Artists Respond American Art and the Vietnam War 19651975
Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975
Curated past: Melissa Ho
Fig. 1. John Lennon and Yoko Ono, WAR IS OVER! IF You lot Desire IT, 1969. Commencement lithograph, thirty x twenty in. Courtesy of Yoko Ono Lennon
Exhibition schedule: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC: March xv –August eighteen, 2019; Minneapolis Plant of Art, MN: September 28, 2019–January 5, 2020
Exhibition catalogue: Melissa Ho, ed., Artists Answer: American Fine art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975, exh. cat., with essays by Melissa Ho, Thomas Crow, Erica Levin, Katherine Markoski, Mignon Nixon, and Martha Rosler and contributions by Robert Cozzolino, Joe Madura, Sarah Newman, and E. Carmen Ramos. Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum in association with Princeton Academy Printing, 2019. 416 pp.; 171 color illus.; 107 b/w illus. Fabric $65.00 (ISBN: 97806911911188)
As the title indicates, this outstanding exhibition curated by Melissa Ho for the Smithsonian American Art Museum focuses on the responses of private American artists in their real time to the armed conflict in Vietnam. Equally nosotros might imagine, these responses took the grade of outrage, indignation, horror, sadness, and grief—just also wit, as the show abundantly demonstrates (fig. 1). Numerous media are featured: painting, drawing, sculpture, graphics, photography, collage, an environmental installation, and video, operation, and conceptual works., executed in a multifariousness of styles, including traditional, modern, postmodern, and agitprop. While all this multifariousness might suggest a disorderly exhibition, a hodgepodge, or grab-all, it is instead splendidly disciplined and thoughtfully organized.
It is not a backward-looking exhibition. It panders neither to infant boomer nostalgia nor the yearning of millennials for a useable past to be establish in the antiwar generation of their parents or grandparents. No lava lamps on display, no sound mixes of Janis, Jim, Jimi, and Bob, and no heavy-handed connections spelled out between those tumultuous times and our ain. The connections are at that place, certainly, but the viewer is not steered into making them.
This is serious concern, even when clever, witty, and fun. Take, for example, the 1968 Minimalist steel sculpture by Barnett Newman, Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley. Newman, the famed first-generation Abstract Expressionist and Colour Field painter, was not known for his occasional forays into sculpture, and certainly not for his sense of sense of humor. Even so, this 6-pes-high steel bedframe encasing a grid of galvanized barbed wire—seven vertical strands crossed laterally by eleven shorter ones—impishly conjures up the barbed-wire barriers affixed to the front end of army jeeps for crowd control during the 1968 Chicago riots. But that is not its but level of sense of humour. As Robert Cozzolino points out, the championship of the work jeeringly alludes to the parvenu pretentions of formerly working grade ("lace-curtain Irish") Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley.1 The steel construct also mocks, more gently, the relatively apolitical aspirations of Minimalist sculpture and the Procrustean confinements of the modernist grid.
Fig. 2. Martha Rosler, Red Stripe Kitchen, from the series Business firm Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, c. 1967–72. Photomontage, 24 x 20 in. The Art Institute of Chicago, through prior gift of Adeline Yates; exhibition re-create provided by Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
Less conceptual and abstract than Newman's spinous-wire bedframe and more firsthand in its punch is Martha Rosler'south House Cute: Bringing the War Domicile (1967–72), a portfolio of framed photomontages that bristles with aggressive black humor. Rosler cutting pages from mass-media publications, most notably the piece of furniture and decor magazine Firm Cute, and collaged onto them photojournalistic images of the war or other contemporary sites of violence. Red Stripe Kitchen (fig. ii), for example, introduces 2 American gainsay soldiers into a staged, up-to-the-minute consumer paradise with white walls, white counters, wicker-topped stools, matching red cups, bowls, and plates, and, on the far wall, a swooshing red stripe. Wrenched from their original context, the soldiers stoop over equally if searching for booby traps in a Vietnamese hut; but hither, it is a pristine American kitchen.
Another in the series, Balloons, so called because of the multicolored rubber balls artfully piled upwards in the corner of a stylish, two-story American living room, inserts into the foreground a Vietnamese mother carrying a bloodied baby in her arms. The viewer experiences sickening cerebral dissonance: the moral distance betwixt the opulent setting of the photomontage and its grief-stricken protagonist is appalling. Nevertheless the juxtaposition is likewise mordantly satiric in its cruel, Swiftian incongruity. Milder, simply likewise drawing on satire, is Commencement Lady (Pat Nixon), which shows the golden-gowned and golden-haired presidential bays wife posed formally at the mantelpiece of a golden-papered and aureate-upholstered salon in the White House. Above the mantelpiece appears a golden picture frame that would take independent an oval oil painting, probably a portrait. Rosler has replaced any was actually there with a blackness-and-white particular from the brutal finale of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), in which the championship character played past Faye Dunaway is machine-gunned to death in a police deadfall.
Fig. 3, Yayoi Kusama, Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street, 1968. Performance photo; exhibition re-create, fourteen x xi in. Courtesy of Yayoi Kusama Inc.
A sort of Merry Prankersterish, Abby Hoffmanish, Yippie sense of humor informs two 1968 Happenings past Yayoi Kusama, known collectively as Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street. Kusama, a Japanese-born painter turned functioning artist, enlisted four dancers—2 men and two women—to strip naked on Wall Street and frolic with Dionysian gyrations at the base of operations of the iconic statue of George Washington on the steps of Federal Hall. In a photograph documenting the encounter (fig. 3), the hero of the American Revolution, who was once an inspiration to revolutionaries around the world, including Ho Chi Minh, appears to be pushing abroad the unruliness below. He looks disgusted, repulsed by the pesky, muddied, naked bacchanalians undulating at his feet. The punning title, collapsing "An Diminutive" into "Anatomic," alludes to the destabilization of the establishment by the then-chosen youthquake of the antiwar movement. In the mise-en-scène of the photograph, with its skewed angles and two-tiered layout, the joyous immature dancers, unfettered by clothing, undermine the stern and stodgy general. Samson-like, they seem set to topple him and the Temple of Mammon over which he presides.
To exist certain, dancing naked in the streets did not truly threaten the military-industrial complex symbolized here by the conjunction of Washington and Wall Street. Just nor were politically motivated Happenings such as these simply frivolous fantasies of anti-government power by those who in reality had none. Instead, they might be thought of as morale-boosters and customs-builders for the antiwar campaign, much the aforementioned equally "We Shall Overcome" and other so-called Freedom Songs instilled strength and backbone in Civil Rights activists during their darkest hours. Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street figuratively put flesh on the familiar slogan "Make Love, Not War" and, in doing so, provided the antiwar base with a utopian glimpse of a repression-complimentary future. Its goal was to create for its partisans a sort of psychic, rather than concrete, nuclear fission.
Philip Guston, the distinguished Abstruse Expressionist painter, jeopardized his critical reputation when he renounced cool, discrete, formalist abstraction for hot, cartoonish, intentionally vulgar antiwar satires that included a serial of caustic caricatures of Richard Nixon. He just could not encounter any other way of being both an artist and an activist—an artist who patriotically served the republic by standing up confronting the War machine that perverted its principles. He asked himself, with self-deprecating humor, "What kind of man am I, sitting at home reading magazines [most the war], going into a frustrated fury about everything—and and so going into my studio to adapt a scarlet to a blue?"2
One concluding example of the multiple senses of sense of humor then liberally displayed in Artists Respond is a reinstallation of Hans Haacke'southward News (1969), originally mounted at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1970 (fig. four). In the nowadays exhibition, resting on a table is an erstwhile-fashioned dot matrix printer that noisily and endlessly prints out rolls of real-fourth dimension feeds from an actual wire service, daily news in 2019. Teletype newspaper blackened with ink spews out of the printer onto the gallery floor in crazy coils and random loops. These Mobius Strips accrue into a mountain—or deject—of data run amok. Placed centrally in the concluding suite of the exhibition, the installation is impossible to tune out, regardless of what other work you might exist trying to contemplate. Its visual clutter and aural clatter are unavoidable, like news itself in the modern earth. Insistently enervating our attention, information technology seems to exert a will of its own.
Fig. 4. Hans Haacke, News, 1969, reconstructed 2019. Newsfeed, printer, and paper, dimensions variable. San Francisco Museum of Modern Fine art, Purchase through gifts of Helen Crocker Russell, the Crocker Family, and bearding donors, by substitution, and the Accessions Commission Fund
In Goethe'due south 1797 poem "The Sorcerer'due south Apprentice," which was gear up to orchestral music in the tardily nineteenth century and given the Disney handling in Fantasia (1940), the assistant to an absent magician tries to save time in his chores past commanding a broom to fetch pails of water for him. The broom speeds upwards the activity past subdividing into a proliferating army of smaller brooms, which also fetch water and empty information technology on the flooring, flooding the chamber considering the apprentice has no idea how to cease the monster he has created. Haacke's News is a realization of Goethe's cautionary tale near the perils of mechanization gone rogue. It updates Fantasia for a wartime society in which knowledge may be a class of power, but besides much knowledge incurs distraction, and therefore powerlessness.
1 of the nigh satisfying elements of Artists Respond is its ethnic, racial, and gender inclusivity. It features art by numerous well-known and bottom-known African American, Asian, and Latinx artists, many of whom are female. Among these female artists, in addition to Rosler and Kusama, are Judith Bernstein, Rosemarie Castoro, Judy Chicago, Corita Kent, Yoko Ono, Liliana Porter, Yvonne Rainer, Faith Ringgold, Carolee Schneeman, Nancy Spero, May Stevens, and Carol Summers.
In manifesting such a capacious diversity of artistic responses to the Vietnam War, the exhibition makes an of import point for art-historical revisionism. A scattering of canonical modernists, Minimalists, and postmodernists are represented in the exhibition: Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Guston, Donald Judd, Newman, Advertisement Reinhardt, Robert Smithson, and Marker di Suvero, among others. Only the bulk of artists included were far removed from canonical status in the belatedly 1960s and early 1970s. The war, as much every bit annihilation, perforated the catechism, opening it up for types of fine art and artists that heretofore would not have been given serious consideration by the leading authorities of the art world.
In this regard, some of the art in the exhibition attacked carve up, still overlapping, establishments. I of these was the political realm of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Wall Street warmongers, and the arms industry. The other was the artful realm of Greenbergian fine art formalists and politics-shunning abstractionists who at the time dominated fine art journals, art magazines, art schools, and art museums. These two establishments coincided most visibly in the instance of four-term Republican governor Rockefeller, a Nixon supporter who also served every bit a trustee of the Museum of Mod Fine art (MoMA). The governor's oil-rich mother, with a couple of her wealthy friends, had founded the museum in 1929.
Four decades after that founding, the Guerilla Art Action committee staged an unauthorized Happening in the lobby of MoMA that became known as Bloodbath (1969). Four performance artists strapped to bags of fresh beef claret flung into the air hundreds of copies of a statement headed "A Phone call for the Immediate Resignation of All the Rockefellers from the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modernistic Fine art." They and then pretended to attack one another, unleashing the pseudo bloodbath while crying murder and rape. The whole action lasted no more than five minutes. The argument they scattered indicted the Rockefellers for, among other things, the "use of art as a disguise, a cover for their savage involvement in all spheres of the military machine." Given the contempo and ongoing protests against "dirty" trustees and donors of major fine art museums, Bloodbath seems painfully prescient.
Artists Respond is a remarkably polyvocal exhibition, to exist applauded for its variety, although a company might wonder how politically and aesthetically conservative artists of those years also responded to the war. A more than accurate title for the prove might exist Artists Protestation, since principled resistance to the war is the single, unifying mode of response put forward. Similarly, 1 would like to know how Vietnamese artists portrayed the war from their perspective during those aforementioned years, simply this was clearly not within the purview of the exhibition and should not exist seen every bit an omission. Indeed, SAAM has thoughtfully paired Artists Respond with a much smaller exhibition of piece of work past the contemporary Vietnamese American mixed-media artist Tiffany Chung that retrospectively examines the war and its legacy from the perspective of its Vietnamese survivors.
In her illuminating introduction to the catalogue, Melissa Ho explains why the exhibition provides no examples of pro-war art: "That no art in the exhibition expresses full-throated support for the U.South. state of war attempt both reflects the widespread unpopularity of the disharmonize in the belatedly 1960s and confirms the inclination of modern artists to place with progressive or utopian projects."iii This is undoubtedly true, only however, the national museums of the various war machine services maintain respectable fine art collections that are open to the public for viewing and study. Future historians of the Vietnam era might do well to explore the fine art that a vast number of Americans plant conducive to their understanding of the geopolitical conflict, even if—particularly if—it led them toward imitation and dangerous conclusions.
Only that sort of comparative study of opposing American political and artful cultures is not the purpose of this exhibition. The goal of Artists Reply is to demonstrate the unrelenting courage of activist artists to fight for the hearts and minds of their boyfriend citizens during a menstruum of extreme ideological fracture, and in this it has handsomely succeeded.
Cite this article: David Thou. Lubin, review of Artists Answer: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art v, no. 1 (Leap 2019), https://doi.org/x.24926/24716839.1712.
PDF: Lubin, review of Artists Respond
Notes
About the Writer(s): David One thousand. Lubin is the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University
Source: https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/artists-respond/
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