinss sculptures. For her assemblages, some of which have reached fty-ve feet in height, Rubins uses domestic refuse: old mattresses, crushed household appliances, discarded hot-water heaters, and whole mobile homes. countercultural trends
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CHESTER ARNOLD ACCUMULATION, 1998 Oil on linen, 66 88 in. Collection of Katie and Drew Gibson. Photo courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

Rubins gives her gargantuan pieces appropriately massive titles, such as Chas Stainless Steel, Mark Thompsons Airplane Parts, about 1,000 Pounds of Stainless Steel Wire, and Gagosians Beverly Hills Space (2001). For this sculpture, Rubins took crushed airplane parts, which she twisted, dented, and cantilevered to create a work of dynamic buoyancy and great formal power. But at the same time the piece evokes a sense of devastation. Looking at this commanding work, we reect on how much energy was used to construct these airplanes, only to be later discarded. We may even think of the additional nonrenewable energy required to ultimately dispose of all the steel, unless the work remains in its present con126

guration to puzzle the anthropologist of the future about the instruments employed by humans at the turn of the millennium. Piles of refuse from our material culture have been painted with skilled craftsmanship by Chester Arnold. Born in Pasadena, California, in 1952, Arnold grew up in Munich, where he gained a great admiration for the old masters, especially Albrecht Altdorfer and Pieter Brueghel, which may have inspired his care about how a painting is made. He returned to California in 1970, completing his education at the San Francisco Art Institute, but the great masters, from Thodore Gricault and Caspar David Friedrich in the nineteenth century to Max Beckmann and Oskar

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Kokoschka among the moderns, have continued to serve as springboards for his own work. In the 1990s Arnold made ominous paintings of natural catastrophes and human despair. Ascencion Day (1992) shows a man and a boy who have managed to escape a ood by climbing a large oak but are left sitting high up on its branches with no way down. There is also no escape from Ghosts (2000), a reconstruction of Friedrichs famous painting The Wreck of the Hope (1824). In the nineteenth-century painting the sheets of ice and the destruction wrought by the iceberg symbolize the grimness of fate. Mimicking that paintings pyramidal composition, Arnold replaces the shards of ice with his own discarded canvases piling up against the horizon. The vast surfeit of accumulation, stuff and more stuffthats the feeling that comes through in Accumulation (1998), which

depicts everything Arnold has thrown away since his childhood. Kitchen furniture, a ping-pong table, a stuffed dinosaur, a wheelbarrow, shoes, car parts, a canoe, mattresses, a owerpot, a penknife, a skeleton, and an old painting are just some of the items we can make out in this Sears catalogue of waste. Only a splinter of sky is visible above the heap, connoting the chaos of one persons accumulation in half a century of gathering and its ultimate futility. What, then, can we expect in the next half century? In a series of mob scenes made in 2004, Arnold painted crowds of tiny gures, just icks of the brush, lling the canvas from edge to edge, in Abstract Expressionist allover style. The gures raise their right arms in union in a Sieg Heil! salute, recalling a horrendous pastor pointing ahead to a fearful future. More and more, but all the same.

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ON RACISM, DISCRIMINATION, AND IDENTITY POLITICS

CHAPTER 3

living in a democracy, we tend to believe in peoples fundamental rights to equality, life, liberty, participation in government, and political expression as intuitively recognizable. How could anyone argue against such basic human rights? Yet, as history has shown again and again, during World War II, the McCarthy years, and the administration of George W. Bush, these rights can be easily and quickly destroyed. In 1948 the two-year-old United Nations General Assembly, representing close to sixty countries, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Many of this declarations provisions are grounded in the U.S. Constitutions Bill of Rights and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, but the U.N. document extends these protections to all members of the human family. It species the rights to enjoy life, liberty, and security of person (with a specic prohibition against slavery); to be protected against unreasonable search and seizure and to be guaranteed due process; to exercise freedom of thought, con-

science, religion, opinion, expression, and assembly; to participate in ones own government; and to work and to organize to protect workers rights. All these rights, it states, are held by everyone . . . without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. The Constitution of the State of California also expressly protects many of these fundamental rights. Reinforcing the guarantees made by the U.S. Constitution, the California Constitution explicitly states: All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. . . . Every person may freely speak, write and publish his or her sentiments on all subjects . . . [and ] assemble freely to consult for the common good. The California Constitution also species the rights to freedom of religion and equal access to privileges and immunities, and it prohibits the iniction of cruel or unusual punishment, even though California allows the death penalty.
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CHIURA OBATA A SAD PLIGHT, 1942 Sumi on paper, 11 15 34 in. Obata Family Collection.

MATSUSABURO HIBI TOPAZCOYOTES COME OUT OF THE DESERT, 1945 Oil on canvas, 26 22 in. Ibuki Hibi Lee Collection.

But it is one thing to declare these seemingly unambiguous rights and another to make their enjoyment freely available in real life. Asian Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, women, and homosexuals have all had to struggle to obtain such basic rights, challenging discriminatory laws and practices, an arbitrary and brutal justice system, censorship, and the death penalty and other cruel punishments. Artists have joined the protests against the deprivation of fundamental rights and the stigmatizing of minorities (a term still used in California, even though non-Latino whites now form less than half the population).1
THE ASIAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

Remembering the Japanese American Internment

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought about

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laws curtailing the civil rights and liberty of Americans of Japanese descent, even those who were U.S. citizens. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, under pressure from conservative forces on the West Coast, signed Executive Order 9066, targeting western residents of Japanese ancestry as potential enemies and calling for their internment. No such harsh legislation was enacted against persons of German or Italian ancestry anywhere in the country. The exacting rules against the Japanese seem related to the general bias against Asians in California. As a result of Executive Order 9066, more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent, 70,000 of whom were U.S. citizens, were evacuated from seven western states and sent to relocation camps. Chiura Obata (18851975) was among those interned. Born and educated in Tokyo, Obata had emigrated to San Francisco in 1903 and became a successful landscape

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painter, fusing Asian brushwork with Western approaches to produce superb views of Yosemite Valley and other locales. In 1932 he was asked to join the art department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was instrumental in establishing what became known as the California Watercolor School. But his position as a highly regarded teacher and exhibiting artist did not stop him from being imprisoned in 1942 at the Tanforan Assembly Center, a quickly modied racetrack and stable in San Bruno, just outside San Francisco. He organized an art school there, attended by forty percent of the prisoners. When Obata was transferred to the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, he again established an art school, and he recorded the plight of the internees in his own artwork. He corresponded with Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothea Lange about life in the internment camps and made many drawings of the conditions people endured in them. A Sad Plight (1942) includes his own poem (in Japanese), telling of the peoples destitute existence. Obata was released from the camp in 1943 and went back to Berkeley to teach until he retired in 1954. After Obata left Topaz, Matsusaburo (George) Hibi (18861947) took over the direction of its art school. Born in Japan, he had studied law and art in Kyoto before emigrating to the United States via Seattle and settling in San Francisco in 1919. There he registered at the California School of Fine Arts and took classes with the Swiss American landscape painter Gottardo Piazzoni. A founder of the East-West Art Society, Hibi was well known as an animal painter before he was detained and sent rst to Tanforan and then to Topaz. There, working in a style more Western than Japanese, he painted vistas of the relocation center. TopazCoyotes Come Out of the Desert (1945) shows the marauders prowling in the snow at night around the desolate barracks. Upon release from Topaz, Hibi moved to New York, where he exhibited and hoped to make a new start as an artist. His health deteriorated, however, and he died in 1947. His wife, an artist of remarkable talent, Hisako

Hibi (19071991), painted the sorrowful canvas Fetch Coal for the Pot-Belly Stove (1944), which pictures the hard work imposed on the internees. After her release from the Topaz camp and her husbands death, she supported her children through more hard work, sewing dresses, serving as a domestic, and laboring in a factory. She continued painting, however, and returned to California in 1954. Her later works, which at times include Buddhist themes, are high-colored abstractions, frequently incorporating Japanese calligraphy while at the same time relating to contemporary American and European painting. Henry Sugimoto (19001990) also portrayed life in the internment camps. Born in Japan, he immigrated to the United States in 1919. After graduating from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1928, he studied in Paris, showing landscapes indebted to Paul Czanne. In 1933 he had a solo show at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, and later painted in Mexico and Yosemite Valley. After Executive Order 9066 was issued, he and racism, discrimination, identity politics

HISAKO HIBI FETCH COAL FOR THE POT-BELLY STOVE, 1944 Oil on canvas, 20 24 in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Ibuki Hibi Lee.

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HENRY SUGIMOTO WHEN CAN WE GO HOME? 1943 Oil on canvas, 32 12 23 14 in. Japanese American National Museum, Gift of Madeleine Sugimoto and Naomi Tagawa.

his family were taken to the Jerome Relocation Center in the swamplands of southeastern Arkansas. There, living in a minimal shelter, he captured the feeling of disruption caused by internment in paintings such as When Can We Go Home? (1943), which depicts his young daughter stretching out her arms toward her concerned mother. In the lower-left foreground a coiled snake seems poised to strike, while in the background a lightning bolt fractures an internment camp building. Sugimoto also created portraits, one series
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showing young Japanese American men wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army after joining the service from the camps. After his release, Sugimoto too moved to New York, where he took a job creating fabric patterns for a textile company. In his paintings and woodcuts he continued to record his memories of incarceration and to examine the Japanese immigrant experience in America. Isamu Noguchi (19041988) was born in Los Angeles. His father was an eminent Japanese poet and

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writer on art. As a child, Isamu was taken back to Japan, but at the age of thirteen he returned to America. Eventually he became one of the twentieth-centurys foremost sculptors. Outraged by the actions of the U.S. government against Japanese Americans, Noguchi decided to leave New York and voluntarily return to his native California. As a result, he was sent to the Poston Relocation Center in the Arizona desert. He later wrote: With a ash I realized I was no longer the sculptor alone. I was not just an American, but Nisei. . . . I organized a group called Nisei Writers and Artists for Democracy. . . . I willfully became part of humanity uprooted.2 Noguchis act of human engagement is best understood by looking at an early work of stunning power. In 1933 he produced a shocking image of a lynching: a grimly contorted metal gure hangs from a piece of rope, the body imprisoned, seemingly crucied, within a metal framework. Based on a photograph of a lynching, this sculpture was a searing indictment of human hatred and violence. However, the critic Henry McBride, who had written favorably about an earlier exhibition of Noguchis work, could not avoid a racist comment about this gruesome study, calling it just a little Japanese mistake. Deeply offended, Noguchi never forgot this sign of intolerance, quoting it in his autobiography thirty-ve years later.3 Reecting on his internment, Noguchi wrote about the harshness of life in the camps as well as the magnicent Arizona desert with its great heat and cold nights. At one point, when he was asked if he wanted to help plan the landscape at the camp, the sculptor designed a public space with swelling forms and mounted apertures, which he called My Arizona (1943). Like most of his imaginative playground designs, it was never built. Noguchis contact with Japan and its art became increasingly important in his own art. In 1949 he traveled to the land of his ancestors and in time created a personal fusion of East and West. He savored visiting the teahouse of the sixteenth-century tea master Sen no Riky in Kyoto. As Dore Ashton stated, Rikys insistence on the minimum of ostentation in decora-

tive detail pleased Noguchi, who had absorbed similar principles in the studio of Brancusi.4 Ruth Asawa (b. 1926) learned to draw and paint under the instruction of Nisei animators while she was incarcerated as a teenager at the Santa Anita Assembly Center just outside Los Angeles. Later in her career, in the 1980s, she created a sculpture for the Japanese American Internment Memorial at the Robert Peckham Federal Building in San Jose, California, as well as a beautiful memorial waterfall on the campus of San Francisco State University. Howard Ikemoto (b. 1939) recalled the concentration camps in a series of poignant paintings reecting on his own connement at age three at the Tule Lake Relocation Center in Northern California. In addition to immersing himself in the stories relatives and friends told him, he found family photographs and conducted research into the iniquities endured during that time. For him, the paintings were a way of coming to terms with the fact that Americans in-

ISAMU NOGUCHI MY ARIZONA, 1943 Magnasite and plastic, 18 34 18 4 in. The Noguchi Museum, New York. Reproduced with permission of The Noguchi Museum, New York.

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HOWARD IKEMOTO FAMILY NUMBER, 1995 Acrylic and collage, 3012 26 in. Courtesy of Charles Hilger.

terned Americans in concentration camps and with the pain this caused his own family. At an exhibition at the Art Museum of Santa Cruz County in 1996, he showed large paintings depicting the camps watchtowers, from which one of his pals was gunned down; his sister, who was fteen at the time; inmates celebrating the Fourth of July as they had done before their incarceration; and the family numbers by which the inmates were identied. In a video about the exhibition, Ikemoto talks about the strong emotional reactions of visitors to the exhibition and how prob134

lems continue for the ethnic minoritiesnow mostly Mexicansin the area. The kind of racism that led to the relocation camps serves as subject matter for Ben Sakoguchi (see p. 56) in How to Tell the Difference (1981). The painting is based on an illustrated article that appeared two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor in an issue of Life magazine with the American ag on its cover. Using pseudo-scientic ndings, similar to the kind of work done by eugenicists in Nazi Germany, it claimed: life here adduces a rule-of-thumb from

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BEN SAKOGUCHI HOW TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE, 1981 Acrylic on canvas, 10 20 in. Courtesy of Ed and Marcia Nunnery.

the anthropometric conformations that distinguish friendly Chinese from enemy alien Japs.5 The article juxtaposed head shots of Ong Wen-hao, minister of economic affairs in Chungking in northern China, and General Hideki Tojo, the Japanese prime minister, with careful notations suggesting the racial inferiority of the Japanese in comparison with the Chinese, who were ghting on the American side.
From Exclusion to Inclusion

The internment of Japanese Americans arose from a long history of discrimination against all Asian immigrants to the United States. In the late nineteenth century Chinese workers were recruited to build the railroads of California (which they referred to as Gold Mountain), but they were not permitted to bring their families with them. After the railroads had been built and extra workers were no longer needed, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in response to fears that Chinese immigrants would be willing to work for lower wages and take jobs from American workers. People spoke of the yellow peril and eugenicists declared Asians an inferior race. In 1913 the Alien Land Law excluded Asian immigrants

and other noncitizens from owning property and limited them to menial jobs. Not considered a threat to the labor market, artists of Asian descent were still able to exhibit and even sell their work in California institutions, as long as it could be categorized and racialized as Oriental and patronized as being exotic. The artists themselves began to form their own organizations, such as the Chinese Revolutionary Artists Club, founded in San Francisco in 1926, followed by the less political Chinese American Art Association, established in Los Angeles in 1935. Slowly, some Asian American artists were able to cross the boundaries erected around them and enter the mainstream. Chiura Obata (see above) was appointed to the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, and Dong Kingmans picturesque watercolors enjoyed great popularity. Asian American artists, much like artists in those Asian and African countries in which colonialism created a break with traditional cultures, faced a dilemma: Should they replicate the art of their patrimony or borrow from the prevalent modernist styles? The debate between traditional and modern, East and West, was foregrounded among artists from Asian cultures, racism, discrimination, identity politics
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CARLOS VILLA FIRST COAT, CLOSED AND OPEN VIEWS, 1977 Acrylic on canvas with taffeta lining and feathers; pouch on lining contains sperm, blood, hair, teeth, and spit; 67 67 12 in. (without feathers). Courtesy of Erin GoodwinGuerrero.

where appropriation of older art was considered not only legitimate, but, when done with great skill, even laudable. In due time some artists would conate traditional Asian practices with contemporary idioms, often by including autobiographical references. During the past forty years, art by Asian Americans, like that of other ethnic minorities, has significantly contributed to the ever-changing fabric of American art. In part this greater impact arises from the increase in the Asian American population with the easing of restrictive immigration quotas during the Johnson administration and the inux of Asian immigrants after the end of the Vietnam War. In addition, the civil rights movement helped demarginalize Asian American culture. As we have seen, Asian American artists like Hung Liu, Ben Sakoguchi, Long Nguyen, and Dinh Q. L have been at the forefront of artists offering critical perspectives on such issues as war and violence, especially as these issues affect human rights (see chapter 1). Other Asian American artists and organizations like the Kearny Street Workshop (founded in 1972 in San Francisco) have called attention to notions of difference and diversity, underlining what it means to be of both Asian descent and American. One such artist is Carlos Villa (b. 1936), who is also a provocative teacher and a political activist. Born in San Francisco of poor Filipino immigrants, he went to Lowell, the citys premier secondary school, where he was inuenced by the teacher Leo Vallador, a painter of geometric abstractions who was Villas cousin. After serving in the U.S. Army in Korea, Villa attended the California School of Fine Arts, studying with Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell, and Manuel Neri and joining a close-knit community that included fellow students Joan Brown, Robert Hudson, and William T. Wiley. Villa nished his education under Ralph Ducasse at Mills College in 1963 and then lived in New York for several years. In 1968 Villa returned to San Francisco and soon began fabricating ceremonial pieces that drew on Filipino and other Oceanic cultures, as well as Native American and African art and his own personal his-

tory. In order to create seeming artifacts of shamanistic rituals, he conducted anthropological research on early cultures and looked into his own cultural roots. Taking feathers, fabric, twine, paper pulp, glass, bones, teeth, and hair, he blended these materials into assemblage garments (often mantles or capes), which he then painted in acrylic. His First Coat (1977), measured to his own body, has a cruciform shape, which may refer to his Catholic upbringing, as well as to Henri Matisses designs for ecclesiastical vestments at the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, France. Villas mantles are also tributes to Hawaiian feather cloaks. In these remarkable artifacts the artist achieved a fusion of the personal with Christian and totemic pagan culture. Villa moved on to creating ritual performances, inspired by Dogon religious dances, tai chi movements, and his own imagination. He also made mixed-media installations that explored his identity as a Filipino American artist. In the 1990s he made framed wood doors, on which he suspended fedoras, the hats worn by Manongsunmarried Filipino immigrantswho worked as laborers in this foreign country where they lost their pride and identity, as I wrote in the catalogue accompanying a 1997 exhibition of these works. The doors are not the open doors to the Land of Opportunity, but they are closed, black, and resemble open cofns. They serve as reminders of Villas heritage, but also of dreams, hopes, oppression, anxieties, and death.6 Deeply concerned about the place of artists from all ethnic backgrounds, Villa organized a three-year multicultural project and a series of symposia on this subject at the San Francisco Art Institute, which were published as an important sourcebook in 1994.7 For a number of Asian American artists, particularly those who came as refugees from the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the immigrant experience, the sense of being between cultures, serves as potent subject matter. Yong Soon Min, born in Seoul in 1953, was brought by her parents to America at the age of seven. She earned an MFA from the University of racism, discrimination, identity politics
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YONG SOON MIN DEFINING MOMENTS (NO. 4 OF 6), 1992 Gelatin silver print, 20 16 in. Courtesy of the artist.

California, Berkeley, in 1979; lived in New York for several years; and now serves as the chair of the department of studio art at the University of California, Irvine. Her work consists mostly of installations that deal with issues of colonization, war, cultural identity, feminism, global politics, and her own body. In Dening Moments (1992), a six-part photographic ensemble, Min conates crucial moments in Korean history with her own life by etching signicant dates and words on photographs of her body. The rst image presents this commingled history through a series of dates spiraling out of her belly. The chain begins with 1953, the year of Mins birth, which coincided with the end of the Korean War. We then encounter 4/19/60, the date of the popular uprising that overthrew Syngman Rhees dictatorship, which made it possible for Mins family to leave the country; then 5/19/80, the date of the Kwangju rebellion and massacre, in which many students were killedan experience that politicized the young Min; and nally 4/29/92, Mins birthday, the date riots in Central Los Angeles destroyed much of Koreatown, and the date that motivated her to produce Dening Moments. In the same image, we see the word heartland written across Mins chest and occupied territory on her arms. Other images in this series present just her head and shouldersagain with the word heartland on her chest and the letters dmz (for demilitarized zone) etched on her forehead. In each a different image covers Mins torso: U.S. soldiers making their way across Korean rice paddies; Korean soldiers advancing on students during the Kwangju rebellion; a view of Mount Baektu, the legendary birthplace of the Korean people, located in what is now North Korea. Dening Moments literally embodies Mins personal trauma about the separation of the Korean people and her hope for unication. In her poignant installation DMZ XING (1994), Min worked with etched and mirrored glass, steel grating, blinking red lights, and color photos. Commissioned by Real Art Wars in Hartford, Connecticut, this piece evolved from interviews with South138

east Asian refugee families like her own. The result is an eloquent photo documentation about the parallels and intersections between the histories and legacies of the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Cold Wars that the United States lost.8 Mins installation Bridge of No Returns (1997) visualizes geography and history. It consists of a permeable wall/fence, made of aluminum and wood and shaped in an S curve, which resembles the yin/yang symbol at the center of the Korean ag. The title refers to a bridge at the thirty-eighth parallel, where a prisoner exchange occurred at the end of the Korean War. Each soldier was given an irreversible choice of returning to either South or North Korea. The bridge was then closed and guarded on both sides. For her installation, Min covered the sides of a fence with magnets displaying words that refer to the cruelty of the division. She has commented: To me this bridge has come to epitomize the absurd, yet undeniable reality of divisionsgeopolitical, ideological, cultural,

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et al.which render border crossing hazardous, even an oxymoron.9 Like Yong Soon Min (with whom she was friends), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (19511982) left Korea as a child. After spending two years in Hawaii, she came with her family to San Francisco at age thirteen. She went to Catholic school, studied the classics, then enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a degree in comparative literature before immersing herself in the study and practice of art. Language and art were to be fused in her work as a conceptual artist. At the University Art Museum in Berkeley she saw exhibitions of conceptual artists such as Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Lynn Hershman, Tom Marioni, and Linda Montano; at the Pacic Film Archive, where she worked, she grew interested in the cinema of Marguerite Dumas, Jean-Luc Godard, and Alain Resnais. Among the writers she read, Stphane Mallarm and Samuel Beckett found the greatest echo in her work. While still a graduate student, in 1975, Cha performed Aveugle Voix. She appeared with a headband marked voix (voice) tied over her eyes and another band, marked aveugle (blind), covering her mouth. She then unrolled a scroll that read, line for line: aveugle / voix / sans / mot / sans / me (blind voice, without word, without me). Or these words could be read in reverse. In addition, there were the words on her headan almost innite play with words seemed possible. Did she mean me without word or word without me? Blind without a voice or a voice that is blind? And what about her female body with its long, black hair (so often associated with Asian women)? Image, language, the artists self were all interlaced and made to shift. This early work is paradigmatic of Chas other performance pieces, which often combined slide projections, her own voice, and herself as the performer. Versed in deconstruction theory and uent in Korean, English, and French, she played with words, questioning and deconstructing their meanings in a variety of media, including video and lm. In 1982 she published her book Dictea hybrid, written as

THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA AVEUGLE VOIX, 1975 Performance still (detail), 90 12 6 34 in. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation.

a dictation, an exercise, in English, French, Latin, and Korean.10 Combining personal and family history with a re-visioning of Korean history, it includes poetry and suggestions for a lm script, as well as multiple voices. The Greek Muses, Saint Thrse, Joan of Arc, and Korean heroes all make appearances. At times the references are quite specic, especially in relation to the articial division of Korea. Cha tells of the Korean War and the arbitrary and externally imposed separation of the peninsula as a result. The Melpomene/Tragedy section begins not with narration, but a simple map showing North Korea and South Korea, divided by the DMZ.11 Overall, however, Cha writes in an elusive voice, using repetition and fragmented recitation. She leaves it to the reader to assimilate the language: It should be understood that the liberated voice will necessarily confront, disturb, demand that listeners even alter ways of hearing and being.12 Hanh Thi Pham, like Yong Soon Min and Theresa racism, discrimination, identity politics
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HANH THI PHAM EXPATRIATE CONSCIOUSNESS #9 (KHNG L NGUOI O), 199192 Chromogenic development print, composed verses, 10 6 ft. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Fujimoto Kempachi.

Hak Kyung Cha, came to California as a refugee from Asia. She was born in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in 1954, the year the French colonizers were expelled, and left the country in 1975, the year the American invaders were forced out. The evacuation was a painful experience for the young woman, who later wrote, I had to surrender my given name, my real birth date, and my original identity to comply with set requirements dictated by the United States governments
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overseas policy regarding Vietnamese evacuees. The experience was like a death sentence upon me, for I was uprooted and forced into self-erasure.13 Pham, who received an MA from California State University, Fullerton, in 1982, produces poignant, semiautobiographical work that often deals with memories of her ight and her search for and establishment of self-identity. In 1995, working with the sculptor Richard Turner, she produced the installation

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Along the Street of Knives, which consisted of color photographs that examined her childhood memories and her sense of displacement. In Expatriate Consciousness (199192) she offers a grand collage of photographs, conating personal history with references to her lost homeland and her lesbian sexuality. The images include archival family photographs, as well as a drawing of Buffalo Bill Cody, who represents American westward expansion, the manifest destiny that eventually, on the road to Empire, led American troops across the Pacic to the failed mission in Vietnam. Signicantly, Buffalo Bill is shown upside down and crossed out. Dominating the picture is a photograph of Hanh Thi Pham herself, bare-breasted and exing her arm above Buffalo Bill in a gesture of strength and anger. Here she presents herself as proud of being an outsider: both as an immigrant and as a lesbian. Lesbian Precepts (1992) also claims her Asian lesbian identity by showing us her naked body in the Buddhist lotus position, with her hands in mudra-like gestures. Pham summarizes her political concerns:
As an activist artist, I continue to construct Lesbianspecic imageries (sexual and non-sexual) and to explore metamorphic Asian identities; I am organizing my collaborative work to become even more brutally honest, more inammatory when need be, and all the more blatant to bring about change. I personally believe that the future is to be reshaped most likely by outlaw leadershipby aware, autonomous beingsmany marginalized femmes who along with their brothers and sisters have formed revolutionary roots throughout North America.14

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

The Rebellion of the Black Panthers

In the 1950s and 1960s, almost a century after the Civil War, after enduring years of Jim Crow laws, legal segregation, organized lynchings, and dire poverty, African Americans rose up in large numbers and succeeded in confronting the prevailing order. With

economic boycotts, street demonstrations, marches, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and other mobilizations, as well as many courageous personal acts, they disrupted the system that had kept blacks in their place. Rosa Parkss refusal to give up her bus seat in Birmingham, Alabama; Martin Luther King Jr.s march on Washington, D.C.; the Mississippi Summer Projects registering of black voters in the face of violence; the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964all marked an upsurge directed at bringing about a more equitable society. Although most of these landmark civil rights actions took place in the South, they affected Californians, helping to inspire the free speech movement (see chapter 2) and Csar Chvez and his United Farm Workers (see below). Civil rights in California gained national attention when persistent discrimination led to an uprising in 1965 in Los Angeles, the so-called Watts riots, in which thirty-four people (mostly African American) died and parts of the city burned. Some leaders in the black community began to lose faith in Kings nonviolent actions, and new voices called for Black Power. King himself widened his message from integration to a deeper concern for poverty and a strong condemnation of the war in Vietnam. (It was while planning the Poor Peoples March on Washington in 1968 that King was assassinated.) In 1966 a radical organization, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was founded in Oakland by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, both college students at the time. They espoused revolutionary activities as a means for black liberation and, citing a California law that permitted carrying guns in the open, formed armed patrols to curb police brutality against the black community. They were joined by Eldridge Cleaver, author of Soul on Ice and the 1968 presidential candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party, and Emory Douglas, who as the Black Panther minister of culture produced revolutionary posters. The Black Panthers developed a broad following through community programs offering free food, education, and medical aid, while continuing to confront the police. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover responded racism, discrimination, identity politics
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GENE ANTHONY BLACK PANTHER OFFICE SHOT UP BY OAKLAND POLICE, 1968 Gelatin silver print. Gene Anthony.

by organizing a campaign of inltration and repression against the Black Panthers, leading to the killing of a number of Black Panther leaders. The activities of the Black Panthers have come down to us largely by means of photography. Documentary photographers are engaged witnesses, using their eyes and lens to reveal the truth as each experiences it. Ever since Lewis Hine used photography to help enact child labor legislation, many cogent documentary photographers have expressed their personal concerns in the way they present social and political events. Like all art, photography is a matter of individual perception. A ne documentary photograph tells us not only This is what happened, but also This is what I think, or This is what is important. The photograph gains its power from the photographers commitment to what he or she is photographing. As the Brazilian photographer Sebastio Salgado has put it, The picture is not made by the
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photographer, [whether] the picture is more . . . or less good [is a] function of the relationship that you have with the people you photograph.15 The photograph also gains power by isolating and preserving a particular moment in time. As Marshall McLuhan argued, The medium is the message, and still photography, unlike television, which is ephemeral, freezes the event, making it more memorable. One photojournalist who always seemed to be on the spot during newsworthy events in the 1960s was Gene Anthony (see pp. 1078), who had studied with Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange at the San Francisco Art Institute. One of those occasions was an attack on Black Panther headquarters by members of the Oakland police in 1968. The previous year Huey Newton had been arrested and indicted for killing a white police ofcer during a shootout in Oakland, but the case was by no means clear-cut, and Newton was convicted of manslaughter instead of murder. In the

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JEFFREY BLANKFORT BOBBY SEALE SPEAKS TO FREE HUEY NEWTON, ALAMEDA COUNTY COURTHOUSE, 1967 Gelatin silver print. Jeffrey Blankfort, 1967.

MICHELLE VIGNES IN FRONT OF ALAMEDA COURTHOUSE, 1967 Gelatin silver print. Michelle Vignes. Courtesy Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

attack recorded by Anthony, police ofcers, irate that Newton had been spared the death penalty, red guns at a photograph of him symbolically seated in a great wicker throne, holding an African spear and a rie. Anthonys innovative photograph, taken at very close range with a wide-angle extension lens, clearly shows the bullet hole in the window, with the surrounding political posters providing commentary. During Newtons initial imprisonment, a Free Huey movement galvanized African Americans, and numerous demonstrations were organized in Oakland and elsewhere. Jeffrey Blankfort, Pirkle Jones, Stephen Shames, and Michelle Vignes documented some of these events in compelling photographs. In 1967 Blankfort (b. 1934)a photojournalist who also covered the Berkeley free speech protests, the antiwar marches, and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago for the muckraking magazine Rampartscaught Bobby Seale thrusting out his

right arm in a gesture of powerful deance as he defended his coleader, Newton. A few months later Vignes (see p. 106) covered a more disciplined demonstration at the Alameda County courthouse in Oakland. In a picture of formal precision and visual clarity, she shows three men wearing the Black Panther uniform (leather jackets and black berets) and waving a Free Huey banner. Before focusing her lens on the Black Panthers and later the American Indian movement, Vignes had belonged to the Magnum photo agency in Paris, where she had worked closely with Henri Cartier-Bresson, and then had served as photo editor for UNESCO and as an international press photographer. Although internal disputes and the violent FBI campaign against them would bring an end to the party, during the late 1960s the Black Panthers were arguably the most inuential revolutionary organization in the country. Without question, their asserracism, discrimination, identity politics
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NACIO JAN BROWN SAN FRANCISCO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS, 1968 Gelatin silver print. Nacio Jan Brown.

tion of political power served to raise ethnic pride among the black population. This kind of pride is eloquently portrayed in a photograph of two San Francisco high school students by Nacio Jan Brown (see pp. 4143), who worked largely for the Bay Area underground press, documenting major antiwar and civil rights activities. The Black Panthers were instrumental in exposing police brutality, and their legacy can be seen in a recent case of wrongful imprisonment. In 2002 Rigo made a huge mural in San Francisco in recognition of Robert Hilary King, who became a member of the Black Panther Party after he was convicted of a crime he did not commit. Rigo (born Ricardo Gouveia in 1966) came to San Francisco from Portugals Madeira Islands and studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and Stanford University. He became known for his paintings of Native Americans in which he used pushpins to create his images, for his ink-jet paintings scanned from drawings, and for his gigantic murals. Rigo was deeply disturbed by the fate of Robert King, who was wrongly convicted of armed
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robbery and spent twenty-nine years in solitary connement in the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, a place that has been described as a plantation, with the prisoners as slave laborers. When he was nally released in 2001, he went on a speaking tour, which brought him to San Francisco. Mayor Willie Brown issued a proclamation praising King for the way he had dedicated his life to the struggle for equality between the races and to the struggle for the advancement of civil rights in the United States. Mayor Brown also dedicated Rigos mural Truth, created in honor of King and to celebrate truth prevailing after so many years of hardship and wrongful imprisonment.16
Afrming African American Identity and Calling for Justice

Of course, many African Americans afrmed pride in their heritage well before the Black Panthers. In California black artists established the Watts Towers Art Center, reaching out to the community after the 1965 riots. The yearly Watts Summer Festivals, initi-

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ated in 1966, included artwork, often with a political thrust, by Alonzo Davis, John Outterbridge, John Riddle, and many others. The black-owned Brockman Gallery opened in Los Angeles, followed by the Heritage Gallery and the Alitash Kebede Gallery. In 1968 Cecil Fergerson and Claude Booker organized the Black Arts Council at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, demanding the inclusion of African American art in the museum. In the same year Raymond Saunders, Russel Gordon, and this books author formed a special Committee for the Acquisition of African American Art at the University Art Museum at Berkeley. In 1981 the California African American Museum was founded in Los Angeles, operating in temporary quarters at the California Museum of Science and Industry until 1984, at the time of the Olympics, when it moved to its present site, a new building designed by African American architects Jack Haywood and Vince Proby. An important advocate for African American artists, as well as various sociopolitical causes, was Noah Purifoy (19172004), who served as the founding director of the Watts Towers Art Center. Born in a small Alabama town, he attended Alabama State Teachers College in Montgomery and worked as a social worker and high school teacher before earning a degree from the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1956. In 1966 he completed the large assemblage Watts Riot, consisting of charred wood and other debris collected in the wake of the uprising. It is a celebration of destruction. Arthur Secunda, reviewing it at the time, postulated: If there is a breath of fresh air in smog-lled Los Angeles, it is somewhere in Watts today. In the same article Purifoy is quoted: Art itself is of little value if it . . . does not effect change. We mean a change in the thought and behavior of human beings and not in the physical appearance of things.17 Purifoy continued to make assemblages, many of them of weighty metals, in his studio in Joshua Tree, in Californias desert, where he lived in his later years and where his work is permanently installed. Noah Purifoys work, with its political thrust, had a ma-

NOAH PURIFOY WATTS RIOT, 1966 Mixed-media assemblage, 52 37 in. Collection of California African American Foundation. Courtesy of California African American Museum. Noah Purifoy Foundation.

jor impact on younger California artists, especially Betye Saar and David Hammons (see below). Belonging to the same generation as Purifoy, Charles White (19181979) came to California from Chicago in 1959 and spent the last twenty years of his productive life in Los Angeles. Born to a povertystricken family, he displayed great artistic talent as a child and gained admission to the Art Institute of Chicago after having been refused by several other institutions on racial grounds. Along with other African American painters, like Aaron Douglas, White participated in the mural project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). These painters were convinced that artists, especially black artists, had a responsibility to further the emancipation of the oppressed African American minority. Later, fusing social realism with modernist devices, White painted a very large mural for the Hampton Institute in Virginia, The racism, discrimination, identity politics
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CHARLES WHITE BIRMINGHAM TOTEM, 1964 Ink and charcoal on paper, 71 716 40 116 in. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Purchase with funds from Edith G. and Philip A. Rhodes and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America (1943), which traced the history of black Americans from the American Revolution to Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson. He also produced a series of prints on black history, portraying such heroes as Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth. In 1946 White went to Mexico for a year and worked at the Taller de Grca Popular, a political printmaking workshop. In 1949 he moved to New York and, like many of his friends, from the writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright to the painters Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, became deeply
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concerned with social, political, and economic problems. He worked for the Daily Worker and Masses and Mainstream, making compassionate drawings, lithographs, and etchings. He also visited Socialist countries such as the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union, where his work was well received. In the mid-1950s White moved to California, and in 1965 he began teaching at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he inuenced many young artists. In a period when many artists have deserted reality for various schools of nonobjectivity and abstraction, White has continued to work for broader horizons of human expression and the exploration of deeper dimensions of truth and reality, wrote Whites friend Harry Belafonte.18 In response to the 1963 killing of four black children in a church in Birmingham, Alabama, by a segregationist mob, White produced a large drawing, Birmingham Totem (1964). The totem shows a naked black boy under a large shroud on top of a very tall pyre of wooden sticks. The boy is dangling a plumb line in front of the rubble of the church pews and altars. White went on to make a series of charcoal drawings, JAccuse (1966), which show black men and women of great force and dignity, sometimes battling obstacles like icy weather, often looking directly at the viewer as if to ask, What are you going to do? White later wrote: My work takes shape around images and ideas that are centered within the vortex of a black life experience, a nitty-gritty ghetto experience resulting in contradictory emotions: anguish, hope, love, despair, happiness, faith, lack of faith, dreams. Yet stubbornly holding onto an elusive romantic belief that the people of this land cannot always be insensible to the dictates of justice or deaf to the voice of humanity.19 In 1976 White created a large, simple mural for the Los Angeles Public Library, Mary McLeod Bethune. It shows the early-twentieth-century black educator and activist as a larger-than-life gure, towering protectively over a young boy as he reads a huge book. At their side a guitar player croons:

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I leave you love I leave you hope I leave you faith . . .

In a 1976 interview White explained, I look to the life of my people as the fountainhead of challenging themes and monumental concepts.20 He also discussed how his own work had shifted from more propagandistic paintings toward more objective and universal ones. Continuing in the same tradition of protest art, bringing it from the mid-twentieth century up to the cutting-edge present, is David Hammons, born in 1943 in Springeld, Illinois. Hammons attended various art schools in Los Angeles, but he also studied privately with White, writing later, with admiration, of the unsmiling, agonized faces and expressive hands in Whites work. Hammons, a sculptor, social commentator, and conceptual artist, who has also been described as a magician and philosopher, locates himself somewhere between Marcel Duchamp, Outsider art, and arte povera.21 Hammons was strongly affected by the Black Panther movement and by the trial of the Chicago Eight after the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Having earlier made prints of his own body, he produced Injustice Case (1970), a directtransfer image of Seales body as he was bound and gagged in court during the Chicago Eight trial.22 Parts of the Stars and Stripes decorate the pictures frame, contrasting patriotic bunting with the American justice system. After moving to Harlem in the mid-1970s, Hammons continued to create assemblages and installations with a strong political thrust, dealing with the black experience in America. He became known for his anti-art pieces, using discarded and outlandish materials such as chains, hair, bottles, chicken parts, bricks, trees, basketball hoops, dirt from the streets, and elephant dung to shape his own pointed visual metaphors. In 2003 he exhibited Concerto in Black and Blue, consisting of a large empty dark space that viewers entered with tiny blue ashlights, which cre-

DAVID HAMMONS INJUSTICE CASE, 1970 Body print, margarine, powdered pigment, and U.S. ag, 63 4012 in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum Acquisition Fund. Photo: 2004 Museum Associates/LACMA.

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ROMARE BEARDEN BERKELEYTHE CITY AND ITS PEOPLE, 1973 Collage of paper with paint, ink, and graphite on seven berboard panels, 1212 16 ft. City of Berkeley Council Chambers. City of Berkeley, California, Public Art Collection. Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

ated beams of light that might crisscross with those of other viewers. The experience could evoke a sense of dread or simply nothingness, or it might elicit the feeling of exploring the void, as suggested by Yves Kleins zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility, presented in a vacant space in Paris in 1958. Seven years older than Charles White and one of the foremost American artists of his generation, Romare Bearden (19111988) is usually considered a New York artist, but he created a major piece for the city of Berkeley in California. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bearden grew up in Harlem, in a home that became a hub for such distinguished writers, artists, and musicians as W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and Fats Waller. While studying at New York University, Bearden began publishing political cartoons and took classes at the Art Students League with the German emigr artist George Grosz, known for his political
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works. From the mid-1930s to 1969 Bearden worked as a social worker while creating his art. His early gouaches and watercolors deal with the life of black Americans as well as mythological themes. During the early 1950s he wrote songs for Billie Holiday and Billy Eckstine, among others, but Hannah Arendt encouraged him to return to painting. It was not, however, until the mid-1960s, when he turned to collage, that he came into his own as an artist. In his intricate collages, pieced together with small scraps of paper, mostly cut from magazines, Bearden created evocative metaphors for the often disparate life of African Americans in both southern and northern cities. Earlier in the twentieth century political artists such as Hannah Hch and John Hearteld had used collage and photomontage, but nobody before had given the medium the same quality of human presence. Drawing on jazz and his deep knowledge of Western and African art, Bearden fused these and other inuences

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into compelling works of art. As the novelist Ralph Ellison observed in 1964: In the poetic sense these works give plastic expression to a vision in which the socially grotesque conceals a tragic beauty, and they embody Beardens interrogation of the empirical value of a society which mocks its own ideas through the blindness induced by race. . . . Beardens work is not only an afrmation of his own freedom and responsibility as an individual and an artist, it is an afrmation of the irrelevance of the notion of race as a limiting force in the arts. These are works by a man possessing a rare lucidity of vision.23 In 1971, after the exhibition Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual traveled from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the University Art Museum in Berkeley, Bearden was commissioned to create a mural for the Berkeley City Council chambers.24 This mural, titled BerkeleyThe City and Its People (1973), became Beardens largest collage, measuring ten by sixteen feet, and his premier public work. In its numerous segments, this intricate work reveals Beardens amazing familiarity with the landscape, history, and life of the city, depicting San Francisco Bay and the Bay Bridge, specic buildings, and various groups of people, including students demonstrating against the Vietnam War. At the bottom Bearden placed four overlapping proles in different colors, underlining the citys racial diversity, and this image has since been adopted as the citys logo. On a far different scale is the small assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), which Betye Saar produced at about the same time, addressing racism and the black experience more directly. Born in Los Angeles in 1926, Saar is of mixed African, European, and Native American ancestry. She studied graphic design at UCLA at a time when, she remembers, women of racial minorities were hardly encouraged to become artists. But she was able to watch the Italian immigrant Simon Rodia at work when he built his soaring towers of glass, pottery, and tile in Watts. After seeing a Joseph Cornell exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1968, she began to collect all

BETYE SAAR THE LIBERATION OF AUNT JEMIMA, 1972 Mixed-media assemblage, 11 34 8 2 34 in. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, Purchased with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts (selected by The Committee for the Acquisition of AfroAmerican Art). Photo: Benjamin Blackwell.

kinds of objects herself and create her own boxes, as well as producing window frames lled with random articles. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Saar found assemblage, with its history as a counteraction to purist aesthetics, an appropriate medium for conveying political messages. In The Liberation of Aunt Jemima she appropriated a stereotypical racist image and recontextualized it as art. The manufacturers emblem of good, old humble Aunt Jemima appears in three guises: a stereotyped smiling black mammy holds a mulatto baby in front of a militant Jemima with a broom and pistol in one hand and a rie in the other, while behind a Warhol-like grid of wallpaper shows the advertisers new, more contemporary Aunt Jemima. The central gure stands as an image of black feminist power. (Some twenty years later Faith Ringgold [see p. 151] would make a quilt, Whos Afraid of Aunt Jemima?, that depicts Aunt Jemima as a female survivor and woman of racism, discrimination, identity politics
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ROBERT COLESCOTT SCHOOL DAYS, 1988 Acrylic on canvas, 90 114 in. Denver Art Museum Collection: Funds from NBT Foundation, 1991.56. Courtesy of the artist and the Phyllis Kind Gallery.

strength, with a large family and a long narrative.) Saar continued to create boxed assemblages that paid tribute to black womens strength, including a thoughtful memorial to the jazz singer Bessie Smith (1975). In 1975 she became the third black woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Fascinated by ritual, the occult, mysticism, and ancient cultures, and inspired by trips to Mexico, Haiti, and Nigeria, Betye Saar expanded her scale to create ceremonial altars, at times also using sound and light for poetic environments, and then returned to assemblages of long-discarded photographs. In contrast to her earlier pieces, which tend to be more didactic, her later work is more spiritual, with reverence for ancient folk traditions. Based on history as well as nostalgia, these pieces address slavery and the continuation of racism in an attempt to penetrate visually into the essence of black American culture. Alison Saar (b. 1956), Betye Saars daughter, also turned to assemblage after graduating from Otis Art Institute. Her mature work, made mostly in New York, focuses on the human body. Inspired by African

and Haitian religion and art, she has produced totems, rootmen, shamans, and fetishes. Her sculptures have a symbolic presence, as in Compton Nocturne (1999), in which an odalisquelike female body, painted black, sprouts branches of empty white bottles from her head. (In black folklore an empty bottle can fend off evil spirits.) A different kind of commentary on African American identity comes from the Oakland-born painter Robert Colescott (see pp. 5354). In the late 1960s he adopted his cartoonlike images, art in line with what Marcia Tucker referred to as Bad Painting in her salient 1978 exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Inuenced by comic strips and Pop Art, Colescotts paintings are sarcastic, irony-lled comments on the black experience. Before the term appropriation became part of art-critical jargon, he appropriated images from Jan van Eyck, Pablo Picasso, Francisco de Goya, Henri Matisse, and Emanuel Leutze, adding his own brand of aggressive humor and replacing the white people in the paintings with caricatured blacks. In George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975, p. 20), we see the famous peanut farmer and botanist in the generals place at the helm of the boat, while stereotyped darkies sh, drink, and gamble in the stern. By subverting accepted values, including art icons, and by questioning the conventional authority of history and traditional art, Colescott makes his viewers consider racist as well as gender platitudes. His big, bawdy paintings exhibit a wicked sense of humor: he comes on like the Lenny Bruce of painting. With a lush palette, Colescott offers his misshapen gures as tragicomic observations of the world in which he resides and the way he experiences it. Although not as forthrightly personal as Philip Gustons haunting late paintings, which were also based on comic strips, Colescotts pictures are implicitly autobiographical narratives. Colescotts colors are often incongruous; he likes to use a distorted perspective, with gures pressing against one another on tilted planes, reminiscent

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FAITH RINGGOLD THE FLAG IS BLEEDING, 1967 Oil on canvas, 72 96 in. Courtesy of the artist. 1967 Faith Ringgold.

of Mannerist paintings. Most of his mature paintings are narrative, but ambiguous in their intention and multilayered, both literally and guratively. In School Days (1988) the central gure is a naked black woman with large breasts and tiny hips. Around her we see football players, a school, a wheateld where a scale weighs a white man against his dollars, and other black women, standing and lying down, including one who echoes the central gures pose with her arms at right angles. On the left a tough guy points his gun at the viewer. Colescott explains: The relationships (about race) are fragmented, and institutional spaces (schools, housing projects) are battlegrounds. But the gun that kills is ultimately pointed at you.25 In 1997 Robert Colescott was chosen to be the sole representative of the United States at the Venice Biennale. A black artist whose work was certainly outside the art historical discourse of the 1990s thus

entered its very centerat least for a short period. Summarizing Colescotts contribution, Miriam Roberts, who curated the exhibition, concluded: In lush compositions of form and color, Colescott reminds us that painting is rst and foremost a sensual experience with the power to set in motion thoughts, emotions, and memories that force us to confront the reality of the world and deepen our sense of what it means to be human.26 Like Colescott, Faith Ringgold (b. 1930) has stories to tell of the black experience, but she comes from a distinctly feminist position. A versatile artist and writer, she was born and bred in Harlem and graduated from the City College of New York, but since 1984 she has split her time between California and New York. Although she was unsuccessful in her attempt to join Spiral, an almost all-male black artists group, she did form connections with other black racism, discrimination, identity politics
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artists in the 1960s. Romare Bearden, observing the semirealist style of her American People Series, suggested that she look at the work of Max Beckmann and other modern German masters, and in 1966 he included her in a group show of African American artists he curated. Soon afterward she had a solo exhibition , in which she showed works about civil rights issues, including the large canvas The Flag Is Bleeding (1967). In this trenchant painting the American ag sheds blood from its stripes, while a young white womanthe peacemakerstands between a black man wielding a knife and a white man in suit and tie who, Ringgold has stated, is armed with guns (concealed in his pockets). During this period a number of artists used images of the Stars and Stripes to protest the war in Vietnam (see chapter 1), but Ringgolds work focuses more pointedly on the issue of racism; when it work was shown in New York, her dealer was arrested for desecration of the ag. During the 1960s and 1970s Ringgold took part in various demonstrations and organized the group Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL). In 1980 she began her signature work, fabricating story quilts that combined high art and folk traditions with texts. Typical is The Bitter Nest, Part 2: Harlem Renaissance (1988), which was based on Ringgolds 1985 performance piece. In the quilt Ringgold tells the story of Cee Cee, a creative young African American woman who dances with joy at a dinner party for the celebrated gures of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1985 Ringgold joined the Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San Diego, and in 1995 she published her memoir We Flew over the Bridge, in which she reects on how race, gender, and cultural politics affected her life as a black artist.27 In her work Ringgold has managed to bridge many gaps: between painting and quiltmaking; between visual art, performance art, and writing; between racial bias and African American achievement. She has produced art that is both uniquely her own and widely accessible to the public.
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Raymond Saunders (b. 1934) may not tell stories directly, as Ringgold does, but his use of collage and gestural painting suggests a narrative about the black experience nonetheless. Saunders studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia as well as the Barnes Foundation (where he had the opportunity to take in European modernism rsthand) and later received degrees from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the California College of Arts and Crafts. Coming of age in the 1950s, he was also inuenced by the intensity of the Abstract Expressionists painterly act, which he transferred to the making of collages. Like Robert Rauschenberg, he came to feel that a fusion of painting and collage would impart a tactile sense of the urban environment, and his works are frequently full of references to the art of the past and the world of the present. Saunders uses anything that comes to handposters, postcards, scraps of material, newspaper clippings, and ticket stubs, as well as his own drawings and calligraphyanything that looks right and also serves his own inclination toward paradox. Preferring to let viewers respond in their own ways, he rarely makes works with overt political meaning. Between 1992 and 1999, however, he made a major collage, Beauty in Darkness, which clearly addresses White/Colored relations (as the signage on the top left insinuates). Earlier, in 1985, the playwright David Mamet, sensing a parallel between his own writing and Saunderss art, noted, with amazing prescience: Our poetry does not rhyme, our doctors cannot cure, our politicians cannot represent, our artists cannot explain. It seems to me obvious that we are in line for a great catastrophe of some sort and that nothing will avert it; that these symptoms are unimportant in themselves and are only the inescapable forewarnings of that which is to come.28 Much more pointed in her commentary is Mildred Howard (b. 1948), whose parents were activists in the radical International Longshoremens and Warehousemens Union in San Francisco, as well as restorers and dealers of antiques. Like many black artists of her generation, Howard focuses on memory and black folk

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culture, and she speaks of Betye Saar as a mentor. She recalls, My early sense of what an artist was, what an artist did, was shaped by a Bay Area art scene hovering between funk and conceptual art, craft and abstraction, surrealism and photographic realism. It was a time when artists made pictures from found objects and odd pieces of junk, where folk artists were worshipped, where natural materials were as common as paint.29 Early in her career Howard collaged color photocopies of sepia-toned old photographs, burned at the edges, with various abandoned materials, and showed these assemblages in storefronts. Later, like David Hammons and Alison Saar, she made direct reference to the African belief that bottle trees have the mysterious power to protect against bad spirits. In Memory Garden (1990) a shack made of four thousand

green bottles refracts and reects light, prompting visitors to ponder and meditate as they are protected from menacing spirits. In 1991, in her installation Ten Little Children Standing in Line . . . one got shot and then there were nine, Howard voiced her opposition to apartheid in South Africa. Here the titles not-soinnocent nursery rhyme reminds us of the gunningdown of black children in Soweto in the summer of 1976. In her solemnization of anger, grief, and mourning, Howard presents us with a large number of opened hands, made of copper using molds that originally served to make rubber gloves, standing upright on wooden sticks. The open palms call attention to the horrible deed, but perhaps they are raised also to protect other children from a similar murder. Arranged around a large cross on the oor, the hands stand in front of a seemingly abstract geometric design, which racism, discrimination, identity politics

RAYMOND SAUNDERS BEAUTY IN DARKNESS, 199299 Mixed-media collage on metal and wood, 95 176 in. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco.

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MILDRED HOWARD TEN LITTLE CHILDREN STANDING IN A LINE . . . ONE GOT SHOT AND THEN THERE WERE NINE, 1991 Mixed-media installation; variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Paule Anglim.

is actually a wall composed from thousands of bullet casings. In a later, poignant work, Line of Fire (1996), Howard places silkscreened cutouts of a regiment of young black U.S. soldiers behind rocks, so they stand there like decoys on which to re. They wear the uniforms of World War I, when, after ghting in Flanders, troops such as this returned to Jim Crow America. In Red (1998) Howard manipulates a photograph of Paul Robeson, printing a red screen across his face, referring to the vilication of the famed singer, actor, football hero, and political activist by anti-Communist zealots. One might compare Mildred Howards powerful installations to Robesons performances, in the way they combine art with acute political awareness. Carrie Mae Weems also directly addresses the issue of racism, as well as class, gender, and identity. Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1953, she began taking documentary photographs in the San Francisco Bay Area while working at different jobs and participating in socialist and feminist actions. As a young adult, she studied with political artists like Allan Sekula at the University of California, San Diego, and became aware of the work of such black photographers as James Van Der Zee and Roy DeCarava, who knew how to use the photograph as a political tool. She then produced a racism, discrimination, identity politics

suite of images, Family Pictures and Stories (198284), dealing with her familys migration from the South to Oregon. Weems returned to the Bay Area to study folklore at the University of California, Berkeley, where the anthropologist Alan Dundes led her to understand that photographs can be constructed as folklore. She abandoned the 35 mm camera, which was suitable for the informality of her early work, for a larger format, and began to use texts in her work, drawing on a tradition that extended from James Agee and Walker Evans to conceptual artists and her contemporaries Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer (and also relating to lm and photonovellas). In her Kitchen Table series (1990) the visual and the verbal are interrelated constructions. The narrative draws on the oral tradition of the disempowered African American people, what Henry Louis Gates refers to as the speakerly text. Consisting of thirteen panels, with single images as well as triptychs, the series deconstructs the clichs of patronizing views of black folks to construct a life story of two individualsa romantic, but very real, narrative. The gures are posed, the props carefully chosen, the lighting painstakingly controlled. A couple sits at a kitchen table, the most familiar place for eating and talking. The cycle tells of their love, their child, and their separation. It deals with issues of power, establishing the woman as the dominant person in the relationship: she is the wage earner, the political activist, the one who instigates the separation. In one panel toward the end of the story, Untitled (Woman Standing Alone), she gazes at the viewer across the table under a glaring hanging lamp, hand on the tables surface, asserting her strength. In later worksSea Islands (199193), Africa (1990 93), Who What When (1998), and Picture Revolution (1998)Weems has created eccentric installations, using allusive texts, furniture, banners, old daguerreotypes, and digital photographs, to explore black lives and problems across various continents at different times in history. In 1992, for an exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York,

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CARRIE MAE WEEMS UNTITLED (WOMAN STANDING ALONE) FROM KITCHEN TABLE SERIES, 1990 Gelatin silver print, 27 14 27 14 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Weems summarized her goals in a plaque placed outside the show: I want to make things that are beautiful, seductive, formally challenging and culturally meaningful. Im also committed to radical social change. . . . Any form of human injustice moves me deeply . . . the battle against all forms of oppression keeps me going and keeps me focused.30
White Artists Standing Against Racism

Just as white activists joined African Americans in the civil rights movement, so too have some white artists taken a stand against racism in America. Irving Petlin (b. 1934), for example, produced a major painting about the Watts riots in 1965. After studying at the Art

Institute in his native Chicago and at Yale University with Josef Albers, he arrived in Los Angeles in the 1960s to teach at UCLA. For the most part his art has rarely turned to overt political statements, responding more to the sensibility and imagination of Odilon Redon, as well as his own personal memories and contemplative fantasy. Petlin has attempted to recapture his Jewish heritage and to relate his painting to great Jewish writers like Primo Levi, Bruno Schulz, and Paul Celan. But he was not unaware of his immediate surroundings in Los Angeles during the mid1960s. As he explained, [I] had this very strong feeling that [there] was a cauldron of racial separation and hatred that would one day explode. [My wife] racism, discrimination, identity politics
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IRVING PETLIN THE BURNING OF LOS ANGELES (DETAIL), 196567 Oil on canvas, one of four panels; each panel 96 60 in. (96 240 in. total). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Odyssia Skouras, 1999.151a-d. Photo: 1986 D. James Dee; courtesy of Odyssia Gallery, New York.

Sarah and I would go to Watts to listen to music and dance. The last time we went there we were the only whites and I knew that it was the last time we would come. I started The Burning of Los Angeles [196567] shortly after that; it actually was begun six months before the Watts riots.31 Artists may not have the gift of prophecy, but some do seem to be able to sense the pulse of the time. The Burning of Los Angeles, an ambitious polyptych measuring fteen feet across, depicts black men in positions of combative action. They are immersed in a surface ssure that suggests an eerie expanse of ames and evokes Dantes Inferno. Petlins moral and aesthetic vision may come across so strongly here because nothing is dened distinctly; it is evocative on a more basic level. While living in Los Angeles, Petlin also helped plan the Peace Tower (1966; see chapter 1). Although he remained politically active as a founder of Artists and Writers Against the War in Vietnam and the Venice Biennale Action, a rebuff against the Biennale establishment, he refrained from making political art. Since the 1980s he has lived mostly in Paris, working in an evocative, postsymbolist mode that is entirely his own. In 2005, however, alarmed by President George W. Bushs radical abuse of power, he painted the twenty-onefoot-wide Entry of Christ into Washington (after Ensor). A more recent outcry against racism can be seen in Raft of the Grand Wizard (2003) by Travis Somerville, a white California artist who comes from the South. He was born in Atlanta in 1963 and grew up in Georgia and Tennessee at a time when there may have been de jure desegregation in the South, but racial stereotypes still ruled in daily life and the presence of the Ku Klux Klan was felt. Traviss parents were liberalshis father a Protestant minister, his mother a schoolteacher. He eventually went to study at the Maryland Institute College of Art, then moved to San Francisco in 1984. Somervilles pictures probe the history of the South, with its legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. He has painted individuals who have made an imprint on history, but not as straight portraits. Aware of the con-

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tradictions and paradoxes of southern culture, he paints a dismembered head of Malcolm X wearing Hollywood sunglasses and a white Klan hood, calling this painting, which is in the shape of an altarpiece, Boy in the Hood (2000) in reference to John Singletons 1991 movie Boyz n the Hood. Martin Luther King Jr. appears in The Only Begotten Son (199798), along with a Nike logo and architectural drawings. It can be difcult to gure out a Somerville painting, but the artist encourages the viewer to become engaged in doing so. More direct in its meaning is Everybody Needs a Mamma (2001), depicting an elderly, wrinkled black servant in a white kerchief with Walt Disney birds chirping and, below, the legend Im living on Fifth Avenue. In Raft of the Grand Wizard Somerville appropriates Thodore Gricaults The Raft of the Medusa, a highly controversial painting when it was shown at the Salon of 1819. Gricaults image was based on a news story about the frigate Mduse, a ship in bad condition and severely overloaded that was shipwrecked on the west coast of Africa while transporting soldiers and settlers to the colony of Senegal. (The Mduse may have been involved in the triangular slave trade.) Fifteen men climbed on a raft, hoping to reach the shore. Gricault painted these desperate gures piled onto the raft, their twisting bodies struggling and striving as they direct the viewers eyes toward a powerful black youth raising a piece of cloth in the hope of rescue. Somerville has substituted eight gures in Ku Klux Klan garments for the dead and dying in the original painting. He retains much of Gricaults pyramidal composition as well as the boy raising the cloth. But now this gure is balanced by a large burning cross, not a billowing sail. A sizable red dab, suggesting blood from a bullet wound, appears in the center of the picture, and Emancipation Day is written in large letters by the ropes on the bottom. The boy stands on a beer cask labeled Dixie Brewing Company, and railroad ties line the bottom of the raft. As in much of his work, Somerville has several narratives working simultaneously (the

railroad ties probably refer to the Chinese laborers who built the railroads in conditions of servitude). The canvas is done in oil and oil stick over collage elements, layered in turn over a stratum of architectural blueprints. Details of old newspapers remain visible, as do sheet-music covers (such as a picture of Harry Belafonte with the song title Im Just a Country Boy). On the right, above an image of the Capitol dome, is a clipping headed Four Men of the Apocalypsethe vision of ultimate disaster. For some viewers, Somervilles work has proved highly provocative. The artist himself articulates some concerns: As a whole my work raises the question: What does it mean for a white man from the South now living in California to explore race issues from the privileged and outside perspective of being a white person? Who has the right to render or write about black history?32

TRAVIS SOMERVILLE RAFT OF THE GRAND WIZARD, 2003 Mixed media, 106 147 12 in. San Jose Museum of Art. Gift of Jeffrey N. Dauber.

THE NATIVE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

In the 1960s Native Americansfrustrated by persistent betrayals, forced relocations, and abuse by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and suffering from high unracism, discrimination, identity politics
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STEPHEN SHAMES INDIAN OCCUPATION OF ALCATRAZ, 1971 Gelatin silver print. 2005 Stephen Shames/Polaris.

employment and impoverished living conditions began organizing civil disobedience actions, stimulated by the civil rights movement and the social activism of the times. In March 1964 ve Sioux activists landed on Alcatraz Island to claim it for Native American use, after the notorious federal penitentiary there had stood vacant for years and the government had declared it excess property. These activists then waged an unsuccessful court ght for the island, which had been Indian land for thousands of years prior to its occupation by the U.S. Army in the 1850s. In November 1969 a group of Native Americans again occupied the island, proclaiming that Alcatraz should serve as a symbol for Native American liberation and proposing the establishment there of an educational and spiritual center for American Indians (the American Indian Center in San Francisco had burned down just a month before). The occupation grew, even though the Coast Guard blocked some of the
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landings, and within a month more than two hundred Native American men, women, and children were camping out at the Rock. They put up tepees, as seen in Stephen Shamess photograph of the traditional conical tent outlined against the San Francisco Bay and the citys skylinean image that would have intrigued the French Surrealists. When Michelle Vignes, with her eye for the human portent of a historic occasion, photographed a similar view from Alcatraz, she foregrounded the tired young son of Richard Oakes, a Mohawk leader of the occupation, who had been a student at San Francisco State University. Oakes and his family would leave the island in early January 1970, after his stepdaughter died in a fall. Others also began to leave the island, for a variety of reasonsincluding the General Services Administrations cutting off electric power and disrupting phone communications. Press reports of violence on the island eroded public sup-

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MICHELLE VIGNES ALCATRAZ: THE SON OF INDIAN LEADER RICHARD OAKES, 1969 Gelatin silver print. Michelle Vignes. Courtesy The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

port, as did concerns for safe navigation, as the lack of electricity shut down the islands lighthouse and fog signals. Food and fresh water became harder to come by. By June 1971 only fteen people remained, and the government had no trouble removing them. Yet, despite the failures, the nineteen months of occupation had been widely publicized, creating a greater awareness among the American public of the plight of its Native population. For too long, indigenous culture in North America had been seen as an archaism. Native Americans were stereotyped as either howling, lthy heathens or noble savages. This attitude was clearly evident in the way Native Americans were photographed. In an article about the noted Native American photographer and lmmaker Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (b. 1954, Din/Seminole/Muscogee), the writer and curator Veronica Passalacqua observes: Early encounters between photography and Native Americans

have a history laced with racism, colonialism, broken treaties, captivity, and romanticism. Before the medium found its artistic outlets it purveyed so-called factual evidence by functioning as a mode of onesided documentation serving governmental and scientic purposes. Many stereotypes generated by early images of Native American life and culture continue to be insidiously pervasive.33 Over time, however, this situation has changed. Telling their stories of resistance and survival, Native American photographers are bringing about a new vision. Tsinhnahjinnie, now the director of the C. N. Gorman Museum at the University of California, Davis (see below), says: No longer is the camera held by an outsider looking in, the camera is held with brown hands opening familiar worlds. We document ourselves with a humanizing eye, we create new visions with ease, and we can turn the camera and show how we see you.34 Within the mainstream art world, an initial change racism, discrimination, identity politics
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in attitude toward Native American art can be traced to two exhibitions organized by Ren dHarnoncourt: Indian Art in the United States and Alaska for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco and the highly acclaimed Indian Art of the United States at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941. Instead of displaying Native American art as specimens in a natural history or ethnographic museum, or as curios at a trading post, these exhibitions put it on an equal footing with Euro-American art. In doing so, however, they also placed Native American art outside its indigenous cultural context. When Edward Said described Orientalism as a discourse by which European culture was able to manageand even producethe Orient politically, ideologically and imaginatively,35 he could easily have been referring to whites attitudes to American Indian culture. During the twentieth century socalled primitive, or tribal, art became venerated for the way it inspired modern Euro-American artists; it was not seen within its own cultural context but rather as part of a universalist art, which was essentially Western modernism in disguise. This linear equation of primitive/modern underlay the Museum of Modern Arts well-publicized (and beautiful) 1984 exhibition Primitivism in Twentieth Century Art: Afnity of the Tribal and the Modern. 36 Taking issue with the basic concept of this exhibition, the critic Thomas McElivey has questioned any universal hegemony for Western art, transcending and denying cultural identity. Instead, McElivey postulates the emergence of a new postmodern model in which each ethnic group would write its own history and create its own art without resorting to a linear view of historic evolution.37 Also arguing for a nonlinear approach, the writer Alicia Gaspar de Alba criticizes the vertical term subculture, whose prex signies the hegemony of a higher culture, and introduces the horizontal word alter-culture, simply connoting the condition of Otherness. Gaspar de Alba was writing about Chicano art, but her terminology is applicable to the art of all ethnic groups.38
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Perhaps in discussing Native American culture we should refer to multiple alter-cultures. The nearly 2.5 million Native American citizens in the United States belong to more than ve hundred separate tribes and bands, where each tribes culture has its own character and each artist his or her own individuality. Stereotypes need to be discarded. As the artist Frank LaPena has pointed out, Indian art is not realism, abstract, mixed media or traditional items but includes all of these things and more, for it is a diverse and rich combination of cultural expressions.39 Within their diversity, these tribal cultures do all seem to share an intimate relationship with the world of nature, a rapport with animals, plants, the earth, the wind, the rain, the sun, and the stars. They offer a holistic worldview, so any consideration of indigenous art must nally deconstruct the EuroAmerican separation of art and craft, of performing arts and ritual.
Tradition and Protest

The takeover of Alcatraz and the succeeding occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 were undoubtedly instrumental in sparking a new self-awareness among Native American artists. When Art in America published a special issue on The Native American Indian in the summer of 1972, it included a contribution by Lloyd E. Oxendine, a member of the Lumbee tribe and former director of Native North American Artists. He discussed and illustrated contemporary American Indian art that was based on traditional artifacts and totemic images, including a painting of an American ag on buffalo hide by Wayne Eagleboy, with two Native Americans in the eld customarily reserved for the stars, and Earl Eders image of the head of a Sioux Ghost Dancer crying for revenge. Oxendine asserted that much recent American Indian painting and sculpture is protest art, and can be seen as part of the larger American counter-revolution that in turn likes to identify itself with the Indian. . . . For the rst time a generation of articulate well-educated Indian artists have positive Indian identity to which

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they may relate. Their new solidarity focuses their art, an art that is Indian in a whole new way.40 Fritz Scholder (19372005, Luiseo) was prominently featured in the article. Born in Minnesota, Scholder has lived mostly in the Southwest, although he did study with Wayne Thiebaud at Sacramento City College in 195758. While Scholder is not really a California artist, he is of signal importance because early on he established an art that honored American Indian culture yet opposed romantic clichs about it, an art that was open to but not dominated by EuroAmerican inuences. His borrowing from artists such as Francis Bacon can be seen as a reversal of the interest of Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists in the totemic imagery of Amerindian art. Moreover, Scholders work has dealt directly with such issues as dislocation and alcoholism, breaking the ice for a politically potent Native art. A painting by Frank LaPena is also illustrated in Oxendines article. LaPena (Wintu/Nomtipom) was born in 1937 in San Francisco and, like many Native Americans at the time, was sent to a government-run Indian school. Later he went to California State University, Chico, and received a masters degree in anthropology from California State University, Sacramento, in 1978, by which time he was an exhibiting artist. After spending some time teaching juvenile delinquents in San Francisco, LaPena joined the faculty of California State University, Sacramento, where he taught for some thirty years and headed the Native American Studies Program. In addition to working as a visual artist and publishing in ethnography, LaPena is a singer, an essayist, a poet, and a founding member of the Maidu Dancers and Traditionalists. LaPena speaks of art making as a spiritual act, empowering the maker to achieve a greater understanding of life, and of dancing as an act of renewal. Some of his work is harrowing in its deance. His 1989 monoprint Destruction: Hostage shows dead men on hangmens ropes with a skeleton and skull looking at the viewer and a cross below the dead bodies. A decade later he produced Diaspora: California Indi-

ans, a series of frontal views of heads of Native Americans on which he superimposed texts referring to key events in the history of California Native Americans. After this work was shown in a special exhibition at the Venice Biennale in the summer of 1999, LaPena wrote:
Diaspora: California Indians . . . was to let the world know what happened in California to the indigenous population and to point out that survival issues are still of concern. The destruction/desecration of California begins with the Mission system. The enslavement of the Native Americans to create and maintain the Mission system in California was reinforced by the militia. The great epidemics of the 1800s were brought to a population that had no resistance to many of the diseases. Measles, inuenza, tuberculosis, malaria and smallpox . . . 41

FRANK LAPENA HOUSE OF SOUND: MOUNT SHASTA, 1996 Mono-transfer print, 21 12 29 34 in. Courtesy of the artist.

LaPena has also created works inspired by prehistoric rock painting, saying that he looks at Chumash rock art through the eyes of Abstract Expressionism.42 At times he has painted total abstractions, though more often his works show a strong sense of his Native heritage. Often LaPena has turned to naracism, discrimination, identity politics
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GEORGE LONGFISH THE END OF INNOCENCES, 1992 Acrylic on canvas, two of three panels, each 8 9 ft. Courtesy of the artist.

ture for his inspiration. House of Sound: Mount Shasta (1996) grew out of his memories of the sacred mountain before it was dammed and polluted, when he could swim in the stream below it. In this monoprint a great spiral ascends to the snow-covered volcanic peak, a sacred place for healers and shamans. Large black circles appear on the road below, while a red cross is set against the dark blue sky. As LaPena describes it: I am remembering stories of Creation that the mountain is alive and that it has been teaching people for many generations. This ancient wisdom has continued to direct the elders with its teaching. We can learn something about being distant from the land by knowing these stories.43 George Longsh, a Seneca/Tuscarora artist and writer, feels strongly about the way images of Native peoples have been distorted in American culture: The images I create are meant to question the stereotypical romantic image of Native People so often portrayed in past as well as current media.44 Longsh was born in 1942 on a reservation in Ontario, Canada, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before racism, discrimination, identity politics

moving to California. For many years a professor in the Native American Studies Program at the University of California, Davis, Longsh also directed the C. N. Gorman Museum at Davis, turning it into a showcase for Native art that he considers some of the best contemporary art being made in America. In his paintings Longsh, who calls himself a narrative abstractionist, merges Indigenous emblems (which may at rst appear abstract) with contemporary forms and images. Some of this contemporary imagery might be compared to that of older California painters such as William T. Wiley (see pp. 24345) and Robert Hudson, artists who themselves were inuenced by Native American art. Longsh is acutely aware not only of his ancestral spiritual culture but also of the dominant outside culture, speaking admiringly of Arshile Gorky and aiming for an inclusive art. The way he juxtaposes Native American images with ones from extrinsic cultures makes for powerfully incongruous and idiosyncratic work. Longshs The End of Innocences (1992) is a triptych inspired by the quincentennial of Christopher

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JEAN LAMARR SOME KIND OF BUCKAROO, 1990 Screenprint, 24 36 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Columbuss arrival in North America. Together, the three panels measure more than twenty-ve feet long. As Longsh noted, Five hundred years later the nonIndians, who have had little respect for human rights, animal rights or the earths environment, are having to overcome their own ignorance and come to terms with the alternative concept of making change that doesnt destroy the elements of this planet and its people.45 The left panel of the triptych shows an Indian chief in elaborate attire, with contradictory words and phrases stenciled seemingly at random: Blackfeet Pencil Co., Sacred Land, The Only Good Indian Is, Spiritual. Jagged shapes and thrusting forms, all painted with a vigorous brush, appear on a ground that is mostly red, dark blue, and green. In the right panel a chief presides over Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, updating the Iroquois warrior clan. Against a background of electric colors, the artist has inscribed Sioux, Land, Wounded Knee 1892, Wounded Knee 1973, Broken Treaties, Rain Forest, Termination, and other evocative words. This monumental painting is about Native Americans

renewing their tradition of martial courage and spirituality to regain power and create change. Like Longsh, Jean LaMarr (Paiute/Pit River) makes works with Native themes. She was born in 1945 in Susanville, near the Nevada border of the California high desert, where she now directs the Native American Graphic Workshop. She came to the Bay Area through the relocation program of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and studied painting and printmaking at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1970s. At Berkeley she encountered difculties in having her work accepted, as she did not adhere to the abstract modern art favored there at the time, and joined forces with Chicano/Chicana classmates in rejecting Eurocentric biases. Much later, in 1995, the city of Berkeley would commission her to paint a large mural, Commemoration of the Ohlone Way of Life, in Ohlone Park. In the early 1970s LaMarr designed a poster protesting the government attack at Wounded Knee. We dont want to be your whitemans Indian anymore, the caption read. In a series of monoprints in racism, discrimination, identity politics
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HARRY FONSECA CREATION STORY, 2000 Mixed media on canvas, 6 ft. 1 in. 17 ft. 3 in. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution.

the 1980s she depicted contemporary women in the Great Basin area expressing their opposition to the governments actions on their land, especially the testing of MX missiles. In her silkscreen Some Kind of Buckaroo (1990) a Native American cowboy stands on a owered lace ground that symbolizes the earth. But he is shut in by barbed wire. Overhead, against a dark red sky, a ghter plane and a missile whiz by, presumably toward the testing grounds in Nevada. LaMarr has described how, during the rst Bush administration, war planes would y across the desert almost daily, dropping test bombs.46 For many Native American artists, irony serves as a foil to the tragedy of life inside or outside the reservation. Certainly this is true of the art of Henry Fonseca (Maidu/Niseman/Hawaiian/Portuguese). Born in 1946 in Sacramento, he grew up and attended college there, rst at Sacramento City College and then at California State University. In semiabstract landscapes, such as The Discovery of Gold in California (1979), he has recorded how, during the Gold Rush, Indigenous people who had lived in the Sierra Nevada foothills for millennia were subjected to forced labor, starvation, disease, and murder by prospectors and their crews.47 Fonseca is also fascinated by the coyote, the trickracism, discrimination, identity politics

ster par excellence of Native American mythology, and he frequently paints himself as one. In his effort to deconstruct clichs, he may show us his coyote alter ego in street clothes, a hipster outt, or a womans rose-owered dress, or as a Hawaiian-shirted tourist visiting a pueblo. Fonsecas coyote is able simultaneously to laugh at himself and at others. He embodies paradox and ambiguity and personies the Native American as both separate from and a part of the dominant culture. Fonsecas painting Creation Story (2000), which is more than seventeen feet wide, is based on Native American pictographs. Its story is told through schematic gures, standing or seated with outstretched arms and legs, not dissimilar to devices found in Outsider Art. Stylized trees and running deer animate the landscape. Clusters of semicircular humps suggest hills or mountains, while serpentine lines indicate streams. A large concentric circle appears in the center on the left, depicting the creation of the world, and a spiral turns around itself on the right. Painted largely in blue and earth colors, this canvas captures the color and energy of the earth, honoring the land and its ora and fauna prior to its despoliation. The trickster irreverence evident in Fonsecas coy-

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ote paintings takes an even more provocative form in the installations and performance pieces of James Luna (b. 1950, Luiseo/Diegueo). Luna studied at the University of California, Irvine, but became dissatised with the limitations of the college curriculum and worked as a labor organizer, before returning to obtain his degree. He sees his art as functioning beyond the discourse about art itselfas a strategy for confrontation, inseparable from its reception in the sociopolitical sphere. His work questions the dominant cultures views about Native American art. The Artifact Piece (1987), produced for the ethnographic Museum of Man in Balboa Park, San Diego, recalls the exhibition of the Hottentot Venus at fairs in England and France during the nineteenth century. We see Luna, wearing a leather breechclout, lying on a bed of sand in a display case, like an object in a museum of anthropology. An adjacent display case is lled with medicines used in rituals at his reservation, and a third contains various trappings of the 1960s counterculture, such as a Rolling Stones album and United Farm Workers buttons. A year later Luna and the Chicano artist David Avalos (see below) created the satiric California Mission Daze, condemning the Catholic Church and Father Junpero Serra for their subhuman treatment of the Native population. The piece was a response to Pope John Paul IIs beatication of Father Serra. For a 1991 show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Luna again exposed himself as an exotic specimen. Entitled Take a Picture with a Real Indian, this installation presented Luna, once again in a breechclout, next to cutout portraits of himself in traditional garb or in Western street clothes. Spectators were invited over a public address system to have their pictures taken with a living ethnographic artifact to show how fond they were of the Native population. The resulting photos, with museum visitors posed next to the live Indian artist, turned the humiliating photo op on its head: Who is the subject here? James Luna has worked as an academic counselor, confronting problems such as alcoholism at the Palo-

mar College, near the La Jolla Reservation, where he was born. He has explained: I feel like my art is strong as long as I stay working as a counselor. We Indians have survived as long as we have because of our ability to adapt. We still have our healers, leaders, and warriors. Its just that the new warriors are armed with legal, political, and artistic weapons. I am one of the warriors.48

THE CHICANO EXPERIENCE

Csar Chvez, the United Farm Workers, and La Causa

When in the 1930s John Steinbeck, in the novels In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath, described the plight of California farmworkers (migrants from Oklahoma at the time), he did not think they could

JAMES LUNA TAKE A PICTURE WITH A REAL INDIAN, 1991 Performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Sheldon Collins.

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GEORGE BALLIS UNITED FARM WORKERS UNION: GRAPE STRIKE, 1966 Gelatin silver print. 1976 George Ballis/Take Stock.

organize into a viable labor union. Steinbeck told of the abominable wages and housing, the exploitation of child labor, the lack of potable water. But during the turmoil of the 1960swith the civil rights movement and the New Lefts revolt against the status quothe young, energetic Csar Chvez succeeded in organizing Mexican American, Filipino, and other laborers in the elds of California to bring about potent change. He believed in militant nonviolence, and Mahatma Gandhi was his paradigm. He also followed the radical activist Saul Alinskys strategies for community empowerment. A man of the people, Chvez combined personal charisma with the strength of perseverance and an astute tactical sense. The struggle of the California farmworkers and the personality of their leader became central to the progressive movement, with millions of Americans joining the United Farm Workers call for a boycott of table grapes and, later, lettuce. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, George McGovern, and other leaders befriended Chvez and supported his efforts. Many ne photographers came to document the farmworkers long strikes. Among them was George Ele Ballis, who had photographed the activities of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Missis166

sippi and lmed the struggle of dispossessed Native Americans. Ballis was intimately familiar with the farmworkers cause as he had worked as an organizer for the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, which predated the United Farm Workers. In 1965 he photographed the Delano Grape Strike, showing us a determined Chvez leading a group of Filipino and Mexican laborers, many of them waving the unions banner with the word huelga (strike) in large letters. Jeffrey Blankfort (see pp. 43, 143) also documented the UFWs struggle. Viewing his photograph of a march in Sacramento County in 1971, one is tempted to raise ones st and shout out in unison with the workers in their demand for power. In another moving photograph from the same demonstration Blankfort focused on a worker, wearing a headband with the word war imprinted on it, who raises his clenched st as he stands behind a large crucix. Chvez and many of the Mexican and Filipino workers who followed him were devout Catholics, and this picture stands as a powerful and memorable image of the fusion of religious feeling and determination among the farmworkers. The UFW movement activated a broader push for civil rights for Mexican Americans, or Chicanos, as

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JEFFREY BLANKFORT Both photographs. LA RAZA MARCH: LA MARCHA DE LA RECONQUISTA, STATE CAPITOL, SACRAMENTO, 1971 Gelatin silver prints. Both Jeffrey Blankfort, 1971.

they came to call themselves. As a self-description, the appellation Chicano purposely differentiates this group from the dominant culture, stressing their duality, their mixed-blood heritage. Prior to the selfafrmation of the 1960s, Mexican Americans were expected to assimilate into the U.S. melting pot like other ethnic minorities. But as the Mexican American community began to assert itself, assimilation was challenged. Young rebels began proudly calling themselves Chicanos, taking on a slang term used earlier by pachucos. As the Los Angeles Times correspondent Rubn Salazar explained, A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself.49 Chicanos rallied for La Causa and afrmed their consciousness of a history dating to ancient pre-

colonial times as well as their Spanish ancestry. They emphasized their link to Aztln, the Nahutl name for the Aztecs mythical homeland in what is today the southwestern United States, from which the Aztecs supposedly migrated to central Mexico. In addition to calling for basic civil rights, Chicano activists voiced strong opposition to the Vietnam War, both for moral reasons and because a proportionally large number of Mexican Americans were being killed in Southeast Asia. In August 1970 they organized the Chicano Moratorium march against the Vietnam War, a massive demonstration by some twenty to thirty thousand people in Los Angeles. During that march Rubn Salazar was killed by a sheriffs deputy , and he quickly became a hero among the racism, discrimination, identity politics
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Chicano population. Raised, like Che Guevara, to near-mythic status as a martyr of the movement, Salazar became the subject of paintings by Rupert Garca, Frank Romero, and many others (see below).
The Chicano Art Movement

against much of the above concerns of the Chicano Art Movement.51

The political struggle of the farmworkers, as well as the broader civil rights movement and unrest of the 1960s, helped give birth to the Chicano art movement.50 Csar Chvezs organizing of the United Farm Workers inspired posters and murals by politically oriented Mexican American artists. The UFW emblem, a stylized black eagle with extended wings, appeared in many Chicano artworks of the time. Also prominent was religious imagery, especially the Virgin of Guadalupe, underlining the importance of Catholicism in the lives of many Chicanos. In the catalogue for the show Chicano Art: Resistance and Afrmation (CARA), 19651985, Rupert Garca remarked:
Forming a part of a pronounced and critical national and international social and cultural shift, the Chicano Art Movement was truly a post-modernist cultural activity during the late 1960s and into the mid-1970s. In the personal and collective afrmation of the complex identity and vitality of the Chicano . . .; the concern with Mexican, Indian and Mexican American histories and traditions; the appropriation and conation of popular and high art; the merging of everyday life, especially the political, and art; the ubiquitous use of the gure and an expressive representationalism; the almost nonexistence of an art for arts sake attitude; the subversive use of the mass media aesthetic and a critique of the sames perverse depictions of America and Americans, Chicano Art diversely and unevenly protested not only against racism, the Vietnam War, sexism, EuroAnglo ethnocentrism, imperialism, police brutality, drug abuse, gang warfare, and much more, but it also expressed discontent with the U.S. and European Modernist tradition which variously positioned itself

Although early Chicano art was rooted in the UFWs struggle, it quickly spread to the barrios. Art centers were established in major cities, such as Plaza de la Raza (founded in 1969) and Mechicano Art Center (1970) in Los Angeles, Centro Cultural de la Raza (1970) in San Diego, Galera de la Raza (1970) and Mission Cultural Center (1977) in San Francisco, and Centro de Artistas Chicanos (1972) and Royal Chicano Air Force (1972) in Sacramento. The rst Chicano art exhibition in a mainstream venue was by Los Four (Roberto de la Rocha, Gilbert Lujan, Frank Romero, and Carlos Almaraz), who showed their work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1974. This artists collective used grafti as an art form and spray-painted murals depicting Chicano life. Los Four, which remained active until 1983, established direct connections with the UFW and brought their art into more and more visible public spaces. A different, more performance-oriented collective was a group called Asco (Spanish for nausea), which was organized in East Los Angeles in 1971 by Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrn, and Patssi Valdez. (It remained active until 1985.) In the tradition of guerrilla theater, Asco staged actions and events in the streets, using the barrios as performance spaces and calling attention to Chicano culture. Through its employment of satire for cultural and political critique, Asco helped move Chicano art into the postmodern era. In 1990 the Wight Art Gallery at UCLA presented the major exhibition Chicano Art: Resistance and Afrmation, 19651985, known by its acronym CARA, which traveled to nine museums throughout the country before it closed in 1993. (Cara means facing or confronting in Spanish.) Extensive in scope, the show went through six years of planning by artists, scholars, and many national and local working committees consisting mostly of Chicanos.52 Unlike most art exhibitions, CARA emphasized the close

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relationship between art and life among Chicanos, erasing distinctions between high, low, and folk art; it was thus in keeping with postmodern critical strategies. In a sizable study analyzing the exhibition and its reception, Alicia Gaspar de Alba concludes: The response to CARA received from all sides from the critics who could not stop writing about it to the Chicano/a and Latino/a audiences who came by the thousands to each of the venuesproved that, more than being a transgression into the boundaries of the art world, CARA was decisively a kick in the face of the mainstream cultural canon.53
Artwork in Support of the Farmworkers

ANDREW ZERMEO HUELGA! (STRIKE!), 1965 Ink drawing, 17 11 in. Courtesy of the artist.

SALVADOR ROBERTO TORRES VIVA LA RAZA, LONG LIVE HUMANITY, 1969 Oil on canvas, 53 42 in. Courtesy of the artist. Photo courtesy of California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives.

Artists involvement with the farmworkers struggle went far beyond documentary photography. Artists collectives, such as the Royal Chicano Air Force in Sacramento and La Brocha del Valle in Fresno, created posters promoting La Causa. As early as 1965 Andrew Zermeo (b. 1935) made the dynamic offset lithograph Huelga! for the Delano Grape Strike, which led to a nationwide boycott and the merging of the two existing farmworkers unions into Csar Chvezs United Farm Workers. Zermeo worked on the UFW staff as a cartoonist for the bilingual newspaper El Malcriado and for the Mexican political printmaking workshop El Taller de Grca Popular. In his grape strike lithograph, which came into wide use as a poster, a shouting young man runs with great speed out of the word Huelga! while waving the banner of the United Farm Workers. This red UFW ag, with its white circle around a stylized black eagle with spread wings, stepped like an inverted Aztec pyramid, became the icon for the farmworkers causa.54 It appears in various artworks, including a compelling oil painting by Salvador Roberto Torres, entitled Viva La Raza, Long Live Humanity (1969). This painting grew out of a protest against the San Diego Gas and Electric Company, which had placed two advertisements in Life magazine that were degrading toward Chicanos. Various Chicano groups organized a picket line in front of the companys racism, discrimination, identity politics
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CARLOS VILLA ASPARAGUS, 1991 Installation at Davis, California. Courtesy of the artist.

ofces, where they cried out, Viva La Raza! Dominating the upper portion of Torress painting is the word viva, brushed in broad black strokes over a textured surface of greens, ochres, and reds. From below a bold red Aztec eagle, built up with a palette knife, seems to ght its way upward, rising majestically from La Raza (a designation for the Chicano community). Like a ag, the canvas is composed in horizontal bands, and its red, white, and green coloring reects that of Mexicos ag. Torres was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1936 to a family of farmworkers, and he worked in the elds as a child. After deciding to study art, he attended the California College of Arts and Crafts and later California State University, San Diego. Like many of his colleagues, he went to Mexico City and met David Alfaro Siqueiros. In 1969 Torres helped establish El Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diegos Balboa Park and became a leading force in creating the murals in San Diegos Chicano Park. Like Torres, Ester Hernndez, who was born in 1944 in Californias San Joaquin Valley, grew up among farmworkers and worked on farms herself, becoming involved in civil rights early in her life. She went to the University of California, Berkeley, to study art and has since taught in elementary schools, colleges, and senior centers. In 1974, while living in San Francisco, she assisted Las Mujeres Muralistas

(see p. 172). In 1976 she made an etching called Libertad, in which the American cultural icon is transformed by a Chicana sculptor into a Mayan goddess. She holds her torch high, welcoming immigrants to Aztln, which is inscribed in large letters on the statues base. Borders did not always exists, Hernndez later said, but immigration always occurred. That was my American Bicentennial contribution.55 Hernndez achieved renown with her Sun Mad (1982, p. 13), which was widely distributed as a poster and postcard. A parody of ads for the Sunmaid brand, Sun Mad transforms Sunmaids pretty girl offering a basket of grapes into a skeleton dressed in a white blouse and red bonnet. In the caption we learn the grapes are unnaturally grown with insecticides, miticides, herbicides, [and] fungicides. The whole image is placed on a primary red ground, echoing not only the Sunmaid box but also the UFW ag. Its ironic use of commercial advertising calls to mind Ben Sakoguchis use of orange crate labels (see p. 56). Later, in 1989, Hernndez made an installation in which she greatly enlarged Sun Mad and placed it on a screen. Below the print, in a circular bed of sand, she placed implements used by farmworkers, including a laborers hat, a bandana, and spray cans. In this setting the print appears like an avatar to remind us of the men and women who died picking grapes. Although the UFW has been able to bring about slight improvements in the living conditions of farmworkers, the struggle continues, and so does the art in support of it, both by Chicano artists and others, such as the Filipino American artist Carlos Villa (see p. 137). In 1991, believing in cooperation among artists, Villa worked with a group of young Filipino American artists to produce the installation piece Asparagus, which was inspired by the Filipino migrant workers who labored in the elds of the Central Valley in the 1930s and 1940s. Villa tells a familiar tale:
In the early 1920s young men had been recruited from poverty-stricken villages in the Philippines, rst to harvest pineapple in Hawaii . . . and then on the West

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Coast where they were called Manongs. Their reputation as a cheap and effective labor force spread quickly. The young men had been tempted by glowing descriptions of golden opportunities of American wealth and the possibilities of dating movie stars. With these dreams in mind, a steady stream of Filipinos bought steamship tickets to America to chase their dream.56

Villa focused on asparagus because it was, he writes, a fragile crop that Filipinos were famous for harvesting. Those labor gangs were always rewarded very well for their endeavors. Prostitutes, gamblers, and the Filipino labor groups celebrated in high fashion at the time of the harvest.57 On one wall of the installation we see asparagus plants growing under electric grow lights and photographs of Filipino workers in silhouette, resembling a picture of a small town. Another wall repeats a photographic image of workers sowing asparagus seed, reminiscent of JeanFranois Millets famous painting The Sowers (1859 62). A third wall holds farm implements: asparagus knives and a small hoe. The fourth wall collages clippings from various California newspapers containing racist comments about Filipinos. The installation confronts discrimination while afrming the fortitude of the farmworkers.
Murals

Chicano artists brought their work directly to the people through the Chicano mural movement, which began in the late 1960s and served as a means of social communication in the barrios. Although the Chicano movement had its roots in the work of the Mexican muralists and the domestic WPA murals, it was much more community oriented. Many, perhaps most, of the murals were painted by people within the communities, often by untrained individuals and groups under the guidance of professional artists. There was much less emphasis on individual expression than in the earlier murals. While not disposable, the Chicano murals were less concerned with the art-

works permanence than with the immediate benet of direct communication. In addition, like much of the work produced by avant-garde artists at the time, from Land and Earth artists to conceptual and performance artists, this art was not marketable. In 1968 Antonio Bernal painted one of the rst Chicano murals in California, for the United Farm Workers Teatro Campesino Cultural Center in Del Rey, near Fresno. The Teatro Campesino arranged impromptu performances and street actions for and by farmworkers. Bernals mural in turn clearly roots the mural movement among the farmworkers. Included within the murals virtual procession are the Mexican revolutionary leaders Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, Csar Chvez, and, on the far right, Martin Luther King Jr. and a Black Panther leader.58 These gures clearly associate the Mexican Revolution and Chicano afrmation with the black civil rights movement. During the rst decade of the movement, at least 1,500 murals were produced in California. Most focused on the call for racial equality, but gender equality also appeared as an issue, especially as Chicanas began questioning the movements male domination and the cultural value placed on machismo. In racism, discrimination, identity politics

ANTONIO BERNAL DEL REY MURAL, AT TEATRO CAMPESINO CULTURAL CENTER (DETAIL), 1968 Mural, 6 15 ft. Del Rey, California (no longer extant). Photo: Robert Sommer.

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LAS MUJERES MURALISTAS (PATRICIA RODRIGUEZ, GRACIELA CARRILLO, CONSUELO MENDEZ, AND IRENE PEREZ) PANAMERICA, 1974 Acrylic on concrete, 20 72 ft. San Francisco (no longer extant).

1973 a team of female artists formed Las Mujeres Muralistas in San Francisco. One of its guiding spirits, Patricia Rodriguez (b. 1944), grew up in Texas, moved to California, eventually studied at Merritt College in Oakland and the San Francisco Art Institute, and became active in the Mexican American Liberation Art Front. Rodriguez joined forces with the Chicanas Graciela Carrillo and Irene Perez and with Consuelo Mendez, who was from Venezuela, to create socially committed murals that portrayed the strengths of their community. (Other women, including Ester Hernndez, assisted in this collective project.) With a bright palette, their signature work Panamerica (1974), in San Franciscos Mission District, celebrates the history, culture, and family life of diverse Latinos. It incorporates traditions from Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, and Guatemala, with images of corn stalks, banana palms, agaves, women dressed in beautiful traditional garments, as well as the sun and the moon. The mural, which met with great appreciation, helped pave the way for other women muralists, such as Juana Alicia, leading indirectly to the 1994 Womens Building murals in San Francisco. In the 1980s Rodriguez began
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to concentrate on more personal work, such as box constructions, assemblages, reliquaries, and spiritual ceremonial pieces. Another prominent Chicana muralist is Judith Baca, who began working on The Great Wall of Los Angeles (p. 14) in 1976. Born in Los Angeles in 1946 to an immigrant family, Baca was raised in a house of women. She attended Siqueiross workshop in Cuernevaca and later cofounded the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Los Angeles, which, under the auspices of the citys Department of Recreation and Parks, has sponsored more than a hundred murals in diverse areas of the city. Baca, like the Mujeres Muralistas, put Marxist ideologies of class, race, and gender solidarity into practice. The Great Wall, located in the Tujunga ood control drainage canal in the San Fernando Valley, became the longest painting ever made, eventually extending into a mural more than half a mile longand new sections are still being planned. Some four hundred youth, including gang members from the barrios, as well as forty assisting artists and numerous scholars, have worked on the mural, which was painted mostly

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JUDY BACA GREAT WALL OF LOS ANGELES: ZOOT SUIT RIOTS (DETAIL), 1983 Acrylic on cast concrete. SPARC www.sparcmurals.org.

during ve summers between 1976 and 1983. It was not an easy project: For me, Baca explains, the process of making art is the transforming of pain. First theres rage, below that rage is indignation, below that indignation is shame, below that hope, and at its corniest base, love. After I got through all of that I could love myself, my art, my people, who I really was. Thats how the Great Wall got done. The art process takes pain to its furthest transformation.59 The Great Wallwith its images of the illusion of prosperity, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl refugees, unsigned Indian treaties, the deportation of Mexicans, Japanese internment camps, and the red scare and McCarthyism, as well as such positive moments as the civil rights movement, Jewish achievements in arts and science, and the gaining of citizenship and property by Asiansis, above all, a grand panorama of social struggles. For the 1984 Olympic Games, Baca, together with Frank Romero and other Chicano artists, painted the mural Hitting the Wall: Women in the Marathon along a Los Angeles freeway. She began another major project in 1987, called World Wall: A Vision of the Fu-

ture without Fear, an ongoing portable installation mural, comprised of eight ten-by-thirty-foot canvas panels, which has been exhibited in Finland and in Moscows Gorky Park, among other places. In addition to painting murals and directing SPARC, Baca has spent prodigious energy organizing a community of poor immigrants in Central California and served as a professor at the Csar E. Chvez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction at UCLA. Recently, turning to contemporary technology and working with Latino and African American groups as well as a digital engineer, she produced a digitally generated, handpainted mural for the Denver International Airport in 2000. Called La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra, it explores the Chicano/Mexicano history of and landscape of the Southwest. Chicano Park in San Diego is the site of another major mural project. The park is located in an area of the city formerly known as Logan Heights and now as Barrio Logan. When an eight-lane freeway was cut through the center of the neighborhood during the 1960s, some ve thousand families were displaced. In 1970 local residents, students, and various other racism, discrimination, identity politics
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MARIO TORERO, ASSISTED BY CARMEN KALO AND COMMUNITY LAURA RODRIGUEZ, 1995 Acrylic on concrete. Chicano Park, San Diego, California. Photo: Zia Salim.

activists occupied the site in protest for twelve days, stopping the bulldozers and managing to reclaim an area intended for a California Highway Patrol headquarters under the freeway interchange. They began to plant cacti and owers, and soon started to paint murals all over the massive columns and retaining walls. Famous, as well as lesser-known, Chicano artists from all over the state have since been invited to paint murals in this large ongoing project. The resulting wall paintings range over revolutionary subjects, portraits of Mexican artists, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Aztec pyramids, and fantasy images. In 1979, using ceramic tile, Eduardo Carrillo (1937 1997) created a remarkable mural, forty-four feet long, as a commission for the city of Los Angeles. Born in Santa Monica, Carrillo studied at UCLA with Stanton MacDonald Wright and William Brice, and also spent a year in Spain, where he came to admire the paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, Diego Velzracism, discrimination, identity politics

quez, and El Greco in the Prado, as well as the work of Giorgio de Chirico. As he matured, he combined the Spanish and Mexican Baroque traditions with European modernism, achieving work of highly personal authenticity. In 1966 he founded El Centro de Arte Regional in La Paz, Baja California, which he directed for several years. There he helped revive the regional crafts of ceramics, leatherwork, dyeing, and weaving for the production of ne salable items. In 1972 Carrillo joined the art faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he remained until his death in 1997. In 1976, as a gift to the community, he painted a mural based on the theme of birth, death, and regeneration, in a vaulted passageway near a downtown shopping mall in Santa Cruz. The mural was obliterated, however, by a bank that later acquired the property, the manager claiming he had no idea of the value of the work. Carrillos ceramic mural for Los Angeles was done

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on a curved wall in front of the Church of Dolores, close to Siqueiross mural Tropical America on Olvera Street, in the original Mexican section of the city. Entitled El Grito, it commemorates the Mexican revolt against Spain in 1810. Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costillo, a Mexican Creole priest, launched the revolt with his cry for independence, known as El Grito de Dolores. Leading an insurgent army in the early ght for independence, Hidalgo is said to have carried the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the revolts crucial battle. The revolutionary army conquered many cities, including Guadalajara, but was eventually defeated by the royalists. Hidalgo was defrocked and shot. But his grito, calling for the freeing of slaves and the redistribution of land, was not forgotten. In Carrillos mural Hidalgo is the central gure. Next to him we see a woman carrying the standard of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and farther to the right Native men with arrows, women carrying baskets of corn, and children

at play. Spanish grandees ee on horseback, and a black ag displays a skull and crossbones. The luminous glazes of the ceramics, predominantly in blue and ochre, endow the work with an amazing glow. Carrillos later paintings, shown in a solo exhibition at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento in 1986, were often preoccupied with images from Mexican mythology, history, and contemporary culture. Painted in closely hued vibrant colors, these depictions of human drama convey a sense of mystery, reminding the viewer of Surrealist imagination.
La Frontera and the Continuing Colonial Threat

EDUARDO CARRILLO EL GRITO (DETAIL), 1979 Ceramic tile, 8 44 ft. Placita de Dolores, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Museo Eduardo Carrillo.

The border between Mexico and the United States gures as a major concern in the lives and art of Chicanos, who lay claim to the ancient land of Aztln. In 1848, at the conclusion of the United States manifest destiny war against Mexico, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded, in the name of Almighty God, racism, discrimination, identity politics
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MALAQUIAS MONTOYA THE TREATY OF GUADALUPE HIDALGO, 1848, 1998 Offset lithograph of collage/mixed media, 24 18 12 in. Courtesy of the artist.

about half of Mexicos territory, including what is now California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas and large sections of Nevada, Colorado, and Utah to the United States. While people of Mexican descent living north of the Rio Grande were humiliated and exploited, economic conditions were worse for people to the south, and so they crossed the border. During the rst three decades of the twentieth century more than a million Mexicans came to El Norte. Although they provided low-paid labor for the railroads, the mines, and agriculture, thus subsidizing the U.S. economy, xenophobic attitudes made their lives increasingly difcult. As time went on, the federal and state governments passed anti-immigration measures, built great fences and walls, and did little to stop violence at the border, including shootings and rape by U.S. border police and Mexican coyotes (those paid to conduct illegal crossings). Increasingly aware of their heritage and inherent power, Chicanos began to reframe the whole concept of the border, or
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La Frontera. We didnt cross the border, the border crossed us, they asserted. One of the artists who has graphically portrayed the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is Malaquias Montoya. Born in 1938 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he spent his childhood on farms in the San Joaquin Valley. Montoya knew he had to obtain an education and, after serving in the U.S. Marines, studied art at the University of California, Berkeley; he later chaired the Ethnic Studies Department at the California College of Arts and Crafts. In a powerful expression of the continuing struggle of his people, he wrote, As a Chicano artist I feel a responsibility that all my art should be a reection of my political beliefs, an art of protest. The struggle of all people cannot be merely intellectually accepted. It must become part of our very being as artists, otherwise we cannot give expression to it in our work.60 In his print The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848 (1998), Montoya not only documents the treaty that was forced on Mexicans, but in the small print on the lower right includes his own commentary on The Spiritual Plan of Aztln, denouncing the brutal gringo invasion of our territories and calling for reclaiming the land of [our forefathers] birth. The command Resistenca! cries out above the doubleheaded Aztec warrior to the left. During the late 1960s Montoya was one of the leaders of the vital political poster movement in San Francisco, and he has continued to produce posters and prints of relevance and power. In Undocumented (1981) an immigrant runs headlong into the barbed wire fence at the border, causing blood to ow. The word undocumented scrawled across the gure seems literally written in blood. Similarly compelling is the 1973 silkscreen Cesen Deportacin! by Rupert Garca (see pp. 4446). The bold yellow block capitals at the top shout Stop deportation! while the jagged black barbs of wire against the blood-red ground leave no doubt about the human consequences of U.S. policies. David Avalos also confronts viewers with just what

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MALAQUIAS MONTOYA UNDOCUMENTED, 1981 Silkscreen, 35 23 in. Courtesy of the artist.

RUPERT GARCA CESEN DEPORTACION! 1973 Silkscreen, 20 26 in. Courtesy of the artist; Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Marcus.

border policing means in human terms. Born in San Diego in 1947, Avalos was raised on the border, in National City, where he still resides. The son of immigrants who came north during the Mexican Revolution, he studied at the University of California, San Diego, with its highly innovative faculty. There, in 1974, he helped start the Chicano newspaper Voz Froneriza, which led to the formation of the Committee on Chicano Rights. An installation artist, performance artist, painter, and sculptor, as well as the writer of trenchant essays, he helped found the Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, dedicated to dialogue on border issues. In 1985 Avalos produced the sculpture Donkey Cart Altar, based on the colorful but absurdly overdecorated carts, pulled by

donkeys, that are used as exotic photo opportunities for tourists to Mexico. Eliminating the romantic backgrounds that typically appear in such photos, showing Mexican scenes with cacti and sunsets, Avalos focuses attention instead on an undocumented Mexican worker, who assumes a Crucixion-like pose as he is frisked by a border patrolman. The artist, with his sense of irony, has placed a ladder of success above the bracero and a dollar sign below him. A typical Day of the Dead skull sits on the step below the altar. On the back we nd a section of chain-link fencing and a photograph of Francisco Sanchez, shot to death by the Border Patrol on Dec. 8, 1980.61 This work was installed outside the federal courthouse in San Diego but was removed almost immediately by court order racism, discrimination, identity politics
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DAVID AVALOS DONKEY CART ALTAR, 1985 Mixed media and acrylic on wood, 42 28 45 in. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Manuel Memo Cavada.

for security reasons. After public protest against this violation of the First Amendment, as well as media coverage, the matter went into litigation. As an art activist, Avalos sees his role as an agent provocateur challenging the status quo. In 1988, working with Louis Hock and Elizabeth Sisco, Avalos produced posters with the message Welcome to Americas Finest Tourist Plantation (San Diego refers to itself as Americas nest city) and then placed them on a hundred city buses just when eighty thousand visitors were arriving in San Diego for the Super Bowl. Bus passengers saw the cuffed hands of an immigrant beside a border patrol ofcers gut and gun, anked on the left by a workers hands scraping dirty dishes and on the right by a hand reaching toward a doorknob with the notice Maid service . . . please. Like ads, the posters could be taken in at a glance. The artists strategy was to expose visitors to actual life in the city with this display of the unexpected. In his exhibition Caf Mestizo (1989) at the In178

tar Gallery in New York, Avalos exposed another Anglo assumption, disputing the picture of civilized settlers and savage natives drawn in books such as James Fenimore Coopers The Last of the Mohicans (1826) or Frederick Jackson Turners widely read The Frontier in American History (1920). Earlier, in 1988, Avalos had collaborated with the Native American artist James Luna (see above) in California Mission Daze, a deconstruction of the role of the beatied Father Junpero Serra. In an interview Avalos commented: It is not surprising that today the situation of people of Mexican ancestry in this country is a situation of conquered people, a colonized people. Its a situation where we do not have entry into society. We exist as a community outside the law.62 Avaloss Art Rebate (1989) plays on the notions of what is inside and outside the law. Using money from the Centro Cultural de la Raza, he distributed ten-dollar bills to undocumented migrant workers in Encinitas, California individuals who, in contrast to public perception, pay taxes but do not receive social benets. The work can be seen as an investigation of the systemic operation of market capitalism. Avalos has also spoken out against border-aspower, referring to the activities of armed border patrols as state-sponsored violence. Ricardo Duffys Curtain Raiser (1997) depicts this in its outright cruelty. Duffy, who was born in 1951 in Monterey Park, California, to an Irish father and a Mexican mother, grew up in East Los Angeles, in the center of Chicano gang activity. He went to California State University, Fullerton, where he majored in ceramics, and later opened his own ceramic studio in Costa Mesa, making ceramic sculpture in the vein of Mexican folk art. In the 1980s Duffy began to concentrate on painting and printmaking, creating often highly sardonic works dealing with the plight of immigrants. He addressed such California ballot initiatives as Proposition 187, aimed at denying health care and education to immigrant children, and Proposition 209, which attempted to cancel bilingual education. To make his point he often combines different narratives. In his 1996 seri-

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RICARDO DUFFY CURTAIN RAISER, 1997 Oil, acrylic, immigration card, and photomontage on canvas, 48 72 ft. Courtesy of the artist.

graph The New Order, for example, he depicts the redrocked Arizona mountains from which Native Americans once jumped to their deaths to escape U.S. troops, and in front he places a large bust of President George Washington, dressed in a skeleton-print suit and dangling a cigarette. Above, the word monstrous ghosts over the omnipresent Marlboro logo advertising the toxin. To the left, a caution sign shows a family on the run, while in the center a border patrol truck drives down a mountainside of human skulls. Additional labels in the center read Prop. 187 and The New Order. Despite the diversity of images the message is clear. In Curtain Raiser Duffy depicts the harsh attacks of armed border patrols with their snifng dogs. A erce, aggressive jaguar in the foreground, with its open mouth and sharp fangs, instills terror in the viewer. (In ancient Meso-American reliefs the jaguar is the armed god of the underworld who requires human blood.) Above the jaguar, Donald Duck drives

a patrol truck, with Mickey Mouse as his passenger. Undocumented migrants remain locked in the back, with the torch of the Statue of Liberty right behind them. The hood is ornamented with a statue of a conquistador, his sword dripping blood. On the ground lies a green card dated 1492, the year Columbus landed in the New World. This fearsome work protests the violence at the border, which seems a hypocritical contradiction to the open border of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In recent work Duffy has also addressed pollution and environmental problems, fearing that the long-term effect of corporate colonialism was to devour the last remnants of resources and wilderness, to demolish the viability of any traditional local culture or taste, stimulating global and ecological disintegration.63 The border clash, in which capitalist power looms large, is painted with stunning simplicity in the ironically titled When Paradise Arrived (1989) by Enrique racism, discrimination, identity politics
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ENRIQUE CHAGOYA WHEN PARADISE ARRIVED, 1989 Charcoal and pastel on paper, 80 80 in. Di Rosa Preserve, Napa, California. Photo: Stefan Kirkeby.

Chagoya (see p. 64). In this large drawing Mickey Mouses gigantic thrusting hand (with English only imprinted discreetly on a nger) is about to ick away a young Chicana with a red heart painted on her small body. With arrogance and xenophobic power, the hand seems to issue the command Get out! In 1994 Chagoya painted his acclaimed tragicomic work The Governors Nightmare, in acrylic and oil on amate-bark paper (a support used in the MesoAmerican codices). It deals with the clash of cultures in a most sardonic manner. Syncretically fusing aspects of Meso-American culture with the political situation in California during Pete Wilsons governorship, Chagoya depicts the Lord of the Mitlantecutli, the Aztec Lord of the Dead, sitting on a pyramid, exhorting people to cannibalism. He sprinkles salt on a terried Mickey Mouse, who is tied up on a plate, garracism, discrimination, identity politics

nished with chili peppers. Stereotyped Aztecs sit around, eagerly devouring parts of a human body, presumably that of Pete Wilson, who was known for his rabid anti-immigration stance. As a parallel to this event, Chagoya has placed a small reproduction of a colonial-era painting, Allegory of the Sacrament by Juan Correa, in the upper-right corner. It shows Christ pressing grapes, with the juice falling into the mouths of lambssymbolizing the devout drinking Christs blood at the Eucharist. In 1995 Chagoya made six monoprints, Tausend Jhrige Reich, referring to the history of colonialism in the Americas from the Conquest to current U.S. border patrols. The prints title comes from Hitlers proclamation of his Thousand Year Reich and from John Heartelds photomontaged comment on this pronouncement. Chagoya has also produced works that celebrate Mexican culture, as in his etchings for a privately published collection of sixteenth- to twentieth-century Mexican verse, The Bread of Days, with poems selected by Octavio Paz and translated by Samuel Beckett. In 2002, after joining the art faculty at Stanford University, he exhibited a number of his own codices, often mixing pre-Columbian mythology with Catholic icons, characters from American comics, and images of ethnic stereotypes. He comments, My work is a product of collisions between historical vision and contemporary paradigms. It is a thesis and an antithesis that ends in a synthesis in the mind of the viewer. I seek to create a nonlinear narrative with many possible interpretations.64 Like Chagoya and other Mexican American artists, Armando Rascn protests the U.S. colonialist threat to Chicanos and their culture. Rascn was born in 1956 in Calexico, California, directly across the border from Mexicali, Mexico, a border that was very uid at the time. Educated at the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Rascn was part of a second generation of politically conscious artists who beneted from the earlier Chicano art movement. Artists of this generation were able to enter the space of postmodern mobility and

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could afrm their ethnic presence without being defensive. In 1991 Rascn produced Artifact with Three Declarations of Independence. The artifact is a group of twelve found photographs that depict stereotypical images, such as a Mexican bullght, an attractive and exotic seorita, an old peasant selling owers, and the face of an elderly Mexican in his sombrero. The three manifestos are El Plan de Delano of 1966 (the initial statement of the Delano Grape Strike, which served as the basis for the working principles of the United Farm Workers), El Plan de la Raza Unida (a statement by the Chicano political party), and The Spiritual Plan for Aztln (adopted at the First National Chicano Youth Conference in Denver in 1969). These declarations chart the evolution, within three years, from the movements rst, basically religious and humble statement to its cry of deance and militancy. The work is also partly autobiographical, and, for Rascn, the personal is indeed

political. His sister attended the Denver conference, and the artist himself, when he was ten years old, witnessed the farmworkers three-hundred-mile march from Delano to Sacramento (at which Robert F. Kennedy, then attorney general, was present). It was there that he picked up a mimeographed sheet of the Plan de Delano, which left an indelible impression on him. Rascn served as curator, archivist, demographer, and researcher for Xicano Ricorso, a 1994 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that covered thirty years of work by Chicano artists in lm, animation, and digital photography, from 1963 to 1993. In 1994 he also organized Occupied Aztln at the San Francisco Art Institute. Here Rascn amassed many elements, including maps, sepia-toned family photographs, FBI les on the UFW, texts about the Chicano Moratorium, and a small monitor showing a clip of Orson Welless lm A Touch of Evil, which is about

ENRIQUE CHAGOYA THE GOVERNORS NIGHTMARE, 1994 Acrylic and oil on amate paper, 48 72 in. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Paule Anglim.

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Memories of a Martyr

ARMANDO RASCN BORDER METAMORPHOSIS: THE BINATIONAL MURAL PROJECT, 19982001 Mural on metal, 2 miles long. Calexico, California; Mexicali, Mexico. Calexico Arts Commission. 1998 Armando Rascn.

corruption in Calexico, where the lm was made in 1958, when the border was still open, before the heavy steel barriers were erected. The border wall became the subject of Rascns community project Border Metamorphosis: The Binational Mural Project (1998 2001), in which artists painted a two-mile stretch of the fence from Calexico to Mexicali in Baja California with circular and diamond-shaped designs in bright red, white, yellow, blue, and green. Whereas Occupied Aztln was discursive, remapping the borderland, the mural project addressed this new Berlin Wall, representing gringos latest attempt at control and separation. By painting on this wall, Rascn seems to tell us that cross-cultural discourse will continue in spite of the physical barrier. It is worth noting that the wall dividing Berlin went down soon after people in the West used it as a support for their pictures. Rascn intends to use a forty-foot segment of the CalexicoMexicali wall in an installation, Naco Nocturno, at the reopened de Young Museum in San Francisco in 20056. racism, discrimination, identity politics

A Chicano reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Rubn Salazar knew the street from the inside, and, when he wrote about the Mexican community in East Los Angeles, he was able to articulate the voice and the visions of the people in the barrios. In August 1970 he went to cover a major Chicano demonstration against the Vietnam War, protesting the disproportionate numbers of Chicanos being drafted and killed in combat. Salazar was not even on the streets but sitting inside a bar when he was killed by a tear gas projectile red by a Los Angeles County ofcer. His death was a devastating blow, causing despair as well as great anger in the Mexican community. Underlining the signicance of this event, Rupert Garca produced a strong portrait of the fallen journalist in the year of his death, and Frank Romero made a compelling painting of the shooting, The Death of Ruben Salazar (1986). Romero, who was born in Los Angeles in 1941, came to prominence as a founding member of Los Four (see above). He had studied at the Otis Art Institute and California State University, Los Angeles, and had worked as a designer for Charles and Ray Eames. After joining the Chicano movement, he helped produce murals on Broadway in Los Angeles and in 1981 curated the important exhibition The Murals at Aztln at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles. In Romeros painting of Salazars murder, we see a line of policemen shooting their guns while a bomb explodes in the Silver Dollar Bar and Poolroom, which is anked by a check-cashing place and a movie marquee. The painting is almost entirely orange, the color of re, and the gestural brushwork conveys urgency. Romero has commented, I always like to paint the rhythm of things, to express the big pulse that I see in everything around me. In order to distribute the image widely, Romero made a silkscreen of the painting in 1998. He has also created such pungent and rather gruesome pictures as La Llorana (The Weeping Woman, 1985), based on a Mexican myth

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FRANK ROMERO THE DEATH OF RUBEN SALAZAR, 1986 Oil on canvas, 72 120 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Museum purchase made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment. Courtesy of Patricia Correia Gallery, Santa Monica, California.

about a woman who killed her children and now wanders through the land looking for them, and Back Seat Dodge, Homage to Kienholz (1991), in which a naked woman seated next to the open door of the car is in deep embrace with a skeleton.
Ritual and Death

Adhering to Mexican traditions that grew out of the pre-Hispanic era, as well as Catholic piety and its Baroque manifestations, Chicano artists have created reliquaries, shrines, home altars, retablos, and sacred environments. The brown-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe is a popular image, as are references to woodcarved santos and the calavera (cavorting skeleton), which has its origins in pre-Columbian art but reached a high point in the late-nineteenth-century zinc engravings of the Mexican artist Jos Guadalupe Posada (18511913). In Mexican culture death is mediated and celebrated by ritual and pageantry not just on the Da de los Muertos but throughout the year. A number of Chicana artists have produced par-

ticularly powerful works that draw on this rich folk tradition involving religious imagery and ritual. Consuelo Jimnez Underwood, for instance, sees her work as sacred communication, and she at times combines religious references with overtly political themes. She was born to a family of migrant farmworkers in Sacramento in 1949, the eleventh of twelve children. In college she originally majored in religious studies but later concentrated on textiles, earning an MFA at San Jose State University, where she has been a professor since 1989. In her series Revolutionary Banners (1993) Underwood transformed the custom of hanging banners in churches into potent political messages on such issues as land grabs, the killing of the buffaloes, and the greed for gold. She wove these textile pieces with consummate skill, adding shreds of glistening metal into the fabric. In Virgen de los Caminos (Virgin of the Highways, 1994) she embroidered a white quilt with an image of the Virgin and lovely ower decorations at the corners. But the initial viewing is misleading: the praying Virgin is deadher face racism, discrimination, identity politics
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CONSUELO JIMNEZ UNDERWOOD VIRGEN DE LOS CAMINOS, 1994 Embroidered and quilted cotton and silk with graphite, 58 36 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Photo: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC / Art Resource, NY.

is actually a skulland she stands on a nest of barbed wire. Barbed wire is also embroidered across the quilt. Almost invisible within the fabric design is the word caution, repeated in a pattern, and the image of Mexicans scurrying across the highway. It is a work of almost secret ambiguity, combining anger and adoration, by an artist who has said: With beauty, grace and traditional form, my work expresses quiet rage that has permeated the indigenous peoples of the Americas for over ve hundred years.65 Much of Amalia Mesa-Bainss work might be called critical celebration, as it both honors her cultural heritage and takes a hard look at the politics affecting it. An artist, author, cultural critic, and teacher, MesaBains was born in 1943 in San Jose and holds degrees in art and interdisciplinary education as well as a doctorate in psychology. She has received a fellowship
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from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and has served as a member of the San Francisco Art Commission and as director of the Visual and Public Art Institute at California State University, Monterey. Her artworks include sculptures, codices, photocollages, prints, and, above all, ritual altars, which she sees as part of the secret history of women. Her ofrendas are in the tradition of the domestic altars that women would decorate, but at the same time they are political statements against womens connement to the home. They often focus inward, exploring womens psyches, while at the same time offering metaphors for pride and rostrums for memory. During the Chicano movement, Mesa-Bains has written, Chicana artists focused on their political identity, using the female lenses of narrative, domestic space, social critique and ceremony, which ltered these nutrient experiences, contradictory roles and community structures.66 In her Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio (1984), for example, Mesa-Bains pays homage to the Hollywood movie queen who was the rst Mexican woman to become a popular idol in the dominant culture. Del Rio was also a supporter of the Loyalist antifascist cause during the Spanish Civil War and a friend of the socialist artist Frida Kahlo. Mesa-Bainss altar opulently frames del Rios Hollywood photograph with cascades of pink satin and lace. The shrine is replete with votive objects and hints of del Rios roots, such as a small Mexican ag, as well as a variety of secular relics, from glamorous movie stills to perfume bottles, lipsticks, and lace fans. At the foot of the altar, a carpet of scattered glitter and crushed rose petals seems a reminder of the transitoriness of all beauty, reinforcing our need to honor and remember. While Mesa-Bainss altars to such movie stars as Dolores del Rio and Rita Hayworth exude glamour and luxury, Yolanda Lopezs installation The Nanny (1994) depicts a more common role for the Mexicana in California, as a domestic worker, with her maids uniform on a hanger and her cleaning paraphernalia in a bucket on the oor. Born in 1942 in the Logan Heights (now Barrio Heights) district of San

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AMALIA MESA-BAINS AN OFRENDA FOR DOLORES DEL RIO, 1984 Mixed-media installation with plywood, fabric, framed items, and decorative elements, 96 72 48 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Photo: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC / Art Resource, NY.

YOLANDA M. LOPEZ PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS THE VIRGIN OF GUADALUPE, 1978 Oil pastel on paper, 32 22 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Diego, Lopez became involved in the Third World Liberation Front student strike at San Francisco State College (now University) in 1968 and later continued her studies at the University of California, San Diego, where she produced the widely shown poster Whos the Illegal Alien Pilgrim? (1978). In this work an indigenous Mexican warrior with Toltec headdress and bracelet points his nger at the viewer with a erce expression as he asks a question that subverts and inverts anti-immigrant fervor by referring to the alien racism, discrimination, identity politics

status of the Anglo Pilgrims, who arrived at Plymouth Rock rather late in North American history. Lopezs most popular work is her Virgin of Guadalupe triptych (1978), in which she represented herself, her mother, and her grandmotherthree generations of Chicanasusing the iconography of Mexicos revered Virgin to take on issues of class, race, and gender. All three women are surrounded by a halo. In the right-hand panel her grandmother, a mestiza, holds a rattlesnake that she had skinned. In the lefthand panel her mother, who was a seamstress, stitches the Virgins cape. In the center a youthful Yolanda runs with force toward the viewer, one hand holding onto the Virgins mantle as it ies behind her and the other hand grasping the rattlesnakean image of young feminine power liberated from the constraining stereotyped icon. When this work was rst shown, it caused considerable controversy because to the faithful it seemed blasphemous. In the intervening years it has been widely accepted as an image of liberation. Drawing on the rituals surrounding death and the calavera tradition, Ricardo Favela (b. 1944) gives death a total presence in his 1975 serigraph for El Centro de Artistas Chicanos in Sacramento. Favela, like many artists discussed here, was born to migrant parents in the San Joaquin Valley. Wanting a better life, he attended California State University, Sacramento, where he has been teaching since 1982. In Sacramento he was one of the founders of the Royal Chicano Air Force, a close-knit community group committed to activist struggles, with art as an essential part of its political mission. With a black humor similar to that in Posadas engravings, Favelas print advertising El Centro de Artistas Chicanos and its classes presents two calaveras, one holding up a mirror to his skeletal colleague, who raises his arm in a saluting gesture. In line with Indigenous tradition, Favela suggests that the presence of death is not a matter to be ignored, as it is in Anglo culture, but an event to be both feared and celebrated as part of the natural circle of life.

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A Pranksters Strategy

Controversy lies at the heart of Gronks work. Often playing the prankster, he has created art that dees conventions as well as works with a ritualistic aspect that is highly personal. Gluglio Gronk Nicandro was born in 1954 in Los Angeles, where he continues to live and work. His rst exposure to art was in the form of street grafti, and over the years he has worked as a painter, muralist, grafti artist, performer, lmmaker, lecturer, opera set designer, and curator. He rst came to public attention in 1971 when, at the age of seventeen, he cofounded Asco (see above). Gronk and the other members of Asco would walk about in outlandish costumes and perform pranks. In 1971, for example, they staged Stations of the Cross in Los Angeles as an alternative ritual of resistance to belief systems that gloried useless deaths.67 In the performance Gronk, wearing a green bowler hat and car-

rying a large bag of popcorn, personied Pontius Pilate; Willie Herrn represented Christ/Death; and Harry Gamboa Jr. was a zombie altar boy. The performance, which occurred on Whittier Boulevard and Eastern Avenue, concluded with a silent vigil at the U.S. Marine Recruiting Station on Goodrich Boulevard. In another action, at the end of 1972, they spraypainted their names on the entrance wall of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in reaction to the negative response of a museum curator to their query about the possibility of including Chicano art in museum exhibitions.68 They were modern-day nihilists, latter-day Dadaists, creators of agitprop and Happenings. Eccentric by gringo standards, Gronk and his associates saw themselves as outsiders in relation to the dominant culture but as community artists within their own ethnic group. By 1985, already well accepted as a group of Chicano artists, they took part in the exhibition CARA, where they painted their agonizing Black and White Mural in memory of the Chicano Moratorium and Rubn Salazar. In 1984 Gronk began an ongoing series of paintings, most of which include the recurrent character La Tormenta, and he slowly turned to art that might be more accepted in the mainstream art world. Not ignoring his roots as a street artist, he became more formal, almost ritualistic in his work. La Tormenta is like a gure in a Greek chorus or Max Beckmanns bellhopsomeone who sees, who witnesses, but is not part of the event. She may appear as a fashionably dressed woman, seen bare-backed from the rear or behind a fan. La Tormenta is Gronks guide, his Beatrice, and probably his alter ego. His irreverent attitude in these works seems shaped by Antonin Artaud, Marcel Duchamp, and certainly Cantinas, the great Mexican comedian. In 1985 Gronk produced an exhibition titled The Titanic and Other Tragedies at Sea, which used the unsinkable ocean liner, built to withstand all danger, as a metaphor for the mindless disaster and misdeeds of the Reagan administration. In one picture from this series, called Getting the Fuck Out of the Way (1987), lit cigarettes drop from plumes racism, discrimination, identity politics

RICARDO FAVELA EL CENTRO DE ARTISTAS CHICANOS, 1975 Silkscreen, 25 19 in. Courtesy of the artist.

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GRONK JOSEPHINE BONEAPART PROTECTING THE REAR GUARD, 1987 Acrylic on canvas, 75 12 63 12 in. Private collection. Courtesy of Daniel Saxon Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: William Nettles.

of smoke, threatening to bomb the ship, while a large, aming object, resembling both a bone and a penis, hovers in the dark above and in front of the vessel forging ahead, oblivious to its fate. A skeletal phallus also appears in another 1987 painting Josephine Boneapart Protecting the Rear Guard. Here La Tormenta takes on the imagined personality of Josephine at the death of the Napleonic empire. With his typical bravura gestural handling of paint, Gronk depicts her hiding her face behind a large fan or the beams of a ashlight, while a large phallus with a huge head sits on a red drum next to her. By 1995 the former prankster, now fully accepted in the art world,
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was commissioned to design sets for the Los Angeles Opera. The same year, dressed as La Tormenta, he produced an improvisatory painting in a performance at UCLA while the Kronos Quartet played; he also made exterior and interior murals for the Saint Gertrude Catholic Church in East Los Angeles.

WOMENS EXPERIENCE

The Feminist Movement

Feminist art in its current form originated with the womens liberation movement in the 1960s, which in

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turn was sparked by the intense political ferment of the time. The rst wave of feminism in the United States arose much earlier, however, in the womens suffrage movement during the second half of the nineteenth century, led by, among others, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had been active abolitionists. Eventually, in 1920, women throughout the United States achieved the right to vote (California women won this right almost a decade earlier, in 1911). Another issue that began to take hold was reproductive choice, with women such as Margaret Sanger and the famous anarchist Emma Goldman pushing for the availability of birth control. A womans right to choose abortion, which states had begun denying in the 1860s, was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (1973), although this right continues to be assaulted at the time of this writing. Consonant with cultural change, the image of women has undergone a process of modication. By the middle of the twentieth century, stereotypes of women as mild household nuns or commanding dominatrices, as bestial sluts or goddesses of nature, as sirenlike pinups or innocent schoolgirls, were coming into question; the culture was prepared for a new, feminist image of women. In 1949 the French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex (issued in English in 1953). De Beauvoir raised the fundamental question What is a woman? She proposed that culture is the chief determining factor: One is not born a woman, rather one becomes one.69 A harbinger of postmodern theory, de Beauvoirs book initiated critiques of female identity, of the history of women, and of the problematic issue of gender and representation. A decade or so later Betty Friedans The Feminist Mystique (1963) had a powerful impact. Friedan took issue with the notion, popular in postwar America, that women could nd their fulllment through childbearing and housewifery, and her book helped raise womens awareness of themselves as individuals outside those roles. Feminist agitation expedited the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which

prohibits discrimination based on gender. In 1966 Friedan helped found the politically potent National Organization for Women (NOW), and by the end of the decade womens liberation and consciousnessraising groups were proliferating. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, there were sixty-four womens liberation groups by 1970. Increasingly, organizations also formed to focus attention on concerns of women of color, including the Comisin Femenil Mexicana, started in Sacramento in 1970, and Black Women Organized for Action, founded in the Bay Area in 1973. In 1970 the literary scholar, activist, and sculptor Kate Millett published her radical treatise Sexual Politics, which remains a strong polemical work. The feminist art historian Linda Nochlin wrote that this book positioned Millett as La Passionaria of womens liberationery, articulate, and avid for justice: justice not only for women, but for political prisoners, for antiwar protesters and civil libertarians, for children, for the mentally ill, and for gays and lesbians.70 Other passionate voices appeared in two inuential anthologies from 1970: Sisterhood Is Powerful, edited by Robin Morgan, and The Black Woman, edited by Toni Cade. Women were examining the discrimination they faced on every front. Why have there been no great women artists? Linda Nochlin asked in the title of her famous 1971 essay. She answered: The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education. . . . Women can take part in the creation of institutions in which clear thought and true greatness are challenges open to anyoneman or woman courageous enough to take the necessary risk, the leap into the unknown.71 Nochlins essay and her subsequent books were followed by an outpouring of studies of art by women. The College Art Association established the Womens Caucus for Art in 1972, and more women artists, critics, and historians were appointed to tenured positions in academe. Artists began to look for womens art in museums and commercial art galleries, nding racism, discrimination, identity politics
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enormous discrepancies between male and female representation; the ratio of artists being reviewed in Art in America in 197071 was twelve males to one female; the ratio in Artforum was seven to one. As late as 1982 Mary Boone, a major gallery owner in New York, asserted: Its the men now who are emotional and intuitive . . . and, besides, museums just dont buy paintings by women.72 In 1971 the representation of women in the Whitney Museum Annual was less than twenty percent, even with pressure from women activists. Slowly the situation has improved,73 although feminist groups like the Guerrilla Girls continue to point to discrepancies in the treatment of female and male artists. Early on, California became a leader in feminist art education. In 1970 the rst study program for feminist art was established by Judy Chicago at Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno). It subsequently moved to the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, where it was codirected by Judy Chicago and the New York artist Miriam Schapiro (then living in California). In 197172 twenty-one women in the CalArts Feminist Art Program converted an abandoned building in Los Angeles into a domestic space called Womanhouse. It both celebrated and critiqued womens everyday experiences, featuring cosmetics, shoes, linens, and the like. Specially designed spaces, such as The Dollhouse (by Sherry Brody and Schapiro) and Menstruation Bathroom (by Chicago), sparked questions about womens life at home. The central space was the kitchen, where eggs over easy covered the walls, growing into breastlike forms. In the pantry leading to the kitchen, plate after plate overowing with plenty reinforced the sense of a trap for women, from which society did not encourage escape. Womanhouse gave birth to a performance workshop, through which women began putting private, personal experiences on a public stage. In 1973 hundreds of women came to CalArts to attend the First West Coast Conference of Women Artists. That same year the gallery Womanspace opened in Los Angeles,
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followed by the Womans Building, which came to house not only the gallery and a performance space, but also an alternative feminist art school, the Feminist Studio Workshop, led by Chicago, Arlene Raven, and Sheila de Bretteville. For almost two decades the Womans Building remained a major force in encouraging feminist art, especially performance art, fostering such groups as the Feminist Art Workers and The Waitresses. As Schapiro observed, it was at the Womans Building, on the West Coastan area generally less supported and dominated by the established art worldthat the most lively separatist feminist performance scene developed.74 It also provided a venue for such distinguished visitors over the years as Eleanor Antin, Judy Baca, Susan Grifn, Helen Mayer Harrison, Lynn Hershman, Joan Jonas, Suzanne Lacy, Lucy Lippard, Kate Millett, Linda Montano, Yvonne Rainer, Adrienne Rich, Martha Rosler, and Moira Roth.
Feminist Performance Art

A great deal of the most outstanding feminist art was indeed in the area of performance. Performance art in the twentieth century can be traced back to the Futurist Luigi Russolos manifesto The Art of Noises (1913) and his noise-organs, introduced a year later, as well as to actions by the Dadaists and the early Soviet agitprop artists. But it moved from the margins of artistic expression toward its center in Europe, Japan, and the United States simultaneously after World War II. In New York Jean Tinguelys Homage to New York, that miraculous machine which destroyed itself in a public performance in the Museum of Modern Arts sculpture garden in March 1960, gave great impetus to Happenings and subsequent performance art. The critic Harold Rosenberg had spoken of action paintinghere was an artwork whose action could be observed in time.75 Indeed, Happeningsthe term Allan Kaprow used for his and his colleagues performances in New York in the late 1950s and early 1960sgrew out of action painting. But with Happenings, instead of the painters

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confronting the canvas as an arena in which to act spontaneously with his or her brush, the artist set actual events in motionactions that, as Kaprow pointed out, utilized the specic substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odor, touch.76 The critic Henry Sayre has traced the growth of performance art in relation to the California counterculture: As a medium, performance was initially intensely political in orientation. In northern California it emerged in connection with the 1967 San Francisco Be-In in Golden Gate Park, at the Peace March the same year, and during the 1969 Peoples Park demonstrations in Berkeley; in the southern part of the state, it received its greatest impact from the feminist movement.77 Be-Ins, Happenings, and early performances all differed signicantly from the theater, even from the Brechtian mode with its distance devices. In contrast to conceptual art, which emerged at about the same time and which negates the necessity of the object for the causation of an aesthetic experience, the strategy of performance art shifts art from contemplation of an object to something less tangiblethe audiences direct experience in the moment. At times it may border on ritual. Many performances have specically addressed political issues, including power relationships, the marginalization of women, ethnicity, war, and the destruction of the earth. Performance has also helped dene art as process in the postmodern era. In California during the 1970s, women artists, energized by consciousness-raising groups, began using performance art to reexamine their physical and psychological self-images. The phrase the personal is political applies to works by such early feminist performance artists as Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, Linda Montano, Rachel Rosenthal, and Faith Wilding. Antin, for example, made the exploration of self and female identity a central theme in her oeuvre, which brought together performance, installation art, photography, and video. Born in New York in 1935, Antin majored in creative writing and acting at the City College of New York, where she met her fu-

ture husband and collaborator, the poet, critic, and performer David Antin. Early on, her artwork became informed by the international Fluxus movement, with its iconoclastic and anarchic experimentation that set out to demystify the aura of the arts. In 1969 the Antins moved to Southern California, exchanging the New York hothouse art world for the greater freedom and reduced pressure that artists enjoyed there. In San Diego Eleanor began to create personal narrative installations pertaining to consumerism in California (California Lives, 1969), gender discrimination in the New York art world (Portraits of Eight New York Women, 1972), and other issues. Focusing more directly on her own person, she produced Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972), a satire on the way the classical Greek sculptor cut into the marble block hoping to release the ideal image of the human gure. For this project, Antin photographed her own naked body in four positions over a period of fortyve days and then arranged the 144 resulting photographs in a grid, recalling the studies of Eadweard Muybridge. But her photographic sequence offered a personal visual comment on womens xation with the perfect body image. As time went on, Antin created various personae, often resurrecting historical gures, in her search for her own identity: I am interested in dening the limits of myself. I consider the usual aids of self-denitionsex, age, talent and spaceas tyrannical limitations upon my freedom of choice. I have projected 4 selvesThe Ballerina, the King, the Black Movie Star and the Nurse.78 In the early 1970s Antin came to wide attention with her 100 Boots (197173), a narrative told in ftyone picture postcards, which, in keeping with the praxis of Fluxus mail art, were sent to recipients the world over. The postcards show a hundred rubber boots on the march across the countryside of Southern Californialining up to go to church, checking out a drive-in movie theater, or standing out of a job near an oil renery. Eventually they clamber onto the Staten Island ferry and reach their exhibition destination at the Museum of Modern Art. More racism, discrimination, identity politics
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a series of some sixty photographs made to look like vintage nineteenth-century prints and a related performance freely based on the gure of Florence Nightingale and her trek through the Crimean War with the British army. That work brought up many moral and ethical issues, not just about war, but about the meaning of service to others in the pursuit of war. If youre a nurse, and you save one soldier, and then he goes back and kills some more people, you have in reality become a multiple murderer. But if a man is bleeding, you have to bandage him. Thats what a nurse does. And bandaging the man, whoever he is, is the moral thing to do. Its the human thing, even though, alas, humans dont do it all that much. But nurses do. Its the nature of their professionor was, before managed care came into the picture.79

ELEANOR ANTIN IN THE TRENCHES BEFORE SEBASTOPOL (DETAIL), FROM THE ANGEL OF MERCY: MY TOUR OF DUTY IN THE CRIMEA, 1977 Tinted gelatin silver print mounted on handmade paper with text, 30 38 22 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Purchase, with funds from Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo and the Photography Committee. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York. Photo: 1987 D. James Dee.

clearly articulating Antins idea of a living self-portrait and her relation to feminist art is The Angel of Mercy (1977). This piece began as an album of tinted prints of Crimean War photographs as well as photos of her friends and colleagues in the UC San Diego art communityDavid Antin, Helen and Newton Harrison, Martha Rosler, Jerome Rothenbergall in Victorian costumes. Next she created a video and an installation, and eventually she scripted, directed, and staged a performance in which she and two actors were attired to resemble the photographs. Antin assumed the persona of Florence Nightingale during her tour of duty as a nurse in the Crimean War. In an interview with Howard Fox, the curator of Antins 1999 solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, she explained:
I hadnt yet explored the nature of serve and its historical role in womens lives. So I looked back in history at the founder of nursing and found Florence Nightingale. The Angel of Mercy was the title of both

While Antin told personal/political stories by adopting the guise of real and invented historical gures, Linda Montano began to put her own life onstage in real-time performances that blurred the boundaries between life and art. Born in 1942 near Kingston, New York, Montano came from a strong Catholic background and lived in a convent from 1960 to 1962. In the church she encountered mystery and awe. Her later work as a performance artist owes much to this religious culture, as well as to her studies of meditation, Hinduism, and Buddhism. After studying sculpture in Italy in the mid-1960s, Montano came to feel that traditional sculpture was limited to object making and so turned to performance art. For her MFA project at the University of Wisconsin, she created The Chicken Show (1969), an action with live chickens both on the roof of the art department and throughout the city of Madison. In 1971 she moved to California, working rst in San Francisco, then in San Diego, until she moved back to New York in 1980. In 1971 Montano began what she called life-art performances, and in 1973, during the rst year of Tom Marionis Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco, she performed Handcuff, in which she and Marioni were cuffed together for three days. She re-

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members, Somehow this event, more than any other one, raised questions about public/private, and I felt a tension between my ability to be permissive in my work and yet not in my life. I needed to redene marriage and tried to do so with art. Despite the conict, it was a magical piece and I discovered that Tom and I had probably been related a long time ago.80 Ten years later she and the Taiwanese refugee Tehching Hsieh collaborated in Hsiehs Art/Life: One Year Performance, spending twelve months (from July 1983 to July 1984) tied together with an eight-foot rope and always in the same room at the same time. This action, in which the two individuals were not to touch each other with a literal exhibition of male/female longing, demanded rigor and self-restraint (a quality found in Hsiehs other One-Year Performances). One of Montanos most powerful works is the haunting and passionate performance and later video Mitchells Death, rst performed at the University of

California, San Diego, in 1978. Mitchell Paine, her exhusband, had died from gunshot wounds incurred while preparing to go hunting, and Montano, with acupuncture needles in her face, chanted her experience from the time she rst heard about his death to the instant when she saw him in the mortuary. She presented this ritualistic, self-reective performance in which she wondered whether Mitchell had died in an accident or some other way, questioning whether she herself was in some way guiltyin an unrelenting monotone, accompanied by two musicians. The performance was an exorcism of real grief and mourning, witnessed by her audience. In a different example of her belief that performance is therapy, Montano confronted the loss of control experienced in menopause and aging by acting out a series of alcoholic episodes, with a seemingly similar loss of control, in the video Seven Years of Intoxication (1995). Although Montano does not seem as adamant about changing social structures as some feminists, her work forcefully puts a womans life (her own) forward as valid subject matter and a tool for art making, leading to a greater understanding of self and others. Growing up in a commune in Paraguay, Faith Wilding (b. 1943), like Montano, came from a strong Catholic background. In 197172, as a graduate student in the Feminist Art Program at CalArts, Wilding participated in the creation of Womanhouse and a female iconography: We vied with each other to come up with images of female sexual organs by making paintings and drawings and constructions of bleeding slits, holes, and gashes, boxes, caves, or exquisite vulval jewel pillows. Making cunt art was exciting, subversive, and fun, because cunt signied to us an awakened consciousness about our bodies and our sexual selves.81 It was at Womanhouse in 1972 that Wilding rst performed Waiting, a piece inspired by a performance she had seen of Samuel Becketts Happy Days. Sitting passively with her hands on her lap, she rocked in her chair and declaimed in a monotone the innumerable instances of waiting in a womans life. Her text began: racism, discrimination, identity politics

LINDA MONTANO WITH TOM MARIONI IN HANDCUFF, 1973 Event at the Museum of Conceptual Art, San Francisco. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Minnette Lehmann.

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FAITH WILDING WAITING, 1972 Performance at Womanhouse, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Lloyd Hamrol.

Waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting . . . Waiting for someone to come in Waiting for someone to pick me up Waiting for someone to hold me Waiting for someone to feed me Waiting for someone to change my diaper. Waiting . . . Waiting to crawl, to walk, waiting to talk82

She went on to evoke the waiting for my breasts to develop . . . for my rst date . . . for the secret . . . for him to give me an orgasm . . . for menopause . . . for the end of day. Waiting was later performed for womens and theater groups throughout the country and included in a documentary about Womanhouse. In contrast to the passive stance of Waiting, Wilding later became actively engaged in cyberfeminism, a movement that had its rst international conference in Kassel, Germany, in 1997. The strategy of cyberfeminism is to secure innovative female empower194

ment by providing women with full access to cyberspace and all electronic resources. Wilding sees it as a natural move beyond Third Wave feminism as a new popular front of feminist activism and resistancesaying that through the work of numerous Netactive women, there is now a distinct cyberfeminist Netpresence that is fresh, brash, smart, and iconoclastic of many of the tenets of classical feminism, which will create a place for women in a eld which is still dominated by men.83 Another performance artist to emerge out of the Feminist Art Program was Suzanne Lacy (b. 1945), who had left the small town of Wasco in Californias Central Valley to study geology and psychology at Fresno State College, where she encountered Judy Chicago in 1970. She stayed with Chicagos Feminist Art Program when it moved to CalArts, where she also studied with Allan Kaprow. In 1972 she joined Chicago, Aviva Rahmani, and Sandra Orgel in creating the performance Ablutions to address the issue of rape, at a time when women were just beginning to speak out about their experiences. On an audiotape women told of their rapes, while in front of the audience one woman was bound (starting with her feet) to a chair and two others bathed themselves, rst in eggs, then blood, then clay, before being tied up in sheets and left as corpses. Behind them a performer nailed raw beef kidneys to the studio wall. In the end a web of ropes ensnared the various objects and performers, while a taped voice repeated, I felt so helpless, so powerless, there was nothing I could do but [lie] there and cry softly.84 Five years later, enraged by violence against women, sensationalist reporting of rapes in the press, and the lax attitude of the Los Angeles police in tracking rapists, Lacy, in collaboration with other women, created Three Weeks in May. Every day for three weeks, on a map of the Los Angeles area, placed on display near City Hall, Lacy stamped the word rape in red to designate the location where a sexual assault had been reported the previous day. This work also included public discussions, readings, self-defense demonstrations, and per-

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SUZANNE LACY AND LESLIE LABOWITZ IN MOURNING AND IN RAGE, 1977 Performance, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Suzanne Lacy.

formances, including Lacys She Who Would Fly and a theater piece by Leslie Labowitz (b. 1946), who had studied in Germany with Joseph Beuys and saw actions as meaningful political art forms. Lacy, Labowitz, and other feminists in their group acted according to the belief that, as Lucy Lippard put it, lived experience is the ground from which all politics come.85 In 1977, again at Los Angeles City Hall, Lacy and Labowitz staged In Mourning and in Rage, a public media action directed specically against the medias presentation of the murders by the notorious Hillside Strangler. The media exploited the cases with sensationalistic news reports, but did not offer any access to support for endangered women, leaving them frustrated, frightened, and helpless. Lacy and Labowitz decided to create a public forum that would transform individual predicaments into collective action. Nine women shrouded in the black of mourning but gripping bright red shawls signifying action stood tall on the steps of City Hall, each making a statement against the abuse of women. The stunning performance attracted local and national attention and caused a re-

versal in attitude by the media. Labowitz and Lacy then organized Ariadne, a social network that became a nationwide forum for womens voices. In 1984 Lacy produced a performance called Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, in which 154 white-clad women, ranging in age from sixty-ve to one hundred, sat on white tables on the white sand of the beach at La Jolla, talking about issues of aging and survival. The conversation was recorded and heard by many witnesses standing on the cliff above. Although visual aesthetics may not have been Lacys primary motivation in creating the piece, the physical layout of the work, its juxtaposition of sky, sand, sea, and performers, and its carefully measured duration in time invested the performance with great beauty. This quality of Lacys work became even more apparent in The Crystal Quilt (1987), performed on the oor of the Crystal Court in Minneapolis, an elegant large atrium in a commercial building designed by Philip Johnson. Here 430 older women again spoke with one another about growing old and facing death. The performers were dressed in black and seated at red- and yellow-clothed tables, which were arranged in a quiltracism, discrimination, identity politics
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like pattern designed by Miriam Schapiro. Through their choreographed hand movements, they made a constantly changing quilt for the viewers in the balcony above. At the end of their performance, their voices invited the large audience to enter the quilt, bringing with them colorful scarves that altered the design. With this work, Lacy was consciously drawing on the history of nineteenth-century tableaux vivants, those frozen theater pieces that usually entailed moral messages. Here the older women were no longer frozen but gained power through their intercommunication. Lacy has continued to create works for the public sphere. She participated in Culture in Action, a public art program in Chicago, set up as a discourse between artists, curators, and funders concerning the relation of art to public life. In 1995 Lacy edited Mapping the Terrain, a compendium of essays about artists who work outside the traditional venuesin performance art, urban planning, and other eldsto create a new visual language, with the aim of engineering social change. In 1993 Lacy had worked with a number of women imprisoned in the maximum-security Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York. In this collaborative work the women placed testimonials about being abused, violated, and battered in demolished automobiles, which became metaphors for their own maltreatment. The women, who learned how to use power tools to work on the cars, created a healing car that, while still wrecked on the outside, was restored inside and lled with photos and precious objects, symbolizing the potential of amelioration. The action was documented in Lacys video Auto-Women in Prison. Lacy then undertook similar projects involving wrecked-car sculptures with women and children in domestic violence shelters in other areas. While living in Oakland, where she served as dean of ne arts at the California College of Arts from 1987 to 1997, she collaborated on several pieces with children in the local public schools. In 1999 Lacy, Julio Morales, Unique Holland, and others produced Code
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33, a piece named for an Oakland police emergency code. In its nal performance 150 teenagers and 100 police ofcers sat together on the rooftop of a parking garage, again with people listening to their amplied conversations. As in earlier works, the intent, for both participants and observers, was to raise consciousness and reexamine established values. Although she is a generation older than Lacy and Wilding, the performance artist Rachel Rosenthal was also strongly inuenced by the push toward feminist performance in Los Angeles during the early 1970s. Born to wealthy parents in Paris in 1926, she made her childhood the theme of Charm, performed at Mount St. Marys art gallery in Los Angeles in 1977. Called a sonata in three movements, it recalled the delights, the charm of her protected and luxurious childhood, but also the secret reality of her troubled relationship with her mother and the restraint she experienced from the servants who brought her up. When Rosenthal was fourteen, the Nazis occupied Paris and her family ed, eventually settling in New York in 1941. There Rosenthal went to the High School of Music and Art and later attended the New School for Social Research, where she took classes with Meyer Schapiro and Rudolf Arnheim. Returning to Paris in the late 1940s, she studied mime with Jean-Louis Barrault and read Antonin Artauds Le thtre et son double, which she would describe as her theater bible. Artauds theater of cruelty, with its tumultuous action in the physical space of the stage, broke with conventional bourgeois theater. In 1955 Rosenthal arrived in Los Angeles, where she created the Instant Theatre, an experimental group combining improvisational theater with music, words, gestures, costumes, and masks. Her work at this time was informed by Dada and Surrealism as well as puppet theater and the German director Erwin Piscator, who had founded a proletarian theater in Berlin (Rosenthal had met him in New York). Unlike the Happenings that began in New York in 1959, Rosenthals theater still worked with trained actors, and she counted such future stars as Dean Stockwell and Anthony Perkins among her stu-

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dents. In 1966 she closed the Instant Theatre, began studying ceramics with John Mason, and met the Ferus Gallery artists, including Wallace Berman and Ed Kienholz, as well as the feminist artists Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago. She helped establish Womanspace in 1973. Rosenthals rst performance-art piece, Replays (1975), related to other feminist performance works of the time in its emphasis on autobiographical material and its call for audience participation. Later, Rosenthals works began to delve into history, philosophy, literature, art, and ecology, offering discourses on self-revelation, transformation, and death and redemption. Interweaving feminist and environmental issues, she has focused on love, sex, food, the body and its parts, and, increasingly, the earth. (She is a strong advocate of animal rights and an activist in the environmental movement.) Her fundamental strategy, going back to Artaud, has been to jolt the audience. The impression she makes on her audience is well described by Martin Bernheimer, music critic of the Los Angeles Times, reviewing Rosenthals Amazonia (1990): The woman is a monument and a marvel. She is a force of nature. She materializes upon the stage, just sits in an ornate chair, and dees the observer not to be magnetized. Her eyes glare with zeal. Her shaven skull gleams with deant pride. Her mouth curls in passion mitigated, perhaps, by a trace of self-mockery.86 In Rachels Brain (1987) a slide is projected with these words from Arthur Koestler: The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is also the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.87 Then the scene changes to a baroque stage set, and Rosenthal appears as Marie Antoinette, wearing an ornate gown and a two-foot-high peruke with an eighteenth-century frigate on top. She declaims about the Enlightenments rationalism and Cartesian mind-body split. After the queen is beheaded, Rosenthal reappears, this time as herself, with a shaved head instead of the elaborate wig. Tak-

ing a cauliower head, which resembles a brain, she begins to cut it up. After declaring that the number of possible interconnections in the human brain exceeds the number of atoms in the universe, she nishes cutting the cauliower-brain and eats it. Her performance, which seems almost excessive, demonstrates her background in expressionist theater. Loud music accompanies the performance as well as a series of slides with images of her own life, pictures of the brain and of stars, and images of atrocities committed toward humans and animals throughout history. The performance signies the need to unify the rational with the physical, as Rosenthal chants toward the end of the piece:
Old Mother Earth, sacred Gaia! My brain, just like my heart, is hollow at the core. A wind womb secreting liquid consciousness diffused throughout the body, thought-rivers overowing the banks of the self and creating vast cross-currents of mind in the multidimensional Universe. Marvel and apotheosis! It took ve hundred million years for the Mother to create a consciousness of herself. I am her brainchild.88

Feminist Installations and Collaborations

Like performance art, installation art appeared as a new medium in the early 1970s, offering an outlet for feminist expression that seemed less fettered by art-making rules. Womanhouse (described above) was one of the earliest feminist installations, literally placing womans traditional space (in the home) in the public arena. Judy Chicago, one of the directors of this project, followed it up with another large-scale collaborative workThe Dinner Party (197479) which she conceived as a symbolic history of women in Western Civilization. Born Judy Cohen in Chicago in 1939, she studied painting and sculpture at UCLA from 1960 to 1964 and, under her married name, Judy Gerowitz, became known for her Minimalist metal racism, discrimination, identity politics
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JUDY CHICAGO THE DINNER PARTY, 1979 Mixed media, 48 42 3 ft. Collection of The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Gift of The Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. Judy Chicago 1979. Photo: Donald Woodman.

and plastic sculpture. In 1969, still married but wishing to assert her independence as a woman and no longer bear a mans surname, she changed her last name to that of her hometown, Chicago. Soon afterward she instigated the rst feminist art program in the United States, at Fresno State College; the program then moved to CalArts and later became the Feminist Studio Workshop (see above). Between 1974 and 1979, with about 200 assistants, Chicago produced her monumental Dinner Party, a large triangular banquet table that rests on a porcelain oor composed of 2,300 hand-cast tiles, inscribed with the names of 999 women. At the table 39 elaborate ceramic place settings honor mythological and historical women, from Sappho to Artemisia Gentileschi to Virginia Woolf and Georgia OKeeffe. The plates suggest female genitalia, and the highly embellished embroidered runners seem to review the history of womens handwork, reecting the style and technique of each dinner guests time. When rst exhibited at the San Francisco Museum racism, discrimination, identity politics

of Modern Art, in a darkened room with light reecting on the work, The Dinner Party evoked the feeling of a religious space. It attracted the largest audience the museum had tallied until that time; it then traveled to museums in the United States, Canada, Scotland, England, Germany, and Australia, eventually nding a home in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. Leading feminists in the art world, such as Suzanne Lacy and Lucy Lippard, have praised The Dinner Party as a great celebration of the history of women. Others have noted that it helped to break down the articial distinction between art and craft. The work has become generally acknowledged as part of American culture, although, as Roberta Smith, art critic of the New York Times, observed twenty-three years after its rst appearance, its historic and social signicance is greater than its aesthetic value.89 Even this signicance has been questioned by those who have noticed that thirtyeight of the thirty-nine women are white. Some of the strongest criticisms, however, have come from those who object to the demotion of women implicit in their being celebrated as decorated vulvas. When the work was exhibited at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1981, for example, the radical feminist Lolette Kuby found the thirty-nine pudenda and thirty-nine plates highly offensive and more reprehensible than Playboy and Penthouse magazines, which are what they are. They cater to what they cater to. They make no pretensions. There is no overblown pompous purpose. . . . Travelling under the guise of exaltation of the female principle, The Dinner Party is a reduction, once again, of women to vulvas, wombs . . . to a common biological denominator of sexual symbolism.90 From a different perspective, in 1990 conservative members of Congress labeled The Dinner Party pornographic and effectively prevented Chicago from donating the piece to the University of the District of Columbia. In response, the Armand Hammer Museum of Art at UCLA mounted the 1996 exhibition Sexual Politics: Judy Chicagos Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, which showcased Chicagos

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piece along with works by more than fty other leading feminist artists.91 Chicago has continued to produce large-scale visionary works, among them The Birth Project (1980 85), made with the collaboration of 150 needleworkers and examining the role played by women in the creation myths of various cultures, and The Holocaust Project: From Darkness to Light (198593), created in collaboration with her husband, the photographer Donald Woodman, and others, a work that took Chicago and Woodman to many former death camps in Eastern Europe. Including a large tapestry, many images combining photography and painting, and stained-glass windows, the work tells the human story of the Holocaust, with a special focus on the Nazis treatment of women, children, and homosexuals. The New York artist Miriam Schapiro codirected the Womanhouse project with Judy Chicago. Although she lived and worked in California for only eight years, from 1967 to 1975, she had a great impact on feminist art in the state, as well as later in New York. Schapiro was born in Toronto in 1923 and studied at Hunter College in New York and at the University of Iowa. Her work from the 1950s was in the Abstract Expressionist mode, but often disclosed submerged female images, derived from masters like Giorgione and Peter Paul Rubens. Her large paintings of the early 1960s, the Shrines, are tall towers that frequently include an egg shape, a metaphor for herself as a woman and creative artist. In the late 1960s Schapiro produced hard-edge painting. Then, around 1970, while living in California, she felt the need for a major change. It was at this time that she joined forces with Judy Chicago in creating the Feminist Art Program at CalArts. Later she recalled it as a time when my consciousness had been raised and . . . I had been taken out of a very gray area that I had lived in with regard to how I saw events in the world. The rst thing that happened was that I looked into my own self, my own body, my own cycles, my rhythms, my nest, my family, my relationship to the earth around me.92 For The Dollhouse, created for Womanhouse, Scha-

piro and Sherry Brody assembled wooden liquor boxes into what seems at rst a lovely dollhouse, with six miniature rooms referring to woman as homemaker. But it is not that simple: The artists studio, with a miniature Schapiro painting on the easel and a nude male model on a stand, looks out at the Kremlin; a grizzly bear appears threateningly at the nursery window; a whole army of Magritte-like men stand at the kitchen window; and a coiled snake awaits in the parlor. At the time Schapiro wrote: Merely to speak out, to describe the daily ways of your life, turns out to be political.93 racism, discrimination, identity politics

MIRIAM SCHAPIRO AND SHERRY BRODY DOLLHOUSE, 1972 Three-dimensional construction, 84 40 9 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Photo: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC / Art Resource, NY.

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LYNN HERSHMAN ROBERTAS CONSTRUCTION CHART #2, 1975 C-print, 30 40 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Schapiro also made fabric collages during the 1970s, for which she coined the word femmage. Femmage, she pointed out, predated twentieth-century collage, as women had used craft techniquessewing, quilting, hooking, and applying scraps, spangles, buttons, and sequinsto make decorative and useful objects long before Braque and Picasso made their papier colles. Schapiros femmage pieces were intended to emphasize the culture of women, which was no longer seen as low art. Turning to the history of women in the ne arts, she made a series of mixed-media collages, called collaborations, in which she created elaborate decorative borders around central images by her predecessors: lisabeth Vige-Lebrun, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Sonia Delaunay, Frida Kahlo, and the Russian women painters of the Constructivist movement. In the mid-1970s she became a leading artist in the Pattern and Decoration movement, which afrmed that the decorative arts were not mar200

ginal; rather, they were based on different aesthetic values and had been underrated largely because an art world dominated by males tended to dismiss them as womens work. Although male artists such as Robert Kushner and the much older George Sugarman participated in Pattern and Decoration exhibitions, women artists such as Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff, Valerie Jaudon, and Cynthia Carlson were at the movements center. Asked whether this could be seen as protest art, Schapiro replied: Yes. . . . Youre protesting to all civilization that your values have been left out. Youre protesting and in that sense you are asserting: the fact that so many women assert themselves as artists is a protest.94 A central concern for many feminist artists in the 1970s was the notion of self, especially in relation to societys image of Woman. Some, like Eleanor Antin, Linda Montano, and Lynn Hershman (later Hershman Leeson), tried out different personas in their ex-

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plorations of who they were or could be. Born in 1941 in Cleveland, Ohio, Hershman attended the Cleveland Institute of Art, Case Western Reserve University, UCLA, and San Francisco State University. For one of her early pieces, The Dante Hotel (197374), she rented a room in a seedy ophouse in San Francisco, near the nude encounter bars of the time, but also close to the area where the Beats hung out and to Lawrence Ferlinghettis City Lights bookstore. Visitors entered the room to discover, as I wrote at the time, two waxcast women with heavy wigs, lying in an unmade bed. Their paraphernaliacurlers, Tampax, skin cream, lipstick, rouge, birth control pills, dirty glasses, old letters and seedy magazines [were] placed neatly around. Resident cockroaches crawl[ed] over the bed, dresser and chair. . . . This elaborate objet trouv aid also include[d] strips of torn wallpaper, made of xeroxed photographs representing the supine occupants of the bed.95 A sound track of Siobhan McKenna reading Molly Blooms soliloquy from James Joyces Ulysses ran continuously. Like much of Hershmans work to follow, this installation addressed womens vulnerability. It also presaged this artists construction of surrogates that assume lifelike personalities. Indeed, the Dante Hotel dummies were so realistic that one visitor called the police. In one of her best-known pieces Hershman created an alter ego named Roberta Breitmore (197478). Surely inspired by Marcel Duchamps Rrose Slavy, Hershmans Roberta Breitmore persona was provided with her own rsum, bank statements, and drivers license. She advertised for a roommate and went to a psychiatrist. Hershman carefully documented Breitmores activities with audiotapes, photographs, and lm. She also laid bare her construction, showing just how the makeup was applied to create this ctional character. In 1977 Hershman began to work with interactive video installations, feeling that a videodisc was a sculptural form that used both electricity and time in a nonlinear way, working in the way our brains do and so bringing us closer to the idea of reality than straight

conguration can.96 In one such installation, Lorna (198384), the viewer makes choices for the character Lorna, manipulating the video so the womans story takes different paths, with suicide as one possible ending. A 1990 photograph from the Phantom Limb series (1988) shows an elegantly dressed woman crouched on a bed, looking toward us with her eyes closed on her TV screen head. This substitution of a robotic appendage for the womans actual face alludes to technologys capacity for dehumanization. Hershmans playful lm Teknolust (2002) presents the adventures of women in cyberspace, as a self-replicating female automaton moves from virtual reality into the emotions of the real world. As a pacist and an ecofeminist, Helne Aylon (see pp. 6263) has also addressed the many knotty problems women confront. In the 1990s, combining her feminist concerns with her Jewish scholarship, she created a series of installations that followed the tradition of midrash, the biblical commentary that goes back to the second century. In Liberation of G-d (199096), after covering the texts with transparent velum, she used pink markers to highlight the most offensive words in the Five Books of MosesGenesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy (which were long said to have been written by Moses himself, not by God). Aylon takes issue with the Bibles God of vengeance and cruelty, with Egyptian babies being killed and the Canaanite population being slain and their cities destroyed. She suggests that the sexism of the Torah impedes spiritual experience and can be destructive to children reading the words of violence and prejudice. As her title implies, her strategy is to liberate the divine from the patriarchal discourse of the Torah. In 2004 Roselyne Swig commissioned Aylon to produce an interactive installation based on this work for the newly built Jewish Community Center in San Francisco. The curator Peter Samis, working with installation designers Stephen Jaycox and Dina Tooley and fabricator Alain Gerbault, put the resulting piece, The Digital Liberation of G-d , in the Beth Midrash, racism, discrimination, identity politics
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HELNE AYLON THE DIGITAL LIBERATION OF G-D, 2004 Video and digital installation. Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. Photo: Peter Samis.

or house of discourse. In this new work the highlighted biblical text, in both Hebrew and English, is projected onto and seems to cascade down the white fabric, owing from the rst verse of Genesis to the last of Deuteronomy and beginning again in an endless loop. Next to the video projector, an interactive messaging/input station allows viewers to ask questions or make comments about the text. Continuing in the Jewish tradition of probing the holy scripture, Aylon provides no answersit is the process of questioning that matters. As the progressive theologist Paul Tillich pronounced, art indicates what the character of a given situation is; it does this more immediately and directly than science and philosophy, for it is less burdened by objective considerations.97
Womens Image in Painting and Assemblage

While feminist art historians in the 1970s began critiquing the sexism in many male artists portrayals of
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women, female painters and sculptors explored new ways of dening the image of women image in their work. Betye Saar has taken a look back on the lives of women from the past, especially her own familys past. She is probably best known for her Liberation of Aunt Jemima (see p. 149), with its deconstruction of racist stereotypes of black women. Yet ever since Saar started making assemblages in the 1960s, she has used the medium largely to locate and reclaim memories of African American history and her familys personal record. In doing so, she has created a personal iconography that often endows everyday items and old photographs with evocative symbolic meaning. Record for Hattie (1975) refers to her great-aunt Hattie ParsonKeyes, who was born in 1880, only seventeen years after the emancipation of slaves, and taught in a Missouri elementary school early in the twentieth century. Through the personal effects gathered in this Joseph Cornelllike magic boxthe long, elegant

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hand mirror, the baby picture, the crucix, the hourglass, the pearls, and the dried rose lying on an embroidered pursewe are invited to remember a real woman, Hattie Parson-Keyes, and, through her, our own mothers, grandmothers, great-aunts. During the late 1970s and 1980s Betye Saar made altars and installations with a metaphysical and spiritual thrust, which she considered walk-in versions of her boxes. Her great-aunt Hattie continued to appear, with her likeness showing up, for example, on an old dress in Blend (2002), one of several works dealing with African American womens experience of abuse as domestic servants. But the history of the black American women Saar presents is not just a bitter one. As in Record for Hattie, she often reveals womens sense of bonding with family, the kind of cultural continuity, through heirlooms and ancestral legacy, that is largely handed down by women. A number of artists, including Joan Brown (1938 1990), turned to self-portraiture to explore and redene womens image. Born in San Francisco, Brown enrolled at the local California School of Fine Arts at the age of seventeen, where she studied with Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn, and soon became associated with the Bay Area Figurative painters. She worked in a wild style, inuenced by the work of Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning. While she occasionally made funky pieces like Fur Rat (1962; see p. 91), more often she concentrated on expressionist images of humans or animals, sloshing thick, buttery paint in dark or bright hues onto canvases in broad strokes. By the mid-1960s, however, Brown changed her style and manner of painting, shifting to a smooth touch, placing her humans and animals into a more two-dimensional space and using lighter color. Her attitude toward being a woman painter also shifted. During the male-dominated 1950s and early 1960s she did not want to be classied as a woman painter, as the term implied belittlement, but as the atmosphere changed, she became a strong advocate of feminist art. In 1981 she stated, I am totally a feminist. I feel I am absolutely equal and do not put up with a lot of

nonsense about womens inequality, or anything like that.98 Throughout her life, Joan Brown painted self-portraits as a means of introspection and self-revelation, looking at herself as a woman, an artist, and above all a person. Sometimes she used a cat as her alter ego, saying, The cat is like an androgynous being, its neither male nor female and its both.99 Her painting Woman Wearing Mask (Cat Lady) (1972) surely refers to herself. She stands, arms akimbo, boldly confronting the viewer, almost as if challenging him/her to engage in a discourse. The female body, with its sexy black lace bra and panties and red shoes, wears the sexually ambiguous mask of a blue cat. It is a fascinating and disturbing image: human/animal, male/female. Browns later work continued to explore these dualities between human and animal, male and female, nding resonances in Egyptian art, as well as Indian, Hindu, and Buddhist mythology. She died racism, discrimination, identity politics

BETYE SAAR RECORD FOR HATTIE, 1975 Mixed-media assemblage, 13 12 14 2 in. Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York.

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JOAN BROWN WOMAN WEARING MASK (CAT LADY), 1972 Oil enamel on masonite, 90 18 48 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Audrey Strohl. Estate of Joan Brown. Courtesy of George Adams Gallery, New York, and Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco. Photo: Ben Blackwell.

in 1990 in a construction accident while installing one of her obelisks in India. A very different self-portrait of mysterious connotation is Patssi Valdezs The Glass (Self-Portrait) from 1990. Born in the barrios of East Los Angeles in 1951, Valdez was aware of the struggles in the developing Chicano movement. At nineteen she became a founding memberand the only female member of Asco (see pp. 16, 168), participating in the groups outrageous actions. She might appear as the Virgin of Guadalupe with an aluminum skull on the back of her head or put on glamorous costumes that related
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both to her life as a Chicana and to nearby Hollywood. Together with the other Asco members, she appeared in Agns Vardas documentary lm Murs, murs (1980), and a full-page photograph of her appeared in Andy Warhols Interview magazine in 1985. Later she participated in the pivotal LACE exhibition of Chicano art at UCLA. Valdez has worked as a photographer, lmmaker, set designer, and installation artist, as well as a painter. Her installation pieces derive from Chicano popular culture and Mexican house shrines. Her provocative neo-expressionist paintings of the early 1990s are mostly turbulent domestic interiors, in loud crimsons, saturated greens, and some blues. The walls slant, the oors seem to creak, the spaces look askew, the furniture tumbles and levitatesas if a demonic poltergeist had been at work in the house. Womans traditional domain has become a menacing place of utter confusion. In 1990, while in Europe for the traveling exhibition Le Demon des Anges, Valdez was greatly impressed by the Black Madonna of Montserrat, near Barcelona. It inspired her to create a series of black Virgins, paintings that often resemble Outsider Art in their intuitive certainty, conveying the intensity of her experience. A similar intensity empowers The Glass (Self-Portrait). Here a goblet half-lled with blood is suspended under a crown of thorns, which is bleeding into the vessel. On either side, two decorated dagger-crosses point downward on a diagonal, while pieces of fruit and a dismembered hand oat in the blue space. A tasseled red curtain at the top sets the stage, while a baroque balustrade frames the view. The painting undoubtedly refers to Christs Passion and the Eucharist, but it may also be interpreted as selfrepresentation, perhaps referring to Valdezs childhood experience of sexual abuse. Amalia Mesa-Bains has written: In her struggle for healing, [Valdez] has expressed a visual language of self-realization and autonomy through images of the home space, transforming critical gender and cultural identities in artwork that inseparably links ruin and regeneration.100

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PATSSI VALDEZ THE GLASS (SELF-PORTRAIT), 1990 Acrylic on canvas, 72 48 in. Courtesy of Patricia Correia Gallery, Santa Monica, California.

M. LOUISE STANLEY JUDGEMENT OF PARIS, 1987 Gouache, 18 24 in. Mills College Art Museum. Courtesy of the artist.

Women are usually the main protagonists in M. Louise Stanleys paintings, which wittily examine female experience. With clear feminist convictions and a strong sense of satire, Stanley pokes good-hearted fun at womens foibles, as well as at art and its history. Born in West Virginia in 1942 to a family of missionaries, she came to California as a young child. When she did her graduate work at the California College of Arts and Crafts in the late 1960s, Abstract Expressionism was comme il faut, but Stanley and other women in her consciousness-raising group had different ideas. They contacted Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago and began picketing and leaeting museums for not showing enough womens art. With practically no market for any kind of art in Northern California, they, like the Funk artists, took risks and pursued their own orientation. Stanley gravitated

toward the obsolete tradition of narrative painting and produced sarcastic parodies based on GrecoRoman mythology, employing sexual politics and commenting on current events. Her paintings recall such English caricaturists as James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, but they also suggest that she, like William T. Wiley, enjoyed looking at Mad magazine. (Rubens and Reginald Marsh are also in the background.) Stanleys distorted gures often seem rambunctious, creating a visual energy that heightens her arch commentary. In making her points, she draws on her own experiences as a woman, offering a different view from that of the typical male artist. Her satirical force can be seen in Judgement of Paris (1987), where three women hold up their stretched canvases, which act as a screen, concealing them from a spectacled critic, who sits on a log and holds his pipe. The racism, discrimination, identity politics
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HUNG LIU THREE GRACES, 2001 Oil on canvas, 80 80 in. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco. Photo: Ben Blackwell.

viewer sees a black woman with a wild Afro, a eshy lady wearing a blue garter belt, and a naked woman with a great smile. How can this Paris choose the beauteous Helen? All he can see are the paintings, not the goddesses hidden behind, beyond the reach of the male gaze. What, then, is the image that he sees? We cannot know, for the paintings are invisible to us, as viewers of this puzzling canvas. Hung Liu (see p. 82) offers a different reading of goddesses from Greek mythology, presenting them as icons of ordinary peasant womens strength. Although her training at the Central Academy of Art in Beijing taught her how to depict the human gure with remarkable craft, she chose to base her Three Graces (2001) on a photographsomething that was not allowed at the academy. It was only after Liu came to San Diego, with its atmosphere of artistic freedom
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and experimentation, that she felt free to appropriate photographs, turning to books like Famous Prostitutes throughout the Country (the source of her series Comfort Women) and a propagandistic Marxist pictorial history of China (from which she derived Three Graces). The source photographs for Three Graces depict women in paramilitary uniforms in heroic poses, shown from below to give the appearance of greater height and stature. These ghters for Maos cause carry primitive ries as they march forward to engage in the revolutionary strugglehelping to enforce the Cultural Revolution that put young intellectuals and artists like Hung Liu into the rice elds to be reeducated by the peasants. Liu found, however, that the peasants had little sympathy for the authoritarian regime, and she began to identify with them. In Three Graces she adorns the plain clothes

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worn by the women in the original photographs with owers, painted in the traditional Chinese style. The drips of oil paint that enliven the paintings surface, however, are a part of Western praxis, as is the paintings ironic title, with its reference to the personications of beauty, charm, and grace. But the powerful presence of these women goes beyond Eastern and Western traditions, reminding us of all the women who have stood strong and endured, even as the world was shattered around them. It seems signicant that Three Graces was included in Lius 2003 exhibition at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. Titled Strange Fruit (in reference to Billie Holidays mournful ballad about lynching), the show focused on Lius series on Korean comfort women, who were forced into prostitution by Japanese soldierspaintings that, in Lius words, reveal the tragedy and horror of how these women were violated.101
Male Sculptors on Womens Rights

EDWARD KIENHOLZ THE ILLEGAL OPERATION, 1962 Mixed-media installation, 59 48 54 in. Betty and Monte Factor Collection. Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, California.

Women artists were not the only ones to protest gender inequities and violence against women. A few male artists also produced signicant works dealing with womens rights and the battleground of womens bodies (to borrow a phrase from Barbara Krugers memorable poster for a 1989 pro-choice rally). One of these artists was Edward Kienholz, whose work has generally confronted the viewer with societys evils, from the immorality of war to the hypocrisy surrounding sexual mores (see pp. 4849 and 9496). At a time when women had to resort to surreptitious back-alley abortions, Kienholz presented the intensely anguished, life-size assemblage The Illegal Operation (1962). A battered shopping cart serves as the operating table; a dirty sack of concrete, representing a womans body, lies on top of this makeshift bedit has been punctured, penetrated by a phallus, violated by cruel laws. Below the shopping cart a hospital bedpan contains rusty implements, and on the side an old bucket is lled with lthy rags. A lopsided lampshade and its naked bulb serve as the surgical light, exposing the brutal drama brought about by abhorrent insti-

tutional standards that reduce women to objects of mortication. Some ten years later John Battenberg produced Battle of Waterloo (1973), a small bronze that shows warriors swarming over a womans torso. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1931, Battenberg studied at Michigan State University with the American painter Abraham Rattner, who, through his long years in Paris, was well prepared to transmit the spirit of modernism to his students. Attracted by the work of Peter Voulkos and Harold Paris, Battenberg then moved to California, where he earned a second MFA degree at the California College of Arts and Crafts. During the Vietnam War Battenberg became known for his life-size bronzes of aviators uniforms eerily empty of the pilots bodiesreminding us that in war the individual soldier is expendable. Next came a seracism, discrimination, identity politics
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JOHN BATTENBERG BATTLE OF WATERLOO, 1973 Bronze, 13 25 17 in. Private collection.

ries of bronzes of women in erotic poses, sometimes bound or bandaged, reminiscent of Egyptian mummies but also reecting the artists disapproval of the social bondage of women. With Battle of Waterloo, Battenberg, relating to what Max Ernst called the surrealist coupling of irreconcilable realities, shows innumerable gun-toting Lilliputian soldiers trampling over a womans torso. Are these warriors attempting to overpower Mother Earth, or are they Greek warriors ghting the Trojans for the possession of beautiful Helen? The works title clearly suggests that such efforts are doomed. Battenbergs works have not been without controversy, but he insists that he is a strong supporter of feminism and his intent is to say something about the human condition.102 More recent works have focused on environmental issues, such as his openwork bronzes of endangered North American animals of the 1990s.

THE GAY AND LESBIAN EXPERIENCE

Gay Liberation and the AIDS Crisis

The 1969 response to the police raids at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in New Yorks Greenwich Village, long considered the beginning of gay libera208

tion, was really a culmination rather than an isolated uprising, according to the writer John Loughery.103 It occurred after a long history of suppression of homosexuality, years in which this pattern of sexual preference was seen as a sin, an illness, a crime, or a psychological disturbance, and gay men were disdained, medicated, thrown in prisons or asylums, or psychoanalyzed. They were disparaged as fairies, faggots, fruits, pansies, queens, queers, freaks, and sissies by a society that did not know how to respond to their behavior. Yet, in both Europe and America, sexual preference was not a major issue until the later nineteenth century. Indeed, the terms heterosexual and homosexual were not in the lexicon. They were coined by a little-known writer in Berlin, Karl Maria Kertbeny, in 1869, in his pamphlets protesting laws against sodomy.104 By the time of the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895, homosexuality had become the Love that dare not say its name. Half a century later, in 1948, Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues published Sexual Behavior of the American Male, which revealed the prevalence of homosexuality and bisexuality in America, reporting that 35.7 percent of American men had had homosexual experiences. This work helped to break down the stereotyping either/or approach to sexual behavior. California gave birth to two early gay and lesbian rights groups: the Mattachine Society, founded in Los Angeles in 1951, and the Daughters of Bilitis, started in San Francisco in 1955. In 1953 the magazine One, written from the homosexual viewpoint, began publication in Los Angeles, although the U.S. Post Ofce banned its distribution until a 1958 Supreme Court ruling against such censorship. In San Francisco the Beats (see chapter 2) created a milieu where homosexuals were welcome. Overall, however, during the 1950s gays faced persecution from the McCarthyera witch-hunts. In 1962 Life magazine published a fourteen-page spread of photographs and text on the furtive life of homosexual men. But the 1960s proved to be a decade of change for gays, much as it was for other oppressed groups. In

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1961 Hollywood set aside its rule against references to homosexuality. In 1964 the Los Angeles chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union went to court to seek a change in laws dealing with homosexuality, and the American Friends Service Committee in Los Angeles took similar steps. In San Francisco the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) protested discriminatory actions and in 1966 set up a gay community center with a bar, a bathhouse, a place for meetings, counseling programs, and art exhibitions. The rst gay newspaper, the Advocate, started publishing in Los Angeles in 1967. Reecting the spirit of the African American slogan Black is beautiful, the Advocate announced Gay is good and reported on how gays and lesbians were beginning to take political action. For example, gays founded the Metropolitan Community Church, which started holding services for the gay community in Los Angeles in 1968. The turmoil at the Stonewall Inn in New York was a pivotal event. Like other gay bars in the Village, the Stonewall was raided regularly by the police. But on the night of June 2728, 1969, when the police came, the bar crowd responded, leading to a bloody riot that attracted huge crowds and lasted three days and nights. The result, Allen Ginsberg remarked later, was that the gays lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago. Soon after Stonewall the Gay Liberation Front was founded, asserting the word gay with pride and titling its newsletter Come Out! Early victories for the gay rights movement in the 1970s included the decriminalizing of homosexuality in several states and an end to the classication of homosexuality as a disease in the psychiatrists diagnostic manual. As expected, however, a backlash arose among Americas Moral Majority, and right-wing conservatives went into action. In Dade County, Florida, Anita Bryant and her Save Our Children organization denounced homosexuals as child molesters and pedophiles; in 1977 they mobilized voters to repeal an ordinance against discrimination toward gays in housing, public accommodation, and employment. Bryant then took her campaign to other states.

On the West Coast, especially in San Francisco, gay resistance to this backlash mounted. The citys Castro district became a center of gay activitiesone estimate suggested that a fth of the citys population in 1970 was gay. In 1977 Harvey Milk, openly campaigning on a gay rights platform, won election as a city supervisor. In June 1978 an estimated 350,000 people turned out for a gay pride parade. But a few months later, in November 1978, Harvey Milk, together with Mayor George Moscone, was assassinated by former city supervisor Dan White (see pp. 9697). When White was convicted only of manslaughter, not rst-degree murder, and given a short prison sentence, making him eligible for parole in just ve and a half years, the gay community rose in protest, and the White Night Riots broke out in the city. The gay rights movement was gaining momentum in the 1980s, but it faced a major crisis. In the fall of 1980 physicians in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York began to observe signs of immunological breakdown among some homosexual patients that left them vulnerable to deadly diseases. In the United States, from the start, acquired immune deciency syndrome (AIDS) was depicted as primarily a disease of gay men, fostered by unprotected sex. In 1986 the U.S. Public Health Service estimated that as many as one million Americans were infected with human immunodeciency virus (HIV), a precursor of AIDS. By 1987 some twenty thousand people, mostly males, had died from AIDS in the United States, and that number was rapidly rising. Some individuals on the extreme right spoke of natures revenge against unnatural acts. Gay activists put energy into organizing clinics and ghting against a lack of government funding and what they called a conspiracy of silence in the press, which barely covered the growing epidemic. In 1987 gays and lesbians in New York started the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which quickly spread to other major cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles. That same year gay rights activists in San Francisco organized the NAMES Project, creating a memorial racism, discrimination, identity politics
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quilt to commemorate those who had succumbed to AIDS. By October 1987, when the quilt was rst displayed on the Mall in Washington, D.C., it was larger than a football eld and had close to two thousand panels, each honoring some loved one who had died. By 1996 it covered the entire Mall, and it is now too large to transport by any practical means, so only sections of it can be shown at any one time. On December 1, 1989, activists succeeded in getting the institutional art world to recognize the devastating impact of AIDS with a national Day Without Art. At the time the Berkeley Art Museum was showing the AIDS Timeline, put together by the artists collective Group Materiala mixed-media installation that condemned the governments inadequate response to the epidemic and the delay in funding AIDS research. A few months later, in late spring 1990, the San Francisco Art Institute presented Inside Out: Voices from Home, showing work that, in the words of its curator, the artist Rudy Lemcke (b. 1951), was about actively constructing pragmatic strategies for ghting AIDS on a personal and political level using the medium of visual art.105 In his later performance installation Immemorial (1992), created for the Day Without Art at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Lemcke adapted the die-in technique of ACT UP and other groups, tracing peoples body outlines with chalk on the museums oor. Feeling the need for an art institution devoted explicitly to their experience, gay and lesbian artists in San Francisco founded the Queer Cultural Center in 1993, a group that has not only sponsored annual art festivals but has helped secure funding for queer arts and maintains an online gallery (www.queerculturalcenter.org). In 1995 the show In a Different Light, organized by the artist Nayland Blake and the curator Lawrence Rinder for the University Art Museum at Berkeley, exhibited work that addressed the gay and lesbian experience. As Rinder wrote in his catalogue essay, The resonance of gay and lesbian experience in twentieth-century American art has been profound in ways that we are just beginning to appreciate.106
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In the decades since Stonewall, discrimination against homosexuals has somewhat abated, but it has by no means disappeared. Only in 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, did the U.S. Supreme Court overturn sodomy laws, declaring laws regulating private sexual behavior between consenting adults unconstitutional.107 In 2004 San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom grabbed national headlines when he opened City Hall marriages to gay couples, but the legality of these weddings was contested in the courts. When, in September 2005, the California state legislature passed a bill allowing same-sex marriages, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed to veto it. Although gay marriage has become possible in a few American communities, most gay couples remain without the legal rights accorded to heterosexual couples, and President George W. Bush has voiced his support for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
Expressions of Gay Identity in Art

In 1948 the poets Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, and Jack Spicer were writing poetry that would combine an erudite intellectualism with passionately felt homosexual desire.108 With a bit of hubris, they called their work the Berkeley Renaissance. Earlier, while living in New York, Duncan had been close to the Surrealists, and he was in contact with such older American poets as Wallace Stevens and John Crowe Ransom. In 1944 Duncan had published his essay The Homosexual in Society in Dwight Macdonalds Politics, a journal that combined radical (Trotskyist) views on politics with avant-garde literature. In this essay Duncan admonished homosexuals who kept their desires secret, advocating homosexual liberation. In 1949, when Duncan read his homosexual love poem Venice Poem at a Berkeley poetry reading, the art student Jess (see below) was deeply moved. Jess and Duncan became friends and started living together in 1951, collaborating on art and poetry for many years, until Duncans death in 1988. Together, they founded the King Ubu Gallery (where Jess had his rst exhibition), and their Victorian home in San

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Franciscos Mission District became central to a community of artists, including poets Jack Spicer, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, and Michael Palmer; visual artists Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Wally Hedrick, and Jay DeFeo; and lmmakers Larry Jordan and Stan Brakhage. Jess (19232004) was born Burgess Collins in Long Beach, California. He would later drop his surname, partly in protest against family values, and adopt the name Jess. He started out in the sciences, working for the Manhattan Project during World War II and graduating from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. But a dream he had about nuclear annihilation, as well his almost epiphanic experience in reading James Joyces Finnegans Wake, made him abandon his work in atomic science and turn toward art. He went to the California School of Fine Arts during its days of glory, studying with Clyfford Still, Hassel Smith, and Edward Corbett. Jesss early paintings of the 1950s were informed not only by his San Francisco teachers, but also by his afnity with the Nabis and the French Symbolists. With their unique combination of gurative and abstract elements, these romantic, visionary paintings were far removed from the mainstream of art at the time. Although he lived the life of a recluse and produced eccentric, often bizarre art, Jess was highly respected as an artists artist. The painter R. B. Kitaj, a friend of both Duncan and Jess, remarked that Jess had turned from a chemist to an alchemist, and one can see his alchemy at work in a series of idiosyncratic collages that were partly inspired by Max Ernsts Une Semaine de Bont (1934), a ve-volume book of collages that Jess and Duncan had purchased. Jess called his collages paste-ups, preferring the more intimate, childlike name for the assemblages he made with old photographs, magazine illustrations, comic strips, and pieces of jigsaw puzzles. Like his friends Bruce Conner and George Herms, Jess haunted Salvation Army stores in search of material. He then cut out items that he thought he might use and started to pin them down, shufing them back and forth until

JESS THE MOUSES TALE, 195154 Gelatin silver prints, magazine reproductions, and gouache on paper, 4758 32 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Frederic P. Snowden. The Jess Collins Trust. Photo: Ben Blackwell.

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he got what seemed right, nally pasting them on a paper support. In his rst paste-up, The Mouses Tale (195154), we see the large silhouette of a crouching male gure, with the ngers of his right hand seemingly splayed in fear. This highly ambitious work, measuring four feet in height, makes a strong statement on male sexuality. It is comprised of scores of images of naked male gures cut from old magazines such as Physique Pictorial. Made in the same year he began living with Duncan, it relates to an early statement by Duncan that the gay writer or artist should reveal his sexual preference in his work. At the bottom of the collage Jess pinned a picture of a chemical factory, and the left margin consists of many clowns heads, leading up to a gallows made of a sitting monkey, butting into a great lions head, which faces the viewer. The title of this work is taken from Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland, and, like some of Carrolls nonsense rhymes, it is an exercise in fantasy that reveals its layers of meaning slowly. Both Jess and Duncan were very fond of Carroll, Edward Lear, and Christian Morgenstern, whose Galgenlieder (Gallows Songs) Jess translated and illustrated with drawings that are as expressive as they are decorative. Jess played with pictures much as these poets played with words. In the 1950s Jess illustrated books of poetry by Denise Levertov, Charles Olsen, Jack Spicer, and others, as well as work by Duncan and Morgenstern. While continuing his paste-ups, between 1959 and 1976 Jess produced a series of translations, paintings that are haunting appropriations of old photographs, reproductions of known and unknown works, visual narrations whose sources range from cabalistic manuals to Gertrude Stein, from Pieter Brueghel to George Herrimans comic books and bubble gum cards. Done with heavy pigmentation, related to the matter painting of the time, they are accompanied by relevantor not always so relevanttexts. The juxtaposition of words and images is essential to the comprehension of the work. We tend to alternate between looking and reading, shifting our attention
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from the pictorial image to the written word, thereby jolting and deepening our understanding of the work.109 Many of Jesss paste-ups and translations are so full that they literally seem to spill over the frames, somewhat like the all-over compositions of the action painters. The translations also compare to the appropriation of graphics by Jasper Johns. The latters Flags, Numbers, or Maps, however, seem perfected works in a formalist mode, whereas Jess created crowded, elaborate, and complex collages and paintings whose metaphorical meaning calls for decoding to nd a key to their enigmatic and mysterious meaning. Much more overt in its homosexual expression is Peter Getting out of Nicks Pool (1966) by David Hockney (b. 1937), known not only for his paintings and exploratory photography but also for his theater designs and controversial writings on art history. Born to a working-class family in northern Englands industrial area, Hockney entered the Royal College of Art in London in 1959. Feeling that the new American abstraction popular at the time was too barren, he concentrated on gurative drawings and paintings, receiving encouragement from his friend R. B. Kitaj, who also believed in the reclamation of the gure. Portraiture and a focus on male gures would become important aspects of Hockneys work. In 1961 he painted a small picture, We Two Boys Together Clinging, showing an anonymous encounter of two boys kissing. The paintings style and the way the title is scribbled in the manner of grafti in a toilet stall show an awareness of Jean Dubuffets work. (As artists committed to gurative painting, Dubuffet and Francis Bacon were paradigms for Hockney and several of his young colleagues.) In the early 1960s, handsome, gay, with bleachedblond hair to go with his gold lam jacket, Hockney was very much a part of swinging London. He became established as an anti-establishment personage. In 1964 Hockney visited Los Angeles for the rst time, a city he would eventually make his home. From the beginning he was enchanted by this magical lotus land, with its Mediterranean climate and apparent

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DAVID HOCKNEY PETER GETTING OUT OF NICKS POOL, 1966 Acrylic on canvas, 84 84 in. National Museums Liverpool (Walker Art Gallery). David Hockney.

lack of an art scene. He enjoyed drawing and painting the young men in the open-air showers at the beach, and he loved the swimming pools. A special delight was going to the studio where Physique Pictorial was published, for he had long collected its drawings and photographs of gay types. In his autobiography he wrote: I must admit that I have a weakness for the pretty boys; I prefer them to the big, butch, scabby ones. I was quite taken by the place.110

In 1966 he met Peter Schlesinger, then a nineteenyear-old history student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and they became lovers for ve years. He recalled in a 1980 interview: It was incredible to me to meet in California a young, very sexy, attractive boy who was also curious and intelligent. In California you can meet curious and intelligent people, but generally theyre not the sexy boy of your fantasy as well.111 In Peter Getting out of Nicks Pool, Hockneys racism, discrimination, identity politics
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LARI PITTMAN THIS WHOLESOMENESS, BELOVED AND DESPISED, CONTINUES REGARDLESS, 198990 Acrylic and enamel on two mahogany panels, 128 96 in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Purchased with funds provided by the Ansley I. Graham Trust. Photo: 2004 Museum Associates / LACMA. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

rst of many pictures of Peter, the young man is placed in the very center, and the viewers gaze focuses on his buttocks. Leaning against the pools edge with his head turned sideways, he creates a vertical tension, a kind of male counterpart to the traditional odalisque seducer. The aquamarine pool, with its dancing pattern of white lines, adds to the sexual energy. As in his other paintings of Los Angeles featuring its pools, sprinkled lawns, and palm trees, Hockney, the foreigner, takes a fresh look at the dream city, with
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its carefree, sun-drenched life far from the turmoil of less afuent areas. He was also one of the rst artists to feature subjects of gay interest in paintings that appealed to a broad audience.112 Almost a generation younger than Hockney, Lari Pittman was born in Los Angeles in 1952 to parents from very different backgrounds, which has inuenced his work (his American-born father was from a German-English Presbyterian family, while his Colombian-born mother had a Spanish-Italian Cath-

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olic heritage). He studied art at UCLA, and then attended CalArts, receiving both BFA and MFA degrees. At the time the school was widely regarded as the most avant-garde in the country, known both for its conceptual art and for its feminist program (see p. 190). Pittman and fellow students Eric Fischl, David Salle, and Ross Bleckner resisted the conceptual trend and activated a vigorous return to painting. Pittmans work revitalizes the Pattern and Decoration style of the 1970s, thrusting it over the top into intense, often bizarre, baroque complexity. His visually hyperactive paintings bring beauty, strongly disparaged for so long, back to the center. He has dedicated a painting to Gustav Mahler, admires Gustav Klimts elaborate canvases, and speaks highly of Florine Stettheimers ultrafeminine, playful fantasies. Clearly, his interests lie at the opposite pole from the puritan reductionism so essential to much of the modern enterprise. Like Hockney, Pittman is not afraid to bring his sexual identity into his art. Modernism, with its claim of universality, excluded both ethnic and gender identities. Postmodernism, on the other hand, has afrmed cultural differences and advanced the recognition of Third World and women artists. Pittman wants to highlight the homosexuality in his art, saying, There are endless examples of homosexuals making art, but there are very few examples of homosexual artists who erase the arbitrary distinction between the private and the public, which is something heterosexual artists can do all the time. I am tired of sexually neutered histories of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Ellsworth Kelly.113 Pittmans kaleidoscopic paintings and drawings are lled with the sheer joy of painting, but they also abound with references to sexuality and his gay orientation, including the number 69 as well as depictions of penises, ejaculations, and anuses. Engrossed in the visual activity of these often-rambunctious paintings, the viewer takes in these details as integral to the whole. In his 198990 painting This Wholesomeness, Be-

loved and Despised, Continues Regardless Pittman (who is fond of intricate titles) sets out to tell us visual stories, using evocative imagery and virtuoso techniques. Heavy golden ropes demarcate a theater curtain that has opened to our view. In the center, on a diagonal, two silhouetted lovers, with red circles targeting their hearts and groins, divide the painting into two parts. In the lower register two silhouetted gentlemen in Victorian dress face off on opposite sides, one pointing at the others erection. Beautifully painted sailboats glide in the water between these gures. In the upper register small silhouetted gures occupy a huge, phallic bell tower or cross a bridgelike span. The number 69 emblazoned on a golden star inevitably catches our eye. Pittman has explained that he sees this number not primarily as indicating a physical act, but rather as signifying symbiosis and fulllment in love. Throughout the painting arrows keep redirecting our attention, up, down, around. Theres no one reading to this complex morality tale. As Pittman has noted, For every drop of ebullience and optimism in my work, there is an equal amount of real sadness.114 Compared with Pittmans hyperactive surfaces, with their complex interconnections and overlays, Tino Rodrguezs small panels seem pictures of tranquillity. Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1965, the third of nine children in a Catholic family, Rodrguez was exposed at an early age to retablo paintings of saints and angels, whose sense of mystery, of loss, hope, and beauty, left a signicant imprint. He studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he encountered the work of French Symbolists like Gustav Moreau, with its rich imagination, sonorous color, slow visual rhythm, often morbid sensibility, and allusive sexuality. He also admired the art of the Mexican Surrealist womenLeonore Fini, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carringtonand their predilection for fabulist narration. Rodrguez continued his studies at the University of New Mexico and the San Francisco Art Institute, where he had his rst solo exhibition in 1994. Rodrguezs work is predisposed to fantasy, to a racism, discrimination, identity politics
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TINO RODRGUEZ ONEIRIC SONG (THE DARKENING GARDEN), 2002 Oil on canvas, 20 24 in. San Jose Museum of Art. Promised gift of Peter and Beverly Lipman, in honor of the San Jose Museum of Arts 35th anniversary.

world of fairy tales and romance. He paints pictures with milleeur meadows, tropical birds, lizards, chubby cherubs, Velzquezian dwarfs, humans emerging from broken shells, all kinds of butteries, magic lanterns, imaginary theater sets, rare orchids, and masked gures. But at times the lovely stories hint at painful tales, with headless, pissing children; blood streaming from raised arms; a man holding his penis and biting another mans chest in a Saturnalian ritual titled Sooo Sweet (1999). Rodrguez sees his work as a way of dening his gay Mexican American identity, and he frequently paints his own image in different guises, as in Elamante (The Lover, 1998) and Oneiric Song (The Darkening Garden, 2002). In the latter we see him as a merman stretched out on a owering meadow, with his entwined legs covered with sh scales and his penis exposed. This transsexual odalisque returns the viewers gaze with a dreamy expression (Oneiros, or Morpheus, is the god of dreams in Greek mythology). A heavy bluish-green curtain hovers over his head and shoulder, while two cherubs racism, discrimination, identity politics

and a white rabbit frolic behind him. Filled with tropical plants and wondrous birds, the composition of this small panel recalls Persian miniature paintings. In the sky the sun is in eclipse, and an articial lamp shines brightly on thin Gothic spires. The painting, with its exotic, erotic content, fuses carnal sexuality with a spiritual longing for life in Eden. As Rodrguez has commented, Like retablo paintings, I like to depict stories and use bright jewel-like colors; but my stories are personal and charged with contemporary issues that challenge typical gender ideologies; stories that express my cultural heritage, my spiritual yearnings, my fantasies, my frustrations, my desire to transcend the negativity of stereotypes and to show a true picture of myself and the worlds that live within me; a picture that is lled with both horror and awe.115 More sharply biting commentary on gay identity in deance of Catholic morality as well as the AIDS crisis comes from Jerome Caja (known by his rst name only, as Jerome). Born in Cleveland, Jerome (19581995) grew up in a large, strict Catholic family and, like Rodrguez, was inuenced by religious images of saints and martyrs. After studying ceramics at the Cleveland Art Institute, he attended the San Francisco Art Institute. From early on, Jerome enjoyed cross-dressing, gaining attention as a drag queen. He enjoyed being a sexual provocateur and accomplished trickster. Knowledgeable about art of the past, he was drawn to the monstrosities in Hieronymous Boschs paintings, as well as to Matthias Grnewalds Isenheim Altarpiece (1515), Goyas Saturn Devouring One of His Children (182122), the Villa Dei Mysterii at Pompeii, and the erotic drawings and paintings of Egon Schiele and Max Ernst. His friend, the poet and writer Thomas Avena, recalls talking to Jerome about a Bosch image in which one man uses anothers anus for a vase of daisies. As Avena explains, These profane images embodied the art of a deeply religious, sacred world. Jeromes acute awareness of historyhis deployment of the singular profane imageis particularly frightening to the viewer who lacks a sense of historical violence and corruption.116

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Jerome, who was also inuenced by sexually explicit comic strips, painted clowns, skeletons, popes, penises, animals with human heads and humans with animal heads, strange visions such as eggs sitting around a dining table feasting on a turkeya whole theater of cannibalism. He expressed his passions in works with pronounced homosexual themes, using nontraditional materials like cosmetics to paint pictures small enough in size to be carried in his pockets. Typical is Venus in Cleveland (1995), which measures seven by four inches and is painted with nail polish. One of his less violent pictures, it is a selfportrait, depicting Jeromes blonde-bombshell alter ego, a transsexual Venus, outrageously costumed in a black bra and garter belt, with a very visible penis hanging from crotchless panties. The gure is set against a bright blue sky and green lawn, with a white picket fence and laundry blowing in the breeze. Like most of his small paintings, it combines disdain with a carnival atmosphere. Disturbing fantasies are expressed with a ceremonial sense of pathos. When Jeromes close friend, the painter Charles Sexton, who was sick with AIDS, committed suicide, Jerome used his ashes as a medium for some of his paintings. Jerome certainly raised the bar of audacity with his paintings, which could easily be characterized as hideous, bizarre, and reprobate. To enter into Jerome Cajas world is to risk ones own innocence, Avena declared.117 Pressure from the Christian Right notwithstanding, Paul Karlstrom, former West Coast director of the Archives of American Art, collected his papers and small paintings and facilitated their exhibition at California State University, Fullerton, in 1999. There was, as might be expected, some concern about the archives being associated with the blatantly homoerotic images by this artist, but Karlstrom was proud of acquiring Jeromes work and of interviewing him in 1995. In 1996, the year after Jerome died, Avena and Adam Klein published a ne book, Jerome: After the Pageant, with an introduction by the curator Klaus Kertess. Perhaps the hand of censorship has lightened.

JEROME CAJA VENUS IN CLEVELAND, 1995 Nail polish, enamel, and White-out on paper, 712 412 in. Courtesy of the Jerome Caja papers, 196095, in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Lesbian Issues

There were American artists known to be lesbians long before lesbian afrmation became a rallying cry. Romaine Brooks (c. 18741969) comes to mind. Brooks, a scion of an upper-class family, painted elegant portraits of herself, ladies of the European aristocracy, and American expatriates, including dashing images of her friend Gabriele DAnnunzio and nude pictures of her lover Ida Rubinstein. Brookss work, however, seems the extreme opposite of the often grungy pictures by some recent lesbian/dyke artists. Between these two poles, perhaps, is the 1973 call by Jill Johnston, in her inuential book Lesbian Nation, for a conjunction of the feminist and gay liberation movements. Many feminists, she believed, could see the racism, discrimination, identity politics
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instant logic of sex with another woman as the basic afrmation of a powerful sisterhood.118 During the 1970s in Los Angeles Womanspace (see p. 190) initiated events such as the 1973 Lesbian Week, which included an exhibition, a workshop, lectures, and dances. Four years later Arlene Raven started the Lesbian Art Project as part of the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles (see p. 190). In 1979, under the direction of Terry Wolverton, this group presented An Oral Herstory of Lesbianism, a series of performances. As Raven described it, The experience helped women [both lesbian and heterosexual] better understand one another and thus put to rest divisive issues that can impede political action.119 Another outgrowth of the Feminist Studio Workshop was The Great American Lesbian Art Show (GALAS) in 1980, curated by Bia Lowe. This exhibition was accompanied by more than two hundred sister events throughout the United States and Canada. Ten years later, writing about All But the Obvious, another exhibition of lesbian art in Los Angeles, Terry Wolverton observed that there was a new generation of lesbian artists, and they insist on dening pleasure in their own terms, demanding access to all images of themselves, including those generated in pornography.120 A number of lesbian artists of color have addressed the issue of multiple identities. Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie prefers to call herself two spirited, situating herself rmly within a Native American context. I . . . believe that lesbian would be a very white description of who I am, she has stated.121 Similarly, Judith Baca (see pp. 17273) has insisted that lesbian offers too narrow a denition of who she is and speaks counter to a belief system thats much more incorporative.122 Her collaborative mural Great Wall of Los Angeles focuses on issues of class and race as well as gender, but it does include a section titled The Origins of Gay Rights (1983). Other California artists, like the Vietnamese-born photographer Hanh Thi Pham (see pp. 13941), have produced strongly charged art dealing with both ethnic identity and
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lesbianism. Ester Hernndez (see p. 170) created a silkscreen in which one womans hand offers a red rose to the iconic image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on another womans back, bringing together two sometimes conictingidentity groups, Chicanas and lesbians, in a single image, La Ofrenda II (1990). Carla Trujillo used this painting for the cover of her book Chicana Lesbians.123 The double bind that confronts women who are both Chicana and lesbian is addressed by Laura Aguilar in her Latina Lesbian Series (198790). Aguilar, born in the San Gabriel Valley in 1959, is largely selftaught in photography, although she attended the East Los Angeles Community College and the Santa Fe Photography Workshop. The Latina Lesbian Series focuses on middle-class Latina couples, but she followed it with what she called the Plush Pony Series. As the lesbian activist artist Harmony Hammond explains, She photographed working-class Chicana dykes from the Plush Pony, a Latina lesbian bar in East Los Angeles. The women are working-class; some have been jailed, some are on welfaretheyre butch, theyre femme, theyre tough.124 In 1990 Aguilar produced a polemical work that seems to summarize the plight of her life and workthe triptych Three Eagles Flying, in which her body is a template caught between the U.S. and Mexican ags, displayed in the side panels. The central panel shows her corpulent body tied up with rope, with her lower body wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, her large breasts provocatively exposed, and her head suffocated by the Mexican ag. The Mexican eagle covering her face here has a double meaning, as aguila, her name, is Spanish for eagle. In this work Aguilar seems to be asking whether she is Mexican or American while addressing issues of nationalism, feminism, connement, and strength. Also in 1990 Aguilar began work on a series of gelatin silver prints, titled Clothed/Unclothed. Men and women from diverse ethnic backgrounds stand in frontal poses, dressed and undressed, for diptychs that are arresting because they are so matter-of-fact.

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LAURA AGUILAR THREE EAGLES FLYING, 1990 Gelatin silver print (triptych), 60 24 in. each. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Nothing unexpected is seen in the unclothed version. Do clothes make the person? Or are we looking at the naked truth? Aguilars interest in the honesty of the naked self continues in her series Stillness and Motion, begun in 2000. These photographs no longer seem so provocative, presenting the nude forms of Aguilar, sometimes with women friends, blending into nature, with rocks and trees, evoking a sense of serenity. Yet there is a catch, for Aguilars large-size body is far from any of Western arts handed-down female ideals. She seems here and throughout her work to be questioning whether we can accept her for who she is all of herlesbian, Chicana, plus-sized. Catherine Opie expresses her lesbian identity with a punk orientation. Born in Sandusky, Ohio, in 1961, she grew up in a suburb of San Diego. As a child, she was deeply moved by seeing Lewis Hines photographs of the plight of children, and she decided early on to become a photographer. After graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute and CalArts, she taught at the University of California, Irvine. Opie generally works in series. For her signature series Being and Having (1991) she focused her lens, close up, on headshots of her lesbian friends made up as men, reversing the more usual gender-bending portrayals of drag queens. Referring to this and other work, she has said

that she drew her inspiration from Hans Holbeins portraits, but there could be no greater contrast to the German Renaissance painters portraits of resolute men than Opies grungy punk photographs of lesbians wearing theatrical moustaches or goatees and women whose bodies have been altered by piercings and tattoos. Opie has also created a number of sensational selfportraits, including one, from 1993, in which her back is decorated with a childlike drawing of two girls holding hands. It looks nice until we realize that these red stick gures have been cut into her esh. In another startling work from this group, Self-Portrait/ Pervert (1994), Opie is posed against a brocade curtain and faces the viewer head-on. Her head, however, is covered by a warlike leather mask, recalling the hooded black leather heads sculpted by Nancy Grossman, a New York lesbian artist of the previous generation. Opies arms in Self-Portrait/Pervert are replete with a great many needles stuck into her skin, and the word pervert has been cut into her esh above her large breasts (this painful scarication in decorative script was done by Raelyn Gallina, an expert esh cutter from San Francisco). Opie reported that she felt highly agitated by talk about the danger of perverts by Senator Jesse Helms and others and racism, discrimination, identity politics
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CATHERINE OPIE SELF-PORTRAIT / PERVERT, 1994 Chromogenic print, 40 30 in. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee, 2003. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

wanted to have the despised word cut into her body for the shock of recognition. Opies portfolio O (1999) consists of black-andwhite photogravures made in response to Robert Mapplethorpes X portfolio (1980). These S/M scenes between two women could easily be called pornographic by some. In contrast, Opies Domestic series (199599) comprises images of lesbians at their everyday household tasks. For these photographs she traveled across the country, documenting gay women cooking, reading, or playing with their children, afrming family values.

REFLECTIONS ON MASAMI TERAOKAS ART THEATER

In his art Masami Teraoka has tackled a variety of politically charged issues, including rampant consumerism, censorship, sexual mores, and cloning. He sees himself as creating a fantastical aesthetic world where human folly and dilemma are expressed in such a way
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that the beauty and ugliness of human activity and psyche thrive in a complex pictorial recipe.125 Nowhere is this more apparent than in the series of paintings he made dealing with the scourge of AIDS. Teraoka was born in 1936 in Onomichi, Japan, and studied aesthetics at Kwansei Gakuin University in Kobe. Enamored of the great Japanese woodblock artists Utagawa Kunisada and Katsushika Hokusai of the Edo period, he began mimicking classical woodblock printing in watercolor, an extremely difcult and effective technical achievement. In 1961 Teraoka moved to California, studying at the Otis Art Institute and becoming fascinated with Pop Art, especially that of Claes Oldenburg. He continued to live and work in Los Angeles until 1980, when he established a studio in Hawaii; he now divides his time between the two places. During the mid-1970s Teraoka attacked the spread of American-style consumerism through watercolors painted in the eighteenth-century Edo style. In McDonalds Hamburgers Invading Japan / Hamburger and Chopsticks (1976), for example, a hamburger bun and chopsticks discreetly occupy one corner, the seal marks of traditional Edo woodblocks another, and a sprig of cherry blossoms ornaments the top, with most of the painting an elegant void. In McDonalds Hamburgers Invading Japan / Geisha and Tattoed Woman (1975), we see a blonde Japanese woman slurping her noodles with chopsticks while a geisha behind her looks, with a dubious expression, at the hamburger in her hand. The Hanauma Bay watercolor series (1982) followed, featuring humorous scenes of Japanese and American vacationers swimming and snorkeling in turbulent waves, carrying scuba-diving equipment, cameras, radios, and even ice chests. One of Teraokas erotic Venice Beach paintings (1975 ) shows a young nude Caucasian woman exposing herself seductively to a samurai warrior, who awkwardly fumbles with his bicycle. A Japanese seal imprint on the left and a pink bra ying in the sky clearly show the clash between two cultures. Santa Monica Pier (1975) depicts a Buddhist monk/sherman (actually a self-portrait) caught in

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the waves, while a large crescent moon rises against the black sky. Night shing, as Teraoka shows himself doing, is an ancient Japanese sexual metaphor. Although Teraoka had his rst solo show in Los Angeles in 1973, it was his series on AIDS begun in the late 1980s that brought him to widespread attention. He explains:
After I worked with themes such as intercultural relations, consumerism, and environmental degradation, the issues surrounding AIDS . . . seemed a natural progression. Expanding my subject matter compelled me to synthesize a variety of aesthetic traditions in an effort to create an effective visual language. In retrospect, I believe this stylistic and conceptual evolution began with my AIDS paintings in 1986. The AIDS theme encompasses many serious issues. First, it decimates the comfort of love, awarding the lover with a death sentence, an unthinkable trap! In the early eighties attention was focused on the spread of AIDS in the gay community, which raised gender and sexual issues. Proponents of increased AIDS awareness and funding used the media to advance their message. Safe sex and the open promotion of condoms and/or abstinence were framed as health or morality issues. AIDS quickly became a global concern, highlighting how interconnected the world has become. Whether technology could stem the plague became a crucial question. Science today is advanced enough to send satellites and shuttles into space, but still struggles with microscopic viruses that torment our earthbound race. AIDS affects so many facets of the human condition that I was compelled to address the subject in depth. Tackling such a range of issues challenged me as an artist. I did my rst AIDS-themed painting, American Kabuk/Oishiwa (No. 1), in 1986. Almost immediately the subject demanded modications in my style and scale of work.126

For his AIDS Series, which extends over about fteen years, Teraoka reached back to the ghost-inspired

ukiyo-e prints of the Kabuki stage. To create these much larger pictures, he devised a new technique, dipping the canvas into large tubs of sizing and then painting in what he calls an aerobic dance with sumi ink and watercolor. The process was arduous, mentally and physically. Later he worked with aquatint and sugar-lift etching. Condoms are central to this series of works, which were intended as warnings and are often frightening indeed. AIDS Series / Geisha and Ghost Cat (1989 2002) shows two horried, naked heterosexual lovers crawling to the corner of their bed; condoms along racism, discrimination, identity politics

MASAMI TERAOKA AIDS SERIES / GEISHA AND GHOST CAT, 19892002 Aquatint and sugar lift etching, spit bite, and direct gravure, 38 30 in. San Jose Museum of Art. Gift of the Lipman Family Foundation. Photo: Douglas Sandberg.

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with a diaphragm and jelly lie unused on the night table; and a large, erce, ghostlike cat, devouring a geisha, looms above in the sky as a messenger of death. The curatorial assistant Lindsey Wylie remarked: As an added salute to the iconography of traditional Ukiyo-e, the eyes of the man and woman are banded in blue, indicating that they too will become ghosts. Like the other works from this series, Geisha and Ghost Cat boldly considers whether the human race can survive the challenges of contemporary society.127 In the early 1990s, in his New Wave series, Teraoka depicted naked women swimming in high waves, holding onto condoms while being threatened by a huge catsh. In Virtual Reality (1995), from his Adam and Eve series (which refers to paintings by Bosch and Hans Baldung Grien), he painted Adam as a hooded skeleton holding a condom against Eves pubic area, clearly bringing the messenger of death into Western culture.

In 1995 Teraoka created his masterpiece Media Bacchanalia, about the victims of the information age. The painting, over fourteen feet wide, consists of four panels. In its symbolic and dramatic melding of current life with history and fantasy and its realistic treatment of gures, it relates to Max Beckmanns powerful triptychs. Teraoka shows President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton nailed to trees, while voracious journalists hold their microphones up to them, much as vinegar was served to the crucied Christ. The left panel depicts a deadly carnival of skeletons while great apocalyptic res annihilate the area on the right. Teraoka has continued to address world events in paintings that simulate Western religious art rather than Japanese woodblocks. In the US Inquisition series, started in 2003, he refers to 9/11 as well as to the child molestation scandal in the Catholic Church, the hypocrisy of the churchs ofcial response, and the social and cultural disintegration of human values.

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racism, discrimination, identity politics

TOWARD A SUSTAINABLE EARTH

CHAPTER 4

Compared to the environmental crisis, all other social, political, economic, and scientic issues pale into insignicance. Obviously, if humanity expires from global warming, over-population, pollution, starvation, and a lack of water, it will matter very little whether civil rights have been achieved, the Middle East is at peace, an AIDS vaccine exists, or the national debts have been paid. In point of fact, all these threats to our survival are directly or indirectly related to environmental destruction. james wines, Green Architecture

with these words, james wines, an environmental designer, writer, and dean of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, sums up the profound crisis that national, corporate, and individual greed have created for the sustainability of the earth and, indeed, for human survival. For too long, it seems, civilized nations have acted in the belief that the earth is subject to domination by humans. Even in the Bible we read: And God said, Be fruitful, and multiply, and ll the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the sh of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth(Gen. 1:28). This directive was of little help to the people who lived on Easter or Pitcairn Island or to the inhabitants of Greenland, Haiti, or the Indus Valley, who committed biological sui-

cide by cutting down their forests, polluting their watersheds, and causing irredeemable ecological disaster by extirpation of all kinds. It was not until Rachel Carson, a marine biologist, published her poetic and controversial book Silent Spring (1962), focusing on the threat to all life on this planet posed by the use of insecticides, that a broad-based awareness began of human-induced dangers to the worlds ecology and of the inherent interdependence of all organisms and the environment.1 Taking up Carsons cry, Rupert Garca (see pp. 4446) made a poster in 1969 showing a frightened little girl who cries as she runs through a large toxic blue space, the color of smog, with large red letters above spelling DDT. The industrial establishment tried to deny Carsons charges as hysterical and unfounded. The DuPont
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corporation continued to propagate its slogan Better Living Through Chemistry: DDT, banned in the United States in 1972, is still produced for sale abroad. Carsons ndings, however, have been corroborated, and the degradation of the environment has been even more serious than she predicted. In 1963 the young balladeer Bob Dylan recorded A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall, singing of the pellets of poison . . . ooding the waters. Such pessimistic views about the destruction of the biosphere have proved only too accurate as environmental devastation visibly takes its toll. The exponential growth of the worlds population threatens to increase environmental problems. Six billion at the turn of the millennium, it is estimated to reach twelve billion by the year 2050. Moreover, global temperatures are rising at an alarming rate. In the face of measurable melting of glaciers and the polar ice caps and the dangerous rise in sea levels, numerous nations signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 to reduce global warming.2 Putting the hope of the world aside, however, President George W. Bush abrogated the treaty soon after taking ofce and downgraded standards for clean air as well as clean water. According to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment Report of November 2004, the Arctic sea-ice in summer will virtually disappear by the middle to the end of the century.3 It is quite likely, therefore, that, if the present situation is allowed to continue, many of the globes major cities, located at sea level, will eventually be under water. While the oceans are rising, the worlds potable water is in serious decline. Adding to the magnitude of the global crisis, tropical forests, as well as forests in milder climates, are being cut down to serve the timber industry and to make room for cattle ranches and corporate agriculture. Already, topsoil built up over millions of years is being used up at a rapid rate. As climate changes destroy existing arable land, more and more land will become desert, causing famine to spread across the earth. Environmental degradation is a real and present danger, not merely a prediction for the future.
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To change this situation, some people argue, we must change not only our industrial practices, but the way we view the world. In the mid-twentieth century the philosopher Martin Heidegger provided a signicant critique of Platonic and Christian anthropocentrism, asserting that a nonanthropocentric conception of humanity and its relation to nature must go beyond the doctrine of rights. We can dwell harmoniously on Earth only by submitting to our primary obligation to be open for the Being of beings.4 Thinkers such as the theoretical physicist Fritjof Capra, the cultural historian Theodore Roszak, the philosopher Arne Naess, the forester Aldo Leopold, and the environmental activist David Brower have contributed to the new eld of deep ecology, which recognizes the intrinsic values of all living beings, and views humans as just one particular strand in the web of life.5 Visual artists have also called attention to the overwhelming environmental challenges we face. Environmental art, which interprets fragile ecologies and in some instances incorporates solutions for environmental problems, grew out of the Land Art and Earthworks of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Transforming the genre that for centuries had held up a mirror to the landscape so as to transfer the view onto paper or canvas, a number of artists engaged in a direct encounter with the land itself. The bulldozer took the place of the paintbrush, chisel, or blowtorch. The rst generation of Land artistsRobert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Nancy Holt, Michael Heizer, Robert Morris, and Dennis Oppenheimmoved the earth itself to create often colossal works in the remote wilderness. In some respects, they adapted the Abstract Expressionists gesture, making a strong, authentic mark, to the land itself. Early in their careers many Land artists had produced Minimalist sculpture: geometric forms that resembled the glass- and steel-enclosed International-style architecture of the 1960s, designed by the artist but produced by industrial fabricators. Soon a number of Minimalist sculptors decided to move beyond the gallery, museum, or

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corporate enclosure and to launch into open space. In 1968 Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt exhibited their horizontal work, suggesting the atness of the land. In the same year Robert Morris placed a small mound of dirt in the Dwan Gallery in New York and titled it Earthwork. Some years later, in 1977, Walter De Maria lled the Heiner Friedrich Gallery in New York with two feet of earth. Called The New York Earth Room, this installation is now on permanent view at the West Broadway branch of the Dia Center for the Arts. Many of the Earthworkers, as Suzaan Boettger points out in her book Earthworks, spent a signicant number of years in California.6 Heizer, for example, grew up in California, where his father was an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and he studied at the San Francisco Art Institute. (Morris also studied there.) De Maria earned his masters degree in art at UC Berkeley, and Oppenheim did his undergraduate work at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and earned his graduate degree at Stanford University. Virginia Dwan, the major patron of Earth Art, had her pivotal gallery in Los Angeles from 1959 until 1967, before moving it to New York, where she mounted the rst important group show of Earthworks in 1968. In her study Boettger also draws a plausible connection between Earthworks and the free spirit of the free speech movement, the antiwar demonstrations, the counterculture, and the growing concern for the natural environment.7 All these artists advocated the dematerialization of art. In the spirit of the 1960s, they strongly opposed the wholesale commercialization and commodication of art and the art world. They produced work that did not t into the white cube of the museum or gallery and could not decorate the living rooms of luxury apartments. They did not want, as Heizer pointed out, to add their art to sagging warehouse oors. But in these early years of Earth Art, many of the artists had not yet disengaged themselves from anthropocentrism, from human domination over nature. In fact, most still appropriated the earth for their

own formal purposes. It took a new awareness, partly indebted to the feminist critique, to realize that art celebrating the earth could indeed be made directly on the land. The fragrance of the watered earth is a great relief from the fumes of the city. Two early examples of this shift in perspective came out of the New York art world. In Rice/Tree/ Burial (1968), in upstate New York, Agnes Denes planted rice to symbolize life and sustenance, chained trees to signify mans interference with nature, and buried her poetry to represent thinking in a dialectical triangulation that indicates the human relationship to nature. In 1988 she planted an entire wheateld in Lower Manhattan, harvesting eleven thousand pounds of healthy wheat. Her 1982 concept for the Tree Mountain project, calling for eleven thousand trees to be planted in an intricate geometric pattern, became in 1992 part of a land reclamation enterprise in Finland designed to help alleviate the worlds ecological stress. On a much smaller scale, Alan Sonst created Time Landscape (196578) on a plot near a busy New York intersection. Reclaiming an urban wasteland of rubble, cement, broken glass, and weeds, he planted a small indigenous garden, bringing the original ora of Lower Manhattan back to the community at LaGuardia Place.

COLLABORATIONS WITH NATURE AND THE BODY POLITIC

Californians attitude toward nature has been fraught with ambiguity. For most Californians today, the landscape is something glimpsed from the freeways or seen as an opportunity for real estate development. For painters in the nineteenth century, the California landscape was a vision of El Dorado at the far side of the North American continent. In 1870, when John Muir visited Yosemite, he saw his mission as the preservation of Gods garden and helped found the Sierra Club in 1892. Countering the view that the wilderness was something to be conquered and tamed, the Sierra Club helped create a populist mind-set toward a sustainable earth
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about the value of preserving wild beauty. In the twentieth century distinguished photographers such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Brett Weston focused their cameras on the High Sierra and the undeled Pacic shore, capturing a natural paradise far removed from the reality of the increasingly polluted urban areas. Groups arose to protect the land from the growing cities. In 1961 three female activists started a movement to save the San Francisco Bay from a series of planned landlls that would have turned it into a saltwater lake, and to the south Friends of the Los Angeles River managed to stop a plan to turn the riverbed into a truck freeway. Artists in California soon added their voices to efforts to preserve the land and increase the body politics respect for the life of the natural environment. First and foremost among ecological artists in California are Helen Mayer Harrison (b. 1929) and Newton Harrison (b. 1932). In 1953 Helen, who had studied literature and the psychology of education at Cornell University, Queens College, and New York University, married Newton, who had received his MFA from Yale University and produced well-received color eld paintings. With their different but complementary backgrounds, they began collaborating on art that combined sociopolitical concerns with aesthetic values. In 1970 they came to California to help form the new Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, moving to Santa Cruz in 2004. In opposition to the general postmodern pessimism, as expounded by Jean Baudrillard, the Harrisons have confronted ecological problems with eco-aesthetic metaphors, in the rm belief that their work can make a difference. They actively consult with engineers, hydrologists, biologists, historians, politicians, journalists, and businesspeople as part of the research for their projects. They see this verbal artthis dialogue, discourse, and recitationas an integral part of their social sculpture, to use a term introduced by Joseph Beuys. In the early 1970s, at about the time that Smithson made his Spiral Jetty, the Harrisons produced a series
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of survival pieces. Alarmed by the devastation of the California orchards by smog and urban sprawl, they constructed Portable Orchard, in which citrus trees could bear fruit in a well-designed, healthful setting. In their sh events, Portable Brine Shrimp Farm, Fish Feast, and Catsh Feast, the artists grew shrimp or sh in ponds containing algae that, depending on the waters salinity, would change color, making the water surface resemble contemporary color eld painting. Exhibitions of the sh farms at museum sites in Los Angeles, London, and Brussels were accompanied by dialogues and performances, concluding with an end to the cycle of life in which the sh were killed, fried, and served to invited guests, some of whom were dismayed by an artwork so poignantly replicating normal life experience. Many of the Harrisons projectssuch as Meditations on the Condition of the Sacramento River, the Delta, and the Bays at San Francisco (1977)asked questions about and, at the same time, suggested solutions for aficted watersheds. Large maps were central to their strategy, evoking the work of the historic cartographers whose maps, used as instruments of navigation, transportation, and warfare, more abstractly described, narrated, and delineated space. In the Harrisons Delta and Bay Area project the maps political, geological, topographical, and satellite were accompanied by explicatory texts, which pointed out the problems caused by damming, agribusiness, and other ventures that place prot ahead of sustainability. This project went beyond the walls of the San Francisco Art Institute and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art into the streets of the city, with posters, grafti, advertisements, billboards, and television programs, as well as recitals of the meditations by the two artists. For ten years (197484) the Harrisons worked on The Lagoon Cycle, consisting of seven interconnected narrative maps and dialogues between a lagoon maker and a witness, meditating on ecological projects from Sri Lanka to the Salton Sea. This magnum opus focused attention on the state of farming,

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HELEN MAYER HARRISON AND NEWTON HARRISON MEDITATIONS ON THE CONDITION OF THE SACRAMENTO RIVER, THE DELTA, AND THE BAYS AT SAN FRANCISCO, 1977 Photography, collage, graphite, and ink, 4 ft. 2 in. 13 ft. 3 in. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

HELEN MAYER HARRISON AND NEWTON HARRISON SO WHOS ATTENDING TO THE CONNECTIVITY OF THE WHOLE? FROM PENINSULA EUROPE, 2001 Paper on canvas, 9 5 ft. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York. Photo: D. James Dee.

with the disintegrating conditions of soil, water, and air, and on the interrelationship of ecosystems. But it went beyond discussion to suggest concrete ways to attain harmony between humanity and our natural surroundings. Over the years the Harrisons have worked mostly on commissioned projects, from Pasadena and San Diego to Baltimore and Atlanta, to Prague and Tel Aviv, among other places. In 1995, at the request of the Cultural Council of South Holland, they produced A Vision for the Green Heart of Holland, a plan for a two-kilometer-wide biodiversity ring, circling 140 kilometers around the green heart that still exists in the center of the Netherlands. It would clean the water and the air and yet allow for the anticipated need to build new homes to absorb immigration. In 2001 the Harrisons published a beautifully illustrated book, Peninsula Europe. Posing the question Who is looking at the continent as a whole? they visualized Europe as a single entity including Scandinavian countries, the Russian plain extending to the Ural Mountains, Great Britain and the other islands, each with [its] own distinct geophysical perception.8 Two of the books many new maps are reproduced here, one showing Peninsula Europes mountain ranges and riverbeds and the other pulling the land mass apart into differently colored sections signifying specic watersheds. Extending their earlier concerns with survival instruction9 onto a grand scale, this work serves as the basis for a new discourse on the continents future, embracing its cultural and biological diversity. At the same time the Harrisons were creating their portable sh farms in the early 1970s, Bonnie Sherk (b. 1945) was collaborating with Howard Levine on the installation of a series of outdoor performance pieces she called portable parks. Sherk, who received her B.A. degree from Rutgers University, studied performance art with Mel Henderson at San Francisco State University. In one of her early portable parks events she covered a dead-end section of a freeway with live turf and palm trees and brought in a cow to keep her com228

pany, anticipating some of her later performances. In Sitting Still Sherk, dressed in formal attire, sat for some time on a discarded stuffed chair near a garbage dump in central San Francisco. In Public Lunch she had herself caged and sat down for an elegant meal next to other animals in the San Francisco Zoo, which were fed publicly at the same time. She became friendly with the tiger in the next cage. In 1974 Sherk created Crossroads Community (The Farm), located at the intersection of two freeways in San Francisco. She transformed some dilapidated buildings and four and a half acres of barren cement into a place where farm animals chickens, pigs, rabbits, cows could live and various plant species could grow. One of the rst ecological works to integrate land, animals, and humans, The Farm presented a restored sustainable ecosystem. Children

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BONNIE SHERK THE FARM, 1974 Plan for Crossroads Community (The Farm), far left, and view from under freeeway. San Francisco. Courtesy of the artist.

and adults from different economic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds came to visit this environment, which became a school without walls, a new, holistic community, and one of the rst alternative art spaces. In Overlay, her study comparing the contemporary dialectic between nature and culture to prehistoric art, Lucy Lippard asserted that Sherks offspring was the most ambitious and successful work of ecological art in this country.10 After seven years Sherk felt that it was time to let go and move on. The Farm was acquired by the city of San Francisco, contiguous acreage became available, and a rural park was developed next to the freeways. Sherk then developed her living libraries, an interactive program, which she dened as broad metaphors that use art as a systematic framework and vehicle for environmental and educational information.11 In 1999 she installed a living library as part of the curriculum of three adjoining schools in southwestern San Francisco. It provides the students with the experience of gardening and thus relating directly to nature. Sherks living libraries also link diversity and commonality around the globe. They are planned to use state-ofthe-art technology to demonstrate the interconnect-

edness between biological, cultural, and technological systems. Sherk has proposed one for Roosevelt Island, opposite the United Nations buildings in New York, and envisions adding a world peace institute and a sustainable development center, which will address problems of health, education, and ecology. The phenomenon of artists working as partners on large-scale environmental projects has increased in recent years. Like the Harrisons, Christo and JeanneClaude have worked together on formidable projects. Their different backgrounds have stimulated a continuous interchange of ideas. Christo (Javacheff ) was born in Bulgaria in 1935, trained at the Soa Academy of Fine Arts in the Social Realist manner, and worked in a brigade that advised farmers on how to arrange their harvests and tools to impress foreign travelers on the Orient Express with a vision of dynamic prosperity. He arrived in Paris in 1958, where he met Jeanne-Claude, who had been bornon the same day as Christoin Casablanca to a French military family. She had studied in France and Switzerland and received a baccalaureate in Latin and philosophy from the University of Tunis. They began to work together, and their rst signal joint project, Iron Curtoward a sustainable earth
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tain(1962), consisted of a big stack of oil barrels that stopped all trafc on a narrow Paris street. For Documenta 4 in Kassel, Germany, in 1968, they installed a lofty, 5,600-cubic-meter air package, which became the hallmark of the exposition. Their next major project, wrapping part of the coast near Sydney, Australia, with one million square feet of fabric in 1969, was both a great engineering feat and a ne work of art, increasing viewers awareness of the sheer beauty of Australias coastal bluffs. It reportedly stopped developers from building in that area. After their monumental project Valley Curtain (197072) in Colorado, Christo and Jeanne-Claude came to California to build Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 19721976. As in most of their projects, the political process of obtaining permissions was a key aspect of the enterprise. It took four years of negotiations, with eighteen hearings with various county planning and zoning boards, the Army Corps of Engineers, the California Coastal

Commission, and other bureaucratic agencies. Landowners, community groups, planners, and civic commissions all had to cooperate for the work to be erected. The sociopolitical context, the software of the process, was as important for Christo and JeanneClaude as the hardware to follow. A committee of disgruntled local artists tried to stop the project, complaining that a bunch of foreignersa Bulgarian artist with a French wife and a German project director (full disclosure: the author of this book) were about to get national, indeed international, attention by doing a stunt on their territory. Christos response at the hearing was that all the opposition was an essential ingredient of the work. Indeed, the whole negotiation process forced members of the public to focus on the geography and appearance of the land, rather than arbitrary boundaries of private property, county divisions, and land regulation. Running Fence extended twenty-four and a half miles, from Meacham Hill north of Petaluma across

CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE RUNNING FENCE, SONOMA AND MARIN COUNTIES, CALIFORNIA, 19721976 Photo: Wolfgang Volz. Christo, 19722005.

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Highway 101, zigzagging over hills, pastures, and ranches, and then dipping into the Pacic Ocean at Bodega Bay. This eighteen-foot-high ribbon, made of nylon panels, swayed like a group of great sails in the wind. As the light changed throughout the day, the fence reected colors from blue to orange. Just as we have come to think of Mont Sainte-Victoire in Provence through the eyes and brush of Paul Czanne, people now remember the Sonoma and Marin hills as construed by Running Fence. I have often been asked to which category of art this work belongs. The answer is that it dees classication. Carefully designed and produced by a large crew of engineers, builders, and workers, it can be seen as architecture. Viewed from the air, it has been compared to the Great Wall of China, but instead of enduring through the ages, it lasted only fourteen daysa transitory structure, characterized by impermanence and change. This ecologically signicant work increased public awareness of the beauty of the landscape, both during its brief existence and after, when people could view documentation in lms, photographs, and books. Christo and Jeanne-Claude came back to California with The Umbrellas, JapanUSA, 19841991. One day in October 1991 the large umbrellas were opened simultaneously in both countries: 1,340 blue umbrellas played against green hills in a valley north of Tokyo, and 1,760 yellow umbrellas, alone or grouped in nests, stood in the dry golden hills at Tejon Pass along Interstate 5, north of Los Angeles. The work of art lasted only nineteen days. As in all of Christo and Jeanne-Claudes projects, every part was carefully removed afterward, leaving only the memory of the land as it had been temporarily enhanced and the visual and written record of the project. Driving on the highway and seeing the large yellow mushrooms reveal themselves reminded me of unrolling a Chinese landscape scroll to discover trees, bridges, rocks, and meditating scholars. But with The Umbrellas the connoisseur became a traveler and the two-dimensional drawing of a scroll became palpable, existing in the actual world. toward a sustainable earth

CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE THE UMBRELLAS, JAPANUSA, 19841991 California, USA. Photo: Wolfgang Volz. Christo, 1991.

CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE THE UMBRELLAS, JAPANUSA, 19841991 Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. Photo: Wolfgang Volz. Christo, 1991.

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Christo and Jeanne-Claude have also worked on transforming urban sites, countering the claim by deconstructivist critics of city planning that public spaces have descended into passive, disjointed places. They wrapped the Pont Neuf in Paris in 1985 and the Reichstag in Berlin in 1995. In conceiving a work for New York, they note, Our attention turned toward the vast ow of people walking through the streets. The resulting proposal [The Gates, Central Park, New York City (19792005)] was . . . a project directly related to the human scale, to be sited in Central Park, whose 843 acres are the ultimate locale for walking at leisure. Like all their projects, it was temporary, giving it a feeling of urgency to be seen, and the love and tenderness brought by the fact that it will not last.12 Christo and Jeanne-Claude remind us of the need to preserve the beauty around us, as well as of the political cooperation required to do so. Other artists have focused on how to undo the damage humans have already done to the environmentoffering, for example, suggestions for waste treatment and water purication. The Harrisons 1971 shrimp farm was an early example of this approach, as was the Germanborn political artist Hans Haackes Rhine Water Purication Plant (1972), which showed how contaminated water from a sewage plant could be pumped through a ltration system, owing into a bowl of goldsh, as a visible sign of the utility of gray-water reclamation. In New York Mierle Laderman Ukeles, a noted performance artist in the 1970s, worked with the Department of Sanitation to install a garbage recycling unit, and in Flow City (198390) she tracked the citys vast garbage treatment program. In the Southwest Dominique Mazeaud, a performance artist and a chronicler, devoted one day every month between 1987 and 1994 to reverentially cleaning a minute portion of the Santa Fe River, a ritual that infused a futile act with meaning. The environmental artist and activist Jo Hanson, who was born in Carbondale, Illinois, and came to San Francisco in 1955, swept the sidewalk in front of her house for some twenty years, beginning in the 1970s, to collect litter and then dis232

played the discarded objects as an archaeological nd, a deed that led to community involvement in cleaning the streets. Ciel Bergman (formerly known as Cheryl Bowers) has directly posed the question of what we can do in the face of the environmental destruction all around us. Born in Berkeley in 1938, she trained to be a psychiatric nurse but then followed her early desire to become a painter, earning an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1973 and teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for eighteen years (from 1976 to 1994). Her early, spare paintings, derived from her resonant imagination, resembled maps of the desert. Later paintings suggested landscapes with clear blue skies or darker scenes. In the 1980s Bergman began a series of semiabstract luminist paintings with veiled images of owers or blades of grass. Believing in the need to reafrm beauty, she called these works antidotes, signifying her deep concern about the destruction of the planet and her faith in the artists potential to serve as a healing agent and turn poison into nectar. In 1987, when the Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara invited Bergman to create an installation, she decided to ll the gallery with nonbiodegradable garbage. For Sea of Clouds What Can I Do, she hired a friend, the sculptor Nancy Merrill, to help collect trash, mostly plastic, from Santa Barbara beaches over a period of several months. They saw sea lions, seals, and birds dying from ingesting plastic materials. After bringing enormous quantities of refuse into the darkened gallery space, littering the oor with it, the artist sprinkled the debris with our. An audiotape played the sounds of pulsating surf and the songs of whales and seagulls. In the center, patterned after an American Indian ceremonial space, a repit of ashes appeared as a sand altar, to which visitors added prayer sticks. The walls were painted in different colors, with a variety of images: tellingly, the west wall, the place of the setting sun, signifying aging and death, was painted black, with openings out to the sea. The only living objects on display were owers in vases, in striking contrast to the rest of the

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CIEL BERGMAN SEA OF CLOUDS WHAT CAN I DO (WEST WALL), 1987 Installation. Courtesy Linda Durham Contemporary Art, Santa Fe.

installation. Visitors could nd places to meditate, and they were encouraged to write on the walls to express their response to the work and their personal feelings of hope or fear. When the installation closed, six dumpsters were needed to carry away the trash. In thinking about this waste, Bergman came up with the idea that perhaps plastic, a petroleum product like asphalt, could be recycled for use on highways. She brought this concept to the attention of her former partner, Gary Fishback, who patented it under the name of Plasphalt, recycling plastic waste into a paving material of greater strength than ordinary asphalt. Bergmans installation, with its compelling contrast of synthetic materials and natural sounds from the ocean, was a clear call for viewers to think about how humans are harming the environment. Joyce CutlerShaws work, with its fusion of image and text, asks us

to reect more generally on our relation to our environment as we follow the artists excursions into science, through investigations of bird migration, human anatomy, and other aspects of nature. Cutler-Shaw was born in Detroit in 1932 and brought up in New York, where she attended New York University and Columbia University. Visiting the museums in New York, she especially admired the works by Rembrandt, Georges de La Tour, Emil Nolde, Egon Schiele, and Otto Dix. She later moved to San Diego, where she wrote poetry and continued her studies in the visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, encountering Allan Kaprow, the Antins, and the Harrisons on the faculty and Linda Montano and Martha Rosler as fellow students. In a brief essay on CutlerShaw, the art historian Konrad Oberhuber observed that for her, as well as these other artists who migrated from New York to San Diego, the intellectual, the sotoward a sustainable earth
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JOYCE CUTLER-SHAW THE SYCAMORE LEAF CANOPY, 2002 Eight plasma-cut, powdercoated steel sections (16 16 ft. each) on structural columns. Mission Valley Branch Library, San Diego. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Marvin Sloben.

cial, and the political components are of equal or even higher importance than the visual one as motivating factors.13 Most of these artists, moreover, employ words, written or spoken, in their artwork. In an early project, The Namewell (1974), CutlerShaw placed thousands of laminated paper tiles, inscribed with rst names, on a wall of the Los Angeles International Airport to alleviate the sterility of the place and give some sense of recognition to the travelers. For the bicentennial of the United States in 1976 she proposed to erect a monument in front of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Made of ice blocks from the waters of all fty states, and standing eleven feet high and fty-one feet long, the monument was to bear the inscription We the people in large capital letters as well as dates central to the preservation and extension of our human rights and freedoms.14 Since
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1978 Cutler-Shaw has investigated what she calls the archaeology of the human body. With permission from UCSDs medical school, she studied sick and dying patients rsthand, creating poignant drawings whose accurate and brittle lines recall the piercing drawings Ferdinand Hodler made of Valentine GodDurrel in 1915. Turning to environmental concerns, such as threats to bird migration, she examined the carrier pigeon, which she saw as a metaphor for the artist, a migratory worker, whose home is a portable loft.15 She also investigated bird fossils, eventually inventing her Alphabet of Bones, twenty-six characters based on anatomically accurate drawings of bird skeletons. She then used these pictographs for her poetry and, working with a dancer, choreographed a 1989 performance of Alphabet of Bones in San Diego.

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In 2002 Cutler-Shaw received a commission from the Mission Valley Branch Library in San Diego to create a permanent installation relating to the ecology of the area. The new library is adjacent to the San Diego River, and it wanted to stress the connection between the building and its books and the river, which is the prime natural resource of San Diegos Mission Valley. The architect had accentuated this relationship in the buildings design, and Cutler-Shaw worked with elements from the rivers embankment. Her ceiling canopy for the main reading room, The Sycamore Leaf Canopy, is composed of eight sixteenby-sixteen-foot sections of plasma-cut steel, each set within the structural columns that support the library ceiling. Patrons of the reading room nd themselves under a canopy of leaf patterns enlivened by light. On the balcony and staircase, drawings etched into glass create the Railing of Wild River Grasses: gooseberry, mugwort, and wild mustard, all of which grow on the rivers bank. Having brought nature into the library, the artist received a Divine Detail design award from the American Institute of Architects in 2002. Rather than retelling natures story, Daniel McCormick has decided to work directly, hands-on, with natural habitats and watersheds. Born in Oakland in 1950, he studied sculpture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where James Turrell was his teacher. Turrell, who had been investigating the effect of light and space on human perception since the 1960s, was then in the early stages of his monumental Roden Crater project in Arizona. Turrell, a pilot, would y with his students above the Santa Barbara coast and over the Channel Islands. These lessons with Turrell helped McCormick realize that sculpture could be more than an object. He began to think globally of Spaceship Earth, to use Buckminster Fullers term, and to understand that even something small can have a great impact on the larger watershed. McCormick was also inuenced by Turrells insistence on an art that goes beyond attractiveness to direct attention and to precipitate change.16 After receiving a degree in environmental design at the Univer-

DANIEL McCORMICK THE WATERSHED: AN ECOLOGICAL INSTALLATION, 2002 Willow and bermat, 3 6 12 ft. Sleepy Hollow Creek, San Anselmo, California. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Pamela Cobb.

sity of California, Berkeley, McCormick wanted to do more than witness and document the changes in our urban and rural landscapes.17 Instead, he intervenes in the environment, with the goal of reestablishing the natural equilibrium. As an artist, McCormick views the watershed as a found object that is to be respected, even revered, and works toward restoring ecological balance. To this end, he constructs woven willow sculptures, reminiscent of Indian baskets and made directly from material in the watershed, placing them strategically to t into the curves of streams and gullies. These baskets ll with leaves and twigs and collect sediment that would otherwise have suffocated the salmon and steelhead eggs in their spawning areas. The baskets also stabilize the banks and allow the natural riparian system to reestablish itself. Coordinating with the National Park Service toward a sustainable earth
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FRANCISCO PEREZ BRIGADE OF VOLUNTEERS, CASA PUEBLO PROJECT, 2003 Photograph of Alexis Massol Gonzales, the founder and director of Casa Pueblo, with three volunteers at installation in Puerto Rico. Photo: Francisco Perez.

for works such as The Watershed: An Ecological Installation (2002), McCormick includes the community, holding public workshops and working with children in the schools. His own environmental sculptures lose their identity as manmade artifacts, deconstructing as natural processes are reestablished. This eventual disintegration of any evidence of the artists intercession with the natural environment is part of the overall concept and strategy. On a grander scale, Francisco Perez has become a guiding activist in transforming fty-ve square miles of tropical forest in Puerto Rico from a huge stripmining operation into a national park. Perez was born in Puerto Rico in 1949, spent his formative years in Connecticut, and attended Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where he was inuenced by the architect Daniel Libeskind. During the 1980s Perez, concerned about the degradation of the environment, especially meadows and wetlands, made works to illustrate our connection to these ecological changes. He wrote, Urban culture displaces and binds us to this relationship, distorting our natural identities, alienating human society from the natural systems [that contain and nurture]. I pull my audience into my constructed allegories to make them aware of their rela-

tionship with nature, to restore their natural sense of self as part of a larger ecology.18 In 1986 Perez accepted a position at San Francisco State University and devised courses in which his students moved beyond traditional art to gain values that contribute to the well being and health of the ecosystem.19 He had his students engage in such environmental community-service projects as Rubble Sculpture Garden, on a San Francisco landll. In his own sculpture he continued to explore the connections of art to natures biological systemsto water and to earth and its plantsoften forcing the viewer to interact with the work and become a participant rather than a disinterested bystander. At times Perez has made distinctly political statements in his sculpture, as with Dilema de mi Pas (The dilemma of my country, 1990), in which he placed a clay model of the United States ag below a transparent map of Puerto Rico, pointing to the disturbing dialectic between colonizer and colonized. But the state of the environment remains an overriding concern. Since 1997 Perez has devoted much of his time and energy to the development of a national park in Puerto Rico, near the town of Adjuntas. The mountains surrounding Adjuntas are rich in gold, silver, copper, and zinc, and the Puerto Rican government had reserved roughly 55 square miles for mineral exploitation. International mining companies sought to extract ore from open pits, according to an article in National Geographic.20 The mining operation would have meant jobs for the impoverished population, but the community decided to persuade the government to transform the mining zone into a national forest, El Bosque del Pueblo, managed jointly by the University of Puerto Rico and the community group Casa Pueblo, founded by Alexis Massol Gonzales. Using the high-quality coffee that grows in this area to help nance the enterprise, the community has preserved the forest of gigantic ferns, philodendrons, and orchids, attracting thousands of visitors. Perez was instrumental in conceiving and designing the Jardin de las Mariposas (Buttery garden), which includes a

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Japanese rock garden and has become a preserve for many buttery species, as well as a testing space for alternative, environmentally sound methods of pest control and an open classroom for students from elementary grades to the university level. Letting go of the ego involvement characteristic of so many artists work, Perez prefers to use his talent in a community effort. El Bosque del Pueblo is not his work, but his participation in this large-scale project offers a paradigm for how art can intersect with ecological pursuits. A different paradigm can be found in Mark Thompsons A House Divided (1989), an action/installation/ performance at the interface of ecology and politics. Thompson was born in 1950 into a military family at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and studied electrical engineering before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied sculpture with Jim Melchert, Harold Paris, and Peter Voulkos. While at Berkeley he became aware of the budding ecology movement and set out to explore living systems, focusing on honeybees and seeing the relationship between beehive and beekeeper as a meaningful, symbiotic guide toward nurturing, interdependence, and balance for the larger human community. As he explained, Within the process of caring for honeybees, an essential spiritual relationship is formed with the natural world. . . . I believe that the honeybee hive and the activity of beekeeping suggest a clear and powerful ecological model for human interaction in the natural environment.21 In Immersion (197376), documented in lm, he placed a queen honeybee on his head and remained motionless until his head and shoulders were totally covered with bees, so he seemed to be wearing a kind of medieval helmet. He relates the experience of bees swarming toward his head to the lines in Alberto Giacomettis drawings, which dene the gure by their convergence and create tension with the uid space around them. A House Divided was created for a major exhibition of art and the environment, entitled Resource Kunst, which took place in 1989 in a converted hospital that bordered the Wall in West Berlin. Over a

three-week period Thompson used a nineteenthcentury bee-hunting box to locate honeybees within a ve-mile area of Berlin, an activity that put him in touch with beekeepers from both East and West Berlin. Eventually a group of bees was transferred to the glass-walled live-in hive, designed by Thompson to house both the bees and his head. Thompson would insert his head into the hive and stay there for about three hours, an extremely dangerous act. This period of meditation, Thompson felt, was a necessary symbolic act on his part. The live-in hive was set on an old oak tree stump in a big room with two large toward a sustainable earth

MARK THOMPSON A HOUSE DIVIDED, 1989 Honeybees, beeswax, wood, and glass. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Michael Harms.

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arched windows, which Thompson covered with beeswax drawn from the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. As sunlight passed through the windows, the view changed, with the beeswax taking on different tones. Beeswax also covered the rooms two tall Corinthian columns (two columns, two windows, two Berlins). The changing light-color of the windows, the drone and smell of the bees, the mufed columns, all contributed to the rooms mysterious appearance. The seed crystal for the windows wax had been harvested before the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown and was not radioactive; it was donated to Thompson by a West Berlin beekeeper, and a young man from East Berlin assisted Thompson in covering the windows. There was a wire-mesh tube in the ceiling, allowing the bees to y back and forth, gathering nectar from the surrounding countryside, paying no attention to the Wall. As Thompson described it: The city architecture of living walls of honeycomb was fused together from the owers of two Berlinstaking form in relation to a human being. The honeybees and the artist bound together through creative, natural processes form a living bridge between two cities, two worlds.22

PHOTOGRAPHIC MEDITATIONS

Photography intensies the act of seeing, and, of all the visual arts, it may have had the greatest impact on political action. Nineteenth-century photographers such as Carleton Watkins and Timothy OSullivan made people aware of the breathtaking beauty of the Western landscape, which helped lead to legislation establishing national parks. Later, during the Great Depression, the photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White along with Farm Security Administration photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn documented the plight of American farmworkers in the face of a major drought and helped win public acceptance for the New Deal. Although the California-based Group f/64, formed in 1932 by Ansel Adams, Brett and Edward Weston, Imogen Cunning238

ham, and others, did not have an overt political purpose, photographs like those Adams took in Yosemite educated the public visually about the value of preserving wild beauty, much as Watkins and Sullivan had done. Still, the aims of Group f/64 were primarily aesthetic, in contrast to those of documentary photography, and these photographers failed to show the devastation of the idyllic Eden that had already begun. The tension between art photography and documentary photography has continued, with photographers such as Allan Sekula (see pp. 6869) taking a strong stand against purely aesthetic camerawork. Photographers such as Walker Evans, Sebastio Salgado, Richard Misrach, and David Maisel seem to have achieved a synthesis of aesthetic form and political message. In speaking of Evanss carefully composed photographs documenting the plight of tenant farmers in the South, the writer Glenway Westcott characterized this work as better propaganda than it would be if it were not aesthetically enjoyable. It is because I enjoy looking that I go on looking until the pity and the shame are impressed upon me unforgettably.23 The debate over aesthetics versus politics has resurfaced in the discourse about contemporary work, especially in regard to Richard Misrachs photographs showing devastation to the land. Much like Sebastio Salgados poignant photographs of exploited miners and endangered refugees, Misrachs photographs have been accused of aestheticizing horror. Responding to the charge by Susan Sontag, among others, that photography can make disaster look attractive, Misrach defends his work: If you make ugly photographs, people will think thats a good place for the wasteland to be. Lets dispose of the water and do nuclear tests there because its so ugly anyway. For me the desert is remarkably powerful and beautiful; I hope that gives reason for it to be saved.24 Misrach, born in Los Angeles in 1949, attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied mathematics and psychology, participated in political actions for nuclear disarmament, and became involved in photography. In 1974 he published his rst

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RICHARD MISRACH DEAD FISH, SALTON SEA, 1983 Dye-coupler photograph, 48 60 in. San Jose Museum of Art, promised gift of Peter and Beverly Lipman. Richard Misrach, 1983.

album of photographs, Telegraph 3 a.m.,25 a straightforward black-and-white photo story in the tradition of Walker Evans or Robert Frank, recording the sinister-seeming nightlife on this Berkeley street, which was once at the center of an idealistic counterculture. Five years later, in 1979, the desertits heat, its solitude, and its amazing scale became Misrachs prime subject. Turning to color and an eight-by-ten view camera, he produced twenty-three Cantos on the desert, named after the epic works of poetry by Dante and Ezra Pound. Over a period of twenty years Misrach took hundreds of photographs to call attention to the beauty of the desert, which for so long had been a barren wasteland, trampled upon and ravaged for economic gain. The desert, however,

has also been the locus where a hermit or a holy man like Saint Jerome could nd profound solitude, where Mormons could discover a safe haven from persecution, and where Carlos Castanedas spiritual guide, Don Juan, could experience shamanistic visions. Misrachs cantos The Terrain, Heavenly Bodies, The Fires, and The Flood evoke the four elements of the ancients. The Flood shows the Salton Sea, an articial body of water created by the diversion of the Colorado River to bring water to the bone-dry Imperial Valley. This manmade lake was rst a recreation area but then became contaminated and turned into a liquid wasteland, which Misrach has referred to as a metaphor of human folly.26 In Dead Fish, Salton Sea (1983) we see mostly an almost innite expanse of water and toward a sustainable earth
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RICHARD MISRACH CRATER AND DESTROYED CONVOY, BRAVO 20 BOMBING RANGE, 1986 Dye-coupler photograph, 48 60 in. Richard Misrach, 1986. Courtesy of the artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

sky. A board oats in the water, and two T-shaped poles stick up from its surface, the remains of a clothesline from when people still lived there. Misrachs fth canto, called The War (Bravo 20), documents the ecological damage to millions of acres of public land caused by the U.S. Navys illegal tests of high-explosive bombs, including 235 nuclear devices, in the Nevada desert. Misrach knew that the American military did its work in the outback, where few people were aware of what was transpiring, and he managed to get access to the former bombing range. In the resulting photographs we see rusted military equipment abandoned in the desert sand, bombs lying on the ground, and thousands of craters. The landscape, Misrach has written, was mag240

nicent. I was surrounded by the vast expanse of light. . . . It was also the most graphically ravaged environment I have ever seen. I found myself at the epicenter, the heart of the apocalypse. Alone, no sounds, no movement. No buildings or roads. No indication of life, no promise of civilization. Only the smell of rusted metal. Bombs and lifeless holes. Side by side were great beauty and great horror.27 This contrast is clearly seen in Crater and Destroyed Convoy (1986), with its pool of blood-red water and rusted remnants of a convoy. Misrachs next canto, The Pit, shows the animals that perished from atomic fallout, although the Atomic Energy Commission claimed that the death of more than four thousand of them could be accounted for

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by a dry year and starvation. Misrachs dead horses and cows are gruesome, evocative accusations against the indiscriminate slaughter caused by nuclear weapons. The eleventh canto, The Playboys, confronts individual human actions, showing bullet-ridden photographs of naked women from Playboy, used for target practice by local rednecks. To commemorate the connection between environmental abuse and reckless military use, Misrach ironically proposed transforming the bomb crater into Bravo 20 National Park, which would not only provide a permanent record of our treatment of the landscape but also help deter its destruction in the future. Working with landscape architects, he outlined a plan for the future park in detailed drawings, text, and a budget, with campgrounds, cafes, sightseeing roads, a visitors center, and a museum all provided. To put the consequences and implications of the Navys actions into perspective, the geological, archaeological, environmental, religious, economic, and cultural (Indian) signicance of the area will be highlighted, he stated.28 But, of course, the federal government is unlikely to build such a park; instead, its efforts are focused on the Yucca Mountain Project, creating a dump site for millions of tons of nuclear waste. Like Misrach, David Maisel uses his camera to bring environmental issues to our attention. Maisel was born in New York in 1961, studied at Princeton and Harvard, and settled in California in 1993. While still a Princeton undergraduate, he ew with his photography professor, Emmet Gowin, over Mount Saint Helens, which had recently erupted. Maisel saw not only the destruction caused by the volcano, but also the widespread damage to the environment caused by the logging industry. About this time he also became interested in the Earthworks, thoughts, and writings of Robert Smithson, who, in all his work, explored the complete breakdown and fracture of both nature and culture.29 Following in the footsteps of Smithson, who photographed many of his sites from the air,30 and such

Northern Californian artists as William Garnett and Robert Hartman, who have also photographed land and sea from the air, capturing the patterns of nature and human activity as beautiful abstract designs, Maisel takes aerial photographs that make us aware of both the beauty of the land and its human-inicted wounds. He calls these images Black Maps. One group in this series, The Lake Project, consists of photographs of Owens Lake and the Owens River, shot on two occasions in 2001 and 2002. As Roman Polanskis lm Chinatown (1974) vividly recounts, a huge water reclamation project, begun in 1913, diverted water from the Owens River via an aqueduct to the arid city of Los Angeles, drying up Owens Lake by 1926. The depletion of Owens Valley water caused the extermination of many species and exposed brightly colored minerals, presenting a surreal landscape for the photographer. In Lake Project #92849 (2001), taken

DAVID MAISEL LAKE PROJECT #9284-9, 2001 C-print, 48 48 in. Courtesy of the artist.

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BARBARA STAUFFACHER SOLOMON FREEWAY TO PARADISE, 1992 Photocollage, 8 5 in. Courtesy of the artist.

while ying at a low altitude, Maisel shows us what has happened to this area (he does not give titles to his C-prints, wanting viewers to nd their own associations and interpretations). The riverbed at the top of the picture appears to be a hill, so we tend to read the area above it as clouds; it is actually the dried-out watercourse, and its maroon coloring derives from the bacteria that thrive on the high concentration of minerals that once lay below water level. Remnants of the mining operations that likely produced the mineral deposits appear toward the foreground. Maisels large printsmeasuring four by four feet compel appreciation as dramatic works of sheer visual beauty. But they turn terrifying once the viewer becomes aware of the photographs subjects. Edmund Burkes eighteenth-century notions of the beautiful and the sublime seem to be combined in these camera productions. And these works have had a political impact. Responding in part to Maisels images and the public pressure that resulted, the Environmental Protection Agency recognized the ecological disaster in the Owens Valley and began ooding the area to stabilize the carcinogenic dust. It is hoped that this disaster, brought about by sucking the river dry to support population growth in Los Angeles, may be reversed. While some of Maisels photographs suggest the abstract Surrealist paintings of Andr Masson, Barbara Stauffacher Solomons astounding Freeway to Paradise (1992) seems a contemporary version of Ren Magrittes implausible paradoxes. The photographic collage appears in Stauffacher Solomons 1992 book Good Mourning California, an interweaving of text, drawings, maps, photographs, and collages that celebrates and laments the Golden West.31 Born in San Francisco, Stauffacher Solomon, who has worked as an architect, designer, and writer, studied in Basel and at the University of California, Berkeley. In Good Mourning California she tells us about the history of El Dorado, the mythical land of gold whose name came to be applied to Californiahow its golden desert was watered to become green lawn, how its pas242

toral vistas were turned into cash, how the land became available for sale as nature was increasingly synthesized and commercialized, how it was faked on location in Hollywoods back lots, and how it was debased in theme parks such as Disneyland. It is time, she suggests, to mourn California, where success is wealth and poverty has always been a sin. Maybe Eden was never intended for the poor.32 The real land has become real estate: They paved paradise and put up a parking lot, as Joni Mitchell sang in Big Yellow Taxi.

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In Freeway to Paradise the road hurtles into Albert Bierstadts romantic landscape painting Yosemite Valley (1863). Stauffacher Solomon observes that Bierstadt was a master of painting myths who produced works that were entrepreneurial, entertaining and BIG, and she quotes Mark Twain, who found Bierstadt altogether too gorgeous, considerably more beautiful than the original . . . more the atmosphere of Kingdom-come than of California. 33 We know that the German American painter produced these canvases in his New York studio from sketches he made on-site, and that he was receptive to Carleton Watkinss earlier photographs. Photography, then, has come full circle with Stauffacher Solomons own photograph of the freeway superimposed upon a reproduction of Bierstadts vision, which, in turn, was based on a photograph. The viewer is given speedy access to Paradise Lost.

OMENS AND AUGURIES

Two individuals, working in totally different modes, help sum up the deep concern felt by artists about the environment at this critical stage. The painter William T. Wiley compares the present dilemma to disasters of the past, and the light artist Peter Erskine confronts the viewer-participant with the destruction caused by violating the beauty of the sun. William T. Wiley is one of the artists whose work makes Bay Area art distinctive. Like Jess or Bruce Conner or the late Robert Arneson, if he didnt exist, youd have to invent him in order to recreate the freewheeling, boundary-blurring, denition-bursting art that ourished here from the late 50s into the 80s, wrote the art critic David Bonetti.34 Wiley was born in 1937 in the small town of Bedford, Indiana, and grew up in another small town, Richland, Washington, where he encountered the paintings of the Northwest Coast modernists Mark Tobey and Morris Graves. In 1956 he came to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, where Frank Lobdell, Nathan Oliveira, Joan Brown, and Elmer Bischoff were among his teachers,

and after graduating in 1962 he started teaching at the University of California, Davis. A painter, sculptor, printmaker, draftsman, and musician, Wiley moved easily from medium to medium. From the beginning his art was idiosyncratic and eccentric. In the years when Minimalism was the mainstream mode, his art must be described as maximal. He lled sheets of paper and canvases with a plethora of images and inscriptions. He was part of the San Francisco generation that was inuenced by the Beat poets, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, and writers on Zen Buddhism like Shunryu Suzuki and Alan Watts. But, like his UC Davis colleagues Robert Arneson and Roy de Forest, he fused this highly sophisticated way of thinking with a folksy attitude, becoming one of the masters of Funk, that impious semimovement that showed no respect for any rules of art. The New York critic Hilton Kramer took offense, referring to Wileys work at a 1971 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art as Dude Ranch Dada.35 Apprehensions about the delement of the natural environment appear insistently in Wileys work. As early as 1970 he made a watercolor titled, in typical Wiley fashion, I Wish I Could Have Known Earlier That You Have All the Time You Need Right Up to the Day You Die. It consists of color squares, but unlike paintings by Gerhard Richter or Ellsworth Kelly, which at rst glance it resembles, one of the 150 squares in Wileys picture shows a small piece of earth with grass sprouting from it. In 1981 his large assemblage Nomad Is an Island addressed the dumping of fty thousand ve-gallon drums of radioactive waste near the Farallon Islands just outside the Golden Gate. Irony and sarcasm are an important part of Wileys visual and verbal vocabulary, as are the puns, homonyms, and funny phrases he likes to put in his paintings. In 1983 he made a series of paintings called Agent Orange, including one with a large bursting ame of red blood and geometric squares on top of a nely drawn map of Vietnam. This combination of abstract forms with gurative images is typical of the artists way of seeing and painting. In an even more toward a sustainable earth
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WILLIAM T. WILEY THE CITY AFTER BOSCH, AFTER CHERNOBYL, 1994 Acrylic on canvas, 72 85 in. Courtesy of the John and Maxine Belger Family Foundation. Photo: Cesar Rubio.

sardonic 1986 sculpture, called Agent Orange Again, a large guitar with a skeletal face and cross is being played by a little man who may be Mr. Unnatural, Wileys alter ego. In 1994, in the memorable exhibition Afterburner at the Rena Branston Gallery in San Francisco, Wiley looked at specic works by Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel as vehicles to express his despair over the tragedy of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. In the shows catalogue he published the response to the contamination by the writer, printer, and social activist Holbrook Teter.36 One of Wileys canvases in the exhibition, The City After Bosch, After Chernobyl (1994), is based on Boschs Temptation of St. Anthony (c. 1500). In the right panel of Boschs triptych, Lucifer appears to St. Anthony in a variety of forms, tempting and mocking him, but he cannot break An244

thonys resolve. The landscape in the background of the panel, however, leaves little hope for salvation. Wiley has appropriated this setting, with its two castle towers. One of them has ominously weighted scales on its spire. Flames shoot out from the dome of the other castle, and a mysterious black door faces clouded waters. When this painting was included in an exhibition called Fallout at San Franciscos Meridian Gallery in 2000, Wiley presented his Yum Yum Song in the announcement for the show. Here are its nal lines:
Then tell me brothers and sisters Do you know what to do with plutonium yet? They were gonna hide it in the mountains And bury it in the sea. Or maybe on some Indian reservation

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PETER ERSKINE ROMAN ARCH IN BLUE SPECTRUM SUNLIGHT AND ROMAN ARCH IN RED SPECTRUM SUNLIGHT, BOTH FROM SECRETS OF THE SUN: MILLENNIAL MEDITATIONS, 1992 Sunlight, heliostat solar tracking mirror, laser-cut prisms, and xed mirrors. Trajans Markets, Rome. Courtesy of the artist. Photos: Peter Erskine.

Thats near you and me. So tell me about advanced technology And virtual reality. Then tell my father and mother What they gonna do with you and me? And does it matter how smart you are? And does it matter how dumb? Cause nobody here on this little planet Knows what to do with plutonium. Yum Yum.

While Wileys work draws on visual narrative to make its point, Peter Erskines work is more directly rooted in the phenomenological experience of the beholder, an emphasis that may be traced back to the philosopher Alfred North Whiteheads proposal of a nonabsolutist metaphysics in his Adventures of Ideas

(1933). After studying political science at Yale University and sculpture at the University of Pennsylvania, Erskine (b. 1941) moved to Los Angeles in 1980. There he encountered artists like Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Maria Nordman, Doug Wheeler, and Larry Bell, who used light and space as their media. As he became more aware of the severity of the environmental crisis, however, Erskine decided that he needed to move beyond creating pristine pieces of light art and to engage in the realm of the political. Concerned about the gaps in the earths protective ozone layer, which are threatening the extinction of various species and causing ice caps and glaciers to melt so that rising sea levels will eventually ood major coastal cities, Erskine wanted to demonstrate both the beauty and the danger of solar radiation. In 1992 he created Secrets of the Sun: Millennial Meditations (SOS), the rst toward a sustainable earth
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site-specic work to be created in the two-thousandyear-old buildings of Trajans Markets in Rome. Much like Richard Misrach, who knows how to combine beauty and horror in his photographs of bomb craters, Erskine plays on the paradox that people are more apt to receive a message of terror when it is presented in a dramatic manner. He cites Mozarts Requiem, which is both sorrowful and exalting, as an example. SOS communicates the beauty of the rainbow and the horror of global warming. As Freud knew so well, the dyad of Eros and Thanatos exist in a concealed unity, which the artist can reveal. Erskines installation led the viewer along a specic itinerary. Before entering the Solar Spectrum Zone, each visitor had to sign a damage waiver and don a protective white jumpsuit. This was to reframe viewers thinking, making them aware of the danger from the sun. Somewhat resembling a Roman toga, the white jumpsuit was also a ne reecting surface for the light, which washed over each visitor in a rainbow of color. Accompanied by site-generated sounds composed by the American Bruce Odland and the Austrian Sam Auinger, visitors proceeded through a series of corridors, antechambers, and rooms. They found themselves in spaces containing prisms and reecting mirrors up to eight feet in height. Beams of light in pure colors appeared on the walls, on the ceilings, and on their own persons. In the Room of Reected History, they encountered the spectrum colors on Roman torsos and colossal portrait heads, reminding them of the fallen empire. One space contained the Spectrum of Vapor Chimneys, where rainbow-hued vapor poured from illusory smokestacks. There one listened to Odlands Mass for Endangered Species, a monotone incan-

tation of the names of endangered mammals and birds, while a digital counter enumerated the species that had become extinct since the exhibition opened. Inundated by pure spectrum light, the viewer learned that, while in the normal evolutionary process one species becomes extinct every thousand years, the rate of species extinction is now one species every fteen minutes (as based on Pulitzer Prizewinner E. O. Wilsons calculation). One sobering mirror carried the message: At the present rate of depletion the Earths protective ozone shield will be gone in less than 100 years and life as we know it could cease to exist. The sun and its light are the source of life, but we cannot look at the sun directlythat would blind us. Through prisms, however, we can experience the sun as a rainbow of color, the symbol of life in many cultures. Years ago Wassily Kandinsky connected such color to our inner life. Colors, Kandinsky felt, have an inner sound that has a profound effect, which occasions a deep emotional response . . . calling for a vibration in the soul.37 In Secrets of the Sun Peter Erskine integrates this resonance of color with issues of global survival, making the suns glory and power visible through science and technology. Speaking with the artist, the scientist Jonas Salk conrmed Erskines meditations in Secrets of the Sun, telling him: The rainbow is a very deep memory for humans. It has been coded into our genetic material over millions of years. Seeing a rainbow restores our connection to natureit restores our physical and psychic functions.38 Erskine is presently working with hospitals to explore applying his artistic endeavor to reduce pain and improve the spirits of patients.

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POSTSCRIPT

as i hope this book demonstrates, during the past half-century artists from California and beyond have continually questioned our governments activities at home and abroad. Yet the art of social and political dissent has remained on the margin of the art world. Commercial art galleries are generally reluctant to exhibit controversial art, which might offend rather than attract potential collectors. Similarly with signicant exceptions, to be suremuseums, whose exhibitions increasingly depend on corporate support, are not inclined to sponsor shows that challenge or even affront the power structure. It is no surprise, then, that political art has not achieved a prominent place in the collections of many leading museums. As the art historian Linda Nochlin has pointed out: visiting the postwar galleries in the magisterial new building of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, one would hardly know that this was a period that encompassed Civil Rights marches, war in Vietnam and, last but far from least, the Womens

Liberation Movement.1 Can we ever expect to see much art in major museums that addresses topics of current political concern, whether it be the war in Iraq or another consequential issue such as censorship? During the period covered in this book, the hierarchies between high and low art and the polarities between form and content gave way to a more polymorphic culture, and new paths emerged. The age of consumer capitalism has made Andy Warhols Brillo Box (1964) its icon, as the art critic Arthur Danto tells us.2 Certainly, many aspects of contemporary art have drifted increasingly toward entertainment. The astute culture critic Frederic Jameson has observed: Postmodernism replicates, it reproducesreinforces the logic of consumer capitalism: The more signicant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists that logic.3 As I have stressed in this book, there have been and continue to be both artists and political activists who resist that logic and the trap of postmodern acquies247

cence. In the face of Americas imperial aggression, fteen to twenty million people from around the world demonstrated in February and March 2003 in an unprecedented effort to stop the predecided war before it began. Artists and activists produced banners, billboards, placards, signs, performances, even skateboards, as signicant visual components of these events. And they did the same for massive protests against globalization in Seattle and Genoa, in Gstaad, Cancun, and Gleneagles in Scotland. Free and critical art, however, continues to meet with censorship as it struggles to assert itself. In the summer of 2005 Stephen Pearcy, a Berkeley lawyer, created a painting that showed the American ag in the shape of a U.S. map going down a toilet with the caption Tanks to Mr. Bush! and exhibited it behind a pair of ceramic cowboy boots in the cafeteria of the California State Department of Justice, in an art show sponsored by California Lawyers for the Arts. It was a vivid image of criticism. Earlier, when Pearcy had displayed an efgy of an American soldier in Iraq with a sign reading, Bush lied, I died, outside his house, it was ripped down. But the public exhibition of a ag going down the toilet caused great anger among Republican Party ofcials, who persuaded the states attorney general, Bill Lockyear, to remove the offending artwork from public view by relocating it to a private ofce. Also in the summer of 2005 the Drawing Center, a highly respected showplace of historical and current art, faced vehement opposition to its proposed new site at Ground Zero in New York. According to the New York Times, Governor George E. Patakihorried by reports that a show at the Drawing Center appeared to have made light of President Bushs description of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the Axis of Evil demanded that the center respect the sacredness of the site. We will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America, he declared.4 In June 2005 Baldwin Park (an area of Los Angeles) city council members received death threats for supporting a Metro-station monument by Judy Baca
248

that had been part of the community for more than a dozen years. When the anti-illegal immigration group Save Our State demonstrated against this public artwork, they were outnumbered about ten to one by local residents and activists, who protested the groups racist intentions as well as the violence of Minutemen at the border. Bacas work, like most current art of dissent, is produced outside the museum and gallery system. Artists are increasingly using nontraditional as well as traditional media to protest against such issues as Americas arms buildup and the concurrent militarization of politics. The Forkscrew Graphics iPod-like billboards protesting the Abu Ghraib atrocities (see p. 71) can be seen in many placesat times to the surprise of the onlookers. Grafti artists/writers in East Los Angeles and Hollywood spray political messages on the surfaces of freeway entrances, where drivers can read them during trafc jams. In Orange County a Freedom Blogger tagged highway overpasses with huge antiwar signs, receiving death threats. Robbie Conal, known for his art attacks, comments on President George W. Bushs ability to energize street artists: That Bush can activate the street, that he can get skateboard and grafti kids pissed off enough to make art, thats amazing.5 The artists collaborative think again, cofounded by David Attyah in San Francisco and Shelly Bachman in Boston, launches mobile billboards and website campaigns pointing to the collaboration between the CIA and Hollywood as well as other misdemeanors. Just north of San Francisco, the Headlands Center for the Arts, long a site for experimental art projects, has turned more of its activities to art of a political character such as energy politics. Just as artists have taken to the streets and created nontraditional venues to make their voices heard, activists have adopted visual tactics to get their message across and catch the medias eye. A series of Baring Witness actions began in November 2002, when nearly fty women in Marin County, north of San Francisco, took off their clothes to be photographed forming the word peace in a demonstration against

postscript

the governments march toward war in Iraq. This and similar actions throughout the world speak of our naked vulnerability in the face of naked aggression. And in February 2005 a roadside vigil was organized that extended from Bodega Bay in Northern California to San Diego in Southern California with signs reading Support our troops: Bring them home from an immoral war and so on. This, like many other antiwar actions and types of political dissent, was organized on the Internet, which has become a major instrument of visual politics. As Susan Landauer points out in her essay Countering Cultures: The California Context: It could be argued that political art is one of Californias most signicant contributions to American art of the twentieth century. And I believe this contribution will extend into the twenty-rst century. In 2004 Judy Bacas

organization, the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), called for entries to a pre-election show titled Bushit: A Creative Response to the State of Democracy. They asked for work that would contemplate, investigate, interrogate, reveal the unseen, tell the truth, provide creative commentary . . . and celebrate freedom of expression.6 Artists will continue to produce art of substance, meaning, and passion as they always have. At times, when I reect on the current situation, with the devastation of the natural environment and the state of unprovoked war, I despair, and the idea of making protest art seems almost senseless. But then I remember the last lines of Samuel Becketts novel The Unnameable. When confronted with the absurdity of existence, the character called Unnameable tells us: I cant go on, I go on.7

postscript

249

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

i dedicate this book to dore ashton, who has been my friend and colleague for more than fty years, during which time we have had an ongoing discourse about politics and art. In the 1960s we worked together organizing Artists for CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), which helped fund the Freedom Summer project in 1963. Together with Stanley Kunitz and others, we formed the Night Letter Committtee in which artists and writers offered resistance to French colonialism in the dirty war in Algeria. During the 1970s we talked about producing a book on the relation of art and politics in the twentieth century, which proved too ambitious an enterprise. As mentioned in the prologue, we traveled to the German Democratic Republic in 1989 to curate an exhibition of painting from East Germany, and in 1990 we attended the Havana Bienal, which featured art from the Third World. During many discussions with my wife, Carole, about the title of the book, she suggested calling it

Art of Engagement, drawing on the title of the original essay I contributed to Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 19002000, published in conjunction with the comprehensive exhibition Made in California mounted at the Los Angeles County Museum in 2000. Over the past ve years, this fourteenpage essay has grown into a rather massive book. Having worked with Susan Landauer on the Nathan Oliveira exhibition, we planned to be joint authors and co-curators of this enterprise, but Susans commitments as chief curator of the San Jose Museum of Art prevented her from adding this project to her busy schedule. I am delighted, however, that she decided to curate the exhibition, based on this study, at the museum and to contribute an authoritative essay to this book. I also want to acknowledge Patricia Hickson, associate curator at the Des Moines Art Center, who worked with me at an early stage of this venture; the director Daniel Keegan and the staff of the San Jose Museum of Art, who were most help251

ful throughout this project; and Jack Rasmussen, director and curator of the new Katzen Arts Center at American University in Washington, D.C. I want to express my deep gratitude to Kathryn Wayne, ne arts librarian at the University of California, Berkeley, for her resourceful assistance in helping me nd primary sources for this study. I also want to express special thanks to Lorna Price, who edited an early draft of this book as a generous gift after editing numerous manuscripts for me over many years. As on previous occasions, I am thankful to Deborah Kirshman, ne arts editor of the Univeristy of California Press, who worked with me from the beginning of this project to its conclusion with genial guidance. Sue Heinemann, project editor at UC Press, gave a great deal of time and experience to the structuring and nal editing of the book. My thanks to to her for suggesting many alterations that make this a better book. Charlotte Robertson and especially Lynn Meinhardt were highly adept in carrying out the often difcult task of obtaining the images and permission to reproduce them. I could not have completed this book without their assistance. I want to thank also the independent scholar Heather Farkas for her assistance in compiling the bibliography and doing additional research. I am obliged to the University for awarding me faculty research grants during the years in which I worked on this study. And many individuals and foundations were of great help in bringing this enterprise to fruition. First and foremost I want to thank Stephen Silberstein, the person who so generously funded the Free Speech Movement Cafe and the FSM Archives on the Berkeley campus commemorating the critical events of 1964for his initial support. In

addition, special thanks are due to the Hans G. and Thordis W. Burkhardt Foundation, to my friend Harold Parker, to Frayda and Ronald Feldman, Paule Anglin, and Catharine Clark. Among the many individuals who have been of assistance in this project, I want to single out a few for special thanks. Kristine Stiles provided me with ideas and materials on Punk and its political ramications. Tim Drescher gave me access to his replete archive on California murals. Carol Wells of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles provided images of many posters in this book. Rupert Garca was most helpful in my research on Chicano artists and Mark Johnson on the political work by Native Americans. Special thanks also to Gary Carson, Paul Karlstrom, Robert Kostka, Ariel Parkinson, and David and Jane Reed for their encouragement and valuable suggestions. And I extend many thanks to the collectors, museums, and galleries who supplied information and permission to reproduce works in their collections. Several gallerists were especially helpful. I particularly want to thank Jack Rutberg of Jack Rutberg Fine Arts in Los Angeles, both for his help while I was compiling this book and for organizing a complementary exhibition entitled Art of Engagement, November 11, 2005, to January 31, 2006, at his gallery. I am also obliged to Ed Gilbert of the Gallery Paule Anglim and Shannon Trimble of Braunstein/Quay in San Francisco. Above all, I want to thank the artists for their collaboration on this project and for granting permission to reproduce their work. Many discussions with them were truly indispensable for this undertaking. It is the artists, after all is said and done, whose work makes this bookor any art historical textpossible.

252

acknowledgments

NOTES

FOREWORD

1. Susan Landauer, ed., Selections: The San Jose Museum of Art Permanent Collection (San Jose: San Jose Museum of Art, 2004), xvi.
OVERVIEW: COUNTERING CULTURES

I would like to thank Heather Farkas, Barbara Kutis, Debbie McKeown, David Richardson, and Lindsey Wylie for their help in researching and fact-checking this essay. 1. Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969). Aesthetics of Silence is the title of Sontags rst chapter, an apology for New Yorks formalism that echoes the support for the separation of art and politics in postwar writings of Old Left intellectuals such as Meyer Schapiro. 2. Max Kozlo, . . . A Collage of Indignation, Nation, February 20, 1967, 248, quoted in Francis Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 113. 3. Holland Cotter, Politics That Makes Peace with the Beauty of Objects, New York Times, June 18, 2004.

4. For a concise discussion of these movements, see Stewart Burns, Social Movements of the 1960s: Searching for Democracy (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990). 5. Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 81. 6. Ibid. 7. Mention of West Coast political art is made in some of the large survey books on American art. See, for example, William C. Seitz, Art in the Age of Aquarius, 1955 1970 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 17173. Seitz identies San Franciscos radical and revolutionary counterculture, represented especially by Beat assemblagists, as having initiated the disenchanted, anarchistic spirit that took hold in New York after 1967. He discusses George Herms, Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, and focuses on Edward Kienholz and Peter Saul (whose name is inexplicably misspelled as Peter Dail). See also Irving Sandlers American Art of the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 293. Most of Sandlers discussion in his chapter The Artist as Political Activist focuses not on art production but on artists involvement with political protest. There are also

253

several broad surveys of California visual culture that discuss political art, although they do not give as much space to the subject as one might expect. Peter Plagenss Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974) shows a marked formalist bias. His chapter covering Beat assemblage does not address the political context of the work and only minimally focuses on content; otherwise he ignores the politics of sixties counterculture and activist art entirely. Thomas Albrights Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 19451980: An Illustrated History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) briey discusses the political nature of Beat assemblage, as well as the psychedelic posters and visionary art of the sixties. The publications accompanying the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts mammoth exhibition of twentiethcentury California art, presented at the museum in 2000, contain essays discussing political art in the state. See Peter Selz, The Art of Political Engagement, and Chon A. Noriega, From Beats to Borders: An Alternative History of Chicano Art in California, in Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, eds., Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 19002000, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Howard N. Fox, Tremors in Paradise, 19601980, and Fox, Many Californias, 19802000, in Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, eds., Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 19002000, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 8. Thomas E. Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, 195569 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 32. Specically, Crow identies Black Friday of 1960 in San Francisco as the event that catalyzed radical activism in both Europe and America. 9. Chicagos artists generally rejected the strict formalism of New York, remaining gurative throughout the fties and sixties. The Monster Roster (Leon Golub, Cosmo Campoli, Seymour Rosofsky, June Leaf, H. C. Westermann, Nancy Spero, and Ellen Lanyon) produced some sociopolitical satire in the sixties, as did some of the Chicago Imagists (including Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Ed Paschke, Roger Brown, Karl Wirsum) and the Hairy Who, a subcategory of the Imagists. After moving to

New York in 1964, Golub painted his Napalm series, which protested the Vietnam War, in 1969. Spero, who also moved to New York in 1964, produced long horizontal paper scrolls depicting screaming heads and headless bodies. Peter Saul, whose paintings stand among the most savage critiques of the Vietnam War, is associated with Chicago because he showed at the Allen Frumkin Gallery. Sauls most vehement political paintings, however, were inspired by his contact with the Bay Areas sixties counterculture. He lived in Mill Valley during the critical years of the Vietnam War, from 1964 to 1974, then moved to Chappaqua, New York, and later to Austin, Texas, where he currently resides. According to art historian Franz Schulze, Chicagos most vital political art came from the mural movement, which began with William Walkers Wall of Respect on the South Side and led to a multitude of wall paintings throughout the city, nearly all of them politically hortatory in content. Franz Schulze, Art in Chicago: the Two Traditions, in Art in Chicago, 19451995, exh. cat. (London: Thames and Hudson in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1996), 26. 10. This is not to say that Californias dark side has not been examined as well. Beginning with Carey McWilliamss muckraking books, notably Factories in the Field (1939), Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946), and California: The Great Exception (1949), Californias noir aspect has been a subject of discussion as a foil for its utopianism. See also Lars Nittve and Helle Crenzien, Sunshine and Noir, exh. cat. (Humlebaek, Denmark: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 1997), and Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Random House, 1992). All of these studies, however, focus on Southern California, and the tendency to view Northern Californias radicalism as a sign of its tolerance for newness and eccentricity continues. See, for example, Robbin Hendersons preface in The Whole Worlds Watching: Peace and Social Justice Movements of the 1960s and 1970s, exh. cat. (Berkeley: Berkeley Art Center, 2001): Californias history is that of diverse people crossing land and ocean to settle at the extreme western edge of what Europeans called The New World. Like the history of America, it is a history of people recreating themselves to live in new ways, adapt to new environments, and form new

254

notes to pages 23

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

communities (1). References to Californias embrace of the new in conjunction with its paradigm shifts can also be found in the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts Made in California and Reading California, even when the authors are aware they are characterizing an image more than a reality. See, for example, Kevin Starr, Carey McWilliamss California: The Light and the Dark, in Barron, Bernstein, and Fort, eds., Reading California, 17, and Fox, Tremors in Paradise, in Barron, Bernstein, and Fort, eds., Made in California, 193. Stephen Schwartz, From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind (New York: Free Press, 1998), 34. John Steven McGroarty, quoted in Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1946; reprint, 1994), 249. Steve Fox, From the Beat Generation to the Sanctuary Movement, in Kevin J. Fernlund, ed., The Cold War American West, 19451989 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 147. Until 1957 the city was also host to the decidedly left-leaning California Labor School, which had the largest art department of its kind in the country. See Mark Dean Johnson, ed., At Work: The Art of California Labor (San Francisco: California Historical Society Press, in conjunction with Heyday Books, San Francisco State University, and the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, 2003). See Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). A. Yvette Huginnie, Containment and Emancipation: Race, Class, and Gender in the Cold War West, in Fernlund, ed., The Cold War American West, 55. Kevin J. Fernlund, Introduction, in Fernlund, ed., The Cold War American West, 1. Maria E. Montoya, Landscapes of the Cold War West, in Fernlund, ed., The Cold War American West, 16. Stewart Burns pointed out that the free speech movement was about more than freedom of speech. Reportedly, most participants, and the silent majority who supported them, felt alienated in the academic assembly line of this huge, impersonal institution that seemed increasingly harnessed to the needs of large corporations and the Pentagon. Burns, Social Movements of the 1960s, 64.

19. See Ronald W. Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983). 20. See Kevin Starrs discussion of the loyalty oath in the chapter Police Action, in his Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 19401950 (London: Oxford University Press, 2002), 31216. In Starrs view, antiCommunism was only a secondary concern of university regents (the school had no hard evidence of Communist Party membership on the part of a single UC faculty member); rather, the loyalty oath had more to do with xenophobic fears and a desire to regain control of an institution that was no longer local and hence moving beyond their grasp (315). 21. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 26. 22. Huginnie, Containment and Emancipation, 64. 23. See William Mandel, Defying the Red-Baiters: The 1960 HUAC Hearings, in The Whole Worlds Watching, 2225. 24. David Lance Goines, The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1993), 687. According to Goines, by September 1961 more than seventy thousand people had participated in civil rights sit-ins. 25. W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 91. 26. Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 23. 27. Marcia A. Eymann, Introduction, in Eymann and Charles Wollenberg, eds., Whats Going On? California and the Vietnam Era, exh. cat. (Oakland: Oakland Museum of California; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 4. 28. Ibid., 45. See also Allison Martin, The Legacy of Operation Babylift, www.adoptvietnam.org. 29. See Toms Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 30. Asian Americans did, however, participate in the identity movements of the seventies and eighties, in which marginalized groups sought to connect with their cultural heritages. For more on the participation of Asian Americans in this later phase of the liberation movements, see Karin Higa, What Is an Asian American

notes to pages 36

255

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

Woman Artist? in Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela Savioni, eds., Art/Women/California: Parallels and Intersections, 19502000, exh. cat. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 8194. Huginnie, Containment and Emancipation, 5254, 58. Asian Americans also enjoyed markedly improved civil rights after the Korean Warfor example, the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which allowed Korean and Japanese immigrants to naturalize and an increase in the number of Chinese immigrants. According to Huginnie, these improvements were in part motivated by international criticism that challenged the notion of the U.S. as the leader of the free world given its treatment of non-Whites. . . . In the West, Asian Americans were in the spotlight of this transformation, whereas nationally it was African Americans (52). Ibid., 58. Huginnie points out that even while Japanese Americans tended to be better educated than whites, their salaries tended to be lower. The African American population in California more than tripled between 1950 and 1970from 462,172 to 1,400,143. Kevin Allen Leonard, Migrants, Immigrants, and Refugees: The Cold War and Population Growth in the American West, in Fernlund, ed., The Cold War American West, 38. This was because the draft policy during the Vietnam War gave exemptions to men in college. A disproportionate number of working-class white men were also drafted. Charles Wollenberg, California and the Vietnam War: Microcosm and Magnication, in Eymann and Wollenberg, eds., Whats Going On?, 17. Some historians date the modern gay movement in California to the early fties. The repression of homosexuality in the West spurred resistance early on, beginning with the formation of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950 and the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco in 1955. These groups were semiclandestine and merely sought personal adjustment and social acceptance until the mid-sixties, when they opened chapters in New York and began picketing for equal rights in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. In San Francisco, as early as 1966, three days of ghting followed a police raid on Comptons Cafeteria, a gay hangout. But the Stonewall riots in New York, which

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

erupted after a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, were the watershed for gay activism in America, sparking the rst mass demonstrations in gay history and the formation of the Gay Liberation Front in New York in 1969. For more on the history of the gay liberation movement in California, see Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk, Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996). Interestingly, while the political leadership of the womens movement was concentrated in the East, California artists took a leading role in fostering feminist art. As early as 1970 Judy Chicago initiated the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno), the rst of its kind in the nation. Just a year later she and Miriam Schapiro launched another, even more inuential program at CalArts in Valencianow legendary for producing Womanhouse (1972), a feminist installation that involved the collaboration of more than twenty artists. Leonard, Migrants, Immigrants, and Refugees, 45. Huginnie, Containment and Emancipation, 63. Leonard, Migrants, Immigrants, and Refugees, 46. Milks status was recently armed by the ongoing exhibition Saint Harvey: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Gay Martyr, which opened at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society in San Francisco on June 26, 2003. See Paul J. Karlstrom, Art Sketches: Notes on the Central Role of Schools in California Art and Culture, in Barron, Bernstein, and Fort, eds., Reading California, 84109. Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting (1965), reprinted in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, eds., Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 8. The group included Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, Jane Harrison Cone, and Sidney Tillim. See Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 14243. See also Barbara Reise, Greenberg and the Group: A Retrospective View, Studio International 175 (May 1968), 25457 (Part I), and 175 (June 1968), 31416 (Part II). An exception to the formalist approach of Greenberg and others could be found in the criticism of Harold Rosenberg, who looked with disfavor upon Greenbergs limited view of arts

256

notes to pages 68

45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51.

expressive potential. Yet while Rosenberg appreciated a wider spectrum of content than most of his colleagues, he was by no means comfortable with mixing politics and art, and in the late sixties was openly disdainful of the New York political group Angry Arts. See Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 13233. For a fascinating discussion of the suppression of painting with political and social themes by the postwar art economy, see Bram Dijkstra, American Expressionism: Art and Social Change, 19201950, exh. cat. (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Columbus Museum of Art, 2003). Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 58. Meyer Schapiro, The Liberating Quality of Avantgarde Art, Art News 56 (Summer 1956), 3642, reprinted in Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Selected Papers, vol. 2 (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 21326. Leon Golub, quoted in Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 147 (see also Frascina, 14041). In 1970 Lucy Lippard attacked Judd for expressing his disgust with the war in private meetings with the Art Workers Coalition but keeping silent in public, positioning Judd as a member of the art communitys silent majority; Lippard, Art Workers Coalition: Not a History, Studio International 180 (November 1970), 172. Stewart Burns argues that the New Left looked to the Beat counterculture for inspiration, citing in particular the Port Huron Statement by Students for a Democratic Society (1962), a critique of American society that sounds very much like Beat ideology; Burns, Social Movements of the 1960s, 5859. According to Francis Frascina, critics upholding the modernist orthodoxy in New York found the worlds of the Beats and of the counter-culture were deeply unsettling; Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 110. Frascina, paraphrasing Billy Al Bengston, Art, Politics and Dissent, 32. For a comparative presentation of the dierences between the Beat cultures on the East and West coasts, see Lisa Phillips, Beat Culture and the New America (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, in association with Flammarion, Paris, 1995). This study, however, omits the vital Southern California Beat scene centered in Venice; see John Arthur Maynard, Venice

52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

West: The Beat Generation in Southern California (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991). Ginsbergs line concerning Moloch reads: sphinx of cement and aluminum . . . Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Allen Ginsberg, Howl, and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Pocket Bookshop, 1956), 17. Robert Duncan, The Homosexual in Society, Politics 1 (August 1944), 20911. On publication of this essay, in which he argued that gay writers were obliged to be honest about their sexuality, Duncan was banned from the Kenyon Review, at that time Americas leading literary journal. Scrapbooks of William Margolis, midlate 1950s, William Margolis papers, Temple of Man, Beverly Hills, California. In Richard Cndida Smiths words, the poem describes Conquest instead of discovery; slavery instead of enterprise; a funeral pyre of indigenous peoples instead of breadbasket of the world or arsenal of democracy; atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead of the good war; see Cndida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 360. Cndida Smith recounts that McClure sent 576 copies of Poisoned Wheat to prominent journalists, and when none responded began to consider whether acts of violence might ultimately be necessary to sabotage the military machine (360). Gary Snyder also presaged many of the reformist ideas of the New Left; see Cndida Smiths chapter Gary Snyder on the Responsibilities of Utopia: Expanding the Boundaries of Domesticity (37299). Both Cndida Smith and Frascina have described the Beats work as apolitical in that it did not, on the whole, attempt social change. See Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 58, and Cndida Smith, 210. William Seitz, on the other hand, singled out the California Beats as the most politically eective artists working in 1950s America, noting that they were the rst to merge, by new gurative modes, modernism with social criticism; see Seitz, Art in the Age of Aquarius, 1617. Rebecca Solnit relates that while Herms was living in Hermosa Beach, the accumulated objects he had harvested from beaches and vacant lots began to grow into art, and by the time [Herms and his wife] left Hermosa

notes to pages 810

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58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63.

Beach for Berkeley . . . Herms had a good-sized array of assemblages. Rather than transport all this transformed junk, he returned it to its source. He installed all his early constructions in a nearby area of several square blocks of razed houses, where the foundations formed a at, blank space like a landing strip, and left them there to be taken, destroyed, or to disintegrate. This was the Secret Exhibition, and he showed it to only two people, Wallace Berman and the artist John Reed; Solnit, Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era, exh. cat. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1990), 15. Peter Selz, Funk, exh. cat. (Berkeley: University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, 1967). For more on the Digger Feeds and Haight-Ashburys counterculture in general, see Charles Perry, The HaightAshbury: A History (New York: Rolling Stone Press, 1984). See Fox, From the Beat Generation to the Sanctuary Movement, in Fernlund, ed., The Cold War American West. Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 171. Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 66. Alan Bisbort, The White Rabbit and Other Delights: East Totem West: A Hippie Company, 196769 (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1996), 3. Very little of substance has been written on the hippie counterculture. An excellent essay that is itself a period piece is Warren Hinckles A Social History of the Hippies, which appeared in Ramparts before the Summer of Love, in March 1967. Hinckle insisted that while hippies were dismissed as passive utopians, they were deeply political. Writing about a Summit Meeting to discuss the political future of the movement, held in the foothills of the Sierras (participants included novelist Ken Kesey and Beat hero Neal Cassady), Hinckle reported that the tone was serious: They talked about reducing government controls, the sanctity of the individual, the need for equality among men. They talked, very seriously, about the kind of society they wanted to live in, and the fact that if they wanted an ideal world they would have to go out and make it for themselves, because nobody, least of all the government, was going to do it for them. The utopian sentiments of these hippies were not

64. 65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

to be put down lightly. Hippies have a clear vision of the ideal communitya psychedelic community, to be surewhere everyone is turned on and beautiful and loving and happy and oating free. But it is a vision [that] necessarily embodies a radical political philosophy: communal life, drastic restriction of private property, rejection of violence, creativity before consumption, freedom before authority, deemphasis of government and traditional forms of leadership; Hinckle, A Social History of the Hippies, reprinted in Dennis Hale and Jonathan Eisen, eds., The California Dream (New York: Collier Books, 1968), 330. Irving Petlin, quoted in Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 29. See Patricia Hickson, National Aairs: Recent Work by Robbie Conal, Frameworks (San Jose Museum of Art) 6 (Summer 2000), 4. George Lipsitz, Not Just Another Social Movement: Poster Art and the Movimiento Chicano, in Chon A. Noriega, ed., Just Another Poster? Chicano Graphic Arts in California, exh. cat. (Santa Barbara: University Art Museum, University of Santa Barbara; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 73. Victoria Quintero, A Mural Is a Painting on a Wall Done by Human Hands, El Tecolote, September 13, 1974, 6, quoted in Terezita Romo, A Collective History: Las Mujeres Muralistas, in Fuller and Savioni, eds., Art/Women/California, 177. Whitney Chadwick, Reecting on History as Histories, in Fuller and Savioni, eds., Art/Women/California, 33. There are so many examples of collective art that only a fraction can be mentioned. Among the projects that have included thousands of participants in recent decades are Ariels Banner of Hope (1986, p. 78), which was created by children, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, an ongoing project conceived in 1985 in San Francisco by gay rights activist Cleve Jones, involving, to date, more than 82,000 family members, friends, and loved ones of AIDS victims. The Peace Tower was organized by the Artists Protest Committee in Los Angeles. According to Francis Frascina, Those participating artists named as illustrious by the organisers in a fund-raising letter were: Elaine

258

notes to pages 1015

71.

72.

73.

74.

75.

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, Csar, Karel Appel, Jean Helion, Leon Golub; Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent, 17. The Peace Tower was the model for another bicoastal production, Collage of Indignation (1967), organized by Artists and Writers Protest and comprising around 150 canvases by individual artists, some of whom, including Petlin and di Suvero, had also contributed to the Peace Tower. Laura Meyer, Constructing a New Paradigm: Women American Artists in California, 19502000, in Fuller and Savioni, eds., Art/Women/California, 104. Social sculpture is Daniela Salvionis term for interventionist artists such as Baca, Sherk, Rieko Goto, Helen and Newton Harrison, and Suzanne Lacy; see Salvioni, Introduction: Art in Context, in Fuller and Salvioni, eds., Art/Women/California, 7. Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 13. Faith Wilding, for example, noted that The California branch [of feminism] focused on collaborative art making, and education and was less career-based than the New York group; Wilding, The Feminist Art Programs at Fresno and CalArts, 197075, in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 290, n. 2. Although artists such as Judith Baca, Faith Ringgold, and Adrienne Rich have explored the intertwined issues of racism and sexism since the early days of the feminist movement, it was not until the early eighties that theorists such as Kimberl Williams Crenshaw began to speak of such ideas as intersectionality. See Crenshaws Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew for a shrewd discussion of structural, political, and representational intersectionality, in Mari J. Mastuda et al., eds. Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), 11132. Lucy Lippard became a major advocate

76.

77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

82.

for cross-culturalism, particularly after the publication of her book Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990). A relatively recent example of intersectionality is Thelma Goldens Freestyle exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, composed of artists who refute the African American label and whom Golden calls post-black; see Golden et al., Freestyle, exh. cat. (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001). On the West Coast, one of the best articulations of this inclusive approach to identity discourse can be found in the proceedings of an artists roundtable at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994, published as Reagan Louie and Carlos Villa, eds., Worlds in Collision: Dialogues on Multicultural Art Issues (London: International Scholars Publications in association with the San Francisco Art Institute, 1994). Todd Gitlin, Afterword, in Stephen Macedo, ed., Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 29192, paraphrased in Margaret Crawford, Alternative Shelter: Counterculture Architecture in Northern California, in Barron, Bernstein, and Fort, eds., Reading California, 268. Wilding, The Feminist Art Programs at Fresno and CalArts, 35. Ibid., 34. Howard N. Fox, Tremors in Paradise, in Barron, Bernstein, and Fort, eds., Made in California, 232. See Susan Landauer, Painting under the Shadow: California Modernism and the Second World War, in Paul Karlstrom, ed., On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 19001950 (Berkeley: University of California Press in association with the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1996), 5055. Whitney Chadwick, Narrative Imagism and the Figurative Tradition in Northern California Painting, Art Journal 45 (Winter 1985), 309. Chadwick describes artists such as Colescott and Stanley as having produced works in which social comment, satire, morality plays, puns, and personal mythology combine with amboyant and eccentric personal styles to form a visual running commentary on the world. Lowery S. Sims, Robert Colescott, 19751986, in Rob-

notes to pages 1520

259

83.

84.

85.

86. 87.

88.

ert Colescott: A Retrospective, 19751986, exh. cat. (San Jose: San Jose Museum of Art, 1987), 3. Rupert Garca, quoted in Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, eds., Chicano Art: Resistance and Armation, 19651985, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, 1992), 23. Lucy R. Lippard, Sweeping Exchanges: The Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s, Art Journal 40 (FallWinter 1980), 363. For a good overview of the politicization of New Yorks avant-garde in the seventies and eighties, see I. Michael Dano, The Establishment of Social and Political Art, in Compassion and Protest: Recent Social and Political Art from the Eli Broad Family Foundation Collection, exh. cat. (San Jose: San Jose Museum of Art in association with Cross River Press, 1991), 816. Dano notes that as late as 1984 viewers were shocked by Content, an exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. At the time, he explains, it was still a very new idea for art to be driven by subject rather than style, form, or method (8). Paul Mills, Bay Area Figurative Art, Art in America 52 (June 1964), 43. David Park, quoted in Paul Mills, Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting, exh. cat. (Oakland, Calif.: Oakland Art Museum, 1957), 7. Jos Montoya, quoted in Tere Romo, Points of Convergence: Iconography of the Chicano Poster, Noriega, ed., Just Another Poster?, 94.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Democratic Republic, exh. cat. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). Bernhard Heisig, conversation with Dore Ashton, Peter Nisbet, and the author, Leipzig, February 6, 1988; quoted in Peter Selz, Revival and Survival of Expressionist Trends in the Art of the GDR, in ibid., 33. Peter Selz, Art and Politics: The Artist and the Social Order, in Hershel B. Chipp with Peter Selz and Joshua C. Taylor, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 456500. See Peter Selz, German Realism of the Twenties: The Artist as Social Critic, exh. cat. (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1980). Peter Selz, The Art of Political Engagement, in Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, eds., Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 19002000 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), which was a companion volume to the exhibition. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in FifteenthCentury Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 36.

INTRODUCTION: PATHS TO ENGAGEMENT

PROLOGUE: A PERSONAL VIEW OF THE INTERACTION OF POLITICS AND ART

1. Adolf Hitler, speech at the opening of the Haus der deutschen Kunst, Munich, July 18, 1937, cited in Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 76. 2. This dissertation was the basis for my rst book: Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). 3. Peter Selz, New Images of Man, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 12. 4. See Peter Selz, Fifteen Polish Painters, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961). 5. See Peter Nisbet, ed., Twelve Artists from the German

1. This was the title of a provocative and highly inuential book on modernist art: Harold Rosenbergs The Tradition of the New (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965). 2. Pablo Picasso, Statements about the Artist as Political Being (1945), quoted in Alfred H. Barr Jr., Picasso: Fifty Years of His Life (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 248. 3. Bertolt Brecht, quoted in Martin Esslin, Brecht: The Man and His Work (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1969), 143. 4. F. T. Marinetti, Initial Manifesto of Futurism (1909), in Joshua C. Taylor, Futurism, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 124. 5. George Grosz, A Little Yes and a Big No (New York: Dial Press, 1946), 163. 6. Anthony W. Lee, Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and the San Francisco Public Murals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), xviixviii. 7. Richard Nixon, quoted in George F. Sherman, Dick Nixon, Art Commissar, Nation, January 10, 1953, 21.

260

notes to pages 2033

8. Thomas Hart Benton, letter to Thomas Craven, quoted in Milton Brown, The Story of the Armory Show (New York: Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1963), 26. 9. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1940), 2. 10. Allan Sekula, Dismantling Modernism: Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation), Massachusetts Review 19, no. 44 (December 1978), 85983.
CHAPTER 1: AGAINST WAR AND VIOLENCE

14.

1. Theodor Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society (London: Neville Spearman, 1964), 150. 2. Albert Camus, The Rebel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), 46. 3. James Thrall Soby, Foreword, in Rico Lebrun, Drawings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), vi. 4. Rico Lebrun, quoted in Peter Selz, New Images of Man, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 97. 5. Henry Seldis, Rico Lebrun, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967), 13. 6. Leonard Baskin, memorial address (May 23, 1963), in Peter Selz, The Genesis of Genesis, Archives of American Art Journal 16 (1977), 3. 7. Harold Paris, quoted in Dinnean, The Ceramic Walls, in Peter Selz, ed., Harold Paris: The California Years, exh. cat. (Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1972), 13. 8. Jerome Tarshis, Harold Paris: Emotions in Mixed Media, Christian Science Monitor, December 14, 1992, 16. 9. Rebecca Solnit, in her ne study of California art in the cold war era, asserts that Hedrick was the rst American artist to protest the Vietnam War. See her Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists in the Cold War Era (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995), 44. 10. Timothy Anglin Burgard, unpublished acquisitions statement, October 2004, Fine Arts Museums Foundation, San Francisco. 11. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 132. 12. The one exception to this is Johnss Moratorium prints, his contribution to the Moratorium Day in 1969. 13. George Maciunas, born in 1931 in Lithuania, is not usually known for political art but for organizing the rst

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

Fluxus performances and events in the early 1960s. In his Fluxus publications Maciunas supplied much of the theory of the international Fluxus movement. Many antiwar posters were produced in the University Art Museum on the Berkeley campus during this time. In response to the American invasion of Cambodia in 1970, there was an outcry against the war among students, faculty, and sta at Berkeley, as at many universities in America. As director of the University Art Museum at the time, I was approached by students who wanted to turn the gallery into campus central for the printing of posters and the mimeographing (since this was before the time of the photocopier) of position papers. I felt that this action was called for, even though the gallery was just then the venue for two major sculpture exhibitionsthe rst museum shows in the United States of work by Pol Bury and Arnaldo Pomodoro, whose sculptures had been brought from Europe. I placed the sculptures behind a screen to make room for silkscreen presses and mimeograph machines, feeling that, just as art is often political, politics is sometimes art. Rupert Garca, quoted in Ramn Favela, The Art of Rupert Garca: A Survey Exhibition, exh. cat. (San Francisco: Chronicle Books and Mexican Museum, 1986), 19. Reported in New York Times, November 25, 1969, 14. Irving Petlin, quoted in The Museum and the Protest Poster (press release), Museum of Modern Art, New York, January 8, 1970. Quoted in ibid. Irving Petlin, letter, Los Angeles Free Press, November 26, 1965, 5. Irving Petlin, letter to the author, May 1999. Grace Glueck, Art Notes, New York Times, January 30, 1966, 24; Tower Against the War (editorial), Nation, February 7, 1966, 143. Francis Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Thomas Crows book is The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, 195569 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996). Barbara Rose, Modernism and Memory, in Rose, ed., Mark di Suvero, exh. cat. (Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio Gonzlez, 1994), 103.

notes to pages 3347

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24. Petlin, letter to the author, May 1999. 25. Edward Kienholz, letter, Artforum 7, no. 10 (Summer 1969), 4. 26. Donald Kuspit, Catastrophe According to Hans Burkhardt, exh. cat. (Allentown, Penn.: Muhlenberg College, 1990), unpaginated. 27. Alfred Frankenstein, San Francisco Chronicle, 1977, cited in Irving Norman papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., microlm roll 4911. 28. Timothy Anglin Burgard, Beyond Words: The Hand of Humanity, in Frank Lobdell: The Art of Making and Meaning, exh. cat. (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in association with Hudson Hills Press, 2003), 2. 29. Thomas Albright, On Art and Artists (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1989), 6667. 30. Peter Saul, Letters to His Dealer, in Peter Saul, exh. cat. (New York: Allan Frumkin Gallery, 1986), unpaginated. 31. Vija Celmins, interviewed by Chuck Close, in Close, Vija Celmins (New York: Art Press, 1992), 5, 51. 32. For Roslers writings, see Martha Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 19752001 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004). 33. In 1951 Picasso used a toy automobile as the head of a monkey in the bronze Baboon and Young. 34. Terry Allen, quoted in Dave Hickey, Vietnam and a Betrayal of Childhood, Los Angeles Times, July 4, 1993. 35. Dinh Q. L, e-mail to Moira Roth, quoted in Christopher Miles and Moira Roth, Dinh Q. L (Seattle: Marquand Books, 2003), 16. 36. Chris Burden, in Chris Burden: A Twenty-Year Survey, exh. cat. (Newport Harbor, Calif.: Newport Art Museum, 1998), 141. 37. Donald Kuspit, Robert Arneson, exh. cat. (San Francisco: Fuller Goldeen Gallery, 1985), unpaginated. 38. Earth Ambulance was installed permanently at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, New York, in the summer of 2004. 39. Helne Aylon, quoted in Anthony Torres, Helne Aylon at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, Artweek 26, no. 9 (September 1995), 24. 40. Marcia Smith, Artists Call Against Intervention in Central America statement, Arts 58, no. 5 (January 1984), 82.

41. Robbie Conal, Another Fine Mess, in Conal, Artburn (New York: RDV Books, 2003), 7. 42. Llyn Foulkes, interviewed by the author, March 1987. 43. Sometimes described as an outsider, Foulkes has actively rejected commercialism in the art world. When still in his twenties and soon after his rst exhibition at the avant-garde Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, he left the gallery, which was originally started by Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps as a space of innovation, because he perceived it as too commercially oriented. 44. Bertolt Brecht, quoted in Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography, in Benjamin, One-Way Street (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanavich, 1978), 255. 45. Jules Greenberg, note to the author, July 2003. 46. Mark Danner, The Election and Americas Future, New York Review of Books, November 4, 2004. 47. Anthony Lewis, Making Torture Legal, New York Review of Books, July 15, 2004, 8. 48. Forkscrew Graphics, quoted in Alisa Solomon, Art Makes a Dierence, Nation, November 8, 2004, 28. 49. Clinton Fein, Artists Statement, Toomey Tourell Gallery, San Francisco, 2004. 50. See www.annoy.com/covers/doc.html?DocumentID =100167. 51. Holland Cotter Martha Rosler Photomontages: 1965 2004, New York Times, December 24, 2004. 52. Kenneth Baker, Arresting Art in a State of Fluxus, San Francisco Chronicle, May 15, 2004, E10. 53. President William McKinley, quoted in Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 313. 54. At Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany, where Ocampo had his own gallery, this painting had to be removed because to display the swastika, the symbol most loaded with the memory of genocide, is illegal in Germany. 55. Scott MacLeod, letter to the author, June 1, 2002. 56. Yvonne Grin, letter to Ariel, July 21, 1998. 57. In Paris, where I witnessed large demonstrations, posters by Louis Mittelberg, cartoonist for Humanit, were plastered over the city. Called His Famous Smile, it showed the grinning face of President Eisenhower, with a mouthful of electric chairs in place of teeth. 58. Arthur Miller, The Crucible and the Execution: A Memoir, in Rob A. Okun, ed., The Rosenbergs (New York: Universe Books, 1988), 86.

262

notes to pages 4880

59. Bruce Conner, interviewed by Peter Boswell, in Bruce Conner: Theatre of Light and Shadow, exh. cat. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1999), 44. 60. Edward Kienholz, Interview by Lawrence Weschler, 2 vols. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, 1997), 22324. 61. Hung Liu, Staging Reality: An Interview with Hung Liu, interview by Kathleen McManus Zurko, in McManus Zurko, ed., Hung Liu: A Ten-Year Survey 1988 98, exh. cat. (Wooster, Ohio: College of Wooster Art Museum, 1988), 40. 62. Joan Didion, Where I Was Born (New York: Vintage International, 2003), 187.
CHAPTER 2: COUNTERCULTURAL TRENDS

11.

1. Allen Ginsberg, Howl, in Howl, and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Pocket Bookshop, 1956), pp. 920. 2. Bruce Conner, quoted in John Bowles, Shocking Beat Art Displayed: California Artists and the Beat Image, in Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, eds., Reading California: Art, Image and Identity, 19002000, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 221. 3. Ibid. 4. This show, curated by Dorothy Miller, introduced Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and other artists to the American art public. 5. Wallace Hedrick, quoted in The Beat Generation and Beyond (Davis, Calif.: John Natsoulas Press, 1996), 98. 6. Dennis Hopper, quoted in Colin Gardner, The Inuence of Wallace Berman on the Visual Arts, in Gardner, ed., Wallace Berman: Support the Revolution (Amsterdam: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992), 81. 7. John Coplans, Assemblage in California, exh. cat. (Irvine: California Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine, 1968). 8. Christopher Knight, Bohemia and Counterculture, in Gardner, ed., Wallace Berman: Support the Revolution, 53. 9. Peter Selz, Notes on Funk, in Funk, exh. cat. (Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1967), 3. 10. Congressional Record, 81st Congress, August 16, 1949.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

During the 1950s, however, the American cold war establishment encouraged the work of Abstract Expressionism. As documented by Max Kozlo, Eve Cockcroft, and Serge Guilbaut, more sophisticated critics and institutions co-opted the work of the Abstract Expressionists by supporting it at home and sending it abroad to contrast the fruits of freedom with the suppression of abstract art behind the Iron Curtain. See Max Kozlo, Abstract Painting during the Cold War, Artforum 12, no. 9 (May 1973), 4449; Eva Cockcroft, Abstract Expressionism: Weapon in the Cold War, Artforum 12, no. 10 (June 1974), 3941; Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Hans Burkhardt, Interview with Colin Gardner, in Hans Burkhardt: The War Paintings, exh. cat. (Northridge: California State University, 1984), 17. Connor Everts, letter to the author, October 3, 2001. Connor Everts, Los Angeles Art Community, Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984, 54. Two years later, while Everts was teaching at California State University, Long Beach, he had another brush with the police. He was having drinks at a bar near campus when some police ocers entered; Everts asked for their identication and was arrested. He was then beaten so severely that he had to be hospitalized. The injury to his right hand and the resultant loss of feeling have since made it impossible for him to use his painters arm. When his case against the police came to trial, the jury voted for conviction of the ocers involved, but the judge declared a mistrial. A similar scenario arose in 1999, in connection with the work of African British painter Chris Oli, when New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to withdraw city funds from the Brooklyn Museum of Art unless it stopped showing Olis painting The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), in which the artist, following African tradition, had placed elephant dung on the Madonnas breast. In 1972 Kienholz began collaborating with his wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, and spent much of his last twenty years in Berlin. Alan Watts, Sculpture by Ron Boise: The Kama Sutra Theme, Evergreen Review 9, no. 36 (June 1965), 65.

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18. Richard Cndida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 336. 19. Mike Trimble, quoted in Matthias Gafni, Exhibit Sparks Outrage, Vallejo Times-Herald, May 24, 2002. 20. Jos Sances, quoted in Duncan Campbell, Land of the Twee, Guardian, July 8, 2002, 5. 21. Arnold Mesches, Memoir, unpublished manuscript (1993; 1996; 2002), collection of the author, 2. 22. Ibid., 5. 23. David Cole, Uncle Sam Is Watching You, New York Review of Books, November 18, 2004, 56. 24. The man President Bush appointed to take charge of this operation was Admiral John Poindexter, who had been convicted of ve felonies in 1986 for his involvement in the Iran-Contra aair. When Poindexter suggested that Internet futures trading could be used to predict terrorist attacks, outraged members of Congress called for Poindexters resignation and an end to the program. The oce was closed in September 2003. 25. Philip Roth, The Dying Animal (New York: Vintage International, 2001), 55. 26. Jo Freeman, From Freedom Now! to Free Speech, in Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik, eds., The Free Speech Movement: Reections on Berkeley in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 79. 27. Waldo Martin, Holding One Another: Mario Savio and the Freedom Struggle in Mississippi and Berkeley, in ibid., 91. 28. Robert Hughes, Souls in Aspic, Time, May 22, 1972, 66. 29. I. Michael Heyman, quoted in Art Contest Resurrects Memories of 1964, New York Times, February 9, 1990. 30. Mark Brest van Kempen, Artists Statement, in Peter Selz, Spaces of Nature, exh. cat. (Richmond, Calif.: Richmond Art Center, 1990), 10. 31. San Francisco Chronicle, October 6, 2004, B1. 32. See Peter Selz, The Hippie Poster, Graphis 24, no. 135 (1968), 7077, 9192. 33. Peter Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998), 75. 34. Hughes, Souls in Aspic, 66. 35. Leon Litwak, The Times They Are A-Changin, in

36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

The Whole Worlds Watching: Peace and Justice Movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Berkeley: Berkeley Art Center, 2001), 7. J. C. Garrett, interviewed by the author, June 6, 2004. Kristine Stiles, Art and Technology, in Stiles and Peter Selz, eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 388. Peter Belsito and Bob Davis, Preface, in Hardcore California: A History of Punk and New Wave (Berkeley: Last Gasom, 1984), 7. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 8. Ibid., 3031. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reections from a Damaged Life (New York: Schocken Books, 1951). Bruce Sterling, quoted in Mark Johnstone and Leslie Aboud Holzman, Epicenter: San Francisco Bay Area Art Now (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002), 241. Kristine Stiles, Performance Art, in Stiles and Selz, eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, 694. Lars Nittve, Preface, in Nittve and Helle Crenzien, Sunshine and Noir, exh. cat. (Humlebaek, Denmark: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 1997), 7. Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Paul McCarthy, in Kristine Stiles in Conversation with Paul McCarthy, in Ralph Rugo, Kristine Stiles, and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, Paul McCarthy (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), 1819. Mike Kelley, Fresh Acconci, in Kelley, Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals (Writing Art), ed. John C. Welchman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 220. Paul Schimmel, A Full-Scale Model for a Dysfunctional Institutional Hierarchy, in Elisabeth Sussman et al., Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993), 213. Ibid., 219. Quoted in Kari Lydersen, Art Crimes: The Ebb, Flow and Dilemma of Protest Art, LiP Magazine, March 26, 2001, www.lipmagazine. org.

264

notes to pages 96116

51. Barry McGee, interviewed in the PBS television documentary Art:21; see www.pbs.org/art 21. 52. Barry McGee, interviewed by Germano Celant, in Barry McGee, exh. cat. (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2002). 53. Ibid. 54. Steven Winn, Vandalism or Art? San Francisco Chronicle, March 7, 2005, C2. 55. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1912). 56. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 70. 57. Jean Baudrillard, in Mark Poster, ed., Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 34. 58. Arthur Miller, The Price, in Arthur Millers Collected Plays, vol. 2 (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 323. 59. NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, October 19, 2001. 60. Simon Head, Inside the Leviathan, New York Review of Books, December 16, 2004, 80. 61. Alfred Frankenstein, The Reality of Appearance: The Trompe lOeil Tradition in American Painting, exh. cat. (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1970), 120. 62. The Roman numeral II of the title denotes that this is the second version of the painting, rather than referringas one might thinkto the imperial presidency. 63. Robert Storr, The Peter Principle, in Benot Decron, Robert Storr, and Anne Trouch, Peter Saul, exh. cat. (Les Sables dOlonne: Muse de lAbbaye Sainte-Croix, 1999), 25. 64. Kathryn Spence, Artists Statement, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, Fall 1999. 65. Dave Hickey, Dealing, in Art Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997), 102. 66. Ken Knabb, The Relevance of Rexroth (Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1990), 61. 67. The retrospective later went to the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has shown Krugers work since 1973. In 2005 she received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. 68. See www.epa.gov/msw/facts.htm. This compares with less than three pounds per person per day in the United Kingdom and two pounds in Germany.

69. William C. Seitz, The Art of Assemblage, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 79. Seitz introduced the term assemblage into the art vocabulary with this exhibition and accompanying catalogue. 70. Ibid.
CHAPTER 3: ON RACISM, DISCRIMINATION, AND IDENTITY POLITICS

1. Tanya Schevitz, California Minorities Become Majority: Census Reects Surge among Latinos, Asians, San Francisco Chronicle, August 30, 2000. 2. Isamu Noguchi, Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptors World (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 25. 3. Ibid., 23. 4. Dore Ashton, Noguchi East and West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 107. 5. How to Tell Japs from the Chinese, Life, December 22, 1941, 81. 6. Peter Selz, Diversity California New York, exh. cat. (New York: Hugo de Pagano Gallery, 1997), unpaginated. 7. Reagan Louie and Carlos Villa, eds., Worlds in Collision: Dialogues on Multicultural Art Issues (London: International Scholars Publications in association with the San Francisco Art Institute, 1994). 8. Yong Soon Min, Kindred Distance, in Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds., Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 18991999 (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 296. 9. Ibid., 295. 10. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dicte (New York: Tanam Press, 1982; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Shortly before the publication of Dicte, Cha was murdered in New York, on November 5, 1982. She was thirty-one years old. In 1993 the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized a panel discussion titled Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Then and Now. Panelists included Judith Barry, bell hooks, Lawrence Rinder, and Yong Soon Min. 11. Hyun Yi Kang, The Liberation Voice of Theresa Hak Kyung Chas Dicte, in Norma Alarcn and Elaine H. Kim, eds., Writing Self, Writing Nation: A Collection of Essays on Dicte by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1994), 82.

notes to pages 117139

265

12. Cha, Dicte, 15. 13. Hanh Thi Pham, Personal Statement, www.cla.purdue .edu/WAAW/Corinne/Pham.htm. 14. Artists statement in Hanh Thi Pham, exh. cat. (Fukuoka City, Japan: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1997). 15. Sebastio Salgado, quoted in Peter Wollen, Shooting Wars, Nation, October 6, 2003, 30. 16. Proclamation to Declare Robert Hilary King Day, City and County of San Francisco, April 22, 2002. 17. Arthur Secunda, The Junk of Watts, Arts Magazine 41 (February 1967), 5051. 18. Harry Belafonte, in Images of Dignity: Drawings of Charles White (Los Angeles: Heritage Gallery, 1967), 1. 19. Charles White, in Drawings and Prints by Charles White, exh. cat. (Atlanta, Ga.: Spellman College, 1975), unpaginated. 20. Charles White, interviewed in Chicago Daily News, March 1976. 21. Kellie Jones, The Structure of Myth and the Potency of Magic, in David HammonsRousing the Rubble, exh. cat. (New York: Institute for Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 15. 22. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was nominated for the presidency. Humphrey had supported the escalation of the war in Vietnam, and his selection led to bloody riots. Eight people accused of leading this rebellion were put on trial, including Seale. He was bound and gagged on the order of Julius Homan, the presiding judge. 23. Ralph Ellison, Paintings and Projections (1964), quoted in Abdul Goler, A Refracted Image: Selected Exhibitions and Reviews of Beardens Work, in Ruth Fine, The Art of Romare Bearden, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2003), 2012. 24. In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I was responsible for this commission. 25. Robert Colescott, School Days, in Miriam Roberts, ed., Robert Colescott Paintings, exh. cat. (Santa Fe: SITE Santa Fe, 1997), 14. 26. Miriam Roberts, School Days, in ibid., 30. 27. Faith Ringgold, We Flew over the Bridge (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995). 28. David Mamet, Notes for a Catalogue for Raymond Saunders (San Francisco: Stephen Wirtz Gallery, 1985), 17.

29. Mildred Howard, statement, in Susan Landauer, ed., Selections: The San Jose Museum of Art Permanent Collection (San Jose, Calif.: San Jose Museum of Art, 2004), 118. 30. Carrie Mae Weems, quoted in Ernest Larsen, Between Worlds, Art in America 78, no. 5 (May 1999), 124. 31. Irving Petlin, quoted in New York Times, June 27, 1965. 32. From an artists statement quoted in Mark Athitakis, Southern Discomfort, SF Weekly, October 24, 2001 (www.sfweekly.com/issues/2001-10-24/news/feature_ 2.html). 33. Veronica Passalacqua, Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, in Lucy R. Lippard, ed., Path Breakers (Indianapolis and Seattle: Eiteljorg Museum and University of Washington Press, 2003). 34. Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, quoted in ibid. 35. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 260. 36. See William Rubin, ed., Primitivism in Twentieth Century Art: Anity of the Tribal and the Modern, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984). 37. Thomas McElivey, Art and Otherness: Crisis in Contemporary Art (Kingston, N.Y.: McPherson, 1992). 38. Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art Inside / Outside the Masters House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 16. 39. Frank LaPena, What Does Blood Have to Do with Indian Art? unpublished manuscript, in authors archive. 40. Lloyd E. Oxendine, Twenty-three Contemporary Artists, Art in America 60, no. 4 (JulyAugust 1972), 59. 41. Frank LaPena, A Time of Emptiness, News from Native California, Fall 1999, 56. 42. Margaret Dubin, Sanctioned Scribes, in W. Jackson Rushing III, ed., Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), 158. 43. Frank La Pena, Sometimes, in My Imagination, News from Native California, Summer 1999, 16. 44. George Longsh, quoted in New Art of the West, www.tfaoi.com/aa/1aa/1aa533.htm. 45. George Longsh, Statement, in Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives (Hull, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1992), 150. 46. Jean LaMarr, quoted in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., The Power of Feminist Art: The American

266

notes to pages 139164

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 157. Henry Fonseca exhibited some of these works in an exhibition devoted to his paintings at the Oakland Museum of California in 1998. James Luna, quoted in Lucy R. Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 198. In 2005 Luna performed and had an exhibition at the Venice Biennale, sponsored by the National Museum of the American Indian. Ruben Salazar, quoted in Frank del Olmo, Hispanic, Latino or Chicano?: A Historical Review, www.nahj .org/resourceguide/intro2.html. Throughout this section I have used the terms Chicano and Chicanos to refer to both men and women rather than using the slashed versions Chicano/a and Chicanos/as. The same applies to Filipino and Filipinos. Rupert Garca, in Prologue: La Cultura Chicana: Voices in Dialogue, in Chicano Art: Resistance and Armation 19651985, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, 1992), 23. It received support from many organizations, including the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, although the NEH had previously turned it down more than once. Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art, 122. The ag was designed by Csar Chvezs cousin, Manuel, who simplied the shapes so that nonartist union members could easily replicate the logo. Ester Hernndez, quoted in Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art, 142. Carlos Villa, Selected Works, in Villa, Moira Roth, and Diane Tani, Carlos Villa (Berkeley: Visibility Press, 1994), 27. Ibid. This gure is dicult to identify. See Victor A. Sorell, Articulate Signs of Resistance and Armation in Chicano Public Art, in del Castillo, McKenna, and YarbroBejarano, eds., Chicano Art, 143, 151, n. 3. Judith Baca, quoted in Lippard, Mixed Blessings, 170. Malaquias Montoya, Statement, in Gary D. Keller et al., Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Art: Artists,

61. 62.

63.

64. 65.

66.

67.

68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

74.

75.

Works, Culture, and Education, vol. 2 (Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press, 2002), 154. David Avalos, quoted in Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art, 74. David Avalos, quoted in Philip Brookman, Conversation at Caf Mestizo: The Public Art of David Avalos, exh. cat. (New York: Intar Gallery, 1989), 7. Susan M. Anderson, Tico Nuevo: The Plunder of Paradise, in The Art of Ricardo Duy, Rock Your World, exh. cat. (San Jos, Costa Rica: Centro Cultural Costarricense-Norteamericano, 1998), unpaginated. Enrique Chagoya, Artists Statement / 2002, unpublished manuscript, 1, in authors archive. Consuela Jimnez Underwood, Statement, in Keller et al., Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Art, vol. 2, 44. Amalia Mesa-Bains, El Mundo Feminism: Chicana Artists in the MovementA Commentary on Development and Production, in del Castillo, McKenna, and Yarbro-Bejarano, eds., Chicano Art, 131. Harry Gamboa Jr., In the City of Angels, Chameleons, and Phantoms: Asco, a Case Study of Chicano Art in Urban Tones (or Asco Was a Four-Member Word), in del Castillo, McKenna, and Yarbro-Bejarano, eds., Chicano Art, 125. Ibid. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), xiii. Linda Nochlin, Foreword, in Kathy ODell, Kate Millett, Sculptor: The First Thirty-Eight Years, exh. cat. (Catonsville, Md.: University of Maryland, 1997), viii. Linda Nochlin, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Art News 69, no. 7 (1971), 219. Mary Boone, quoted in Mary Boone, New Queen of the Art Scene, New York, April 19, 1982, 28. The Practice of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, for example, had no women on its tenured faculty in the late 1960s; the proportion in 1999 was six women to one man. Miriam Schapiro, The Education of Women Artists: Project Womanhouse, Art Journal 32, no. 4 (Summer 1973). See Moira Roth, ed., The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 19701980 (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983), 17. I was the curator of paint-

notes to pages 164190

267

76. 77.

78. 79.

80.

81.

82.

83.

84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89.

90.

ing and sculpture exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art at the time and commissioned Tinguely to create this ephemeral work. Several art world personalities complained that the function of a museum was to preserve art, not to destroy it, but the reaction of the press and the audience was positive, and the defunct sculpture has become a benchmark in contemporary art history. Allan Kaprow, The Legacy of Jackson Pollock, ArtNews 57, no. 6 (October 1958), 25. Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 13. Eleanor Antin, Noyes of Transformation, Flash Art, nos. 4445 (April 1974), 69. Eleanor Antin, quoted in Howard N. Fox, ed., Eleanor Antin, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1999), 214. Linda Montano, Handcu: Linda Montana and Tom Marioni, in Montana, Art in Everyday Life (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1981), unpaginated. Faith Wilding, The Feminist Art Programs at Fresno and CalArts, 197075, in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 35. Faith Wilding, Waiting, in Judy Chicago, Through the Flower: My Struggles as a Woman Artist (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1977), 213. Faith Wilding and Critical Art Ensemble, Notes on the Political Condition of Cyberfeminism, Art Journal 57, no. 1 (Summer 1998), 47. Chicago, Through the Flower, 219. Suzanne Lacy and Lucy R. Lippard, Political Performance Art, Heresies 17 (1984), 23. Martin Bernheimer, Rachel Rosenthal Guides E.A.R. Unit on an Amazon Safari, Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1990, F18. Rachel Rosenthal in Una Chaudhuri, ed., Rachels Brain and Other Storms (London: Continuum, 2001), 115. Ibid., 131. Roberta Smith, From a Paeon to Heroic Woman: A Place at Historys Table, New York Times, September 20, 2002. Lolette Kuby, The Hoodwinking of the Womens

Movement: Rethinking Judy Chicagos Dinner Party, Frontiers 6, no. 3 (1982), 128. 91. See Amelia Jones, ed., Sexual Politics: Judy Chicagos Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, exh. cat. (Los Angeles and Berkeley: Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center with University of California Press, 1996). 92. Miriam Schapiro, interviewed by Paula Bradley, in Thalia Gouma-Peterson, ed., Miriam Schapiro: A Retrospective, 19531980, exh. cat. (Wooster, Ohio: College of Wooster, 1980), 44. 93. Miriam Schapiro, in Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels, eds., Working It Out: Twenty-three Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk about Their Lives and Work (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 296. 94. Schapiro, interviewed by Bradley, 44. 95. Peter Selz, Lynn Hershman at the Dante Hotel, Art in America 62, no. 2 (MarchApril 1974), 119. 96. Lynn Hershman, interviewed by Elizabeth Derector, in Moira Roth, ed., Connecting Conversations (Oakland, Calif.: Eucalyptus Press, Mills College, 1988), 89. 97. John Dillenberger and Jane Dillenberger, eds., Paul Tillich on Art and Architecture (New York: Crossroads Publishing, 1987), 67. 98. Joan Brown, quoted in Karen Tsujimoto, Painting as a Visual Diary: The Art of Joan Brown, in Tsujimoto and Jacquelynn Bass, eds., The Art of Joan Brown, exh. cat. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 178. 99. Joan Brown, quoted in Jacquelynn Baas, To Know This Place for the First Time: Interpreting Joan Brown, in Tsujimoto and Bass, eds., The Art of Joan Brown, 212. 100. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Patssi Valdez: Glamour, Domestic Ruin and Regeneration, in Patssi Valdez: A Precarious Comfort / Una comodidad precaria, exh. cat. (San Francisco: Mexican Museum, 1999), 45. 101. Hung Liu, quoted in Victoria Dalkey, Strange Fruit from Far Away, Sacramento Bee, March 16, 2003 (available online). 102. John Battenberg, quoted in Gay Weaver, The World Seen through a Sculptors Eyes, Palo Alto [Calif.] Times, October 8, 1976; see www.battenberg.com/ artist/bibliography.htm. 103. John Loughery, The Other Side of SilenceMens Lives and Gay Identities: A Twentieth-Century History (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), xiv. This excellent history of

268

notes to pages 191208

104. 105. 106.

107.

108.

109.

110. 111. 112.

113.

the gay movement has provided me with much of the information used in these pages. Ibid., 115. Rudy Lemcke, press release, in Art about AIDS, 1986 2005 (self-published booklet by Lemcke, 2005). Lawrence Rinder, Curating in a Dierent Light, in Nayland Blake, Lawrence Rinder, and Amy Scholder, eds., In a Dierent Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995); available online at www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibits/ idl/lressay.html. It is worth noting that Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his majority opinion, cited Michel Foucaults The History of Sexuality. Lew Ellingham and Kevin Killian, Poet Be Like God (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1980), iv. Although Jesss work diers from the mainstream art of his time, his apposition of word and image can be compared to that of another Bay Area artist, William T. Wiley (see pp. 24345), who puts laconic narratives and parables in his paintings. David Hockney, David Hockney by David Hockney (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1976), 99. David Hockney, quoted in Marco Livingstone, David Hockney (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), 103. Hockneys contributions have, of course, extended well beyond this. In the early 1980s he began working seriously with photography and produced Polaroid composites. In many of them he got the viewer to enter the picture by means of placing his own two feet in the immediate foreground. Often built on a grid, these composite images appear as modern versions of mosaics. Perhaps it was his work in photography that prompted Hockney to conduct art historical research and suggest rather persuasively that painters since the fteenth century, in their continuous search for greater illusion, have made use of special devices mirrors, lenses, cameras obscuras, cameras lucidas to project three-dimensional space onto the at surfaces of their drawings and paintings. The use of available tools, Hockney is eager to point out, does not diminish the work of the nest artists, who transcend the naturalistic look by means of emotional power. Lari Pittman, An Interview with Lari Pittman by Paul

114. 115.

116.

117.

118. 119.

120.

121. 122. 123.

124. 125. 126.

127.

Schimmel, in Howard N. Fox, Lari Pittman, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1996), 69. Ibid., 77. Tino Rodriguez, quoted in Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles, press release for Rodriguezs solo exhibition La Voz Impossible (2002), May 4, 2002, www.janbaum .com. Thomas Avena, in Avena and Adam Klein, Jerome: After the Pageant (San Francisco: Bastard Books, 1996), 7374. Thomas Avena and Adam Klein, Queer Arts Interview by Barry Harrison, www.queer-arts.org/archive/ show2/forum/forum297.html. Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 149. Arlene Raven, Los Angeles Lesbian Arts, in Cultures in Contention, ed. Douglas Kahn and Diane Neumaier (Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1985), 241. Terry Wolverton, Generations of Lesbian Art, High Performance (Spring 1991), 10; quoted in Harmony Hammond, Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (New York: Rizzoli, 2000), 113. Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, quoted in Hammond, Lesbian Art in America, 64. Judith Baca, quoted in ibid., 68. Carla Trujillo, ed., Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1991). Hammond, Lesbian Art in America, 84. See Masami Teraokas website: www.lava.net/~artbeat/ main.html. Masami Teraoka and Lynda Hess, Monitoring Our Time, in James T. Ulak et al., Paintings by Masami Teraoka, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1996), 51. L.W. [Lindsey Wylie], Masami Teraoka, in Landauer, ed., Selections, 218.

CHAPTER 4: TOWARD A SUSTAINABLE EARTH

The epigraph is from James Wines, Green Architecture (Cologne: Taschen, 2000), 11. 1. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1962). 2. According to the Kyoto Report, From December 1

notes to pages 208224

269

3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

through 11, 1997, more than 160 nations met in Kyoto, Japan, to negotiate binding limitations on greenhouse gases for the developed nations. . . . The developed nations agreed to limit their greenhouse gas emissions, relative to the levels emitted in 1990. The United States agreed to reduce emissions from 1990 levels by 7 percent during the period 2008 to 2012; www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf /kyoto/kyotorpt.html. Arctic Climate Impact Assessment Report, November 2004. Martin Heidegger, quoted in Michael Zimmerman, Toward a Heideggerian Ethos for Radical Environmentalism, Environmental Ethics 5, no. 2 (Summer 1983), 99. Fritjof Capra, The New Vision of Reality, in Baile Oakes, ed., Sculpting the Environment: A Natural Dialogue (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1995), 7. Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Ibid., 129. Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Peninsula Europe (Berlin: Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, 2001), unpaginated. See Peter Selz, Helen and Newton Harrison: Art as Survival Instruction, Arts 25, no. 6 (February 1976), 13031. Lucy R. Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 233. Overlay compares the contemporary dialectic between nature and culture to prehistoric art. Bonnie Ora Sherk, Life Frames, Inc. Nominated for Computerworld Smithsonian Award, press release, 2000. Christo and Jeanne-Claude in Their Own Words, www.nyc.gov/ html/thegates/ html/qanda.html. Konrad Oberhuber, Joyce Cutler-Shaw or the Gift of Grace, in Julie Dunn, ed., Library Quartet: Joyce CutlerShaw (San Diego: Atheneum Music and Arts Library, 2003), 8. Joyce Cutler-Shaw, newsletter, OctoberNovember 1976. Joyce Cutler-Shaw, Messenger: An Odyssey, in Dunn, ed., Library Quartet, 34.

16. James Turrell, in Elaine A. King, A Conversation with James Turrell, Sculpture 9 (November 2002), 30. 17. Daniel McCormack, Landscapes of Meaning, Landscape and Art 29 (Summer 2003), unpaginated. 18. Francisco Perez, unpublished manuscript, February 1997, in authors archive. 19. Ibid. 20. Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, National Geographic 199, no. 10 (October 2001), 122. 21. Mark Thompson, Fixing the Earth, Artweek, September 23, 1993, 15. 22. Mark Thompson, A House Divided, in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 632. At the same time in which Mark Thompson created his A House Divided, I, working with Dore Ashton and Peter Nesbit, curated the exhibition Twelve Artists from the German Democratic Republic, which was also dedicated to the free ow between East and West. Both enterprises occurred just as the Wall came down. 23. Glenway Westcott, U.S. Camera (1938), 67. 24. Richard Misrach, quoted in Ruth Dusseault, The Machine in the Garden, Art Papers 24, no. 6 (November December 2000), 30. 25. Richard Misrach, Telegraph 3 a.m. (Berkeley: Cornucopia Press, 1974). 26. Richard Misrach, Preface, in Richard Misrach and Myriam Weisang Misrach, Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West, exh. cat. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), xiv. 27. Ibid. 28. Richard Misrach, Bravo National Park, in Misrach and Misrach, Bravo 20, 95. 29. Robert Smithson, quoted in John Perrault, Nonsites in the New, New York, February 24, 1969, 44. 30. Robert Smithson was killed in 1973, at the age of thirtyve, in a plane crash while he was ying over Amarillo Ramp in Texas, photographing the early stages of construction on this work. 31. Barbara Stauacher Solomon, Good Mourning California (New York: Rizzoli, 1992). She also wrote Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden (New York: Rizzoli, 1988).

270

notes to pages 224242

32. Stauacher Solomon, Good Mourning California, 112. 33. Ibid., 31. 34. David Bonetti, Originals with a Past, San Francisco Examiner, January 26, 1996, C1. 35. Hilton Kramer, Wiley and the West: Dude Ranch Dada, New York Times, March 11, 1971. 36. William T. Wiley, Afterburner, exh. cat. (San Francisco: Rena Branston Gallery, 1994). 37. Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, in Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, eds., Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 157. 38. Jonas Salk, conversation with Peter Erskine, La Jolla, California, January 1995; transcript in authors archive.

POSTSCRIPT

1. Linda Nochlin, The New Modern: Itineraries, Art in America (March 2005), 52. 2. Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992). 3. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society, in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 125. 4. Patrick D. Healy, Pataki Warns Ground Zero Cultural Groups Not to Give Oense, New York Times, June 25, 2005, A5. 5. www.freewayblogger.com/MTVonlinestory.htm. 6. www.sparcmurals.org/bush/bushit2.jpg. 7. Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable (New York: Evergreen, 1965), 414.

notes to pages 242249

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

GENERAL ART TEXTS

Bruckner, D. J. R. Art against War: Four Hundred Years of Protest in Art. New York: Abbeville Press, 1984. Burnham, Linda Frye, and Steven Durland, eds. The Citizen Artist: Twenty Years of Art in the Public Arena. Gardiner, N.Y.: Critical Press, 1998. Clearwater, Bonnie, ed. Dening the Nineties: Consensusmaking in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, exh. cat. Miami: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996. Compassion and Protest: Recent Social and Political Art from the Eli Broad Family Foundation Collection, exh. cat. San Jose: San Jose Museum of Art in association with Cross River Press, 1991. Craven, David. Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Crow, Thomas E. The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, 195569. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996. Davies, Hugh M., and Ronald J. Onorato. Blurring the

Boundaries: Installation Art, 19691996, exh. cat. San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997. Dijkstra, Bram. American Expressionism, Art and Social Change, 19201950. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003. Fogle, Douglas. The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 19601982, exh. cat. Minneapolis: : Walker Art Center, 2003. Gablik, Suzi. The Reenchantment of Art. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991. Goldberg, Vicki. American Photography: A Century of Images. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999. Green, Jonathan. American Photography: A Critical History from 1945 to the Present. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984. Hemingway, Andrew. Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 19261956. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Hobbs, Robert, and Fredrick Woodard, eds. Human Rights / Human Wrongs: Art and Social Change, exh.

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cat. Iowa City: Museum of Art, University of Iowa, 1986. Jachec, Nancy. The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, 19401960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Landauer, Susan, ed. Selections: The San Jose Museum of Art Permanent Collection. San Jose: San Jose Museum of Art, 2004. Lippard, Lucy R. Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984. OBrien, Mark, and Craig Little, eds. Re-Imaging America: The Arts of Social Change. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1990. Pohl, Frances K. Framing America: A Social History of American Art. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002. Robins, Corinne. The Pluralist Era: American Art, 19681981. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. Rodriguez, Geno. Disinformation: The Manufacture of Consent, exh. cat. New York: Alternative Museum, 1985. Sandler, Irving. American Art of the 1960s. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. Seitz, William C. Art in the Age of Aquarius, 19551970. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. Selz, Peter. Art in Our Times. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981. Serwer, Jacquelyn Days, ed. American Kaleidoscope: Themes and Perspectives in Recent Art, exh. cat. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1996. Stich, Sidra. Made in U.S.A.: An Americanization in Modern Art, the 50s and 60s, exh. cat. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Stiles, Kristine, and Peter Selz, eds. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Von Blum, Paul. The Critical Vision: A History of Social and Political Art in the U.S. Boston: South End Press, 1982. . The Art of Social Conscience. New York: Universe Books, 1976. Wallis, Brian, ed. Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation. New York: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984; Boston: D. R. Godine.

Wallis, Brian, Marianne Weems, and Philip Yenawine, eds. Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
ART IN CALIFORNIA

Albright, Thomas. On Art and Artists. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1989. . Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 19451980: An Illustrated History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Ayres, Anne, ed. Forty Years of California Assemblage, exh. cat. Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989. Barron, Stephanie, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, eds. Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 19002000, exh. cat. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. , eds. Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 19002000. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Buttereld, Ian. The Art of Light and Space. New York: Abbeville Press, 1993. Crenzien, Helle, and Lars Nittve, eds. Sunshine and Noir: Art in L.A., 19601977, exh. cat. Humlebaek, Denmark: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 1997. Friis-Hansen, Dana, et al., eds. L.A. Hot and Cool: The Eighties, exh. cat. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology List Visual Arts Center, 1987. Heyman, Therese Thau, ed. Picturing California: A Century of Photographic Genius, exh. cat. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1989. Hopkins, Henry. California Painters: New Work. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1989. . Fifty West Coast Artists: A Critical Selection of Painters and Sculptors Working in California. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1981. Johnson, Mark Dean, ed. At Work: The Art of California Labor. San Francisco: California Historical Society Press, 1998. Johnstone, Mark. Contemporary Art in Southern California. Sydney: Craftsman House, 1999. Johnstone, Mark, and Leslie Aboud Holzman. Epicenter: San Francisco Bay Area Art Now. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002.

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Jones, Caroline A. Bay Area Figurative Art, 19501965, exh. cat. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Karlstrom, Paul, ed. On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 19001950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Katzman, Louise. Photography in California, 19451980, exh. cat. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1984. Landauer, Susan. The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism, exh. cat. Berkeley: University of California Press; Laguna Beach, Calif.: Laguna Art Museum, 1996. Lee, Anthony W. Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Franciscos Public Murals. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Loefer, Carl E., and Darlene Tong, eds. Performance Anthology: Source Book for a Decade of California Performance Art. Contemporary Documents, vol. 1. San Francisco: Contemporary Arts Press, 1980. Mills, Paul. Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting, exh. cat. Oakland: Oakland Art Museum, 1957. Moure, Nancy Dustin Wall. California Art: 450 Years of Painting and Other Media. Los Angeles: Dustin Publications, 1988. Plagens, Peter. Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 19451970. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Polledri, Paolo, ed. Visionary San Francisco, exh. cat. Munich: Prestel, 1990. Schimmel, Paul, et al. Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 90s, exh. cat. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990. Selz, Peter. Funk, exh. cat. Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1967. Turnbull, Betty, ed. The Last Time I Saw Ferus, 19571966, exh. cat. Newport Beach, Calif.: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1976.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Bean, Walton, and James J. Rawls. California: An Interpretive History, 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998. Bernard, Bruce. Century. London: Phaidon, 1999. Boal, Ian, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts.

Aficted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of Art. London: Verso, 2005. Brook, James, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy J. Peters, eds. Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998. Bullough, William A., Richard J. Orsi, and Richard B. Rice. The Elusive Eden: A New History of California, 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996. Burns, Stewart. Social Movements of the 1960s: Searching for Democracy. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. Dawson, Robert, and Gray Brechin. Farewell Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Dear, Michael J., H. Eric Shockman, and Greg Hise, eds. Rethinking Los Angeles. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996. Debord, Guy. Comments on the Society of Spectacle. London: Verso, 1990. DeLeon, Richard Edward. Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 19751991. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. Didion, Joan. Slouching towards Bethlehem. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1968. Eyerman, Ron, and Andrew Jamison. Seeds of the Sixties. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Fernlund, Kevin J., ed. The Cold War American West, 19451989. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. Fleming, Thomas, and Paul Gottfried. The Conservative Movement. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988. Hyams, Edward. Soil and Civilization. London: Thames and Hudson, 1952. Keil, Roger. Los Angeles, Globalization, Urbanization, and Social Struggles. New York: John Wiley, 1998. Klein, Norman M. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. New York: Verso Books, 1997. Klein, Norman M., and Martin J. Schiesl, eds. Twentieth Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion, and Social Conict. Claremont, Calif.: Regina Books, 1990. Matsumoto, Valerie J., and Blake Allmendinger, eds. Over the Edge: The American West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. May, Kirse Grant. Golden State, Golden Youth: The Cali-

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275

fornia Image in Popular Culture, 19551963. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. May, Lary, ed. Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Nolan, James L., Jr., ed. The American Culture Wars: Current Contests and Future Prospects. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996. Price, Jerome. The Antinuclear Movement: Is There a New Pentecost? Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982. Rolle, Andrew. California: A History, 6th ed. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 2003. Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: New Press, 1999. Schrag, Peter. Paradise Lost: Californias Experience, Americas Future. New York: New Press, 1998. Scott, Mel. The San Francisco Bay Area: A Metropolis in Perspective, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Starr, Kevin. Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 19401950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. The Whole Worlds Watching: Peace and Social Justice Movements of the 1960s and 1970s, exh. cat. Berkeley: Berkeley Art Center, 2001.
AGAINST WAR AND VIOLENCE

Gesensway, Deborah, and Mindy Roseman. Beyond Words: Images from Americas Concentration Camps. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987. Higa, Karen M., ed. The View from Within: Japanese American Art from the Internment Camps, 19421945, exh. cat. Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, and Asian American Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1992. Lippard, Lucy R. A Different War: Vietnam in Art, exh. cat. Bellingham, Wash.: Whatcom Museum of History and Art; Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1990. Rickards, Maurice. Posters of Protest and Revolution. New York: Walker, 1970. Rorabaugh, W. J. Berkeley at War: The 1960s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Thomas, C. David, ed. As Seen by Both Sides: American and Vietnamese Artists Look at the War, exh. cat. Boston: Indochina Arts Project, William Joiner Foundation, 1991.
COUNTERCULTURAL TRENDS

Artist Call against U.S. Intervention in Central America. San Francisco: Artist Call, 1984. Botey, Mariana, and Pilar Perez, eds. Capitalart: On the Culture of Punishment, exh. cat. Santa Monica, Calif.: Smart Art Press, 2001. Brown, Michael D. Views from Asian California, 19201965: An Illustrated History. San Francisco: M. Brown, 1992. Daniels, Roger. The Politics of Prejudice: The AntiJapanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Eymann, Marcia A., and Charles Wollenberg, eds. Whats Going On? California and the Vietnam Era, exh. cat. Oakland: Oakland Museum of California; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Frascina, Francis. Art, Politics, and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.

Anthony, Gene. The Summer of Love: Haight-Ashbury at Its Highest. Millbrae, Calif.: Celestial Arts, 1980. Belsito, Peter, and Bob Davis. Hardcore California: A History of Punk and New Wave. Berkeley: Last Gasom, 1984. Cndida Smith, Richard. Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Cohen, Robert, and Reginald E. Zelnik, eds. The Free Speech Movement: Reections on Berkeley in the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Ginsberg, Allen. Howl, and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Pocket Bookshop, 1956. Gleason, Ralph J. The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound. New York: Ballantine Books, 1969. Goines, David Lance. The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s. Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 1993. Hopps, Walter. Visions. Corte Madera, Calif.: Pomegranate Publications, 1977. Houston, Jean, and Robert E. L. Masters. Psychedelic Art. New York: Grove Press, 1968. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking Press, 1957.

276

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Knight, Brenda. Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of Revolution. Berkeley: Conari Press, 1996. Lyrical Vision: The 6 Gallery, 19541957, exh. cat. Davis, Calif.: Natsoulas Novelozo Gallery, 1989. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. Martin, Susan, ed. Decade of Protest: Political Posters from the United States, Viet Nam, Cuba, 19651975, exh. cat. Santa Monica, Calif.: Smart Art Press, 1996. Maynard, John Arthur. Venice West: The Generation in Southern California. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Medeiros, Walter, ed. San Francisco Rock Poster Art, exh. cat. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1976. Natsoulas, John, et al., eds. The Beat Generation Galleries and Beyond. Davis, Calif.: John Natsoulas Press, 1996. Perry, Charles. The Haight-Ashbury: A History. New York: Rolling Stone Press, 1984. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969. Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. New York: Random House, 1970. Selvin, Joel. Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock and Roll, Free Love and High Times in the Wild West. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Solnit, Rebecca. Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era, exh. cat. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1990. Thompson, Hunter S. Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. New York: Ballantine, 1967.
ON RACISM, DISCRIMINATION, AND IDENTITY POLITICS

Acuna, Rodolfo. Anything but Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles. London: Verso Books, 1996. Almaguer, Tomas. Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Art against AIDS, San Francisco, exh. cat. New York: American Foundation for AIDS Research, 1989.

Atkinson, J. Edward, ed. Black Dimensions in Contemporary American Art. New York: New American Library, 1971. Beardsley, John. Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors, exh. cat. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts; New York: Abbeville Press, 1987. Blake, Nayland, Lawrence Rinder, and Amy Scholder, eds. In a Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995. Broude, Norma, and Mary D. Garrard, eds. The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact. New York: Harrry N. Abrams, 1994. Broyles-Gonzalez, Yolanda. El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Campbell, Mary Schmidt, et al. Tradition and Conict: Images of a Turbulent Decade, 19631973, exh. cat. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1985. Charles, Roland, and Toyomi Igus, eds. Life in a Day of Black L.A.: The Way We See ItL.A.s Black Photographers Present a New Perspective on Their City, exh. cat. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies Publications, University of California, Los Angeles, 1992. Cockcroft, Eva Sperling. Toward a Peoples Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977. Cockcroft, Eva Sperling, and Holly Barnet-Sanchez, eds. Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals. Venice, Calif.: Social and Public Art Resource Center, 1993. del Castillo, Richard Griswold, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, eds. Chicano Art: Resistance and Afrmation, 19651985, exh. cat. Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991. Drescher, Tim. San Francisco Bay Area Murals: Communities Create Their Muses, 19041997, 3rd ed. St. Paul, Minn.: Pogo Press, 1998. Duberman, Martin B. About Time: Exploring the Gay Past. New York: Meridian, 1991. Dubin, Margaret, ed. The Dirt Is Red Here: Art and Poetry from Native California. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2002.

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277

Farris-Dufrene, Phoebe, ed. Voices of Color: Art and Society in the Americas. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997. Fuller, Diana Burgess, and Daniela Salvioni, eds. Art / Women / California, 19502000: Parallels and Intersections. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Hammond, Harmony. Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History. New York: Rizzoli, 2000. Hewitt, Mary Jane. Beyond the Veil: Art of AfricanAmerican Artists at Centurys End, exh. cat. Winter Park, Fla.: Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, 1999. Jones, Amelia, ed. Sexual Politics: Judy Chicagos Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, exh. cat. Los Angeles: UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Kasher, Steven, ed. Appeal to This Age: Photography of the Civil Rights Movement, 19541968, exh. cat. New York: Howard Greenberg Gallery, 1994. Keller, Gary D., et al. Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Art: Artists, Works, Culture, and Education. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press, 2002. Kim, Elaine H., Margo Machida, and Sharon Mizota. Fresh Talk / Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. LeFalle-Collins, Lizzetta. 19Sixties: A Cultural Awakening Re-evaluated. Los Angeles: California Afro-American Museum, 1989. Lewis, Samella S. African-American Art and Artists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Lippard, Lucy R. Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990. Loughery, John. The Other Side of Silence: Mens Lives and Gay Identities, a Twentieth-Century History. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. Louie, Reagan, and Carlos Villa, eds. Worlds in Collision: Dialogues on Multicultural Art Issues. London: International Scholars Publications in association with the San Francisco Art Institute, 1994. Marin, Cheech. Chicano Visions. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. Marin, Marguerite V. Social Protest in an Urban Barrio: A Study of the Chicano Movement, 19661974. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991.

Mesa-Bains, Amalia, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto. Lo del Corazon: Heartbeat of a Culture, exh. cat. San Francisco: Mexican Museum, 1986. Moore, Sylvia, ed. Yesterday and Tomorrow: California Women Artists. New York: Midmarch Arts, 1989. Noriega, Chon A., ed. Just Another Poster?: Chicano Graphic Arts in California, exh. cat. Santa Barbara: University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2001. Penney, David W. Native American Art Masterpieces. Hong Kong: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 1996. Reckitt, Helena, ed. Art and Feminism. London: Phaidon, 2001. Roth, Moira, ed. The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, 19701980. Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983. Rushing, W. Jackson, III, ed. Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories. London: Routledge, 1999. Sonenshein, Raphael. Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Stryker, Susan, and Jim Van Buskirk. Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996. Von Blum, Paul. Other Visions, Other Voices: Women Political Artists in Greater Los Angeles. Burnham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994. Young, Stanley. The Big Picture: Murals of Los Angeles. Boston: Little, Brown, 1988.
TOWARD A SUSTAINABLE EARTH

Beardsley, John. Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape. New York: Abbeville Press, 1998. Boettger, Suzaan. Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Bourdon, David. Designing the Earth: The Human Impulse to Shape Nature. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995. Callenbach, Ernest. Ecotopia. Berkeley: Banyan Tree Books, 1975. Kastner, Jeffrey, ed. Land and Environmental Art. London: Phaidon, 1998. Lacy, Suzanne, ed. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press, 1995. Matilsky, Barbara C. Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary

278

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Artists Interpretations and Solutions, exh. cat. New York: Queens Museum of Art and Rizzoli International, 1992. Oakes, Baile, ed. Sculpting with the Environment: A Natural Dialogue. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1995.

Smithson, Robert. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Ed. Jack Flam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Wines, James. Green Architecture. Cologne: Taschen, 2000.

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279

INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. For all art media, movements, and schools, see also specic artists. Abeles, Kim, 80; Other (In Memory of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg), 80, 80 abortion, 94, 189, 207 Abstract Expressionism, 33, 87, 88; politics and, 8, 263n10 Abu Ghraib, 71, 72, 248 Acconci, Vito, 115; Seedbed, 115 Actionism, 33, 74, 114 ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), 209, 210 Adams, Ansel, 142, 226, 238 Adams, Eddie, 60 Adorno, Theodor, 3536, 112 Advocate (newspaper), 209 African Americans, 14155, 256nn31, 33, 259n75; defense industry and, 6, 7; imprisonment of, 84, 144;

Vietnam War and, 7; see also Black Panthers; civil rights movement; Watts riots; specic artists Agnew, Spiro, 57 Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, 166 Aguilar, Laura, 21819; Clothed/ Unclothed, 21819; Latina Lesbian Series, 218; Plush Pony Series, 218; Three Eagles Flying, 218, 219 AIDS crisis, 20910; artists responses to, 210, 21617, 22022 Albers, Josef, 11, 106 Albright, Thomas, 53, 254n7 Alcatraz Island occupation, 15859, 160 Alexander, Jane, 97 Alicia, Juana, 172 Alien Land Law, 6, 135 Alinsky, Saul, 166 Alitash Kebede Gallery (Los Angeles), 145

Allen, Terry, 58; Treatment (Angel Leaving Dirty Tracks), Youth in Asia, 58, 58 Allende, Salvador, 9394 Alloway, Lawrence, 119 Almaraz, Carlos, 168 Al Qaeda, 70 Alpert, Richard, 106 Altamont Speedway, 107 Altdorfer, Albrecht, 84, 126 American Civil Liberties Union, 209 American Friends Service Committee, 209 American Indian Center (San Francisco), 158 American Indians. See Native Americans American Scene painters, 33 Anderson, Laurie, 115 Anderson, Marian, 146 Anderson, Robert Mailer, 71 Andre, Carl, 225

281

Angry Arts, 257n44 Anthony, Gene, 107; After the BeIn, 107, 108; All the San Francisco Bay Area Rock Bands . . . , 108; Black Panther Ofce Shot Up by Oakland Police, 14243, 142; Cosmic Car, 108; Now Day, 108 Anthony, Susan B., 189 anti-Communism, 45; see also McCarthy era Antin, David, 56, 191, 192 Antin, Eleanor, 1718, 56, 190, 191 92, 200; Angel of Mercy, 192, 192; California Lives, 191; Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, 191; King of Solana Beach, 18, 18; 100 Boots, 191; Portraits of Eight New York Women, 191 Appel, Karel, 46, 80, 259n70 Aptheker, Bettina, 41 Arbus, Diane, 123 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment Report, 224 Arendt, Hannah, 148 Ariadne, 195 Ariel, 5758; Banner of Hope, 77, 78, 258n69; Nixon Behemoth, 57 58, 57 Aristophanes, 35 Armey, Dick, 97 Arnautoff, Victor, 32 Arneson, Robert, 62, 80, 9697, 125, 243; Minuteman, 62, 63; Oily Bush, 69, 69; Portrait of George (Moscone), 19, 62, 9697, 97; SmorgiBob, the Cook, 12223, 122 Arnheim, Rudolf, 196 Arnold, Chester, 12627; Accumulation, 126, 127; Ascension Day, 127; Ghosts, 127 Artaud, Antonin, 187, 196 Art Brut, 116 Artists and Writers Against the War in Vietnam, 156 Artists and Writers Union, 32, 88

Artists Call Against Intervention in Central America, 64 Artists Liberation Front, 104 Artists Protest Committee, 46, 47; White-out, 12 Artists Respond to Censorship (San Francisco Art Commission Gallery), 98 Art Nouveau, 1056 Art Workers Coalition, 8, 46, 257n48 Asawa, Ruth, 133 Asco, 16, 16, 168, 187, 204; Black and White Mural, 187; Instant Mural, 16; Stations of the Cross, 187 Ashcroft, John, 73 Asher, Michael, 115 Ashton, Dore, 26, 133, 270n23 Asian Americans, 13041, 25556nn3032; defense industry growth and, 6; on immigrant experience, 13741; see also Chinese Americans; Filipinos; Japanese Americans; Korean Americans; Vietnamese Americans; specic artists assemblage, 125, 149, 25354n7, 265n69 Attyah, David, 248 Avalos, David, 17678; Art Rebate, 178; Caf Mestizo, 178; California Mission Daze, 165, 178; Donkey Cart Altar, 17778, 178 Atomic Energy Commission, 240 Auinger, Sam, 246 Aunt Jemima, 14950, 149 Avena, Thomas, 216, 217 Avengers (band), 111 Aylon, Helne, 6263; Bridge of Knots, 63, 63: Liberation of G-d, 2012, 202; Paintings That Change in Time, 62; Sand Carrying, 63; Stone Carrying, 63; Terrestri: Rescued Earth, 63 Aztln, 167, 175; Spiritual Plan for Aztln, 176, 181

Baca, Judith, 14, 17273, 190, 218, 248, 249, 259nn72, 75; Great Wall of Los Angeles, 14, 14, 17273, 173, 218; Hitting the Wall: Women in the Marathon, 173; Memoria de Nuestra Tierra, 173; World Wall: A Vision of the Future without Fear, 173 Bachman, Shelly, 248 Bacon, Francis, 26, 161, 208, 212 Baez, Joan, 1012, 101 Baker, Kenneth, 74 Baldessari, John, 68, 115 Baldwin Park (Los Angeles), 248 Balla, Giacomo: Bankrupt, 116 Ballis, George, 166; United Farm Workers Union: Grape Strike, 166 Banham, Reyner, 119 Baranik, Rudolf, 46 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 196 Barry, Judith, 265n10 Barthes, Roland, 123 Barzun, Jacques, 88 Baskin, Leonard, 35, 36 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 116 Battenberg, John, 2078; Battle of Waterloo, 207, 208, 208 Baudelaire, Charles, 90 Baudrillard, Jean, 43, 74, 118, 123, 226 Bay Area. See San Francisco Bay Area Bay Area Figuratives, 21, 121, 203 Baxandall, Michael, 2627 Bearden, Romare, 146, 14849, 152; BerkeleyThe City and Its People, 148, 149 Beats, 1, 811, 15, 8891, 25354n7, 257n49, 257n51; Cndida Smith on, 23, 257nn5556; censorship of, 910, 90, 91, 93, 96; punk and, 111 Beauvoir, Simone de, 189 Beckett, Samuel, 48, 139, 180, 193, 249 Beckmann, Max, 25, 126, 152, 187, 222 Be-In, 15, 1067, 111, 191 Belafonte, Harry, 146, 157

282

index

Beldner, Ray, 121; All You Need . . . , 121, 121; Counterfeit series, 121 Bell, Daniel, 118 Bell, Larry, 46, 245 Belloli, Jay: Amerika Is Devouring Its Children, 43, 44 Belson, Jordan, 90 Bengston, Billy Al, 8, 119 Benjamin, Walter, 119 Benton, Thomas Hart, 33 Bergman, Ciel, 23233; Sea of Clouds What Can I Do, 23233, 233 Bergson, Henri, 30 Berkeley: Beardens mural for city of, 148, 149; LaMarrs mural for, 163; see also free speech movement; Peoples Park; University Art Museum, Berkeley; University of California, Berkeley Berkeley Art Project, 102 Berlin, 23738; Wall, 26, 270n23 Berman, Wallace, 8, 9, 10, 10, 89, 9091, 96, 197, 211, 253n7, 258n57; Cross, 90, 90; Semina, 10, 90, 93 Bernal, Antonio: Teatro Campesino Cultural Center mural, 171, 171 Bernheimer, Martin, 197 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 146 Beuys, Joseph, 74, 81, 226 Biddle, George, 32 Bierstadt, Alfred, 243; Passing Storm over the Sierra, 84; Yosemite Valley, 243 Big Brother and the Holding Company, 105 Billy the Kid, 96 bin Laden, Osama, 72 Birk, Sandow, 8485; California Institute for Men in Chino, 85; California State Prison in Centinela, 85; Gates of Hell: Los Angeles Landscapes of 1992, 84; Great Battle of San Francisco, 84; San Quentin State Prison, 84, 85; War of Californians, 84

Bischoff, Elmer, 137, 203, 243 Black Arts Council, 145 Black Flag (band), 111 Black Friday, 5, 100, 254n7 Black Panthers, 1, 7, 14144, 147 Black Women Organized for Action, 189 Blake, Nayland, 210 Blankfort, Jeffrey, 43, 143; Antiwar March, 42; Bobby Seale Speaks to Free Huey Newton, 143, 143; La Raza March, 166, 167; Stop the Draft Week, 42 Blaser, Robin, 210 Bleckner, Ross, 215 Boettger, Suzaan, 225 Boise, Ron, 96; Bound of the Tiger (Kama Sutra), 95 Bonetti, David, 243 Boone, Mary, 190 Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, 177 Bosch, Hieronymus, 38, 50, 174, 216, 222, 244; Temptation of St. Anthony, 244 Bourke-White, Margaret, 238 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros, 78 Bowers, Cheryl. See Bergman, Ciel Brach, Paul, 46 Brakhage, Stan, 90, 211 Brancusi, Constantin, 133 Brand, Stewart, 104 Brando, Marlon, 87 Brandt, Rex, 93 Braque, Georges, 200 Brassa, 116 Brautigan, Richard, 107, 108 Brecht, Bertolt, 30, 56, 68 Brest van Kempen, Mark, 1023; Column of Earth and Air (Free Speech Monument), 102, 103 Breton, Andr, 74 Brice, William, 174 Brittin, Charles: Arthur Richer, Wallace Berman, John Reed, Vice

Squad Ofcer, 10; Cross, by Wallace Berman, 90 Brocha del Valle, La, 169 Brockman Gallery (Los Angeles), 145 Brody, Sherry: Dollhouse, 190, 199, 199 Brooker, Claude, 145 Brooks, James, 46 Brooks, Romaine, 217 Brower, David, 224 Brown, Joan, 91, 121, 137, 2034, 243; Fur Rat, 91, 91, 203; Woman Wearing Mask (Cat Lady), 203, 204 Brown, John, 146 Brown, Nacio Jan, 41, 43; Aerial Teargassing of UC Campus during Peoples Park Incident, 107, 109; Mario Savio on Sproul Hall Steps, 102, 102; Mortally Wounded James Rector, 110, 110; San Francisco High School Students, 144, 144; . . . Stop the Draft Week, 41, 42 Brown, Roger, 254n9 Brown, Willie, 144 Bruce, Lenny, 10, 104 Brueghel, Pieter, 35, 50, 59, 99, 100, 126, 212, 244 Bryant, Anita, 209 Buuel, Luis, 49 Burden, Chris, 6162, 114; Reason for the Neutron Bomb, 6162, 62; Trans-Fixed, 61 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 157 Burgard, Timothy, 41 Burke, Edmund, 114, 242 Burkhardt, Hans, 21, 36, 38, 54; Concentration Camp, 38, 38; My Lai, 50, 51; One Way Road, 92; ReaganBlood Money, 9293, 92; Tar Pit, 66, 67; War, Agony in Death, 36 Burns, Stewart, 8, 255n18, 257n49 Burroughs, William, 88 Bury, Pol, 261

index

283

Bush, George H. W., 64, 66, 68, 69, 69 Bush, George W., 64, 129, 156, 248, 264n24; Chagoya on, 19; and death penalty, 82; and environment, 224; vs. gay marriage, 210; and war on Iraq and on terrrorism, 70, 7273, 72, 74, 76, 98 Cade (Bambara), Toni, 189 Caen, Herb, 89 Cage, John, 243 Caja, Jerome. See Jerome Caldicott, Helen, 6263 Caldwell, Catherine, 96 Calexico (California), 182 California African American Museum, 145 California Constitution, 129 California Labor School (San Francisco), 33, 255n13 California Watercolor School, 131 Callot, Jacques, 35 Cambodia, 39, 57, 60, 261n14 Cameron, 9, 10 Campoli, Cosmo, 254n9 Camus, Albert, 36 Cndida Smith, Richard, 23, 96, 257n5556 Cantinas, 187 Capitalist Realism, 119 capital punishment, 7985 Capra, Fritjof, 224 CARA (Chicano Art: Resistance and Afrmation, Wight Art Gallery), 16869, 187 Carlson, Cynthia, 200 Carrillo, Eduardo, 17475; El Grito, 175, 175 Carrillo, Graciela, 172 Carrington, Leonora, 215 Carroll, Lewis, 212 Carson, Rachel, 22324 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 143 Casa Pueblo, 236

Cassady, Neal, 104, 258n63 Cassatt, Mary, 200 Catholic Discipline (band), 111 Celan, Paul, 36, 155 Celmins, Vija, 54; TV, 54, 55 censorship, 91100, 248; and Arnesons Moscone bust, 19, 62, 9697; and Avaloss Donkey Cart Altar, 17778; and Beats, 910, 90, 91, 93, 96; and Chicagos The Dinner Party, 198; and Coit Tower murals, 32, 92; and Communications Decency Act, 72; and National Endowment for the Arts, 97, 113; and One magazine, 208; and Rincon Annex murals, 33, 92; and war on terror, 98100; see also free speech movement Central America, U.S. intervention in, 6466 Centro Cultural de la Raza (San Diego), 168, 170, 178 Centro de Arte Regional, El (Baja California), 174 Centro de Artistas Chicanos (Sacramento), 168, 186, 187 Csar, 46, 125, 259n70 Czanne, Paul, 131, 231 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, 139, 265n10; Aveugle Voix, 139, 139; Dicte, 139 Chadwick, Whitney, 19, 259n81 Chagall, Marc, 30 Chagoya, Enrique, 19, 64; Governors Nightmare, 180, 181; Tausend Jhrige Reich, 180; Their Freedom of Expression . . . The Recovery of Their Economy, 64, 65, 74; When Paradise Arrived, 17980, 180 Chamberlain, Ann, 7677; Evil Empire, 7677, 77 Chamberlain, John, 125 Chvez, Csar, xiv, 7, 141, 166, 166, 168, 169, 171; see also United Farm Workers

Cheney, Dick, 73 Chret, Jules, 105 Chernobyl, 238, 244 Chessman, Caryl, 81, 94 Chiang Kai-shek, 40 Chicago, artists in, 254n9 Chicago, Judy, 16, 46, 190, 194, 197 99, 205, 259n70; Birth Project, 199; Dinner Party, 197, 19899, 198; Holocaust Project: From Darkness to Light, 199; Menstruation Bath, 190; and Womanhouse, 15, 15, 190, 199 Chicago Eight, 147, 266n22 Chicano art movement, 20; murals in, 1314, 17175, 182; posters in, 12, 169, 170, 178; women in, 184 Chicano Art: Resistance and Afrmation (CARA, Wight Art Gallery), 16869, 187 Chicano labor movement, 1, 7, 141, 16568; artwork for, 12, 168, 16971 Chicano Moratorium, 7, 40, 167, 182, 187 Chicano Park (San Diego), 170, 173 74, 174 Chicanos, 6, 16588, 267n50; art movement of, 16875 (see also Chicano art movement); and border issues, 17583; denition of, 167; liberation movement of, 7, 16668 (see also Chicano labor movement); mural movement of, 1314, 17175, 182; on rituals and death, 18386; and United Farm Workers movement, 7, 141, 16571; and womens issues, 17172, 184, 189, 218; see also specic artists Chinese American Art Association, 135 Chinese Americans, 135; see also Asian Americans; specic artists Chinese Exclusion Act, 6, 135 Chinese Revolutionary Artists Club, 135

284

index

Chipp, Herschel B., 26 Chirico, Giorgio de, 174 Christo, 22932; Gates . . . , 232; Iron Curtain, 22930; Running Fence . . . , 23031, 230; Umbrellas, JapanUSA, 231, 231; Valley Curtain, 230 Church, Frederic, 84 Civil Rights Act, 141, 189 civil rights movement, 6, 141, 255n24; and Asian American culture, 137; and free speech movement, 5, 100, 141; United Farm Workers and, 16667 Clark Kent (Superman), 6768 Cleaver, Eldridge, 141 Clinton, Bill, 12, 78, 222 Clinton, Hillary, 12, 222 Close, Chuck, 54 Club Foot (San Francisco), 111, 112 Cobain, Kurt, 76 Cockcroft, Eve, 263n10 Cocteau, Jean, 90 Cody, Buffalo Bill, 141 Coit Tower (San Francisco) murals, 12, 32, 92 cold war, 4, 6, 26, 66; and Abstract Expressionism, 263n10; see also McCarthy era Colescott, Robert, 1920, 5354, 15051, 259n81; Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie, 54, 54, 74; George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook, 20, 20, 150; School Days, 150, 151 color eld painting, 8 Comisin Femenil Mexicana, 189 Communications Decency Act, 72 Conal, Robbie, 12, 64, 66, 248; Bill Clinton, 12; Contra Cocaine, 65, 66; Contra Diction, 65, 66; Hillary Clinton, 12; Monica Lewinsky, 12 conceptual art, 116 Cone, Jane Harrison, 256n44

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 100, 101 Conner, Bruce, 8, 8081, 89, 90, 105, 111, 211, 243, 253n7; CHILD, 81, 81, 89; Movie, 8081 Constructivists, 30, 200 consumerism, 87, 11827, 191, 220, 242; food, 114, 12123, 220; money, 11921; shopping, 12324; waste, 12427, 23233 Coplans, John, 90 CORE. See Congress of Racial Equality Cornell, Joseph, 110, 149 Correa, Juan: Allegory of the Sacrament, 180 Cotter, Holland, 73 Courbet, Gustave, xi Coyote, Peter, 104, 106 Crenshaw, Kimberl Williams, 259n75 Crow, Thomas, 2, 47, 254n8 Crumb, Robert, 115 Cubism, 29, 30; Dondero on, 92 Cubo-Futurists, 30 Cunningham, Imogen, 238 Curry, John Stuart, 33 Cutler-Shaw, Joyce, 23335; Alphabet of Bones, 234; Namewell, 234; Sycamore Leaf Canopy, 234, 235 Dadaism, 15, 111, 190; Dondero on, 92 Danner, Mark, 71 DAnnunzio, Gabriele, 217 Danoff, Michael, 260n85 Dante Alighieri: Inferno, 156 Danto, Arthur, 247 Daughters of Bilitis 208, 256n36 Daumier, Honor, 35, 64, 99 David, Jacques-Louis, 84, 99 Davis, Alonzo, 145 Davis, Ronnie, 104 Day Without Art, 210 DDT, 22324

Dead Kennedys (band), 111, 115; In God We Trust, Inc., 111, 111 Dean, James, 87 death penalty, 7985 de Bretteville, Sheila, 190; catalogue cover for Womanhouse, 15 DeCarava, Roy, 154 defense industry, 4, 6, 7, 111; see also nuclear weapons; weapons testing DeFeo, Jay, 8, 89, 91, 211 de Forest, Roy, 125, 243 degenerate art, 25, 31, 92 de Kooning, Elaine, 25859n70 de Kooning, Willem, 36, 67, 99, 208 Delacroix, Eugne, 84, 99 Delano Grape Strike, 7, 166, 166, 169, 181 Delaunay, Sonia, 200 del Rio, Dolores, 184 De Maria, Walter, 103, 224, 225; New York Earth Room, 225 DeMarinis, Paul, 7374; Edison Effect, 73; Firebirds, 73; Tongues of Fire, 7374, 73 Denes, Agnes, 225; Rice/Tree/Burial, 225; Tree Mountain project, 225 Destruction in Art Symposium (London), 114 dHarnoncourt, Ren, 160 Da de los Muertos, 183 Didion, Joan, 85, 110 Diebenkorn, Richard, 121, 137, 203 Dim, Ng Dinh, 40 Diggers, 11, 104 Dillon, Kenneth H., 46 di Suvero, Mark, 4748, 259n70; Mother Peace, 47, 48, 48; and Peace Tower, 14, 46, 47 Dix, Otto, 26, 31, 35, 50, 58 Dixon, James Budd, 51 Doctorow, E. L., 80 Donahue, Kenneth, 96 Dondero, George A., 92, 93 Dorn, Warren, 94, 96

index

285

Dougherty, Frazier: Q: And Babies? . . . , 46, 46 Douglas, Aaron, 145, 148 Douglas, Emory, 141 Douglass, Frederick, 146 Dowd, Robert, 119 Drawing Center (New York), 248 Duardo, Richard, 12 DuBois, W. E. B., 148 Dubuffet, Jean, 26, 116, 212 Ducasse, Ralph, 137 Duchamp, Marcel, 121, 147, 187, 243; Erratum Musical, 73; Etant donns, 114; as Rrose Slavy, 201 Duffy, Ricardo, 17879; Curtain Raiser, 178, 179, 179; New Order, 179 Dumas, Marguerite, 139 Duncan, Donald, 47 Duncan, Robert, 8, 9, 89, 21011, 212, 257n53 DuPont corporation, 22324 Dwan, Virginia, 225 Dylan, Bob, 87, 224 Eagleboy, Wayne, 160 Eames, Charles, 182 Eames, Ray, 182 Earth Art, 33, 103, 22425 East-West Art Society, 131 Eckstine, Billy, 148 ecological art, 225, 22629, 23238 Edison, Thomas, 73 Ehrlichman, John, 58 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 4, 39 Elder, Earl, 160 Elder, Muldoon, 96 Eliot, T. S., 88 Ellington, Duke, 148 Ellison, Ralph, 149 English, Lindy, 73 environmental movement, 197, 22324; art in response to, 223, 22446

Environmental Protection Agency, 124, 242 Ernst, Max, 74, 208, 216; Semaine de Beaut, 211 Erskine, Peter, 24546; Secrets of the Sun: Millennial Meditations, 245 46, 245 Evans, Walker, 238, 239 Evergood, Philip, 46, 259n70 Everts, Connor, 9394, 263n14; Cry from the Womb, Studies in Desperation, 93, 94 Executive Order 9066, 130 Exter, Alexandra, 30 Eyck, Jan van, 150 Farm Security Administration photographers, 32, 238 farmworkers: during Great Depression, 238; organizing of, see United Farm Workers Fascist party, 30 Favela, Ricardo, 186; El Centro de Artistas Chicanos, 186, 187 Fear (band), 111 Fein, Clinton, 7273; Better Be the Last, 72; Blood-Spangled Banner, 72; Like Apple Fucking Pie, 72; Who Would Jesus Torture?, 72 73, 72 Feinstein, Dianne, 96, 97 Feitelson, Lorser, 99 feminism: artists response to, see feminist art; consumerism and, 123, 124, 191; and cyberspace, 194, 201; Earth Art and, 225; history of, 18890, 256n37; racism and, 259n75; see also womens issues feminist art, 16, 17, 2021, 190207, 256n37, 259n74; education and, 190, 256n37 (see also Feminist Art Program; Feminist Studio Workshop); installations in, 197202;

by lesbians, 21820; Pattern and Decoration movement and, 200; performance in, 19097; womens image in, 2027 Feminist Art Program, 190, 193, 194, 198, 199, 256n37 Feminist Art Workers, 190 Feminist Studio Workshop, 190, 198, 218 femmage, 200 Ferber, Herbert, 259n70 Fergerson, Cecil, 145 Fernlund, Kevin, 4 Ferus Gallery (Los Angeles), 46, 89, 90, 93, 94, 197, 262n43 Filipinos, 137, 166, 17071, 267n50; see also Asian Americans Fini, Leonore, 215 Finley, Karen, 113 Fischl, Eric, 215 Fishback, Gary, 233 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 120 Fluxus, 191, 261n13 Fonseca, Harry, 164, 267n47; Creation Story, 164, 164; Discovery of Gold in California, 164 food, 114, 12123 Forkscrew Graphics, iRaq posters, 7172, 71, 248 Foucault, Michel, 123, 269n107 Foulkes, Llyn, 21, 6668, 262n43; The Coporate Kiss, 21; Where Did I Go Wrong?, 6768, 68 Four, Los, 168, 182 Fox, Howard, 192 Fox, Terry, 139 Francis, Sam, 259n70 Franco, Francisco, 50 Frank, Robert, 239 Frankenstein, Alfred, 32, 11920 Frankfurt School, 112, 123 Frascina, Francis, 2, 47, 257n56, 25960n70 Freedom Ride, 141

286

index

Freedom Summer/Mississippi Summer Project, 100, 141 Freeman, Jo, 100 free speech movement, 1, 5, 6, 26, 100103, 141, 225, 255n18; commemoration of, 1023 Fried, Howard, 139 Fried, Michael, 256n44 Friedan, Betty, 189 Friedrich, Caspar David, 126; Wreck of the Hope, 127 Friends of the Los Angeles River, 226 Frontera, La, 17583 Fuller, Buckminster, 235 Funk Art, 10, 91, 96, 122, 125 Futurism, 30, 190; Dondero on, 92 Galera de la Raza (San Francisco), 1314, 168 Gallina, Raelyn, 219 Gamboa Jr., Harry, 16, 16, 168, 187 Gandhi, Mahatma, 166 Garcia, Jerry, 89 Garca, Rupert, 20, 4446, 64, 80, 168, 182, 223; Cesen Deportacin!, 176, 177; on Chicano art movement, 168; Fuera de Indochina!, 44, 45 Garrett, J. C., 111, 112; Splinter in Your Eye Is the Best Magnifying Glass, 112, 113 Garnett, William, 241 Garza, Carmen Lomas, 17 Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, 160, 169 Gay Liberation Front, 209, 256n36 gay rights movement, 6, 7, 20810, 218, 256n36; see also homosexuals; lesbians Gehry, Frank, 115 General Motors, 118 Geneva Convention, 71 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 198 Gerbault, Alain, 201

Gricault, Thodore, 84, 99, 126; Raft of the Medusa, 157 Germ (band), 111 German Democratic Republic, art in, 26, 270n23 German Expressionism, 25 German Realism of the Twenties: The Artist as Social Critic (Minneapolis Institute of Arts), 26 Gerowitz, Judy. See Chicago, Judy Giacometti, Alberto, 237 Gillray, James, 205 Gingrich, Newt, 97 Ginn, Greg, 111 Ginsberg, Allen, 5, 8, 9, 10, 15, 80, 88, 209; at Be-In, 106, 107; Howl, 10, 15, 88, 257n52 Giorgione, 199 Giotto, 99 Gitlin, Todd, 16 Giuliani, Rudolph, 118, 263n15 Glaubman, Evelyn, 4950; Hot Damn Vietnam, 50, 50 Godard, Jean-Luc, 139 God-Durrel,Valentine, 234 Goines, David Lance, 255n24 Gold, Mike, 80 Golden, Thelma, 259n75 Goldman, Emma, 189 Golub, Leon, 8, 35, 46, 64, 254n9, 259n70; Napalm series, 254n9 Gonzales, Alexis Massol, 236, 236 Gonzalez, Matt, 117 Goode, Joe, 119 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 77, 78, 79 Gordon, Russel, 145 Gorky, Arshile, 36, 162 Gorman, C. N., Museum, University of California, Davis, 159, 162 Goto, Rieko, 259n72 Gowin, Emmet, 241 Goya, Francisco de, 36, 44, 45, 64, 74, 84, 99, 150; Black Paintings, 38;

Saturn Devouring One of His Children, 44, 216 grafti art, 11617, 248 Graham, Bill, 11, 105 Graphic Arts Workshop (San Francisco), 33 Grateful Dead, 105, 105 Graves, Morris, 243 Great American Lesbian Art Show (GALAS), 218 Greco, El, 174 Greenberg, Clement, xi, 8, 29, 256n44 Greenberg, Jules, 70; Skateboarder and Gandhi Against the War, 70, 70 Grien, Hans Baldung, 222 Grifn, Rick, 11, 105 Grifn, Susan, 190 Gronk (Glugio Gronk Nicandro), 16, 16, 168, 18788; Getting the Fuck Out of the Way, 18788; Josephine Boneapart Protecting the Rear Guard, 188, 188; and La Tormenta, 187, 188 Grossman, Nancy, 219 Grosz, George, 1, 26, 31, 35, 148 Group f /643, 238 Group Material: AIDS Timeline, 210 Guevara, Ernesto (Che), 168 Guilbaut, Serge, 263n10 Gulf Wars, 6674, 24849 Grnewald, Matthias, 50, 59; Isenheim Altarpiece, 36, 216 Guerrilla Girls, 190 Guston, Philip, 33, 46, 59, 99, 150; Conspirators, 33 Gutman, John, 32 Gutusso, Renato, 80 Haacke, Hans, 74; Rhine Water Purication Plant, 232 Haberle, John, 119, 120 Haeberle, Ron, 46

index

287

Haight-Ashbury (San Francisco), 11, 104, 106, 107; see also hippie counterculture Hairy Who, 254n9 Haldeman, H. R., 58 Hamilton, Ann, 76 Hamilton, Richard, 119 Hammond, Harmony, 218 Hammons, David, 145, 14748, 153; Concerto in Black and Blue, 147 48; Injustice Case, 147, 147 Hamrol, Lloyd, 259n70 Hanson, Jo, 232 Happenings, 15, 33, 19091, 196 Haring, Keith, 116 Harlow, Jean, 96 Harnett, William Michael, 119 Harrison, Helen Mayer, 56, 190, 192, 22628, 229, 232, 259n72; sh events, 226; Lagoon Cycle, 226, 228; Meditations on the Condition of the Sacramento River . . . , 27, 226, 227; Peninsula Europe, 227, 228; Portable Orchard, 226; Vision for the Green Heart of Holland, 228 Harrison, Newton, 56, 192, 22628, 229, 232, 259n72; sh events, 226; Lagoon Cycle, 226, 228; Meditations on the Condition of the Sacramento River . . . , 27, 226, 227; Peninsula Europe, 227, 228; Portable Orchard, 226; Vision for the Green Heart of Holland, 228 Hartman, Robert, 241 Hasson, Bruce, 7779; Childrens Bell Tower, 78; Millennia bell, 7879, 79; U.N. Bell, 78 Hausmann, Raoul, 67 Hayes, Janet Gray, xii Haywood, Jack, 145 Hayworth, Rita, 184 Head, Simon, 11819 Headlands Center for the Arts (Marin County), 248

Hearst, Patty, 112 Hearteld, John, 31, 35, 64, 148, 180 Hedrick, Wally, 8, 4041, 89, 211, 261n9; Anger, 40, 40; Black Room, 41; Madame Nhus Bar-B-Q, 40 Hefferton, Phillip, 11920; Big G., 120; Sinking George, 119, 120; Winkin Lincoln, 120 Heidegger, Martin, 224 Heil, Walter, 32 Heisenberg, Werner, 27 Heisig, Bernhard, 26 Heizer, Michael, 224, 225 Helion, Jean, 46, 259n70 Hello Again (Oakland Museum of California), 124 Hells Angels, 105 Helms, Jesse, 97, 98, 98, 219 Henderson, Mel, 228 Henderson, Robbin, 25455n10 Hendricks, Jon: Q: And Babies? . . . , 46, 46 Heritage Gallery (Los Angeles), 145 Herms, George, 8, 89, 90, 211, 253n7, 25758n57; Secret Exhibition, 10, 258n58 Hernndez, Ester, 12, 170, 172; Libertad, 169; Ofrenda II, 218; Sun Mad, 13, 169 Herriman, George, 212 Herrn, Willie, 16, 16, 168, 187 Hershman (Leeson), Lynn, 17, 139, 190, 191, 200201; Dante Hotel, 201; Lorna, 201; Phantom Limb series, 201; as Roberta Breitmore, 200, 201; Robertas Construction Chart #2, 200; Teknolust, 201 Hesse, Eva, 46, 63 Hesse, Hermann, 90 Heyman, I. Michael, 102 Hibi, Hisako, 131; Fetch Coal for the Pot-Belly Stove, 131, 131 Hibi, Matsusaburo (George), 131; TopazCoyotes Come Out of the Desert, 130, 131

Hickey, Dave, 58, 121 Hidalgo y Costillo, Miguel, 175 Hinckle, Warren, 258n63 Hine, Lewis, 142, 219 hippie counterculture, 1, 11, 15, 104 11, 258n63; poster in, 11, 1056 Hiramoto, Judy: Oppenheimers Sink, 61, 61 Hiroshima, 39, 61, 62, 63 Hitler, Adolf, 25, 43, 73, 92, 99, 180 Hch, Hannah, 67, 148 Hock, Louis, 178 Hockney, David, 17, 21214, 215, 269n112; Peter Getting out of Nicks Pool, 212, 21314, 213; We Two Boys Together Clinging, 212 Hodler, Ferdinand, 234 Hoffman, Julius, 266n22 Hokusai, Katsushika, 220 Holbein, Hans, 219 Holiday, Billie, 148, 207 Holland, Unique: Code 33, 196 Hollywood Ten, 93 Holocaust, art in reaction to, 3539, 81, 199 Holt, Nancy, 224 homosexuals: discrimination against, 7, 20810; identity as, artists on, 21117; see also gay rights movement; specic artists hooks, bell, 265n10 Hoover, J. Edgar, 57, 14142 Hopkins, Henry, 94 Hopper, Dennis, 90 Hopps, Walter, 47, 8990, 94, 262n43 Horn, Walter, 96 House Un-American Activities Committee, 33; Black Friday and, 5, 100; Reagan before, 4, 93 Howard, John Langley, 32 Howard, Mildred, 15254; Line of Fire, 154; Memory Garden, 153; Red, 154; Ten Little Children Standing in Line . . . , 15354, 154

288

index

Howe, Thomas Carr, 32 Hsieh, Tehching, 193; Art/Life One Year Performance, 193 Hudson, Robert, 137, 162 Hughes, Langston, 146, 148 Hughes, Robert, 100101, 110 Huginnie, A. Yvette, 5, 7, 256nn3132 Human Be-In, 15, 1067, 191 Humphrey, Hubert, 266n22 Hussein, Saddam, 66, 70, 73 Ikemoto, Howard, 13334; Family Number, 134 imperialist intervention, 7477; in Central America, 6466 In a Different Light (University Art Museum, Berkeley), 210 Indiana, Robert, 121 Indian Art in the United States and Alaska (Golden Gate International Exposition), 160 Indian Art of the United States (Museum of Modern Art), 160 Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies), 3 Inquisition, 74, 75 Inside Out: Voices from Home (San Francisco Art Institute), 210 Instant Theatre, 19697 internment camps, 6, 13035, 173; Jerome Relocation Center, 133; Poston Relocation Center, 133; Tanforan Assembly Center, 131; Topaz Relocation Center, 130, 131; Tule Lake Relocation Center, 133 intersectionality, 259n75 Iran-Contra affair, 64, 66, 264n24 Iraq, and Operation Desert Storm, 6669; and Operation Iraqi Freedom, 6974, 248, 249 Irwin, Robert, 245 Jameson, Frederic, 247 Japanese Americans, 256n32; intern-

ment of, 6, 13035; see also Asian Americans; specic artists Jaudon, Valerie, 200 Jaycox, Stephen, 20 Jeanne-Claude, 22932; Gates . . . , 232; Iron Curtain, 22930; Running Fence . . . , 23031, 230; Umbrellas, JapanUSA, 231, 231; Valley Curtain, 230 Jefferson Airplane, 105 Jerome (Caja), 21617; Venus in Cleveland, 217, 217 Jess (Burgess Collins), 8, 89, 210, 21112, 243, 269n109; Mouses Tale, 211, 212 Johanson, Chris, 117 John Paul II, Pope, 165 Johns, Jasper, 43, 54, 121, 212, 215, 263n4; Moratorium prints, 261n12 Johnson, Lyndon B., 6, 39 Johnson, Philip, 195 Johnson, Sargent, 53 Johnston, Jill, 21718 Jonas, Joan, 190 Jones, Cleve, 258n63 Jones, Pirkle, 143 Joplin, Janis, 110 Jordan, Larry, 211 Joyce, James, 201, 211 Judd, Donald, 8, 46, 257n48 junk sculpture, 12426 Kadish, Reuben, 33 Kahlo, Frida, 184, 200, 215 Kalo, Carmen: Laura Rodriguez, 174 Kamler, Richard, 8182; Out of the Holocaust, 81; Table of Voices, 81 82, 83; Waiting Room, 82 Kandinsky, Wassily, 25, 31, 246; Yellow Sound, 73 Kant, Immanuel, 29 Kaprow, Allan, 15, 82, 115, 190, 191, 194 Karlstrom, Paul, 47, 217 Kauffman, Craig, 46

Kaufman, Bob, 9 Kaufman, Irving R., 79 Kearny Street Workshop (San Francisco), 137 Kechely, Don: Thousands of Students March to UC Regents Meeting, 101, 101 Keegan, Daniel T., xixii Kelley, Alton, 105; Grateful Dead, 105, 106 Kelley, Mike, 11314, 11415; Fresh Acconci, 115; Proposal for a Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms . . . , 11516, 115 Kelly, Ellsworth, 215, 243, 263n4 Kennedy, Anthony, 269n107 Kennedy, John F., 94, 124 Kennedy, Robert F., 123, 166, 181 Kerouac, Jack, 15, 88, 89 Kertbeny, 208 Kertess, Klaus, 217 Kesey, Ken, 15, 47, 104, 258n63 Khmer Rouge, 60 Khrushchev, Nikita, 99 Kienholz, Edward, 10, 19, 4849, 94, 183, 197, 253n7, 262n43, 263n16; Back Seat Dodge 38, 10, 27, 94, 95, 96; Conceptual Tableaux, 120; Eleventh Hour Final, 4849, 49; Illegal Operation, 94, 207, 207; Portable War Memorial, 48, 49; Psycho-Vendetta Case, 81; Roxys, 94 Kienholz, Nancy Reddin, 263n16 Kiesler, Frederick, 81 Kilgallen, Margaret, 11718; Sloe, 11718, 118 King, Robert Hilary, 144 King Jr., Martin Luther, 6, 7, 100, 141, 149, 166, 171 Kingman, Dong, 135 King Ubu Gallery (San Francisco), 89, 210 Kinkade, Thomas, 98 Kinsey, Alfred, 208

index

289

Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 26 Kissinger, Henry, 64 Kitaj, R. B., 211, 212 Klee, Paul, 25 Klein, Adam, 217 Klein, Yves, 148 Klimt, Gustav, 215 Kline, Franz, 89 Knight, Christopher, 9091 Koestler, Arthur, 197 Kokoschka, Oskar, 12627 Kollwitz, Kthe, 1, 31, 35, 64, 99 Korean Americans, 13739; see also Asian Americans; specic artists Korean War, 6, 138, 139, 256n31 Kozloff, Joyce, 200 Kozloff, Max, 1, 263n10 Kramer, Hilton, 97, 243 Krauss, Rosalind, 256n44 Kristofferson, Kris, 110 Kruger, Barbara, 12324, 207; Family, 12324; Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am), 123, 123 Kublai Khan, 43 Kuby, Lolette, 198 Ku Klux Klan, 99, 100, 156, 157 Kunisada, Utagawa, 220 Kushner, Robert, 200 Kuspit, Donald, 50, 62 Kuwait, 66, 69 Kyoto Protocol, 224, 26970n2 Labowitz, Leslie, 195; In Mourning and in Rage, 195, 195 Lacan, Jacques, 123 Lacy, Suzanne, 190, 19496, 198, 259n72; Ablutions, 194; AutoWomen in Prison, 196; Code 33, 196; Crystal Quilt, 195; In Mourning and in Rage, 195, 195; Mapping the Terrain, 196; She Who Would Fly, 195; Three Weeks in May, 194; Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, 195 Laing, R. D., 11

Laird, Melvin, 57 Lamantia, Philip, 211 LaMarr, Jean, 16364; Commemoration of the Ohlone Way of Life, 163; Some Kind of Buckaroo, 163, 164 Land Art. See Earth Art Landauer, Susan, 121, 249 Lange, Dorothea, 32, 131, 142, 238 Lanyon, Ellen, 254n9 Laos, U.S. invasion of, 57 LaPena, Frank, 160, 16162; Destruction: Hostage, 161; Diaspora: California Indians, 161; House of Sound: Mount Shasta, 161, 162 Lawrence, Jacob, 146 Lawrence v. Texas, 210 L, Dinh Q., 5961, 137; Cambodian Splendor and Darkness, 60; Mot Coi di Ve, 60; Russian Roulette, 60, 61 Leaf, June, 46, 254n9 Lear, Edward, 212 Leary, Timonthy, 104, 106 Lebrun, Rico, 36, 38, 58; Genesis, 36; Holocaust series, 36, 37; Study for Dachau Chamber, 36, 37 Lee, Anthony W., 32 left vs. right, in California politics, 35 Lger, Fernand, 54, 80 Lemcke, Rudy, 210; Immemorial, 210 Lenin, 31; in Riveras mural, 32 Leonardo da Vinci, Last Supper, 72, 123 Leopold, Aldo, 224 Lesbian Art Project, 218 lesbians, 141, 21720; see also gay rights movement; specic artists Leutze, Emanuel, 150 Levertov, Denise, 212 Levi, Primo, 155 Levine, Howard, 228 Levine, Jack, 46

Levine, Les, 120 Lewinsky, Monica, 12 Lewis, Anthony, 71 LeWitt, Sol, 225 Libeskind, Daniel, 236 Lichtenstein, Roy, 46, 259n70 Lin, Maya, 102 Lippard, Lucy, 2, 2021, 190, 198, 229, 257n48, 259n75, 270n10 Lipsitz, George, 12 Lissitzky, El, 30 Litwak, Leon, 11011 Liu, Hung, 82, 137; Comfort Women, 206, 207; Three Graces, 2067, 206; Yoke, 82, 83 Living in Balance (Richmond Art Center), 124 Lobdell, Frank, 51, 53, 59, 137, 243; Summer 1967: In Memory of James Budd Dixon, 51, 52, 53 Lockyear, Bill, 248 Longsh, George, 16263; End of Innocences, 16263, 162 Lopez, Yolanda, 184, 186; Nanny, 184; Virgin of Guadalupe triptych, 186, 186; Whos the Illegal Alien Pilgrim?, 186 Los Angeles, 3, 87, 242; African American arts groups in, 14445; environmental activism in, 226; gay rights movement in, 7, 208, 209; Hockney on, 214; murals in, 3132, 17273, 17475; Owens River and, 241; political art in, 2, 8, 33, 248; punk scene in, 11112; and Sunshine Noir exhibition, 113; see also Watts riots Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Asco action at, 187 Loughery, John, 208 Lowe, Bia, 218 Lucretius, 35 Lujan, Gilbert, 168 Luna, James, 165; Artifact Piece, 165;

290

index

California Mission Daze, 165, 178; Take a Picture with a Real Indian, 165, 165 Mabuhay Gardens (San Francisco), 111 MacArthur, Douglas, 94 Macdonald, Dwight, 210 Maciunas, George, 261n13; U.S. Surpasses All the Genocide Records (genocide ag), 43, 44 MacLeod, Scott, 7576; American Pop!, 76, 76 Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 19002000 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), 26, 254n7, 255n10 Magritte, Ren, 242 Mahler, Gustav, 215 Mailer, Norman, 5 Maisel, David, 238, 24142; Lake Project series, 24142, 241 Malcolm X, 157 Malevich, Kazimir, 30 Mallarm, Stphane, 139 Mamet, David, 152 Manet, Edouard, 99 Mao Tse-tung, 40 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 97, 98; X portfolio, 220 Marcus, Greil, 111 Marcuse, Herbert, 56, 68 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 30 Marioni, Tom, 139, 192, 193 Marsh, Reginald, 50, 205 Masereel, Frans, 35 Mason, John, 197 Masson, Andr, 47, 74, 242 Matisse, Henri, 137, 150 Matta, 47, 53 Mattachine Society, 208, 256n36 Mazeaud, Dominique, 232 McBride, Henry, 133 McCarthy, Joseph, 4, 33, 99

McCarthy, Paul, 11315; Bossy Burger, 114, 114; Fresh Acconci, 115; Shit Face Painting, 114 McCarthy era, 45, 8, 30, 33, 129, 173; censorship during, 9293; gay persecution in, 208; Rosenbergs trial during, 7980 McClure, Michael, 8, 10, 90, 96, 107, 108, 211, 257n55; Beard, 96 McCormick, Daniel, 23536; Watershed: An Ecological Installation, 235, 236 McElivey, Thomas, 160 McGee, Barry, 117; Untitled #20, 116 McGovern, George, 166 McGroarty, John Steven, 3 McHugh, Joe, 11 McKenna, Siobhan, 201 McKinley, William, 74 McLuhan, Marshall, 142 McWilliams, Carey, 254n10 Mechicano Art Center (Los Angeles), 168 Melchert, Jim, 237 Meltzer, David, 90 Mendez, Consuelo, 172 Merrid, Knud, 93 Merrill, Nancy, 232 Merry Pranksters, 47, 104 Mesa-Bains, Amalia, 184, 204; Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio, 184, 185 Mesches, Arnold, 46, 80, 98100; Anomie, 99; FBI Files, 98, 99100, 99 Metropolitan Community Church (Los Angeles), 209 Mexico: artists from, see Tres Grandes, specic artists; Aztln and, 167, 175; and border with United States, 17583; immigrants from, 7, 176, 178; political art in, 31, 33 Mickey Mouse, 64, 67, 179, 180 Milk, Harvey, 7, 96, 209, 256n41

Miller, Arthur, 7980; Price, 118 Miller, Dorothy, 263n4 Millet, Jean-Franois: Sower, 171 Millett, Kate, 189, 190 Mills, Paul, 21 Min, Yong Soon, 13739, 265n10; Bridge of No Returns, 13839; Dening Moments, 138, 138 Mineta, Norman, xii Minimalism, 8, 102, 22425 Misrach, Richard, 23841, 246; Bravo 20 National Park, 241; Cantos, 23941; Crater and Destroyed Convoy, 240, 240; Dead Fish, Salton Sea, 23940, 239; Flood, 23940; Pit, 24041; Playboys, 241; Telegraph 3 a.m., 239; War (Bravo 20), 240, 240 Mission Cultural Center (San Francisco), 168 Mission School, 117 Mississipi Summer Project/Freedom Summer, 100, 141 Mitchell, Joni, 242 Mittelberg, Louis, 262n57 money, 11921 Monroe, Marilyn, 123 Monster Roser, 254n9 Montadon, Pat, 77 Montano, Linda, 17, 56, 139, 190, 191, 19293, 200; Chicken Show, 192; Handcuff, 19293, 193; and Hsiehs Art/Life: One Year Performance, 193; Mitchells Death, 193; Seven Years of Intoxication, 193 Montoya, Jos, 21 Montoya, Malaquias, 176; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 176, 176; Undocumented, 176, 177 Moore, Marianne, 88 Morales, Julio: Code 33, 196 Moran, Thomas, 84 Morandi, Giorgio, 54, 121 Moreau, Gustav, 215

index

291

Morgan, Robin, 189 Morgenstern, Christian, 212 Morisot, Berthe, 200 Morley, Grace McCann, 32 Morris, Robert, 120, 224, 225; Earthwork, 225 Moscone, George, 96, 209; Arnesons bust of, 19, 62, 9697 Moscoso, Victor, 11, 105, 106; Flower Pot, 105, 106 Moses, 201 Motherwell, Robert, 46, 89, 121, 259n70 Mouse, Stanley, 105; Grateful Dead, 105, 106 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 246 Muir, John, 225 Mujeres Muralistas, Las, 13, 170, 172; Panamerica, 172, 172 Mullican, Lee, 259n70 murals, as political art form, 1214, 3132, 17175, 182, 254n9 Murals at Aztln (Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles) 182 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 247; and antiwar poster, 46; and Conners CHILD, 81 Mussolini, Benito, 30, 43 Muybridge, Eadweard, 191 My Lai massacre, 6, 3940, 46; Burkhardt on, 50, 51 Naess, Arne, 224 Nagasaki, 39, 61, 63 NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, 20910, 258n69 Namuth, Hans, 114 Narrative Imagists, 19 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and censorhip, 97, 113 National Organization for Women (NOW), 7, 189 National Park Service, 235 Native Americans, 15765; and

Alcatraz Island occupation, 15859, 160; stereotypes of, 159, 160, 162, 165; see also specic artists Navy, U.S., and weapons testing, 240, 241 Nazis, 25, 31, 7475, 134; see also Holocaust Neel, Alice, 46 Neo-Primitives, 30 Neri, Manuel, 137 Nesbit, Peter, 270n23 Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), 31 Neuman, Alfred E., 114 Nevelson, Louise, 46, 263n4 New Figuration /New Image of Man, 2526, 36 New Images of Man, 2526 Newsom, Gavin, 210 Newton, Huey P., 14143 New York, political art in, 1, 78; see also specic artists Nguyen, Long, 17, 5859, 137; Refugee Christ, 59, 59; Tales of Yellow Skin, 17, 17, 59 Nhu, Madame, 40 Nicaragua, 64 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 30, 88 Nightingale, Florence, 192 Nilsson, Gladys, 254n9 Nisbet, Peter, 26 Nittve, Lars, 113 Nixon, Richard M., 4, 33, 39, 57, 99 Nochlin, Linda, 189, 247 Noguchi, Isamu, 13233; My Arizona, 133, 133 Nordman, Maria, 245 Norman, Irving, 21, 5051, 54; Rebellions and Revolutions, 5051, 52; War and Peace, 50 North, Oliver, 64, 66 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 179 nuclear weapons, threat of, 6163,

87, 24041; punk movement and, 111 Nuns (band), 111 Nutt, Jim, 254n9 Oakes, Richard, 158 Oakland: antiwar protests, 41, 41, 42, 43; Ariels Banner of Hope in, 77; army base, 6; Black Panthers in, 14143; di Suveros Mother Peace in, 48; Lacy et al.s Code 33 in, 196 Obata, Chiura, 13031, 135; Sad Plight, 130, 131 Ocampo, Manuel, 7475; Stations of the Cross, 74; Untitled (Burntout Europe), 7475, 75, 262n54 Occupied Atzln (San Francisco Art Institute), 18182 Ochs, Phil, 5 October Revolution, 30 Odland, Bruce, 246 Oli, Chris, 263n15 OKeeffe, Georgia, 198 Oldenburg, Claes, 121, 220, 259n70 Oliveira, Nathan, 59, 243 Oliveros, Pauline, 63 Olsen, Charles, 212 One (magazine), 208 Ong Wen-hao, 135, 135 Operation Babylift, 6 Operation Desert Storm, 6669 Operation Ranch Hand, 6 Operation Rolling Thunder, 56 Operation Wetback, 6 Opie, Catherine, 21920; Being and Having, 219; Domestic series, 220; O portfolio, 220; Self-Portrait/ Pervert, 21920, 220 Oppenheim, Dennis, 224, 225 Oppenheimer, Robert, 61 Orange County, 4, 6, 248 Orgel, Sandra, 194 Orozco, Jos Clemente, 1213, 31, 99; Prometheus, 31, 36

292

index

OSullivan, Timothy, 238 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 94 Outsider Art, 116, 147, 164 Outterbridge, John, 145 Owens Valley, 24142 Oxendine, Lloyd E., 16061 Packard, Emmy Lou, 32 Paine, Mitchell, 193 Paley, William S., 46 Palmer, Michael, 211 Paolozzi, Eduardo, 119 Paris, Harold, 36, 3839, 207, 237; Hosanna Suite, 3839; Soul on Telegraph Avenue, 110, 110; Walls for Mem, 39, 110 Park, David, 21, 121 Parks, Rosa, 87, 141 Parson-Keyes, Hattie, 202, 203 Pasadena Art Museum, and Peace Tower, 47 Paschke, Ed, 254n9 Passalacqua, Veronica, 159 Pataki, George E., 248 Patriot Act, 99 Pattern and Decoration movement, 200, 215 Pauline, Mark, 112, 117 Paz, Octavio, 180 peace, calls for, 44, 7779; hippies and, 10411; see also Peace Tower Peace Tower (di Suvero et al., Los Angeles), 8, 1415, 4647, 47, 48, 99, 156, 25960n70 Peale, Raphaelle: Deception, 119 Pearcy, Stephen, 248 Pearlstein, Philip, 46 Peoples Park (Berkeley), 15, 107, 109, 110, 191 Perez, Francisco, 23637; Casa Pueblo Project, El Bosque de Pueblo, 23637, 236; Dilema de mi Pas, 236; Rubble Sculpture Garden, 236 Perez, Irene, 172

performance art, 113, 19091; Asco and, 168, 187; by environmental artists, 228; feminist, 19097 Perkins, Anthony, 196 Perkoff, Stuart, 8 Petlin, Irving, 12, 15556, 259n70; Burning of Los Angeles, 15556, 156; Entry of Christ into Washington (after Ensor), 156; and Peace Tower, 14, 4647, 48; Q: And Babies? . . . , 46, 46 Pettibone, Raumond, 11112; Revolutionary Sex!, 112 Pham, Hanh Thi, 13941, 218; Along the Street of Knives, 141; Expatriate Consciousness, 140, 141; Lesbian Percepts, 141 Philadelphia, grafti in, 11617 Philippines, 74; see also Filipinos photography: documentary, 43, 68, 142, 238; environment and, 226, 23843; Native Americans and, 159 Piazzoni, Gottardo, 131 Picasso, Pablo, 1, 2930, 35, 80, 96, 200; artists inuenced by, 36, 51, 53, 67, 150; Baboon and Young, 262n33; Guernica, 46, 51 Piscator, Erwin, 196 Pittman, Lari, 17, 21415; This Wholesomeness, Beloved and Despised, Continues Regardless, 214, 215 Plagens, Peter, 254n7 Plaza de la Raza (Los Angeles), 13, 168 Poggioli, Renato, 5 Poindexter, John, 64, 264n24 Pol Pot, 60 Poland, art in, 26 Polanski, Roman, 241 Polke, Sigmar, 119 Pollock, Jackson, 31, 39, 47, 89, 96, 114, 161 Pomodoro, Arnaldo, 261n14

Pop Art, 8, 33, 43, 45, 53, 56, 67, 87, 150; consumerism and, 119; Funk vs., 91 Popova, Lyubov, 30 Port Huron Statement, 257n49 Posada, Jos Guadalupe, 45, 64, 183, 186 posters: for farmworkers, 169, 170; as political art form, 1112, 4346, 64, 66, 7172, 178, 261n13; psychedelic, 11, 1056 Pound, Ezra, 88 Presley, Elvis, 87 Primitivism in Twentieth Century Art: Afnity of the Tribal and the Modern (Museum of Modern Art), 160 prisons, 8185, 144; at Alcatraz, 158; women in, 196; see also Abu Ghraib Proby, Vince, 145 Proposition 187, 178 Proposition 209, 178 Public Works of Art Program (PWAP), 32 Puerto Rico, environmental art in, 23637 punk scene, 11112, 113 Purifoy, Noah, 145; Watts Riot, 145, 145 Quang Duc, Thich, 40, 41 Quaye, Dan, 68 Queer Cultural Center (San Francisco), 210 racism, 259n75; African American artists on, 14555; Japanese American internment and, 13035; Native American artists on, 159, 16165; white artists on, 15557 Rahmani, Aviva, 194 Rainer, Yvonne, 190 Ramos, Mel, 119

index

293

Ransom, John Crowe, 210 Rascn, Armando, 18082: Artifact with Three Declarations of Independence, 181; Border Metamorphosis: The Binational Mural Project, 182, 182; Naco Nocturno, 182 Rat Bastard Protective Society, 89, 91 Rattner, Abraham, 207 Rauschenberg, Robert, 99, 152, 215, 263n4 Raven, Arlene, 190, 218 Rayonists, 30 Reagan, Ronald, 4, 64, 65, 66, 9293, 107, 117, 120 Rector, James, 110, 110 Redon, Odilon, 38, 155 Reed, John, 10, 258n57 Refregier, Anton, 3233 Regionalists, 33 Rehbock, Loren: Peace, 44, 44 Reinhardt, Ad, 2, 8, 46, 62, 259n70 relocation camps. See internment camps Rembrandt, 67 Reno, Janet, 72, 78 Residents (band), 111, 117; Third Reich n Roll, 111 Resnais, Alain, 139 Rexroth, Kenneth, 4, 8, 32, 88, 123 Rhee, Syngman, 138 Rich, Adrienne, 80, 190, 259n75 Richer, Arthur, 10 Richter, Gerhard, 119, 243 Riddle, John, 145 right-wing politics, 45, 248; vs. gays, 209; see also McCarthy era Rigo (Ricardo Gouveia), 117, 144; Truth, 144 Riky, Sen no, 133 Rincon Annex (San Francisco) murals, 3233, 92 Rinder, Lawrence, 210, 265n10 Ringgold, Faith, 15152, 259n75;

American People Series, 152; Bitter Nest, Part 2: Harlem Renaissance, 152; Flag Is Bleeding, 151, 152; We Flew over the Bridge, 152; Whos Afraid of Aunt Jemima?, 14950 Rivera, Diego, 12, 31, 32; Man at the Crossroads, 32; Pan-American Unity, 32, 54 Rivers, Larry, 259n70; French Money, 120 Roberts, Miriam, 151 Robeson, Paul, 146, 148, 154 Rocha, Roberto de la, 168 rock concerts, 1045; punk, 11112 Rockefeller, Nelson, 46 Rockwell, Norman, 11 Rodia, Simon, 125, 149 Rodriguez, Patricia, 172 Rodrguez, Tino, 18, 21516; Elamante (The Lover), 216; Oneiric Song (The Darkening Garden), 216, 216; Sooo Sweet, 216 Roe v. Wade, 189 Romero, Frank, 168, 173, 18283; Back Seat Dodge, Homage to Kienholz, 183; Death of Ruben Salazar, 182, 183; Llorana, 18283 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 131 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 32, 73, 130 Rosenberg, Ethel, 7980, 98 Rosenberg, Harold, 190, 25657n44, 260n1 (Introduction) Rosenberg, Julius, 7980. 98 Rosenquist, James, 46, 259n70 Rosenthal, Bernard: American Family, 93 Rosenthal, Rachel, 17, 191, 19697; Amazonia, 196; Rachels Brain, 196; Replays, 196 Rosler, Martha, 54, 56, 68, 80, 190, 192; Photo-Op (Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful), 73, 73; Vacation Getaway (Bringing the

War Home: House Beautiful), 54, 55 Rosofsky, Seymour, 254n9 Roszak, Theodore, 224 Roth, Moira, 56, 61, 190 Roth, Philip, 100 Rothenberg, Erika, 64, 82, 83; God. Death Penalty/Amusement, 84, 84; Have You Attacked America Today?, 82 Rothenberg, Jerome, 192 Rothko, Mark, 259n70 Rouault, Georges, 38 Rowlandson, THomas, 205 Royal Chicano Air Force, 168, 169, 186 Rozsanova, Olga, 30 Rubens, Peter Paul, 199, 205 Rubin, Jerry, 5, 106 Rubins, Nancy, 12426; Chas Stainless Steel, Mark Thompsons Airplane Parts, about 1,000 Pounds of Stainless Steel Wire, and Gagosians Beverly Hills Space, 125, 126 Ruby, Jack, 94 Rumsfeld, Donald, 68, 73 Ruscha, Ed, 54, 119 Russian Revolution, art and, 3031, 92 Russolo, Luis, 190 Rutelli, Francesco, 79 Saar, Alison, 150, 153; Compton Nocturne, 150 Saar, Betye, 145, 14950, 153, 202 3; Blend, 203; Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 149, 149, 202; Record for Hattie, 2023, 203 Sacco-Vanzetti case, 81 Said, Edward, 160 Sakoguchi, Ben, 5657, 64, 137; How to Tell the Difference, 13435, 135; Napalm Brand, 56, 57, 74, 170 Salazar, Rubn, 16768, 182, 187

294

index

Salgado, Sebastio, 142, 238 Salk, Jonas, 246 Salle, David, 215 Salton Sea, 23940 Salvioni, Daniela, 259n72 Samis, Peter, 201 Sances, Jos, 98: Piss Helms, 98, 98; Roll On, 98 Sanchez, Francisco, 177 Sandler, Irving, 253n7 Sandoval, Humberto, 16 Sandperl, Ira, 101 San Francisco Bay Area, 1; anti Vietnam War protests in, 41, 41, 42, 43; Beats in, 23, 8891; environmental activism and art in, 226, 22829, 23031, 236; gay rights movement in, 7, 208, 209, 210, 256n36; murals in, 12, 3233, 172; punk scene in, 111; radicalism in, 34, 8, 32, 33; womens movement in, 189; see also Alcatraz Island occupation; free speech movement; Haight-Asbury; hippie counterculture San Francisco General Strike (1934), 3, 32, 33 San Francisco Mime Troupe, 104 San Francisco Public Library, 76 Sanger, Margaret, 189 Sanity in Art, 93 San Joaquin Valley, 1; see also Chicano labor movement San Jose, xii, 6 Sappho, 198 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 47 Stty, 11; Stone Garden, 11 Saul, Peter, 1819, 53, 115, 253n7, 254n9; Ice Box series, 121; Man in Electric Chair, 81; Ronald Reagan II, 120, 120; Saigon, 53, 53 Saunders, Raymond, 145, 152; Beauty in Darkness, 152, 153 Savage, John, 60

Save Our Children, 209 Save Our State, 248 Savio, Mario, 100101, 100, 102, 102 Sayre, Henry, 15, 191 Schapiro, Meyer, 8, 196, 253n1 Schapiro, Miriam, 16, 190, 196, 197, 199200, 205, 256n37; Dollhouse, 190, 199, 199; Shrines, 199; and Womanhouse, 15, 15, 190, 199 Schiele, Egon, 216 Schiller, Friedrich von, 78 Schimmel, Paul, 116 Schlesinger, Peter, 21314, 213 Scholder, Fritz, 161 Schulz, Bruno, 155 Schulze, Franz, 254n9 Schwartz, Stephen, 3 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 210 Screamers (band), 111 Seale, Bobby, 141, 143, 143, 147, 147, 266n22 Secunda, Arthur, 145 Segal, George, 259n70 Seitz, William, 125, 253n7, 265n69 Sekula, Allan, 3334, 6869, 154, 238; Against the Grain, 68; Dismal Science, 68; Fish Story, 68; Titanics Wake, 68; War without Bodies, 68, 69 Seldis, Henry, 36, 94 Seles, Monica, 76 September 11, 76, 98, 112, 118, 222 Serra, Junpero, 165, 178 Serrano, Andres: Piss Christ, 97 Sex Pistols (band), 111 Sexton, Charles, 217 Sexual Politics: Judy Chicagos Dinner Party in Feminist Art History (Armand Hammer Museum of Art), 19899 Shahn, Ben, 35, 99, 238 Shames, Stephen, 143; Indian Occupation of Alcatraz, 158, 158

Sheets, Millard, 33; Angels Flight, 33; Tenement Flats, 33 Sherk, Bonnie, 22829, 259n72; Crossroads Community (The Farm), 15, 22829, 228, 229; living libraries, 229; Public Lunch, 228; Sitting Still, 228 Sherwood, Richard, 94 Shimomura, Roger, 1617 shopping, 12324 Sierra Club, 22526 Silberstein, Stephen, 103 Sims, Lowery, 20 Sinclair, Upton, 32 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 13, 3132, 76, 93, 170, 172; Tropical America, 31, 175 Sisco, Elizabeth, 178 Siskind, Aaron, 116 Situationists, French, 111, 112 6 Gallery (San Francisco), 15, 88, 89 Six More (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), 119 Skulls (band), 111 Slash magazine, 112, 112 Smith, Bessie, 150 Smith, David, 8 Smith, Hassel, 32 Smith, Kate, 48 Smith, Roberta, 198 Smith, Winston, 111, 111 Smithson, Robert, 103, 224, 241, 270n30; Amarillo Ramp, 270n30; Spiral Jetty, 226 Snowden, Mary, 124; Buy, 124, 124; Levittown, 124; Refrigerator Chase, 124; Window Shopping, 124 Snyder, Gary, 8, 106, 257n55 Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), 14, 172, 249 Socialist Realism: American, 32, 33; Soviet, 31, 119 Society for Individual Rights (SIR), 209

index

295

Solnit, Rebecca, 25758n57, 261n9 Somerville, Travis, 15657; Boy in the Hood, 157; Everybody Needs a Mamma, 157; Only Begotten Son, 157; Raft of the Grand Wizard, 157, 157 Sonst, Alan: Time Landscape, 225 Sontag, Susan, 1, 47, 238, 253n1 Sorel, Georges, 30 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 100 Soviet Union, political art in, 3031 Soyer, Moses, 46 Soyer, Raphael, 46 Spanish Civil War, 33, 36, 50, 184 Spence, Kathryn, 120; Money Pile, 12021, 121 Spero, Nancy, 46, 64, 254n9 Spicer, Jack, 8, 210, 211, 212 Spohn, Clay: Fantastic War Machines, 18 Stalin, Joseph, 31, 43, 73, 92 Stanley, M. Louise, 18, 19, 2056, 259n81; Belly Dancer, 18; Judgement of Paris, 205, 205; Pygmaliana, 18, 19 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 189 Staprans, Raimonds, 121 Starr, Kevin, 4, 255n20 Stauffacher Solomon, Barbara, 242 43; Freeway to Paradise, 242, 243; Good Morning California, 242 Stein, Gertrude, 212 Steinbeck, John, 16566 Steinmetz, Phil, 18 Stella, Frank, 259n70, 263n4 Sterling, Bruce, 113 Sterne, Hedda, 46 Stettheimer, Florine, 215 Stevens, Wallace, 210 Stiles, Kristine, 111, 113, 114 Still, Clyfford, 53; Hedrick and, 89 Stockwell, Dennis, 196 Stone, Oliver: Heaven and Earth, 59 Stonewall riots, 7, 208, 209, 256n36

Stop the Draft Week, 41, 41, 42, 43 Storr, Robert, 120 Streshinsky, Ted, 1067, 110; Bring Our Men Home, 41, 41; Love-In, 107, 107; Peoples Park Riots . . . , 109, 110 Stuck, Franz von: Sin, 112 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 5, 257n49 Sugarman, George, 46, 200, 259n70 Sugimoto, Henry, 13132; When Can We Go Home?, 132, 132 Summer of Love, 107 Sunshine and Noir (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art), 113 Superman, 6768 Suprematists, 30 Surrealists, 88; Dondero on, 92; in New York, 33 Survival Research Laboratories (SRL), 11213, 117 Suzuki, Shunryu, 106, 243 Swig, Roselyne, 201 Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors (Mexico), 31 Talbert, Ben, 8; The Ace, 9 Taller de Arte Fronterizo, 177 Taller de Grca Popular, 146, 169 Tarshis, Jerome, 39 Tatlin, Vladimir, 3031 Taylor, Joshua C., 26 Teatro Campesino, 171 Tenney, Jack, 4 Teraoka, Masami, 22022; Adam and Eve series, 222; AIDS Series, 22122, 221; Geisha and Ghost Cat (AIDS Series), 22122, 221; Hanauma Bay series, 220; McDonalds Hamburgers Invading Japan, 220; Media Bacchanalia, 222; New Wave series, 222; Santa Monica Pier, 22021; US Inquisition series,

222; Venice Beach series, 220; Virtual Reality, 222 terrorism, war on, 6974; censorship and, 98100 Tet Offensive, 39 Theatre of the Absurd Thiebaud, Wayne, 54, 12122, 161 think again, 248 Thompson, Mark, 23738, 270n23; House Divided, 23738, 237; Immersion, 237 Thoreau, Henry David, 100 Tien, Chang-Lin, 103 Tillich, Paul, 202 Tillim, Sidney, 256n44 Tinguely, Jean: Homage to New York, 125, 190, 26768n75 Titian, 59 Tobey, Mark, 243 Tojo, Hideki, 135, 135 Tooley, Dina, 201 Toorop, Jan, 105 Torero, Mario: Laura Rodriguez, 174 Torres, Salvador Roberto, 16970; Viva La Raza, Long Live Humanity, 16970, 169 torture, 7273, 82; at Abu Ghraib, 7172 Total Information Awareness, 99 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 105 Traini, Francesco: Triumph of Death, 36 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 17576 Tres Grandes, Los, 1213, 31, 45; see also Orozco, Jos Clemente; Rivera, Diego; Siqueiros, David Alfaro Trilling, Lionel, 88 Trimble, Mike, 98 Trips Festival (San Francisco), 104 Trujillo, Carla, 218 Truman, Harry S., 61, 101 Truth, Sojourner, 146 Tsinhnahjinnie, Hulleah T., 159, 218

296

index

Tubman, Harriet, 146 Tucker, Marcia, 150 Turner, Richard, 140 Turrell, James, 235 Twain, Mark, 118, 243 Twelve Artists from the German Democratic Republic (BuschReisinger Museum), 26, 270n23 Twombly, Cy, 116, 215 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman, 232; Flow City, 232 Underwood, Consuelo Jimnez, 183 84; Revolutionary Banners, 183; Virgen de los Caminos, 18384, 184 United Farm Workers (UFW), 7, 141, 16568, 169; art for, 12, 168, 16971, 181 United Nations, 63, 78; Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 129 University Art Museum, Berkeley, 145, 261n14 University of California, 4; Berkeley, 5, 26, 41, 261n14, 267n73 (see also free speech movement; Peoples Park); loyalty oath at, 45, 33, 101, 255n20; vs. prison system, 85 University of Michigan, 5 Ut, Hyunh Cong, 57 Valdez, Patssi, 16, 16, 168, 204; The Glass (Self-Portrait), 204, 205 Valry, Paul, 90 Van Der Zee, James, 154 Van Doren, Mark, 88 van Gogh, Vincent, 59 Varda, Agns, 204 Veblen, Thorstein, 118 Velzquez, Diego, 54, 84, 174 Velde, Henry van de, 105 Vermeer, Jan, 67 Vienna Actionists, 74, 114 Vietnamese Americans, 6, 5861, 137, 140; see also Asian Americans; specic artists

Vietnam War, 1, 56, 3940, 57, 137, 141, 152; California artists response to, 2, 12, 19, 4061, 207, 24344 (see also Peace Tower); Chicanos vs., 7, 40, 167, 182; draft policy during, 256n34; protests against, 5, 7, 41, 41, 42, 43, 44, 261n14; refugees from, 6, 5861, 137, 140 Vige-Lebrun, lisabeth, 200 Vignes, Michelle, 106, 143; Alcatraz: The Son of Indian Indian Leader Richard Oakes, 158, 159; Allen Ginsberg at Be-In, 107; In Front of Alameda Courthouse, 143, 143 Villa, Carlos, 137; Asparagus, 17071, 170; First Coat, 136, 137 Villa, Pancho, 171 Virgil, 35 Virgin of Guadalupe, 168, 175, 183; in Lopezs triptych, 186; Valdez as, 204 Voulkos, Peter, 38, 96, 207, 237 Wade, Kat, 70; Mourning Mothers, 70, 71 Waitresses, The, 190 Walker, William: Wall of Respect, 254n9 Wallace, Mike, 46 Waller, Fats, 148 Wal-Mart, 118 Walt Disney Company, 67, 87 Warhol, Andy, 45, 54, 120, 204; Brillo Box, 247 Washington, George, 179 waste, 12427, 23233; nuclear, 241, 243 Watergate, 57, 58 Watkins, Carleton, 238, 243 Watts, Alan, 5, 96, 243 Watts riots, 67, 141, 144; Petlin on, 15556, 156; Purifoy on, 145 Watts Summer Festivals, 14445 Watts Towers, 125, 149

Watts Towers Art Center, 144, 145 Wayne, June, 94 weapons testing, 164, 240, 241; see also nuclear weapons, threat of Weber, John, 46 Weems, Carrie Mae, 15455; Africa, 154; Family Pictures and Stories, 154; Picture Revolution, 154; Sea Islands, 154; Untitled (Woman Standing Alone), 154, 155; Who What When, 154 Weimar Republic, 25, 31, 64 Weinberg, Jack, 101 Weirdos (band), 111 Weldon, Felix de, 48 Welles, Orson: Touch of Evil, 18182 Westcott, Glenway, 238 Westermann, H. C. 115, 254n9 Weston, Brett, 226, 238 Weston, Edward, 226, 238 Wheeler, Doug, 245 White, Charles, 14546, 148; Birmingham Totem, 146, 146; Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America, 146; JAccuse, 146; Mary McLeod Bethune, 14647 White, Dan, 9697, 209 Whitehead, Alfred North, 245 Whitman, Walt, 88, 110 Whitney Museum Annual (1971), women in, 190 Wilde, Oscar, 208 Wilding, Faith, 16, 17, 191, 193 94, 259n74; Waiting, 19394, 194 Wiley, William T., 125, 137, 162, 205, 24345, 269n109; Agent Orange series, 24344; City After Bosch, After Chernobyl, 244, 244; I Wish I Could Have Known Earlier . . . , 243; Nomad Is an Island, 243; Yum Yum Song, 24445 Williams, William Carlos, 88 Wilson, E. O., 246

index

297

Wilson, Lon: Students in Sproul Plaza Surrounding Police Car, 100, 101 Wilson, Pete, 180 Wilson, Wes, 11, 105; Are We Next?, 43, 43; Byrds, 105, 106 Wines, James, 223 Wirsum, Karl, 254n9 Wolfe, Tom, 104, 110 Wolfowitz, Paul, 73 Wolverton, Terry, 218 Womanhouse (Chicago, Schapiro, et al., Los Angeles), 15, 15, 190, 193, 194, 197, 199, 199, 256n37 Womans Building (Los Angeles), 190 Womanspace (Los Angeles), 190, 197, 218 Womens Caucus for Art, 189

womens issues, 7, 15, 188208; Chicanas and, 17172, 184; male artists on, 2078; rape and violence, 194 95, 204; see also feminism; feminist art; lesbians Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL), 152 Wonner, Paul, 121 Wood, Grant, 33 Woodman, Donald, 199 Woodstock, 107 Woolf, Virginia, 198 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 12, 32, 145 World Trade Center, 70, 112, 113 Wounded Knee, 160, 163 Wright, Richard, 146

Wright, Stanton MacDonald, 174 Wyeth, N. C., 11 Wylie, Lindsey, 222 X (band), 111 Xicano Ricorso (Museum of Modern Art), 181 Yucca Mountain Project, 241 Yunkers, Adja, 47 Zaballa, Victor Mario, 7677; Evil Empire, 77 Zajac, Jack, 259n70 Zakheim, Bernard, 32 Zapata, Emilio, 171 Zermeo, Andrew, 169; Huelga!, 169, 169

298

index

This book is published in conjunction with Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement, an exhibition organized by the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California. San Jose Museum of Art November 20, 2005March 5, 2006 Katzen Arts Center American University, Washington, D.C. April 9July 29, 2006 The exhibition Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement at the San Jose Museum of Art is made possible in part through the generous support of Mike and Yvonne Nevens, The Myra Reinhard Family Foundation, McManis Faulkner & Morgan LLP, and LEF Foundation. The exhibition of works of art from the San Jose Museum of Arts permanent collection is supported in part by Alan and Doris Burgess. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England San Jose Museum of Art San Jose, California 2006 by Peter Selz The author and publisher have made considerable effort to contact copyright holders and to secure permission prior to publication. Any copyright holder who remains unacknowledged may contact the publisher, who will correct the oversight at the earliest opportunity. The books epigraph is from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower. By William Carlos Williams, from Collected Poems 193962, Volume II, copyright 1954. Used with permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Selz, Peter Howard, 1919 Art of engagement : visual politics in California and beyond / Peter Selz ; with an essay by Susan Landauer. p. cm. Published in connection with an exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-24052-9 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 0-520-24053-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Art, AmericanCalifornia20th century. 2. Art and societyCaliforniaHistory 20th century. 3. Politics in art. 4. Social movements in art. I. Landauer, Susan. II. San Jose Museum of Art. III. Title. N6530.C2S45 2006 2005023950 Manufactured in Canada 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

SPONSORING EDITOR Deborah Kirshman | ASSISTANT ACQUISITIONS EDITOR Sigi Nacson PROJECT & DEVELOPMENTAL EDITOR Sue Heinemann | PERMISSIONS & IMAGE RESEARCH Lynn Meinhardt, Charlotte Robinson BIBLIOGRAPHY RESEARCH Heather Farkas | COPYEDITOR Jennifer Knox White | PRODUCTION COORDINATOR John Cronin DESIGNER Nicole Hayward | COMPOSITOR Integrated Composition Systems | PRINTER & BINDER Friesens TEXT 10/14 Minion | DISPLAY Interstate