How Did the Netherlands Take Part of Vietnam Vietnam Art
Critic'south Selection
Vietnam, Through the Eyes of Artists
The war and its human cost had a profound touch on on artists addressing the turbulent times. The personal and political meet in a poignant show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
WASHINGTON — Whatever happened to "protest art" — outcome-specific, say-no-to-power-and-say-it-loud fine art? Here nosotros are, embroiled, every bit a nation, in what many in the art world regard as a pretty desperate political state of affairs. Yet with the exception for actions by a few collectives — Decolonize This Place at the Whitney Museum, and Prescription Addiction Intervention At present, or Hurting, at the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art — there's scant visual evidence of pushback.
Has the product glut demanded by endless fine art fairs distracted from the protestation impulse? Has the alluvion of news most turmoil in Washington put out the fires of resistance among artists? Has protest art only become unfashionable?
Such questions came to mind on a visit to "Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975," a big, inspiriting survey at the Smithsonian American Art Museum here. Everything in it dates from a time in the past when the nation was in danger of losing its soul, and American artists — some, anyway — were trying to salvage theirs by denouncing what they viewed as a racist state of war.
Of the '60s shows I've seen in the past few years, this one is the best, evocative of its fourth dimension, and in sync with the present.
And, importantly, it comes with a 2nd, smaller show that's far more a mere add together-on. Titled "Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past Is Prologue," it's a view of the Vietnam War era through Vietnamese eyes, the eyes of people on the receiving end of aggression. In the 1960s — before identity politics, before postcolonial studies — few museums would have idea to practise such a show, but it admittedly needed doing.
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The American involvement in Vietnam was an old and self-serving one, dating back to just after World War II, when the United states began using the Southeast Asian land, under French control since the 1880s, as a buffer, first against Nippon, then against global communism. It wasn't until 1965, though, when Lyndon Johnson sent gainsay troops s to Southeast Asia, that near Americans, and nigh American artists, tuned in.
There were some early responders and the exhibition, organized past Melissa Ho, a curator of 20th-century art at the museum, acknowledges them. In New York, Leon Golub was on the case, marching, arguing, painting boxing scenes in which flesh looks like ground meat. So was Wally Hedrick in San Francisco. A Korean State of war veteran turned Bay Area beatnik, as early as 1957 he began a series of all-blackness abstract paintings which he titled "Vietnam" and conceived, he said, to "mirror the American soul."
And at that place was the Japanese-born On Kawara, who had been in traumatized by the bombing of Hiroshima, and who, in 1966, by which time he lived in New York, would begin a clock-ticking series of paintings consisting entirely of agenda dates. His contribution to the prove predates that serial by a yr. In course, it's a triptych. In tone, it's a bass note. On one panel is the hand-lettered phrase "One Thing"; on a second, a date, "1965"; on the third, the discussion "Viet-Nam."
Paradigm
In the mid-1960s, coolness was hot, with Pop and Minimalism holding the phase. But every bit war consciousness grew, all kinds of defiant weirdness was warming upwardly in the wings. In 1966, Nancy Spero was turning out fleet gouache paintings of issues-shaped bombers, similar buzzing Goyas. Drawings of star-spangled phalluses by Judith Bernstein, and then an art student at Yale, could have been lifted from a men's room wall. And Peter Saul was painting outrage large. His 1967 "Saigon," a detonation of racist stereotypes, ruined bodies, and drawing snark, was a kind of weaponized, offend-everyone Surrealism.
As news images of the first "television state of war" scorched American civilisation, even artists who normally kept politics out of their work got into swing. Philip Guston, once an Abstract Expressionist, returned to the figure. For sheer comedic savagery, no artist alive tin match, his takedowns of Richard Nixon.
The Minimalist Dan Flavin used his principal medium, fluorescent lite, to create visual ambushes. And some other abstract sculptor, Carl Andre, produced ane of the show's most wrenching images. From a World State of war II medical manual on battlefield injury he clipped a minor, close-up photograph of a soldier whose lower confront has been blown away gunfire. And after isolating the pic on a sail of newspaper he penned a gut-punch of a caption: "It was no big deal, sir."
Hypnotically repellent, the picture prompts speculation as to the effect it might have had if enlarged to poster size and displayed at antiwar protests. Some of the bear witness's nigh memorable work was designed for exactly that purpose. Martha Rosler intended the colour photomontages in her now-archetype "Business firm Beautiful: Bringing the War Home" series to be photocopied in black-and-white and passed out at demonstrations.
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Perhaps the era's single almost famous case of artist-made agitprop was similarly conceived as a giveaway. This was the poster titled "Q. And babies? A. And babies" produced in 1970 by the Fine art Workers' Coalition. Its terrible image — an ground forces photo of slaughtered Vietnamese women and children lying dead in a ditch at My Lai — had been revealed to the American public just a year before. The Fine art Workers' Coalition gave their affiche a print run of 50,000 copies and distributed them fast, and costless, to feed revulsion against the state of war.
The Coalition never claimed that the poster as fine art. And in some of the show's nearly potent entries the line between aesthetics and politics was left strategically opaque. Such was the instance with performances, like the one staged by the Guerrilla Art Action committee in the lobby of the Museum of Mod Art in November 1969. After handful mimeographed fliers around the infinite, the artist-performers spattered themselves with cow blood, assaulted each other, and fell to the floor every bit if convulsed with pain.
Their purpose was tactical, to draw attention to what the fliers depict every bit "A Phone call for the Immediate Resignation of All the Rockefellers from the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art." The group accused the Rockefellers of "brutal interest in all spheres of the armed forces," including product of napalm. (Decolonize This Place is in the process of leading a series of similar protests against a electric current Whitney trustee, Warren B. Kanders, whose company, Safariland, articles tear gas.)
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Theatrical besides, merely in a very different way, was a 1971 operation by the Chicano commonage Asco. Their piece took the form of a the Christian passion play, with Jesus carrying a cross through the streets of a city, but with significant updates. The streets were in a hardscrabble Mexican-American neighborhood in Los Angeles. The cross was ultimately used to cake the entrance to a local U.s.a. Marine Corps recruiting station there, a gesture that pointed to the disproportionate numbers of blackness and Latino men being sent to Vietnam, to fight an "enemy" with whom they had, economically and socially, much in common.
The inclusion of Asco here is an indicator of the museum's try to revise the history of Vietnam War-era art — a history that, until recently, excluded artists who had been shut out from the mainstream art world at that fourth dimension. To this terminate, the show brings in a number of Latino figures, including Mel Casas, Rupert Garcia, Carlos Irizarry, Malaquias Montoya, Jesse Treviño, and several African-Americans, among them Benny Andrews, David Hammons and Faith Ringgold. And their presence moves the exhibition beyond a focus on a stand-alone peace movement and links it to much older ceremonious rights and anti-colonialist struggles.
All but left out of the pic, though, are Asian-Americans. (There are exactly 3: Yoko Ono, James Gong Fu Dong and Mr. Kawara.) And this makes the separate exhibition of document-intensive piece of work by the Vietnamese-born American artist Tiffany Chung crucial. Indeed, if Ms. Chung had presented simply one component of her complex prove, a set of video interviews with an older generation of Vietnam refugees to the United States, that would by itself accept been an invaluable contribution.
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Each interview encapsulates a lived narrative shaped by the effects of a state of war — in Vietnam referred to equally the American War — which killed millions of people and inalterably changed a culture. Some of the speakers are tense with acrimony; others half mute with grief. Fifty-fifty the most neutral narratives are laced with laments, resentments and regrets.
Hither y'all see the personal and political meet, which is extremely moving. You see the same coming together in the larger show, also. It's somewhat obscured by the public rhetoric and wait-at-me fashion that protest art often trades in, but information technology'due south in that location. Await again at Mr. Andre'due south image of unthinkable and preventable human damage, or Ms. Spero'southward spidery warplanes, rendered in strokes as distinctive every bit a signature; or a mural-size painting past Jesse Treviño.
Born in United mexican states in 1946, Mr. Treviño was a commercial portrait painter in New York when, in 1966, he was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Badly injured there, he lost his correct arm. Returning dwelling house, he had to retrain himself equally an artist. The painting in the show, begun in 1971 and titled "Mi Vida" — "My Life" — is a result.
It's a kind of time capsule self-portrait set in dreamtime. Cigarettes, pills and beer cans float in the dark. The face of a long-dead friend looms large, half obscured past the course of a prosthetic hand from which hangs a Majestic Heart. And in the distance is a ghostly figure of the creative person himself, young, dressed for combat, holding a gun, both arms intact.
The art of protest comes in many forms, and there's every reason for it today to keep coming.
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'Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, By Is Prologue'
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Ms. Chung, born in Vietnam in 1969, is an case of creative person-every bit-researcher, i who taps into many media — painting, weaving, video, photography, writing — in her investigatory tasks. For her solo show, organized by Sarah Newman, the museum's curator of contemporary art, she approaches the American war in Vietnam, which was also a ceremonious state of war, through the lens of family history.
Ms. Chung's begetter was a helicopter pilot in the S Vietnamese Air Force when he was taken prisoner in Due north Vietnam in 1971. He was held for 14 years. Later his 1984 release, he moved with the family to the United states of america. Apparently, he rarely spoke of his time in combat and captivity, and then his daughter tries to piece the story together herself, past assembling old photographs, painting locational maps and composing speculative accounts of her mother's emotional life, which inevitably colored her own.
The show's 2nd section deals with the refugee experience in video interviews with 21 Vietnamese men and women who arrived in the United States in the war'southward wake. Together they represent a history that has never become part of the American view of the conflict, and that is being forgotten, if not deliberately erased, in Vietnam itself. It'southward a history of in-betwixt-ness, of people, now elderly, who identify neither with the country they've come to, nor with the one they've left behind. Most feel driveling by both.
In the show's third and final department, the perspective goes global, and too points to the hereafter. A 12-human foot long embroidered world map covers a wall. Lines of stitched colored thread trace the paths of forced South Vietnamese migration beyond the world. A nearby display of documents from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva gives a sense of the archival ardor that has gone into Ms. Chung'south Vietnam project, while a set of small watercolors bespeak a way to insure that enquiry continues.
The watercolor images — of migrant camps, food lines, displaced families, crammed and capsizing boats — are paintings based on photographs taken in the 1970s and '80s, when the fallout from state of war was virtually crushing. They were created recently past young Vietnamese artists, deputed by Ms. Chung, in Ho Chi Minh City. Most had no knowledge at all of the past depicted. Now they practise.
Artists Respond: American Fine art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975 (through Aug. xviii)
Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past Is Prologue (through Sept. ii)
Smithsonian American Fine art Museum, Washington; 202-633-7970, americanart.si.edu.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/arts/design/vietnam-war-american-art-review-smithsonian.html
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