Why did smithson chose the inaccessible, inhospitable utah location for spiral jetty?

Book info)Chapter 39 in The Humanities: Culture, Continuity, and Change by Sayre, H. M.

Chapter 39Multiplicity and Diversity

Cultures of Liberation and Identity in the 1960s and 1970s

By April 1963, the focus of the civil rights movement that had begun with Rosa Parks and the Little Rock Nine had shifted to Birmingham, Alabama (map 39.1). In protest over desegregation orders, the city had closed its parks and public golf courses. In retaliation, the black community called for a boycott of Birmingham stores. The city responded by halting the distribution of food normally given to the city’s needy families. In this progressively more heated atmosphere, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–68), decided Birmingham would be their battlefield.

Just a few months later, King would deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech to a crowd of more than 200,000 people from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. (fig. 39.1). But in the spring of 1963, King led groups of protesters, gathering first at local churches, who descended on the city’s downtown both to picket businesses that continued to maintain “separate but equal” practices, such as different fitting rooms for blacks and whites in clothing stores, and to take seats at “whites-only” lunch counters. The city’s police chief, Bull Connor, responded by threatening to arrest anyone marching on the downtown area. On April 6, 50 marchers were arrested. The next day, 600 marchers gathered, and police confronted them with clubs, attack dogs, and the fire department’s new water hoses, which, they bragged, could rip the bark off a tree. But day after day, the marchers kept coming, their ranks swelling. A local judge issued an injunction banning the marches, but on April 12, King led a march of 50 people in defiance of the injunction. Crowds gathered in anticipation of King’s arrest, and, in fact, he was quickly taken into custody and placed in solitary confinement in the Birmingham jail. From jail, King dispatched a letter to a group of local white clergy who had publicly criticized him for willfully breaking the law and promoting demonstrations. Published in June 1963 in The Christian Century, what came to be known as the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” became the key text in the civil rights movement, providing the philosophical framework for the massive civil disobedience that King believed was required (Reading 39.1): READING 39.1

from Martin Luther King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963)

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws … [but] there are two types of laws. There are just laws and there are unjust laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. … We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.

In the days between King’s incarceration and the letter’s publication, the situation in Birmingham had worsened. A local disc jockey urged the city’s African-American youth to attend a “big party” at Kelly Ingram Park, across from the 16th Street Baptist Church (see map 39.1). It was no secret that the “party” was to be a mass demonstration. At least 1,000 youths gathered, most of them teenagers but some as young as 7 or 8 years old. As the chant of “Freedom, freedom now!” rose from the crowd, the Birmingham police closed in with their dogs, ordering them to attack those who did not flee.

Police wagons and squad cars were quickly filled with arrested juveniles, and as the arrests continued, the police used school buses to transport over 600 children and teenagers to jail. By the next day, the entire nation—in fact, the entire world—had come to know Birmingham Police Chief Bull Connor, as televised images documented his dogs attacking children and his fire hoses literally washing them down the streets.

The youths returned, with reinforcements, over the next few days. By May 6, over 2,000 demonstrators were in jail, and police patrol cars were pummeled with rocks and bottles whenever they entered black neighborhoods. As the crisis mounted, secret negotiations between the city and the protestors resulted in change: Within 90 days, all lunch counters, restrooms, department-store fitting rooms, and drinking fountains would be open to all, black and white alike. The 2,000 people under arrest would be released.

It was a victory, but Birmingham remained uneasy. On Sunday, September 15, a dynamite bomb exploded in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church, a center for many civil rights rallies and meetings, killing four girls—one 11-year-old and three 14-year-olds. As news of the tragedy spread, riots and fires broke out throughout the city and two more teenagers were killed.

The tragedy drew many moderate whites into the civil rights movement. Popular culture had put them at the ready. In June 1963, the folk-rock trio Peter, Paul, and Mary released “Blowin’ in the Wind,” their version of the song that Bob Dylan (1941–) had written in April 1962. The Peter, Paul, and Mary record sold 300,000 copies in two weeks. At the March on Washington later that summer—an event organized by the same A. Philip Randolph who had conceived of a similar event over 20 years earlier, this time to promote passage of the Civil Rights Act—Peter, Paul, and Mary performed the song live before 250,000 people, the largest gathering of its kind to that point in the history of the United States. Not many minutes later, Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech to the same crowd. The trio’s album, In the Wind, released in October, quickly rose to number one in the charts. The winds of change were blowing across the country.

The civil rights movement that was ignited in Birmingham was just one manifestation of a growing dissatisfaction in America—and abroad—with the status quo, especially among a younger generation that had not experienced the hardships of the Great Depression and the horrors of World War II. African-American artist Faith Ringgold (1930–) captures something of the dynamics of this dissatisfaction in her 1964 painting God Bless America (fig. 39.2

).

Fig. 39.2

Faith Ringgold, GOD BLESS AMERICA

The blue-eyed white woman portrayed in the painting embodies the status quo of blind patriotism, hand over her heart as she hears the song composed by Irving Berlin (1888–1989) in 1918, and revised in 1938 as a rallying cry against the rise of Hitler’s Germany. But this same woman, the image implies, is also a racist, as on the right side of the painting the stripes of the flag are transformed into the black bars of a jail cell—and the star of the flag, by implication, into a sheriff’s badge. This is an image painted by a 34-year-old female artist challenging the world view of an older generation—and not without a sense of righteous indignation.

That challenge is the subject of this chapter. It manifested itself not only in the civil rights movement, but in the anti-Vietnam War movement and in the burgeoning feminist movement, and in student unrest both in the United States and abroad, and it found particularly powerful expression in popular music, epitomized by Bob Dylan’s 1964 anthem “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” It manifested itself in ways that, in retrospect, seem slightly ridiculous—in the way, for instance, that long hair, on young males especially, signified to their elders a rejection of traditional values. But it manifested itself in other ways that have had a profound impact on American culture ever since—in, for instance, the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion. This challenge to traditional values found a sympathetic audience in the arts, which, after all, had been challenging the authority of tradition since at least Picasso. But as never before, except perhaps in Berlin as Hitler rose to power (see Chapter 37), did the arts so overtly engage in social critique.

The 1960s—a decade whose spirit extended well into the 1970s, until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975—was an era with many centers. New York was the center of the art world; Birmingham of the civil rights movement; Berkeley, California, of the student movement. Women began to question their central role as homemakers. And while Washington, D.C., was the center of government, it was being torn apart, as marchers filled its streets in protest and an embattled president was forced to resign before he could be impeached. Without a well-defined center—geographic or otherwise—the nation seemed to many unmoored and adrift; “blowing in the wind.”

Black Identity

1. 39.1 What factors contributed to changes in African-American self-definition in the 1960s?

It is probably fair to say that an important factor contributing to the civil rights movement was the growing sense of ethnic identity among the African-American population. Its origins can be traced back to the Harlem Renaissance (see Chapter 36), but throughout the 1940s and 1950s, a growing sense of cultural self-awareness and self-definition was taking hold, even though African Americans did not share in the growing wealth and sense of well-being that marked postwar American culture.

Sartre’s “Black Orpheus”

One of the most important contributions to this development was existentialism, with its emphasis on the inevitability of human suffering and the necessity for the individual to act responsibly in the face of that predicament. Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1948 essay “Orphée Noir,” or “Black Orpheus,” was especially influential. The essay defined “blackness” as a mark of authenticity:

A Jew, a white among whites, can deny that he is a Jew, declaring himself a man among men. The black cannot deny that he is black nor claim for himself an abstract, colorless humanity: he is black. Thus he is driven to authenticity: insulted, enslaved, he raises himself up. He picks up the word “black” [“Négre”] that they had thrown at him like a stone, he asserts his blackness, facing the white man, with pride.

If, like the Jews, blacks had undergone a shattering diaspora, or dispersion, across the globe, traces of the original African roots were evident in everything from American blues and jazz to the African-derived religious and ritual practices of the Caribbean that survived as Vodou, Santería, and Condomblé. For Sartre, these were “Orphic” voices, which like the master musician and poet Orpheus of Greek legend, who descended into Hades to rescue his beloved Eurydice, had descended into the “black substratum” of their African heritage to discover an authentic—and revolutionary—voice. In works like The Siren of the Niger (fig. 39.3), Wifredo Lam (1902–82), a Cuban-born artist of African, Chinese, and European descent, evokes the Orphic voice of Africa, the fertile wellspring of inspiration and creativity.

Fig. 39.3

Wifredo Lam, THE SIREN OF THE NIGER

1950. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 51" × 38⅛". Signed LR in Oil: Wifredo Lam/1950. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972.

Lam arrived in Paris in 1938 with a letter of introduction to Picasso, who both befriended him and influenced his work.

Credit: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS. © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

Similarly, the black American writer James Baldwin (1924–87) would describe the power of the blues in his 1957 short story, “Sonny’s Blues.” Playing the jazz standard “Am I Blue,” the band “began to tell us what the blues were all about,” Baldwin writes:

They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.

Asserting Blackness in Art and Literature

Baldwin was, in fact, one of the most influential writers of his generation. Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Notes of a Native Son (1955), the first a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in Harlem and the second a collection of deeply personal essays on race, won him great praise. But probably more instrumental in introducing existentialist attitudes to an American audience was the novel Invisible Man, published in 1952 by Ralph Waldo Ellison (1913–84) and written over a period of about seven years in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In part, the novel is an ironic reversal of the famous trope of Ellison’s namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his book Nature (see Chapter 29): “I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all …” Ellison’s hero is invisible, rather than “nothing,” but he too sees all. He lives in a subterranean “hole” in a cellar at the edge of Harlem into which he has accidentally fallen in the riot that ends the novel (fig. 39.4). As “underground man,” his self-appointed task is to realize, in the narrative he is writing (the novel itself), the realities of black American life and experience. It is to take the responsibility, he realizes, to find words adequate to the history of the times. Throughout his life, his own people have been as invisible to him as he to them. He has opened his own eyes as he must now open others’. At the novel’s end, he is determined to come out of his “hole.”

1999–2000. Cibachrome transparency, aluminum light box, fluorescent bulbs, 75¼" × 106¼" × 10¼". Edition of two.

In his photographic re-creation of the setting of Ellison’s novel, Wall emphasizes, as does the novel, the 1,269 light bulbs in the room, all illegally connected to the electricity grid. “I love light,” Ellison writes; “perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But it is precisely because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form.” Wall recognizes in these words a definition of photography as well.

Credit: Marian Goodman Gallery/Jeff Wall Studio

One of Ellison’s narrator’s most vital realizations is that he must, above all else, assert his blackness instead of hiding from it. He must not allow himself to be absorbed into white society. “Must I strive toward colorlessness?” he asks.

But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. … Our fate is to become one, and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description.

There could be no better description of the collages of Romare Bearden (1911–88), who had worked for two decades in an almost entirely abstract vein, but who in the early 1960s began to tear images out of Ebony, Look, and Life magazines and assemble them into depictions of black experience. The Dove (fig. 39.5)—named for the white dove that is perched over the central door, a symbol of peace and harmony—combines forms of shifting scale and different orders of fragmentation. For example, a giant cigarette extends from the hand of the dandy, sporting a cap, at the right, and the giant fingers of a woman’s hand reach over the windowsill at the top left. The resulting effect is almost kaleidoscopic, an urban panorama of a conservatively dressed older generation and hipper, younger people gathered into a scene nearly bursting with energy—the “one, and yet many.” As Ellison wrote of Bearden’s art in 1968:

Bearden’s meaning is identical with his method. His combination of technique is in itself eloquent of the sharp breaks, leaps of consciousness, distortions, paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time and surreal blending of styles, values, hopes, and dreams which characterize much of [African] American history.

1964. Cut-and-pasted photoreproductions and papers, gouache, pencil and colored pencil on cardboard, 13⅜" × 18¾". Blanchette Rockefeller Fund. (377.1971). The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The white dog at the lower left appears to be stalking the black cat at the foot of the steps in the middle, in counterpoint to the dove above the door.

Credit: Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by Scala-Art Resource, NY. Art © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

The sense of a single black American identity, one containing the diversity of black culture within it that Bearden’s work embodies, is also found in the work of poet and playwright Amiri Baraka (1934–2014). Baraka changed his name from LeRoi Jones in 1968 after the assassination of the radical black Muslim minister Malcolm X in 1965. Malcolm X believed that blacks should separate themselves from whites in every conceivable way, that they should give up integration as a goal and create their own black nation. As opposed to Martin Luther King, who advocated nonviolent protest, Malcolm advocated violent action if necessary: “How are you going to be nonviolent in Mississippi,” he asked a Detroit audience in 1963, “as violent as you were in Korea? How can you justify being nonviolent in Mississippi and Alabama, when your churches are being bombed, and your little girls are being murdered? … If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad.”

Baraka’s chosen Muslim name, Imamu Amiri Baraka, refers to the divine blessing associated with Muslim holy men that can be transferred from a material object to a person, so that a pilgrim returning from Mecca is a carrier of baraka. Baraka’s 1969 poem, “Ka’Ba,” seeks to imbue baraka upon the people of Newark, New Jersey, where Baraka lived (Reading 39.2):

READING 39.2

Amiri Baraka, “Ka’Ba” (1969)

A closed window looks down on a dirty courtyard, and Black people call across or scream across or walk across defying physics in the stream of their will.

Our world is full of sound Our world is more lovely than anyone’s tho we suffer, and kill each other and sometimes fail to walk the air.

We are beautiful people 10With African imaginations full of masks and dances and swelling chants with African eyes, and noses, and arms tho we sprawl in gray chains in a place full of winters, when what we want is sun.

We have been captured, and we labor to make our getaway, into the ancient image; into a new

Correspondence with ourselves and our Black family. We need magic 20now we need the spells, to raise up return, destroy, and create. What will be

the sacred word?

The sacred word, the poem’s title suggests, is indeed “Ka’Ba.” But, despite the spiritual tone of this poem, Baraka became increasingly militant during the 1960s. In 1967, he produced two of his own plays protesting police brutality. A year later, in his play Home on the Range, his protagonist, Criminal, breaks into a white family’s home only to find them so immersed in television that he cannot communicate with them. The play was performed as a benefit for the leaders of the Black Panther Party, a black revolutionary political party founded in 1966 by Huey P. Newton (1942–89) and Bobby Seale (1936–) and dedicated to organizing support for a socialist revolution.

Other events, too, reflected the growing militancy of the African-American community. In August 1965, violent riots in the Watts district of South Central Los Angeles lasted for six days, leaving 34 dead, over 1,000 people injured, nearly 4,000 arrested, and hundreds of buildings destroyed. In July 1967, rioting broke out in both Newark and Detroit. In Newark, six days of rioting left 23 dead, over 700 injured, and close to 1,500 people arrested. In Detroit, five days of rioting resulted in 43 people dead, 1,189 injured, over 7,000 people arrested, and 2,509 stores looted or burned. Finally, it seemed to many that Martin Luther King’s pacifism had come back to haunt him when he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

It was directly out of this climate that the popular poetry/music/performance/dance phenomenon known as rap, or hip-hop, came into being. Shortly after the death of Martin Luther King, on Malcolm X’s birthday, May 19, 1968, David Nelson, Gylan Kain, and Abiodun Oyewole founded the group the Last Poets, named after a poem by South African poet Willie Kgositsile (1938–) in which he had claimed that it would soon be necessary to put poetry aside and take up guns in the looming revolution. “Therefore we are the last poets of the world,” Kgositsile concluded. In performance, the Last Poets were deeply influenced by the musical phrasings of Amiri Baraka’s poetry. They improvised individually, trading words and phrases back and forth like jazz musicians improvising on each other’s melodies, until their voices would come together in a rhythmic chant and the number would end. Most of all, they were political, attacking white racism, black bourgeois complacency, the government, and the police, whoever seemed to stand in the way of significant progress for African Americans. As Abiodun Oyewole put it, “We were angry, and we had something to say.”

Equally influential was performer Gil Scott-Heron, whose recorded poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” appeared on his 1970 album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (Reading 39.3):

READING 39.3

from Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (1970)

You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.1 You will not be able to lose yourself on skag2 and skip out for beer during commercials because The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox in 4 parts without commercial interruptions. … There will be no highlights on the Eleven O’clock News 10and no pictures of hairy armed women liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose. The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb or Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or Rare Earth. The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning or white people. You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, 20a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl. The revolution will not go better with coke. The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath. The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat. The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised, not be televised, be televised. The revolution will be no re-run, brothers; 30The revolution will be LIVE.

As the next section of this chapter underscores, as angry as Scott-Heron’s poem is, the poet’s attitude toward American popular culture, which he strongly condemns, is closely aligned with that of Pop artists of the 1960s as well (see Chapter 38). The Vietnam War: Rebellion and the Arts

1. 39.2 How did artists respond to the Vietnam War?

Even as the civil rights movement took hold, the Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union were increasingly exacerbated by the United States’ involvement in the war in Vietnam. By the mid-1960s, fighting between the North Vietnamese Communists led by Ho Chi Minh and the pro-Western and former French colony of South Vietnam (see Chapter 37) had led to a massive troop buildup of American forces in the region, fueled by a military draft that alienated many American youth—the population of 15- to 24-year-olds that over the course of the 1960s increased from 24.5 million to 36 million.

Across the country, the spirit of rebellion that fueled the civil rights movement took hold on college campuses and in the burgeoning antiwar community. Events at the University of California at Berkeley served to link, in the minds of many, the antiwar movement and the fight for civil rights. In 1964, the university administration tried to stop students from recruiting and raising funds on campus for two groups dedicated to ending racial discrimination. Protesting the administration’s restrictions, a group of students organized the Free Speech Movement, which initiated a series of rallies, sit-ins, and student strikes at Berkeley. The administration backed down, and the Berkeley students’ tactics were quickly adapted by groups in the antiwar movement, which focused on removing the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps from college campuses and helped to organize antiwar marches, teach-ins, and rallies across the country. By 1969, feelings reached a fever pitch, as over a half million protesters, adopting the tactics of the civil rights movement in 1963, marched on Washington.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

Antiwar sentiment was reflected in the arts in works primarily about earlier wars, World War II and Korea, as if it were impossible to deal directly with events in Southeast Asia, which could be seen each night on the evening news. Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 was widely read, and the Robert Altman (1925–2006) film M*A*S*H, a smash-hit satiric comedy about the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea, opened in 1970 and spawned an 11-year-long television series that premiered in 1972. But perhaps the most acclaimed antiwar work was the 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007). It is the oddly narrated story of ex-World War II GI Billy Pilgrim, a survivor, like Vonnegut himself, of the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden (where 135,000 German civilians were killed, more than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined). Pilgrim claims to have been abducted by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet of Trafalmadore. At the beginning of the book, the narrator (more or less, Vonnegut himself) is talking with a friend about the war novel he is about to write (Slaughterhouse-Five), when the friend’s wife interrupts (Reading 39.4):

READING 39.4

from Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

“You’ll pretend that you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by … John Wayne. … And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies. …” She didn’t want her babies or anyone else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

In response, Vonnegut creates, in Pilgrim, the most innocent of heroes, and subtitles his novel: The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. Pilgrim’s reaction to the death he sees everywhere—“So it goes”—became a mantra for the generation that came of age in the late 1960s. The novel’s fatalism mirrored the sense of pointlessness and arbitrariness that so many felt in the face of the Vietnam War.

Artists Against the War

In the minds of many, the Vietnam War was symptomatic of a more general cultural malaise for which the culture of consumption, the growing dominance of mass media, and the military-industrial complex were all responsible. Among many others, Pop artist James Rosenquist explicitly tied the American military to American consumer culture (see Closer Look).

The establishment itself, especially as embodied by university administrations and their boards of trustees, was often the target of protests. Just such a work was Pop artist Claes Oldenburg’s Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (fig. 39.6). The work was pulled into a central square at Yale University, Oldenburg’s alma mater, in the fall of 1969 to stand in front of a World War I monument inscribed with the words “In Memory of the Men of Yale who True to Her Traditions Gave Their Lives that Freedom Might Not Perish from the Earth.” In Oldenburg’s typically audacious way, the piece consists of a three-story-high inflatable lipstick tube mounted on tanklike caterpillar treads. At once a missile-shaped phallic symbol and a wry commentary on the fact that Yale had admitted women to the university for the first time that fall, it was commissioned by the university’s architecture graduate students as an antiwar demonstration. Yale authorities were not amused, and had the piece removed before convocation (though it was subsequently reinstalled on campus in 1974).

Fig. 39.6

Claes Oldenburg, LIPSTICK (ASCENDING) ON CATERPILLAR TRACKS

1969. Cor-Ten steel, steel, aluminum; coated with resin and painted with polyurethane enamel, 23'6" × 24'11" × 10'11". Collection of Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of Colossal Keepsake Corporation.

Initially made of a soft material that would slowly deflate until someone wishing to speak from the sculpture’s platform pumped it up with air to attract attention, the lipstick was constructed of more permanent materials when the piece was reinstalled in 1974.

Credit: Photo by Attilio Maranzano. © 2008 Oldenburg Van Bruggen Foundation, NY

By the fall of 1969, many other artists had organized in opposition to the war. In a speech at an opening hearing that led to the creation of the antiwar Art Workers’ Coalition, art critic and editor Gregory Battcock outlined how the art world was complicit in the war effort:

The trustees of the museums direct NBC and CBS, The New York Times, and the Associated Press, and that greatest cultural travesty of modern times—the Lincoln Center. They own AT&T, Ford, General Motors, the great multi-billion dollar foundations, Columbia University, Alcoa, Minnesota Mining, United Fruit, and AMK, besides sitting on the boards of each other’s museums. The implications of these facts are enormous. Do you realize that it is those art-loving, culturally committed trustees of the Metropolitan and the Modern museums who are waging the war in Vietnam?

In other words, the museums embodied, in the minds of many, the establishment politics that had led to the war in the first place. On October 15, 1969, the first Vietnam Moratorium Day, artists managed to close the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Jewish Museum, but the Metropolitan and the Guggenheim refused to close.

The Art Workers’ Coalition also quickly reacted to reports that American soldiers, the men of Charlie Company, had slaughtered men, women, and children in the Vietnam village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. Over a year later, in November 1969, as the army was investigating Charlie Company’s platoon leader, First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr., photographs taken at My Lai by army photographer Ron Haeberle appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Four days later, in an interview by Mike Wallace on CBS-TV, Paul Meadlo, who had been at My Lai, reported that Lt. Calley had rounded up 40 of 45 villagers and ordered them shot. “Men, women, and children?” Wallace asked. “Men, women, and children,” Meadlo answered. “And babies?” “And babies.” The transcript of the interview was published the next day in the New York Times, accompanied by the photograph. Quickly, the Art Workers’ Coalition added Wallace’s question and Meadlo’s response to the image (fig. 39.7), printed a poster, and distributed it around the world.

Fig. 39.7

Ron Haeberle, Peter Brandt, and the Art Workers’ Coalition, Q. AND BABIES? A. AND BABIES

Conceptual Art

Rather than attacking the museums directly, another strategy designed to undermine the art establishment emerged—making art that was objectless, art that was conceived as either uncollectable or unbuyable, either intangible, temporary, or existing beyond the reach of the museum and gallery system that artists in the antiwar movement believed was, at least in a de facto way, supporting the war. The strategies for creating this objectless art had already been developed by a number of artists who, reacting to the culture of consumption, had chosen to stop making works of art that could easily enter the marketplace. In the catalog for an exhibition entitled “January 5–31, 1969,” a show consisting, in fact, of its catalog but no objects, artist Douglas Huebler (1924–97) wrote: “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting: I do not wish to add any more.” In this way, he sidestepped both the museum and the individual collector. His Duration Piece #13, for instance, consists of one hundred $1 bills listed by serial number and put into circulation throughout the world, the serial numbers to be reprinted 25 years later in an art magazine. Each person holding one of the bills would receive a $1,000 reward.

In light of such works, critics began to speak of “the dematerialization of art” and “the death of painting,” even as California artist John Baldessari (1931–) destroyed 13 years’ worth of his paintings, cremating them at a mortuary. The following year, he created a lithograph with the single phrase “I will not make any more boring art” written over and over again across its surface.

Land Art

Closely related to both the Conceptualists and the Minimalists (see Chapter 38) are those artists who, in the 1960s, began to make site-specific art. (Such art defines itself in relation to the particular place for which it was conceived.) Many of these were earthworks, conceived as enormous mounds and excavations made in the remote regions of the American West. One of the primary motivations for making them was to escape the gallery system. In an essay published in 1972, Robert Smithson (1938–73) put it this way: “A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world. … Works of art seen in such spaces … are looked upon as so many inanimate invalids, waiting for critics to declare them curable or incurable. The function of the warden-curator is to separate art from society. Next comes integration. Once the work of art is totally neutralized, ineffective, abstracted, safe, and politically lobotomized it is ready to be consumed by society.”

Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty

One of the most famous of works designed specifically to escape the gallery system is Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (fig. 39.8), created in 1970. Using dump trucks to haul rocks and dirt, Smithson created a simple spiral form in the Great Salt Lake. The work is intentionally outside the gallery system, in the landscape—and a relatively inaccessible and inhospitable portion of the Utah landscape at that. Smithson chose the site, on the shores of the Great Salt Lake about 100 miles north of Salt Lake City and 15 miles south of the Golden Spike National Historic Monument, where the Eastern and Western railroads met in 1869, connecting both sides of the American continent by rail, because, in his mind, it was the very image of entropy, the condition of decreasing organization or deteriorating order. Here is a giant lake without outlet, a system coming to a stand still. For Smithson, the condition of entropy was not only the hallmark of the modern, but the eventual fate of all things—“an ironic joke of nature,” as one historian has described the lake, “water that is itself more desert than a desert.”

Fig. 39.8

Robert Smithson, SPIRAL JETTY

Great Salt Lake, Utah, April 1970. Black rock, salt crystals, earth, red water (algae). 3½' × 15' × 1,500'. Collection: DIA Center for the Arts, New York.

Smithson’s film of the Jetty’s construction mirrors the earthwork not only by imaging it, but, as a spiral loop of 16mm film, by formally mirroring its structure.

Credit: Gianfranco Gorgoni/DIA Center for the Arts, New York. Art © Holt-Smithson Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York

Smithson’s work on the jetty in fact coincided with the rise of ecology as a wider public issue. On April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day inaugurated the environmental movement, which could trace its roots back to the publication, in 1953, of Eugene P. Odum’s textbook The Fundamentals of Ecology but, more importantly, in terms of its wide popularity, to the 1962 publication of a book by Rachel Carson (1907–64), Silent Spring, first serialized in three issues of the New Yorker magazine. Carson was a marine biologist who had previously published a series of meditative books on the sea that serve as models of nature writing to this day. But Silent Spring was far more polemical, arguing that the introduction of synthetic pesticides, particularly DDT, into the environment threatened human life itself.

Smithson’s jetty was, as a result, widely understood as a work of environmental art. Humans had already degraded the site: Jetties had once stretched out into the lake to serve now-abandoned oil derricks. As Smithson wrote not long after completing the Spiral Jetty, “Across the country there are many mining areas, disused quarries, and polluted lakes and rivers. One