Exhibit features artists’ response to Vietnam
WASHINGTON — Kim Jones was back from active duty in Vietnam eight years when, on his 32nd birthday, he turned himself into, as he put it, "a walking sculpture that's 18 miles long."
He put on combat boots, pulled a nylon stocking over his face and donned a makeshift crown of foam rubber and aviary wire. He slathered his body in mud and strapped to his back a weird, latticelike construction of sticks tied with rope. He then walked westward along Wilshire Boulevard from downtown Los Angeles toward the Pacific Ocean. Toward Vietnam.
Before going to Vietnam, Jones had been an art student. After it ... what?
The cruel, unanswerable question of how art should respond to war is at the heart of "Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975," a must-see show running through Aug. 18 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It's an exhibition of miscellaneous work made
by a diverse group of artists during the peak years of a war that changed everything — including art.
It's the first time the Vietnam War has been addressed on this scale by any museum. Organized by Melissa Ho, it pulsates with anguish from first to last. And it reminds us that though Saigon fell more than 40 years ago, that anguish is still with us.
The shock of Vietnam made conventional art forms such as painting and sculpture look inadequate. Its reverberations inspired a rapid expansion of the possible forms art could take and a search for new audiences. Public performances, video, installations, land art and agitprop all flourished during the war.
Vietnam also opened up avant-garde art to previously neglected voices, including women, AfricanAmericans, Latinos and Asian-americans. There has been a long delay in recognizing this, and part of the triumph of "Artists Respond" is that it shows how many artists from marginalized groups gave their unique responses to the war urgent and potent expression.
African-american and Latino populations bore a disproportionate load under a draft system that was patently unfair. Black and Latino soldiers returned from Vietnam in the late 1960s and early '70s to a society still riven by discrimination. It's no surprise, then, that some of the most explicitly activist art of the period was made by AfricanAmericans and Latinos, including Faith Ringgold, David Hammons and Malaquias Montoya.
These artists didn't have to be told that the war was connected to the fight for civil rights. Hammons's "America the Beautiful" shows a black body and face draped in an American flag. He made the figure by pressing his greased body to paper, then sprinkling the paper with pigment. The resulting image haunts, its ghostliness keyed to the predicament of young black lives even under a banner of patriotism.
The final years of the Vietnam War — the early 1970s — coincided with feminism's second wave. Artists such as Carolee Schneemann (who died this month), Yayoi Kusama, Judy Chicago and Corita Kent rode and Martha Rosler, “Red Stripe Kitchen,” ca. 1967-72 shaped that wave, articulating powerful critiques of the patriarchal forces that create and feed off war.
A lot of antiwar performance art emphasized the vulnerability of the body. Yoko Ono's "Cut Piece" was staged five times between 1964 and 1966, including at New York's Carnegie Hall in 1965. Ono sat on a floor, a pair of scissors in front of her, and invited audience members to come forward one by one and cut off pieces of her clothing.
In a year that saw U.S. troop levels in Vietnam increased from 23,000 to 184,300, it was easy to read Ono's piece as a comment on the war. It was less a metaphor than a form of artas-psych-experiment: Given the license, how much will you cut off? And how long will you watch a situation that is getting more and more disturbing before you intervene?
The wider situation got more disturbing by the day, as bodies came home, and Americans watched it all on television. They saw monks setting themselves on fire and close-range executions. The propaganda and these images didn't match up.
Martha Rosler, who was trained as an abstract painter, turned to making photomontages that highlighted the contradictions. She jammed horrific images from Vietnam into magazine photos of affluent American house interiors, reminding people that, as a brochure accompanying one of her exhibitions put it, "the war is always home."
Artist Chris Burden responded to the anguish of seeing, as he said, "a lot of people being shot on TV every night, in Vietnam, guys my age" with a 1971 performance that has become notorious. He had a marksman aim a rifle at him and shoot him in the arm.
But the pressure to keep art and activism apart became close to unbearable for many of the most acclaimed practitioners of abstraction and minimalism.
Philip Guston had become famous for his "abstract impressionist" paintings in pinks and grays. But, he said, "I was feeling schizophrenic: the war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything — and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?"
In 1970, he switched from abstraction to a clunky kind of figurative painting, with legible, recurring forms (Ku Klux Klan hoods, shoes, bricks, cigarettes) and an overall vision that felt mired in crisis. Guston is represented here by a blistering caricature of President Richard Nixon.
All kinds of artists were trying to find forms to contain the war, to give it meaning. The source of their anguish was that they couldn't: There was no proportionate response. The disaster was too large; their art — art itself — too small.
"Paintings don't change wars," as the passionately political painter Leon Golub said in 1967. "They show feelings about wars."
Are feelings enough?
If you compare the art in "Artists Respond" to the magnitude of the war, it can seem paltry. That does not mean it wasn't poignant, courageous, estimable.