CHAPTER TWELVE

Set the Night on Fire

The Watts Riots forever changed the world’s irresistible dreamy view of Los Angeles. Instead of celebrity and weather reports, television sets were tuned to its black citizens being dragged and beaten by uniformed white policemen while buildings went up in flames to chants of “Burn, baby, burn!” For a searing, smoggy week, from August 11 to 17, 1965, Los Angeles was stripped of her customary disinterest in political engagement. Coincidently, the artist who had spent most of his life constructing the ceramic-encrusted towers in Watts, “Simon” Rodia, had died that summer in San Francisco, having given his spectacular creations to his neighbor and then leaving with no forwarding address.

The riots resulted in $40 million of damage to property in the Watts area, but the towers were untouched. They had become home to an art center founded by African American assemblage artist Noah Purifoy with teacher Sue Welsh and musician Judson Powell. (Purifoy, a Chouinard graduate, scavenged the detritus of the riot with others to make assemblage sculptures that went on tour the following year as 66 Signs of Neon.)

Though sparked by the arrest of a black drunk driver, Marquette Frye, by white LAPD officer Lee Minikus, who insisted on impounding the car rather than letting the driver’s brother take it home, the racial and class tension that fueled the riot had been accumulating for years. In the 1940s and ’50s, the area around southeast and central Los Angeles had been home to a thriving community of African Americans, with jazz clubs, hotels, restaurants, and churches. Unemployment and poverty rose dramatically as white veterans returned from World War II and were given any available jobs. After two decades, addiction and alcoholism had contributed to the general neglect. Residents of Watts, like blacks all across the country, had been listening to Martin Luther King Jr. and reading about the marches in Selma, Alabama, and the rise of the civil rights movement. The previous year, Proposition 14, backed by the California Real Estate Association, repealed the state’s Rumford Fair Housing Act, which had prohibited discrimination by landlords who refused to rent to blacks, Latinos, and others. This further inflamed the sense of injustice felt by the community.

Furthermore, L.A. police chief William Parker was perceived as biased against blacks, a feeling not lessened by his characterization of the rioters as monkeys in a zoo. His justification of the use of extreme force, along with the deployment of National Guard troops, was met with anger and exasperation.

Opinion throughout the city was polarized, but artists were on the side of the black community. Dennis Hopper powered his Corvair convertible, with the top down, through the flames and smoke to take photographs. Rudi Gernreich staged a fashion shoot with his models posing in front of the Watts Towers to draw attention to their surreal beauty. Ed Bereal, the African American artist included in the 1961 War Babies show, had just returned to Los Angeles after three years in San Francisco. Dwan had put him on retainer for a show at her gallery. All that changed when he opened his door on August 14, 1965, at nine in the morning and found himself surrounded by nine National Guardsmen with guns. He was not harmed, but he was scared. Speculating on what might have happened if any of them had pulled the trigger, Bereal wrote, “My current series of sculptures is suddenly questionable. If I could put all the articles written about my work between me and that bullet … none of it would have stopped that bullet!”1 A traumatized Bereal stopped making sculptures in order to pursue performance art and drama to better express his increasingly politicized outlook.

Up until the midsixties, the contemporary art scene in Los Angeles, as elsewhere, was largely the realm of white men. A handful of African American artists struggled to find places to show apart from the Watts Towers summer arts festival. In 1967, Alonzo and Dale Davis opened Brockman Gallery for African American artists, and two years later, Suzanne Jackson opened Gallery 32 in her apartment in the Granada Building near MacArthur Park. David Hammons, Betye Saar, Melvin Edwards, and John Outterbridge were among those who started to get attention.

Female artists were being taken more seriously, but not at Ferus, where the previous year’s group show was unapologetically titled Studs. The gallery was, as Price put it, “the all kings stable.”2 Bengston and others jeered at aspiring female artists but, in truth, other galleries were not much better.

Shirley Hopps said, “I think a lot of that role-playing and machoness and complimenting each other came from the fact that what they were doing was so far-out, not working from the past, just working from themselves and avoiding confrontation with nothingness. There was competitiveness but mostly loneliness and fear.”3

Nonetheless, it was a square-jawed woman of twenty-seven named Vija Celmins who addressed the riots most directly in her black-and-white painting Time Magazine Cover, which reproduced the magazine’s headline and photographs of fire, an overturned car, and black men running in the street. A war refugee from Latvia whose family had immigrated to the United States in 1948, Celmins understood fighting in the streets quite a bit more than the average student at UCLA, where she had just graduated with a master’s degree. She had been raised in Indiana where, unable to speak English at first, she had taken refuge in her extraordinary drawing skills. After graduating from the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, she had earned a grant to enroll at UCLA in 1962, the same year that Hopps organized the first Pop art exhibition. Her precise drawings and paintings of utilitarian objects, such as toasters and fans in tones of gray, black, and white, got her roped into the beginning Pop art movement, though her concerns were considerably more mordant. She copied photographs from books to make detailed drawings and paintings of World War II–era airplanes, zeppelins, and war disasters, both revisiting her past and eliciting admiration from even the most hardened of her male colleagues, who were her neighbors in Venice. She broke through the barrier against women to show with the David Stuart Gallery in 1966.

Vija Celmins, Time Magazine Cover, 1965

Collection of Hauser and Wirth

The politicization of students and young people around the world was gaining velocity. Protests against the Vietnam War were taking place around the country. That April, fifteen thousand students marched on Washington, D.C. The Artists Protest Committee was formed by painters Irving Petlin and Arnold Mesches, both then living in Los Angeles. Petlin, a visiting artist at UCLA, completed a vast canvas called The Burning of Los Angeles; his figurative and abstract paintings were shown in 1966 at the Rolf Nelson Gallery. A few years earlier, he had lived in Paris during the Algerian War of Independence and observed the repression of demonstrations in France. He saw similar government crackdowns against the Vietnam War protests. Though he initially believed Los Angeles artists to be apolitical, he decided to try and mobilize them. Petlin, who had shared an apartment in Paris with Kauffman, said to Mesches, “Let’s do an experiment. Let’s call Craig Kauffman, who was the most non-political person I could think of in Los Angeles, and let’s call Ed Kienholz, and see how they feel about some form of coordinated political activism.”4 To his surprise, Kauffman answered, “Yeah, I would be interested in joining that.” Stunned, he then called Kienholz, who said, “You guys are letting our troops down.” Petlin thought, “It’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen here.… Let’s call a meeting and see.”5

The meeting at Dwan Gallery attracted Hopps, Coplans, Leider, and dozens of willing artists. The group decided to protest the RAND Corporation, perceived to be a liberal think tank but one that was advocating protected zones for Vietnamese civilians to allow greater free fire in other areas of the country. The group contrived a debate with RAND officials that attracted an overflow crowd of eight hundred to the Warner Theater. After this action was ignored by the press, Petlin called antiwar activist and sculptor Mark di Suvero to build a “Peace Tower” on a rented vacant lot on the corner of Sunset and North La Cienega boulevards.

Di Suvero had been in a wheelchair since 1960 after he was crushed brutally in an elevator accident. He had determinedly pursued rehabilitation and just as determinedly pursued sculpture on a massive scale. He designed a sixty-foot-tall pile of polyhedrons, a yellow and purple armature that was erected with the help of Melvin Edwards, Lloyd Hamrol, and Judy Gerowitz, as well as a few of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. Inspired by the spindly height of Watts Towers, it was di Suvero’s first sculpture of architectural scale and it transformed his subsequent work. His huge sculptures made of timbers were being shown at Dwan Gallery, though he did not feel accepted by the Los Angeles artists who were perfecting pristine surfaces. “They used to put me down saying, ‘Oh, you’re A/E, meaning Abstract Expressionist,” he said later. “They didn’t believe in this grungy work I was doing.”6

The tower supported 418 individual paintings of protest, each measuring two feet square, that were donated by artists from all over the world: Rauschenberg, Stella, Reinhardt, Lichtenstein, and others from New York, as well as countless Los Angeles artists. After three months, the works of art were auctioned and the proceeds were used to subsidize continued protests against the war.

A chain-link fence was erected around the tower to keep out vandals and bore a sign declaring “Artists Protest Vietnam War.” Petlin and other artists were attacked by conservatives and outraged members of the military. African American supporters from Watts volunteered to stand guard. When Petlin had to defend himself and the tower with nothing more than the broken end of a lightbulb, Stella sent him a check for $1,000 with a note saying, “Anybody who puts their life on the line defending a work of art of mine, I’m going to send a thousand bucks to.”7

Di Suvero, despite his disability, was harassed and beaten by police. To get rid of the tower, city officials claimed it was structurally unsound. To prove them wrong, the artists suspended a Buick from the armature. When there was no buckling or leaning, city officials had to relent. (The city’s Department of Building and Safety was defeated previously by Watts Towers when, in 1959, they proposed to demolish it as unsafe. Supporters demanded a stress test and found that a crane applying ten thousand pounds of pressure could not budge any part of Rodia’s creation. The Watts Towers remained.)

The Peace Tower grabbed attention from the press, but the Los Angeles Times and other papers and television stations were editorially conservative, and nearly all of the coverage was negative. On February 26, 1966, the day of a massive protest at the tower, Petlin received a telegram of support from Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, André Breton, Michel Leiris, André Masson, Matta, and other artists and intellectuals. Ironically, the Los Angeles war protest took place four years before an equivalent action in the theoretically more politicized art community in New York, where the Art Workers Coalition was formed in 1969.

Adding to the hyperventilated atmosphere of the city, a couple of weeks earlier, on the symbolic date of Lincoln’s birthday, 1966, author Ken Kesey’s friend Ken Babbs had organized an “acid test” to bring love and tolerance to the Merry Pranksters’ African American brothers and sisters in Watts. To bring LSD-fueled enlightenment to the multitudes, the Pranksters rented a vacant Youth Opportunity Center warehouse in Compton. They projected films of their travel adventures on Further, Kesey’s bus, while the Grateful Dead played fitfully. Two plastic trash barrels filled with Kool-Aid were brought out: one labeled for “children,” the other for “adults.” No one bothered to explain that “adults” meant Kool-Aid heavily laced with LSD. Prankster Lee Quarnstrom wrote later, “Owsley [Stanley] had a couple of glass ampules with pure LSD in them and he poured it into the Kool-Aid. We did some quick mathematics and figured that one Dixie cup full of Kool-Aid equaled fifty micrograms of acid. The standard dose, if you wanted to get high, was 300 mics. So we told everyone that six cups would equal a standard trip. After a couple of cups, when I was as high as I had ever been, somebody recomputed and realized that each cup held 300 micrograms. I remember hearing that and realized that I had just gulped down 2,000 micrograms. The rest of the evening was as weird as you might expect.”8

The event had been promoted on the alternative FM radio station KPFK and in the L.A. Free Press, and some two hundred people wound up having their perceptions altered, whether they liked it or not, from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m. In the early morning, the working neighbors of Watts woke up and dropped by to check out the crazy party where people with painted faces and outlandish costumes still had bloodshot, dilated eyes, but they did not grasp the truth of what had gone down that night. Police were on hand but no one was arrested. The tests were held five months before LSD was declared illegal.

For years, Beverly Hills psychiatrists had used LSD to treat the various neuroses of Cary Grant, Esther Williams, and other celebrities. But Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey had linked the drug to their code of “Tune in, turn on, drop out.” Taking LSD was no longer an intimate though antiseptic process conducted with a blindfold in a doctor’s office. Life magazine gathered Prankster faithfuls and their bus in a Los Angeles studio where they were photographed for a big magazine article. Word of the acid tests spread fast, and in no time, LSD was too popular for its own good.

It soon became clear that the unhip population of California, which is to say the majority, was fearful of acid tests and peacenik hippies sweeping visibly down the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles. In November 1966, conservative Republican Ronald Reagan was elected the thirty-third governor of California, ending the relatively benign eight-year rule of Democrat Edmund G. “Pat’ Brown.

Little more than a week later, and a year after the Watts Riots, a smaller, whiter riot took place on the Strip at a purple and gold club called Pandora’s Box owned by KRLA deejay Jimmy O’Neil. So many young rock fans were clogging the sidewalks outside the club and blocking traffic along the two-mile stretch of Sunset Boulevard that a 1939 curfew ordinance was used to establish a 10 p.m. curfew for minors. On November 12, 1966, flyers were circulated inviting a demonstration against the curfew, and rock stations announced a rally at Pandora’s Box. One thousand people turned out, including Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda, though they were not among the many who were arrested. Sonny and Cher performed at Pandora’s Box, then Sonny wrote and immediately released a 45 rpm single “We Have as Much Right to Be Here as Anyone.” The L.A. County Board of Supervisors responded by rescinding the youth permits of a dozen of the Strip’s clubs so they would be off-limits to anybody under twenty-one. Within weeks, American International Pictures produced a film for the drive-in crowd, Riot on Sunset Strip. The official anthem came from Stephen Stills, who wrote “For What It’s Worth,” which was released two months later by his band, Buffalo Springfield.

Young people speaking their minds,

Getting so much resistance from behind.

I think it’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound?

Everybody look what’s going down.