The 1960s are rightly viewed as a time of renewal in the history of twentieth-century anarchism, when mass uprisings in places as far flung as the United States, France, Czechoslovakia, and Mexico challenged the status quo in explicitly anti-authoritarian terms. In America, the civil rights movement merged with the anti-Vietnam War movement, giving rise to a richly diverse counterculture with strong anarchist currents that carried over into the 1970s. Marxist turned anarchist Murray Bookchin nicely encapsulated the gulf between the old left and the emergent counterculture. Recalling Marxist-dominated politics prior to the 1960s, he wrote:
‘Life-style?’—the word was simply unknown. If we were asked by some crazy anarchists how we could hope to change society without changing ourselves, our relations with each other, and our organizational structure, we had one ritualistic answer: ‘... after the revolution.’ ‘After the revolution....’—this was our magic talisman. It expressed our incredibly naive belief that merely by ‘abolishing’ the economic relationships and institutions of capitalism we would thereby abolish the bourgeois family, the bourgeois state, and bourgeois attitudes towards sexuality, women, children, indeed toward people and life as a whole. (The gross deception here—a deception which lies at the very core of Marxism—is that changes in the pre-conditions of society and life are equivalent to changes in the conditions of society and life, a fallacy which blatantly mistakes the sufficient reason for the necessary reason.) And this ‘beautiful revolution’ would be realized by using bourgeois methods of organization and involved bourgeois relations between people. We totally failed to recognize that our methods and relations were subverting our goals, indeed our very personalities as revolutionaries.1
Contemporary “Youth Culture,” on the other hand, was rife with potential: “In its demands for tribalism, free sexuality, community, mutual aid, ecstatic experience, and a balanced ecology,” wrote Bookchin, it prefigured, “however inchoately, a joyous communist and classless society, freed from the trammels of hierarchy and domination, a society that would transcend the historic splits between town and country, individual and society, and mind and body.”2
The 1960s did indeed mark a sea change, at least in terms of who was articulating what radicalism was. For example, this was the era when Noam Chomsky began speaking out against the foreign policies of the United States government from an anarchist viewpoint. While Chomsky critiqued American politics, Bookchin popularized anarchism’s ecological dimension. At the time, anarchist-feminism was renewed in part thanks to the tireless efforts of Alex Kates Shulman and Richard Drinnon to promote the life and writings of Emma Goldman. In the previous chapters, I discussed gay poet Robert Duncan and his role in the American poetry scene; a second voice championing libertarian sexuality was social theorist Paul Goodman, author of the best-seller Growing Up Absurd (1960). In addition, poets Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, and others promoted connections between anarchism, poetics, and spirituality while John Cage explored its musical ramifications. Finally, the Living Theatre collective developed and popularized their distinctive variation of anarchist-pacifism in the United States and Europe.
I have long been interested in what role anarchist visual artists played during these years. I was fortunate, then, to make the acquaintance of one of anarchism’s better-known contemporary artists, Susan Simensky Bietila. During the 1960s, she worked as an illustrator for the activist press in New York while completing an undergraduate degree in art under the tutelage of prominent abstractionist painters. In the following interview, conducted by email, she sheds considerable light on the ways in which the mainstream art world of the 1960s maintained a separation of art and politics at the same time as the American counterculture was failing to realize its anarchic potential.
What was it like growing up in New York?
I was born in 1947 and grew up working-class in Brooklyn. The community was largely Eastern European Jewish, and my family lived in a Federal Housing Project apartment. When I was a kid, I was recruited out of kindergarten on an art scholarship to the Brooklyn Museum School; by the time I was six, I was traveling on the subway by myself to Saturday art classes. I went to the High School of Music & Art and had studio classes as well as art history. There I met bohemian teens from Greenwich Village and heard about the existence of the anti-nuclear bomb group, Student Peace Union.3
My political activism began in the summer of 1964 when I worked at Camp Twin Link, run by covert Communist Party USA members. This same camp also ran a neighborhood after-school program I had attended as a child. It was linked to the Atlanta School of Social Work, which was a hotbed of civil rights activism and connected with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee.4 Other counselors were civil rights activists and college students who were in the Students for a Democratic Society [SDS].5 Many of them had been sent to this or other political summer camps as children by their leftist parents. At the camp, I was caring for five-year-old boys and less than delighted with this sort of work, being too poor to have been sent to summer camp myself, and feeling as if there was some hypocrisy at essentially being a nanny for radicals. I found out about the war in Vietnam and the United States’ role in it from Paul Millman, another counselor at the camp who was in SDS at Antioch College. He scolded me for not reading the news and following world affairs, and I took this advice to heart. There was also an adjoining teen work camp—all black teens from projects near the one where I lived. They were there on scholarship, to be reformed out of their “gang-loving ways.” They got to be kids, but I had to work. While there, I gained class awareness and developed a suspicion of traditional “left” politics.
In the fall of 1964, I went to Brooklyn College, City University of New York [CUNY], as part of the Scholars Program for students gifted in mathematics and the hard sciences, but soon became an art major.
New York was an intense place to be, politically speaking, during this time. What organizations were you involved in at CUNY?
The first group I was involved in was Brooklyn College’s equivalent of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement—the Ad Hoc Committee for Academic Freedom, which included faculty as well as students.6 As at Berkeley, students who had braved confrontations during the civil rights voter registration drives in the south returned to school to find their own political expression severely restricted. The hypocrisy of this being the “norm” at a prestigious institution of higher learning fueled the creation of a powerful movement on campus.
Then SDS. I can’t recall exactly when in 1965 the SDS chapter at Brooklyn College was formed. There were older students at Brooklyn College who had been politically active for several years and were in contact with the students who started SDS. There were also “travelers” who visited college campuses and helped organize. I was active in SDS from the time that there were a few hundred members nationally until tens of thousands were involved, and my political understanding grew exponentially. My thinking developed with the organization to the point where we named the United States government “imperialist” and called for defeat in Vietnam.
I was elected chapter “president”—or was volunteered, as the position was meaningless within the consensus dynamics of the group, but helpful for functioning on campus. All student groups had to be registered and approved by the student council and the administration required a “President—Vice President—Secretary—Treasurer” structure. Only officers could reserve rooms, and submit posters to be approved for display, etc. I was probably elected because I was safe in my standing as a student, since I was in the Scholar’s Program and getting high grades. It was good theater to have the official spokesperson of the most radical group on campus be a fairly inarticulate seventeen-year-old girl who looked even younger than her age. It poked fun at the Administration’s “Red Menace” fear-mongering stereotypes. Whatever the reasons for my selection, the trust the other student activists had in me bolstered my self-confidence.
The college president, Harry Gideonse, was at the time the head of Freedom House, a “liberal” anti-Communist think tank/academic wing of the government’s drive to stamp out domestic radicalism following World War II.7 He had instituted bureaucracies to stifle freedom of political expression after conducting a more blatant reign of terror in the 1950s, when faculty were required to sign anti-Communist “loyalty oaths” and were subjected to political inquisitions. Many were fired for having unacceptable political ideas. Lots of students had been expelled as well. In 1950, Gideonse dissolved the student government and closed the college newspaper, The Vanguard, using bogus excuses, but really because they were bases of opposition to his agenda. During the early 1960s, students were expelled for participating in an anti-nukes protest. I heard about it later in the 1960s from Jerry Badanes, who was active in Movement for a Democratic Society [MDS], the non-student wing of SDS. If my recall is correct, he was one of the students expelled. During an air raid drill, when students were supposed to go to basement areas marked as nuclear shelters, a number of students reclined on the steps of Boylan Hall, the main building, each holding a sun reflector, the kind used at the beach to get a speedy tan, as if from the flash of light that preceded the mushroom cloud. This was an act of civil disobedience, but more impressively, it was my first exposure to détournement8
When I started college, every leaflet and poster had to be approved by the Dean of Student Activities, Archie McGregor, or it would be torn down by employees from the Office of Student Activities. All invited “outside” speakers had to be approved—all films or presentations as well. Prohibitions against walking on the grass and a dress code for female students were rigorously enforced. There was a security guard in front of the library whose job was to turn away women wearing pants. It was quite the model police state. Inspired by the Free Speech Movement, some older students who had been involved in the civil rights movement and some faculty, particularly from the departments of sociology and philosophy, Professor Richard Mendes, and Dr. Sitton, came together to organize for academic freedom. I was on the steering committee of this group and a meeting was held at my house. Mother was awed; she served coffee and pastries. The student council got involved, as did the Young Democrats [youth recruitment wing of the Democratic Party]—both the student government and faculty council, and they overturned the censorship powers of the administration. Harry Gideonse decided that it was the opportune time to retire. This cleared the way for more freedom to agitate against the Vietnam War and the military draft, issues that had immediate impact on every male student.
The SDS chapter grew steadily and included students with various political leanings. It remained somewhat counter-cultural, overlapping with the bohemian, folk-singing, pot-smoking sector of the student community. Trotskyists and the Communist Party USA had their own student groups, which attracted few if any new students.9 The Progressive Labor Party [PLP], however, was active within our SDS chapter and caused distrust against us within the national organization, although anyone who took the trouble to get to know us realized quickly that, despite being very visible, the PLP didn’t dominate the chapter.10 The head of student organizing for the PLP, Jeff Gordon, was in the Brooklyn College Chapter of SDS and was one of the people subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC], along with future Yippie Jerry Rubin, in 1966.11 Rubin was there because he had been one of the organizers of the Vietnam Day Committee which protested against the war in Berkeley. I went to Washington to demonstrate against HUAC shortly after the Brooklyn College SDS chapter was formed.
I was the representative of the Brooklyn College chapter to the New York Regional Council and to the National Council of SDS, which was as important for my political development as the grassroots organizing at Brooklyn College. It got me out of New York for the first time in my life; I met people from all over America, many from different backgrounds and cultures.
Although I was nowhere close to being a regional or national leader, I met other people like me, made interesting friends, and had opportunities I never would have otherwise had. Terry Davis, the chapter representative from the Borough of Manhattan Community College, who also grew up in a housing project, was my age and more worldly. She taught me to dance, and took me and Bobby Quidone, who was gay, to the Newport Folk Festival to talk to artists about doing a benefit for SDS. We got invited to all-night parties and road trips with affluent Argentine-Jewish Brecht Theatre aficionados, one of whom dated a playwright friend of SDS organizer Sarah Murphy. Sarah later married one of the student leaders of the 1968 uprising in Mexico City.12 I first heard of the situationists from them, I believe.13
So you were getting a real political education from the time you entered university. What impact did this have on your art and did politics seep into your art classes?
Though I was an activist, I didn’t do college work with political con-tent. A number of artists from the New York abstractionist school taught at Brooklyn College. The art faculty whom I remember were Ad Reinhardt, Carl Holty, Philip Pearlstein, and Jimmy Ernst, son of the surrealist Max Ernst. David Sawin taught Art History along with Morris Dorsky. The department chairman was the well-known art historian, Milton W. Brown. Walter Rosenblum taught photography and was fine politically.
You photographed some early anti-Vietnam street theater by the Bread and Puppet Theater in 1966 for an assignment in Rosenblum’s class (see color plate 10).14
Bread and Puppet made beautiful masks and decorated anti-war demonstrations with elegant pageantry. Their tone was mournful, grieving. I loved the technique, but was feeling anger at having been taken in by the myth of American democracy and was searching for a means of expression with more satirical bite.
I am intrigued by the fact that you studied with Carl Holty, Ad Reinhardt, and other prominent artists. Reinhardt was among the most vocal regarding the importance of abstraction in his generation, and participated in the founding of the New York-based Writers and Artists Protest organization that formed in 1965. In April and June of that year, they published two anti-Vietnam War advertisements in the New York Times—“End Your Silence”—with hundreds of writers’ and artists’ signatures.15 Can you tell me more about instruction at Brooklyn College and how the artists approached the issue of art and politics in their capacity as teachers? Did they ever discuss political issues in relation to art? Or did they maintain a strict separation between the two?
There was so much of a separation that there was complete silence—not only political content, but narrative had no place in the critical discussion. I later became aware that many of the art faculty very actively opposed the war in Vietnam and marched in organized artists’ contingents at the antiwar demonstrations, but this was never, ever discussed with me. Even though my political activity on campus was obvious and the art faculty knew when I left town for conferences and demonstrations, I was never invited to join the anti-war art groups. I assumed at the time that art students were not welcome.
None of the Art Department faculty joined the student-faculty antiwar group on campus or, for that matter, participated in the campus free speech movement. There was no discussion of politics in studio classes or in critiques [discussions of student work involving professors and students]. Studio critiques were completely formalist—composition and technique were the issues. Art history classes were barely better; heavy on rote slide identification, with art sealed off from the history of the world, the assumption being that art existed only within an “art world” where it had meaning only in relation to previous works of art. Artists were influenced only by other artists, with each school rebelling against the previous generation—an orderly evolution of styles with the present being the glorious and logical culmination of all high art that came before.
I did not accept these premises and felt that I was being fed McCarthyist dogma.16 It was not until the 1980s that I began to understand where all this was coming from, but at the time there was no forum for discussing or questioning the dogma. I just looked else-where for theoretical constructs that were enlightening and to art from previous historical periods for inspiration.
During the World War II era, the Brooklyn College Art Department had been greatly influenced by the German Bauhaus and was, according to the college’s own official history, “blurring the lines between fine and applied art.”17 This had ended before I arrived. Major changes in the curriculum were made in 1956 separating study into classes by discrete mediums—drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, etc.
When I told the Scholars Program that I was going to major in Studio Art, Milton W Brown, the Art Department Chair, called me in for a meeting and laid out a plan for my education. I was to take a few introductory classes and then tutorials with senior professors selected for me. Ad Reinhardt was later assigned to be my “mentor”—in charge of overseeing my progress.
At Brooklyn College, abstraction was the rage. It was considered somewhat scandalous by the media and got lots of attention, the controversy being about whether it was art or not. It was incomprehensible to the uninitiated—elitist and quite the commodity circus, in my opinion.
It was probably Reinhardt who encouraged me to go to galleries to see what was being shown at the time. I knew that there were parties at show openings. He evidently thought that it would be okay for me to show up at openings, but it didn’t seem like something that I would ever do. I imagined feeling awkward, unwelcome, and out of place. It seemed like a career as an abstract painter was basically a sophisticated hustle, playing up to rich patrons, marketing oneself. What I was being encouraged to do as a painter was look at what was selling and then create my own “look”—one extremely similar to what everyone else was doing, but just different enough to not be out and out imitation.... Then, once it “sold,” I was to stick with it as an identity—my own franchise. Well, I was busy creating an identity, but it was about being true to myself and resisting pressures to conform to social mores which were phony.
Besides, even sophisticated women seemed to have an impossible time being taken seriously as painters in the abstractionist boys’ club. I sensed that it would be a fruitless effort as well as self-destructive. I imagined that getting involved in this world would include sleeping with old guys and putting up with the current expectation of feminine behavior. Reinhardt was probably sincere about encouraging me to start going to upscale 57th Street galleries and meeting people in the art world, but I had a visceral reaction against the whole art-as-commodity marketing thing and thought that such circles would be where these forces would operate with the greatest intensity.
Reinhardt never talked to me about politics. I never knew the extent of his political involvement until long after his death [Ad Reinhardt died in 1967]. I was being taught to develop color-and-form presentations on canvas and when I got a harmonious push-pull balance of form, that was the content. I think that Reinhardt himself believed in following a particular abstractionist trajectory, which led to a form of spiritual purism in painting. I could see the logic of his ideas, but disagreed with his premises about the history of art and with his ideas about art’s social role. I never argued with him about these ideas. I did not have the words or the confidence to articulate my objections until after I had done political artwork for publication.
I felt that my art classes were anachronistic and that my political activism was where the real learning was happening. I wanted the same intellectual excitement in my art-making, but I had no role models. None of the other art students were doing anything with provocative content. I was given a studio all to myself and was isolated from other students in the department.
As time went on, I spent less and less time painting and was quite unproductive. I recall listening to Reinhardt’s critiques of my paintings in the spring of 1967 and becoming more aware of composition and color, but being totally frustrated with my work.
I asked questions in art history classes about political content in art and was referred repeatedly to Marxist Arnold Hauser’s Social History of Art; I found it less than forthcoming regarding real questions about the impact of art and the role of the artist in society.18
I talked with Jimmy Ernst [son of German surrealist painter Max Ernst] about doing political art, expecting for some reason that he might be sympathetic, having escaped from the Nazis ... but he was cold as ice. Every professor said the same thing: “Art never changed society.” “All political art is propaganda and not good art.” “Why would you want to create propaganda?” Some also implied that “propaganda” meant “pro-Communist Party dictatorship.”
In an interview with Jeanne Seigel for a series called “Great Artists in America Today,” that aired June 13, 1967 on New York’s WBAI radio station, Reinhardt said:
I think an artist should participate in any protests against war as a human being. There’s no way they can participate as an artist without being almost fraudulent or self-mocking about what they’re doing. There are no good images or good ideas that one can make. There are no effective paintings or objects that one can make against the war. There’s been a complete exhaustion of images. A broken doll with red paint poured over it or a piece of barbed wire may seem to be a symbol or something like that, but that’s not the realm of the fine artist anyway.”19
I gather that the art education you were getting at Brooklyn College convinced you that “modernism” as codified by Reinhardt and others had no political relevance?
Actually, I was convinced that “modernism” as presented by Reinhardt, Ernst, etc., was very political, reactionary art promoting a McCarthyite attack on the ability of art to be an accessible form of social discourse and making it, in fact, an elitist commodity. Looking at documents from the period, I found an interview with Ad Reinhardt in which his opinions are even more blatant—a radio panel discussion between Reinhardt and artists Leon Golub, Allan D’Arcangelo, and Marc Morrel following the Angry Arts events of early 1967.20 The discussion was broadcast on August 10, just twenty days before Reinhardt died. In the debate, Reinhardt says:
I’m not so sure just from a political and social point of view what protest images do and I would raise a question. I suppose this is an advertising or communications problem. In no case in recent decades has the statement of protest art had anything to do with the statement in the fine arts.21
As an artist, you can only reach those people who are willing to meet you more than half way. At least that’s the fine artist’s problem now. Another kind of artist who has techniques of communication or who wants to affect people like an advertising artist or a poster artist or somebody who wants to get a strong reaction, that’s another matter. You don’t know exactly how effective that is.22
Imagination is the word used for an idea man in an advertising agency. You don’t have imagination in the fine arts.23
In response to a question by Marc Morrel—“How do you look at a painting?”—he replies:
Only as a painting, of course. I don’t see how a painter can look at painting except as a painting. Then you know the artist is involved in certain tricks in colors and forms. But one artist doesn’t look at another artist ever as somebody who’s had some kind of experience. That’s for laymen, the idea that an artist expresses some life experience he’s had.24 If you are saying that an artist’s impulse comes from some life experience first it wouldn’t be true. An artist comes from some other artist or some art experience first.25
Goya is only important because of his relation to Manet.26
Reinhardt called Picasso’s anti-war mural Guernica [1937] “just a cubist, surrealist painting of some kind. It doesn’t tell you anything about the Spanish war [the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39].... Actually, I’m against interpretation anyway, but the most interesting or at least the most relevant interpretation seems to be the psychoanalytic one in which Picasso reveals himself to be an open book.”27
When Leon Golub stated that the figures in Guernica “have a tremendous effectiveness on me even today,” Reinhardt responded, “The Spanish war was lost.” Golub replied, “Paintings don’t change wars. They show feelings about wars.” Reinhart responded again, “It didn’t explain anything about Spain to anyone.”28
So, in summary, his position was that: (1) An artist’s life experience does not impact on the artist’s work; (2) Imagination has no role in the fine arts; (3) Art is not a means of communication; (4) Art which at-tempts to communicate is not “fine art,” but advertising or poster art; (5) Looking for meaning in a painting is only for ignorant “laymen”; and (6) Art intended as socially critical satire is inevitably co-opted and successfully exploited by those it was made to criticize.
What an angry, thoroughly negative man. Every single thing that he is against, I advocate. Quite extraordinary.
Tell me more about the divorce between art-making and activism at Brooklyn College.
My studio was a cell at the top of a tower, where, working in complete isolation, it felt more and more like a prison. It occurred to me one day that doing abstract paintings was incredibly isolating as well as boring. To me it just seemed absurd, considering all that was going on in the mid-1960s and what was being questioned. Politics, gender, all the power relationships in society were up for grabs at that point and it was a very exciting time. I was sure that there was a way to do artwork which wasn’t isolating, where the art went out into the city and you got to actually see people’s reactions. I was driven to find a way to do this.
As far as college thwarting my political art goes, the academic structure at Brooklyn—being immersed in the separation of art and politics—was probably more powerful than merely preaching anti-politics dogma. I’m thinking of the way the Art Department was structured: subjects based upon techniques—painting, drawing, printmaking—and then art history divided by periods, with art analyzed mainly within the confines of the art that came before it. There was no structural place for the analysis of art socially: no discussion, no actual interaction between the art student’s work and the public.
In 1966, Brooklyn College SDS was active against the draft and against the war.29 We produced new leaflets every few days and handed them out during class changes. Early on, people would turn away in disgust. Some crumpled up the leaflets and threw them at us. Some called us Communists with great animosity and others took the leaflet and threw it on the ground or in the trash. But as time went on and more soldiers died, students began to pay more attention. They stayed and argued and were more knowledgeable about the war. They argued the domino theory [the American government asserted that South East Asian countries would “fall like dominos” if the war in Vietnam was lost], but were not really sold on it.
Anticipation of being drafted loomed. Within SDS, there were running discussions about the class nature of the draft, and the perceived “immorality” of the protection being in university gave. As the war required more troops, the government Draft Board instituted an exam in early 1966 to cull the college students with low grades and take away their student exemptions. We picketed out front during the exam and students joined the demo as they exited the test. The exam was so crass. An arbitrary grade would decide who would live and who would die.
Military recruiters were scheduled to set up on campus in the lobby of Boylan Hall. SDS planned a sit-in. I helped plan it, but decided not to go, afraid of the reaction at home if I were arrested. My father had gone ballistic when I was arrested the year before at a party of activist kids invaded by 200 police. Eighty-eight of us spent the night in the “tombs” [notorious basement-level holding cells in downtown Manhattan’s police headquarters]. William Kunstler was our lawyer, and all the charges were dropped and records expunged. So I went to English class in the same building as the sit-in. I could hear the chants echoing through the halls and felt so torn.... When class ended, I walked out the door and was grabbed by three burly cops who had been escorted to my class by the Dean of Student Activities, Archie McGregor himself. They lifted me under the arms and shoved me downstairs to the sit-in, where they promptly declared that I was under arrest. I was lifted up by four cops, one holding each limb, and thrown into a waiting paddy wagon. I landed on a pile of my friends. After that wagon was full, they pulled up another and packed the activists in. We sat waiting for the vans to drive off and nothing happened. We couldn’t see what was happening. All the people at the sit-in seemed to have been arrested, but the paddy wagons sat. We heard a buzz of people and felt surges of tumultuous activity outside. Chants of “Cops off campus” rose intermittently. Five hours later, we were finally taken to the police station to be booked (See color plate 11).
Meanwhile, previously uninvolved students and faculty were up in arms. “Cops on campus” was denounced as a disgrace and the faculty demanded that the administration drop the charges against us immediately. My art professors organized a bail fund to get me out and called my parents to tell them that I had done nothing wrong. We spent the night locked up. In the morning, when we were released, we returned to campus to find 5,000 students waiting for us. Students who had never been to a demonstration before organized a student strike and shut down the school. We held a spontaneous rally and heard about the hundreds of students who had sat down around the paddy wagons, blocking their movement, and from one in particular who had chained and padlocked himself to the campus gates, in the process locking his body across the opening. Campus opposition to the war and the draft had reached a new peak.
After the arrest, my parents and grandmother were traumatized for a long time. My mother and grandmother, refugees from anti-Jewish pogroms during the civil war following the Russian revolution, were worried about my safety and my future. There was a student trip to Europe and I really wanted to go, but couldn’t imagine being able to afford such a luxury. College was just about free and I had state scholarship money that had been going into the bank. My grand-mother lifted up her housedress and pulled a bunch of rolled up bills out of the elastic band of her thigh-high stockings. She berated my mother—“The rich people send their girls to Europe to get polished and become ladies. We can’t do anything less for ‘Suzele’.” My grand-mother steadfastly refused to discuss any details of life in Bessarabia and never could imagine why anyone would want to go to the Europe she had fled, but you had to be “modern” to get ahead. So I had a ticket to Europe and money in my pocket.
First, I flew to London and went to the office of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.30 There I met Sheila, the office staff person. She invited me out with two of her friends, one a Londoner and the other a black South African graduate student who was in exile. Sheila introduced me to the famous English peace activist, Peggy Duff, who invited me to go to Stockholm with her and Bertrand Russell to attend the War Crimes Tribunal.31
I decided not to go for a number of reasons. I wanted to meet radicals my own age and did not want to spend my first time away from home in a passive situation listening to other people speak, even if they were world-class thinkers. I went out to a club to hear a rock group, The Social Deviants, and met people who were squatting at a London School of Economics dorm. They turned out to be junkies, so I decided that I would travel on and try my luck in Amsterdam.
When I went to Europe, I was looking for friends and lovers. In Amsterdam, I found the anarchists after being there for two days. An art student was selling the Provo publication, Die Witte Krant [The White Paper], and I volunteered to do artwork for it.32 I never did more than hand-letter an ad, but the group immediately took me in and introduced me around to their friends. A few of the people I spent large amounts of time with had been central to the political actions of Provo. Many others were in close proximity to the main instigators. The scene was much more like the traveling punk kids of today, but it is important to note that I was there when school was not in session and many activists traveled.
In Holland, art students were much more experimental. Art was much more integrated into daily life: be-ins, where people dressed up in costume, chalk drawing on the sidewalk, installation art, poetry readings on the streets.33 The same people who were radical political theorists were participating in public art. Now, a lot of the actual art was more countercultural than about the war and imperialism. The Dutch were involved in their last colonial war in New Guinea and AWOL soldiers were being protected in our midst. There was a lot of humor as well as sex-and-drugs-related content: much more “hippie” than “angry anti-war,” but certainly presenting other possibilities for how art could operate in a community.
Would it be fair to say you became more anarchistic during your time with Provo?
I think the answer is the opposite. I already had anarchist ideas and was seeking out people who were politically and culturally compatible. Politically and artistically, I was already inspired by the détournement-style tactics of Jerry Rubin in a revolutionary War of Independence outfit at the 1966 HUAC hearing handing out copies of the Constitution, and by the anti-nuclear weapons sunbathing action of the early 1960s at Brooklyn College. But I also had my heart set on going to Amsterdam because of what I had heard about the Provos.
I had heard about their very militant demonstrations against the royal wedding. On March 10, 1966, Princess Beatrix of Holland married Claus van Amsberg, a German noble who had been in Hitler youth and the Wehrmacht. The slogan for the Provo demonstration was, “I want my bicycle back,” a reference to the fact that German soldiers had confiscated Dutch bicycles during the Nazi occupation. But the real lure was the Provo’s “white bikes” campaign—free bicycles painted white left throughout the city for anyone to use and then leave on the street for the next person to use. This was a compelling model of visionary communalism for those few in SDS like me who biked to Brooklyn College—our sensible and free form of transportation. So I anticipated finding like-minded people in Amsterdam who would welcome me—I had to check it out.
I met a wide-ranging social network of students and street youth—gay and hetero. It was summer vacation and organized activism was in an ebb. A lot of people were traveling, but people still in Amsterdam had a lot of time on their hands. After a brief session of “imperialist American” baiting—half in jest, but to see how I would respond—I was adopted and cared for. When they found that I was in SDS and had been to the Free University in New York, they quickly warmed up to me. I was introduced to a Provo, Martijn, and he in turn introduced me to another in the group, Barand. They took me to stay at the house of a leading member, Roel van Duijn, who was on vacation in Lapland.34 Barand showed me a news photo of himself looking fierce in the front line of demonstrators in one of the Provo “White Riots.” I later stayed with Johannes van Dam, who was Jewish, gay, and not really a political activist. At the time my hair was very short—think Mia Farrow in the film Rosemary’s Baby—and I wore jeans and work shirts and no makeup, so people often took me to be lesbian. This was reinforced by my directness and aversion to the repressive female behavioral roles of the time.
Susan Simensky Bietila, View 1: 7” × 6“; View 2: 8” × 6”; Be-In, Vondelpark, Amsterdam, July 1967. Gelatin silver prints.
The Provo scene sounds like a diverse one—with free transportation.
Unfortunately, the white bicycles weren’t readily available. Mainly we walked around in groups, talking about politics, philosophy. Everyone in the political and gay circles I had joined spoke English and more. I was taken to meet “queens” and to private social clubs—kind of like basement punk shows today. It was common for gay and hetero youth to socialize together.
I also went to Provo be-ins at Vondelpark, Amsterdam and was asked to work with an underground network smuggling AWOL Dutch soldiers to safety. They were refusing to fight in New Guinea, where the Dutch were trying to hold on to their last colonial possessions in the region. The soldiers did not speak English, so pretending to be out on a date to escort them from one safe house to another required lots of fake conversations.
The group encouraged me to be a traveling companion with Adinka, the art student I first met hawking Die Witte Krant. There is a photo of her from that period where she is kneeling on the ground and drawing in chalk.
Adinka was going on a trip to visit the family of her brother’s fiancé in Barcelona, Spain, then still a fascist dictatorship ruled by Franco. From there it was off to the island of Ibiza to rendezvous with more of the crowd.35 I went along and hitchhiked from Barcelona back to Amsterdam later in the summer with Barand.
Adinka Tellegen, taking part in a continuous chalk drawing from England to the Netherlands, 1967. Newspaper clipping.
Vacationing in fascist Spain was a bit of a contradiction—but certainly it was an education for me. Adinka’s brother was engaged to a working-class girl in Spain and we stayed in a blue collar suburb of Barcelona. I knew very little about the Spanish Civil War at that time. Ibiza was a destination spot for northern Europeans, and the vacationers were largely gay men—a very safe spot for girls at night. I was underage for going to clubs and when Barand and some of the other boys arrived, they made sure to sneak me in through windows or back doors.
Hitchhiking back from Barcelona, Barand and I were welcomed in Antwerp by artist friends of his and we spent the night on the floor of an art gallery which had a display of kinetic sculptures that smoked joints. My friends also told me about street performances, poetry recitations by Simon Vinkenoog, “the Allen Ginsberg of the Netherlands,” although I did not see these. It was obvious, anyway, that the Provos were actively engaged in a massive European counterculture.
Despite spending time with lots of other boys, I was in a very tentative romantic relationship with a guy named Zeno. He offered to marry me so that I could stay in Amsterdam and be able to go to art school there for free. But I sensed that the relationship would be a very rocky one, conflicted as it would be with a “real” marriage—when neither of us was ready. I also felt a pull to return to New York with a whole new understanding of artistic and political possibilities.
I would say that I learned about anarchist culture from my friends in Amsterdam, but not identifiable anarchist political theory per se. Provo culture influenced me to look for a political underground news-paper to join when I got back to the US. And it led to my involvement down the line in street theater and street art.
Your return to Brooklyn College in the fall of 1967 was short-lived.
Reinhardt had died that August. When I returned to school, members of the art faculty were shocked and depressed. By that time, I had come to realize that I wasn’t learning what I wanted to learn about art in college. I had no workable theory of art and politics, but knew that con-tent, narrative, communication with the average person—art as part of social discourse—was what I wanted to learn. But I was blocked: I didn’t understand how to use images to communicate the ideas I felt were important. It wasn’t a technical question, it was a philosophical one. The art history classes touched on some of the issues, but as I said, they were heavy on slide recognition and rote memorization.
What I did decide is that if all political art was “propaganda,” then I would make propaganda. I had already seen Rubin’s guerrilla theater at the HUAC Committee hearing and photographed Bread and Puppet’s performances at antiwar demonstrations. When I returned from Amsterdam, I began to look for an apprenticeship situation with an underground publication, where I would have a structure to produce political work. I dropped out of Brooklyn College in November and ended up going to the west coast, attempting to join the staff of The Movement, a political underground paper in San Francisco.
What was going on at The Movement in terms of artistic production?
There was quite a bit of sophistication. There was an artist, Frank Cieciorka, who did a lot of beautiful work, although I never met him. His clenched fist was iconic. I was invited to some social activities, but was not included in political discussions or invited to try my hand at an art assignment.
You weren’t in San Francisco very long—I understand you were back in New York in the spring of 1968 to finish your degree.
[Back in New York] I set off to look for a “propaganda art” job where I could really learn how to put together an underground publication. I went to the offices of Rolling Stone and I told the editor Jann Wenner that I could completely revolutionize his publication, but he booted me out the door. I ended up going to a political underground paper called the Rat in the Lower East Side. At that time, the Rat had just been started by people I knew from SDS, the “Texas anarchists” and some native New Yorkers. One of the anarchist founders, Jeff Shero, picked the name because a rat was an appropriate image to represent the paper—a tough little city animal, resilient and dangerous. The Rat covered the period’s political and counterculture movements vividly. But it degenerated rapidly, becoming sensationalist and relying on sex ads for revenue, and publishing demeaning pictures of naked women. It started to look like the Los Angeles Free Press, the East Village Other, and other non-political underground newspapers as they moved away from radical politics into exploitative trashiness.
I had questions about whether I really belonged there, but asked about opportunities for doing drawing and artwork. I got the sense that women were welcome to do the typing, but not the writing or artwork. So I went further up the street to the Guardian, which was pretty much the mainstream leftist newspaper in New York, if you could call it that, a weekly that had been in existence since the 1940s. It was originally the newspaper of the electoral-oriented Progressive Party, which was a “third party” slightly left of the Democratic Party. They hired me immediately, and I told them that I wanted to do drawings, illustrations, and political artwork. I was taught layout, but it only took a few months to convince the editors that I could do original art for articles and the front page.
The best cover I remember doing is the one about the moon landing. I drew Mount Rushmore on the moon [featuring faces of] Walter Cronkite; Monkey Bonnie, one of the animal “astronauts” who died in space; Wernher von Braun, the Nazi missile scientist [von Braun, who died in 1977, went on to develop ballistic missiles for the United States]; and Richard Nixon. I also did a presidential election cover in 1968 when Hubert Humphrey was running against Richard Nixon. I have a collage where there is a body sitting in the presidential chair [of the oval office]. Some anonymous CIA-type is unscrewing the head of one president and putting a new president’s head on in its place.
How long were you at the Guardian?
I was hired at the Guardian in the spring of 1968 during the height of the Vietnam War and quit during a “purge”—driven out by management in August 1969. Right after I had started at the paper, it was redesigned by a graphic designer, Harry Driggs. The masthead was changed from “Progressive” to “Independent Radical Weekly.” The editors wanted to appeal to “youth culture” without losing their traditional readership. I was the only artist in the art department; the others did production. They contributed ideas for my artwork and offered insightful critiques with a supportive and collaborative spirit. They were a wonderful group, but were powerless in the Guardian’s hierarchy.
The former SDS people were not all in the same camp politically and there were arguments about hierarchy and class among the staff. Even though the [support] staff were all radical activists, they were treated with condescension; their political ideas were discounted be-cause they were not high in the organizational hierarchy compared to the editors, writers, and financial backers. Toward the end, there were big arguments at staff meetings—that’s where I found out that management had a different pay scale than other staff while I was literally going hungry working there. During the purge, seven staff were fired and twelve others, including me, walked out in protest.
Susan Simensky Bietila, Moon Landing cover, The Guardian, Aug. 2, 1969. Pen and ink collage.
Then you got a call to join the women’s takeover of the Rat. The first women-only issue was published in January 1970—with the headline, “Women Seize Rat! Sabotage Tales!” It lists the collective as follows: “Jill Boskey—valiant typesetter for Rat for unheralded decades, Jane Alpert, Larelei B., Ruth Seller, Pam Booth, Valerie Bouvier, Naomi Clauberman, Carol Crosberg, Sharon Krebs, Robin Morgan, Jacye Pelcha, Doria Price, Judy Robison, Miriam Rosen, Barbara Rothkrug, Judy Russell, Lisa Schnaeidr, Martha Shelley, Sue Simensky, Brensa Smiley, Christine Sweet, Judy Walento, Cathy Werner, and Mark, Jan, Anton, and Neil”—male staff who stayed on to help out for a while with production until they were asked to leave. Tell me more about the takeover.
The women who had been working at the Rat all along had been in SDS and other student groups. They were amazingly intelligent and articulate radicals who had been doing all these menial jobs. One day, they got together and invited their friends to come by and put out a special “women’s” version of the paper. The issue was so good that we decided that the right thing to do was to continue. It was one of the first feminist newspapers in what’s now characterized as the “second wave” of feminism in the United States. The takeover was kind of interrelated with the street theater going on at the time: people involved in the Rat had been involved in the feminist demonstration at the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City [September 7, 1968], where the pageant was picketed by women and items of female oppression were symbolically discarded. Nobody actually burned bras, but that’s where the whole fictive media image of women burning their bras came from. There was another demonstration that I was actually part of—a takeover of a Bridal Fair [February 1969] at the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden. We took over the stage and auctioned off a bride! The Rat women attended meetings held by a range of feminist radical “consciousness-raising,” activist-oriented groups, as well as others—it was all one interlocking network.
Susan Simensky Bietila, Rat cover, May 8-21, 1970. Pen and ink.
This was the same period that the anarchist Yippies were active in New York. There were lots of great political stunts going on, like in August 1968, when Yippies threw dollars off the balcony at the Stock Exchange and watched the stockbrokers scramble over each other, groveling on the floor. It was influential. The theatrical presentation of political ideas was a shared aesthetic.
The overlap between radical feminism and anarchism on the level of organizational tactics and artistic protest strategies is interesting. I recall that “WITCH”—Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hellwas the key initiator of the Bridal Fair action and there was at least one crossover from the Rat collective—Robin Morgan. In her memoir Going Too Far, Morgan characterizes WITCH—disparagingly—as a “proto-anarchist” Yippie-influenced group, so the connection has at least been acknowledged.36 What was it like to participate in such an outrageous action?
It was tremendously liberating. It was absolutely a celebration of freedom from the soul-binding of the female submissive role. I was freeing myself as compared with being a crusader against other people’s oppression, no matter how just, no matter how linked to my own situation. Disrupting a Bridal Fair was certainly outrageous enough to be unanticipated by Madison Square Garden security. But it was very logical, quite a clear target. What was outrageous was not being allowed into the college library wearing pants, not being allowed to go out at night on your own; if you danced without a male partner, it was unacceptable. It was outrageous to be judged, despite your talent and intellect, by your marriageability. I was really angry at it all.
I was not part of the group who came up with the idea for the action, but I was invited to participate in the planning. One of the women who worked at a publication had access to free tickets. The action was well-planned ideologically, with delineated strategic and theatrical roles. The demonstration confronted common cultural assumptions, such as “Every girl dreams of being a bride.” The modern wedding was exposed as a romanticization of women as property—the transfer of a woman from the father to her husband. In addition, it directly questioned consumer culture, because the Bridal Fair was, after all, about buying bridal gowns, flowers, china, and silver. I still think that it was an excellent action and disagree with Morgan and others who have gone more mainstream and think that the critique of marriage consumerism was an attack on women.
Thinking further about the often-ignored anarchist influence, the shared prankster-style activism of the Yippies, WITCH, and the Provos was no accident. In his 1979 memoir, Abbie Hoffman recalls that during the period of 1965-68, the Yippies in New York were in contact with their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere.37 Hoffman mentions Fritz Teufel, Karl Pawla, and Kimmune #1 in Berlin, and Jean-Jacques Lebel in Paris, who came to the United States and played a role linking “the anarchism of the Left Bank [Paris] to the street culture of Haight-Ashbury [San Francisco] and the Lower East Side.” He also emphasizes the importance of the Provos:
Susan Simensky Bietila, Yippee Be-In Poster, Rat, March 7-21, 1970. Cut paper, pen and ink.
In Amsterdam ... street players dubbed themselves the Provos (short for provocateurs). Practicing the politics of ‘free’ they opened parks to free concerts, established crash pads [free housing], and ladled out soup to moneyless hungry customers. Their symbol became the white bicycle. Second-hand wheelies were painted white and left around the city. Whoever needed one could take one, pedal away, and leave it at another location for the next.... [They] established a community ambience that would be held up as a model by all of us. Dana Beal picked up on the Provos and founded a chapter on the Lower East Side.
That’s Hoffman’s recollection—can you say more about anarchism in New York?
In my exploration of the political world, I came across the Free University in 1965-66. This school was started by Allen Krebs and then run by Sharon Krebs, and classes were taught by a member of the anarchist Fugs rock band and by Murray Bookchin. I never attended classes, but I went there to hang out and it fueled my imagination.
Here is what Roy Lisker, one of the instructors, wrote about the Free University when you were attending:
The people that Allen Krebs engaged to set up the Free University of New York represented every shade of opinion across the New Left: poets and writers, disaffected scholars, union organizers, activists, free-lance journalists, and publishers, creative individuals of every sort. Our goal from the beginning was to establish a forum in which every direction of contemporary political activism would be represented. Courses were to be taught by persons actually involved in bringing about the changes they were advocating.
The curriculum for the first two terms contained, in addition to those on leftist politics, courses ranging from hallucinatory drugs to sexual liberation to astrology. Important courses were offered that were not available, or even imaginable, at many main-stream universities: History of the American Left (Staughton Lynd); History of the Labor Movement (Stanley Aronowitz); Cuba Today; Training in non-violent tactics; History of the National Liberation Front. Paul Krassner [a Yippie], editor of the scathing and satiric political magazine, The Realist, gave a course entitled “Why the New York Times is funnier than Mad Magazine.” The enthusiasm that prevailed in the first term of the Free University of New York, from November ‘65 to February ‘66, carried over into the spring. It was an inspiring time for all concerned.38
The Free University was one place where anarchists made themselves known. I have been told that anarchists were also a real presence at anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.
In terms of actions, anarchist affinity groups for street demonstrations were into satire and self-satire. Wearing motorcycle helmets and leather jackets, our fists in the air, we played the role of militant demonstrator, but knew that it was more theatrical, in opposition to other segments of the anti-war movement who were in essence begging, pleading, and lobbying those same politicians responsible for the war in the first place. Demonstrators were relegated to being, in essence, little more than numbers used as lobbying capital by mainstream liberal leaders—a futile and depressing strategy. Networks of anti-imperialist affinity groups went on “vote in the streets, vote with your feet” split-offs from every major demonstration. While the big antiwar coalitions were demanding the gradual withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam—“Support our troops, Bring them home”—we were calling for “victory to the Vietnamese!” and admission that the war was wrong in the first place. I remember one such split-off from a very large picket of a Democratic Party event at an upscale midtown hotel. Word was passed to disperse and converge on Wall Street, the power behind the war-makers. Thousands of demonstrators went downtown by subway and ran a gauntlet ahead of mounted police to the sound of crashing plate glass. This kind of action declared, “no to businessas-usual.” Radical scholars kept tabs on the war-profiteering corporations and made the locations of the military industrial complex common knowledge, opening them up to exposure for complicity during demonstrations.
I should also mention there were a lot of street anarchists at the Guardian. They weren’t only the writers and editors; they were the de-livery people, people in the art department, and the typists—young, like me. It was pretty much an anarchist youth culture. There were also plenty of what would now be called anarchist affinity groups and collectives that were active on the Lower East Side.
More importantly, I had become part of a movement that was becoming “articulate”—working in groups which operated by consensus and where ideas were developed collectively. Every organization I was involved with had a “bottom up” (anarchist) ethic—decision by consensus, encouraging participation in decision-making on an equal basis—as a matter of principle. My politics were clearly anarchist, but not identified as such during the 1960s, because the political dividing line in the movements of that time, anti-Vietnam War, black liberation, women’s liberation, etc., was between anti-imperialist radical social change and reformism. I was also becoming more class-conscious and identified anarchism as mainly influential in terms of cultural expression—despite reading Emma Goldman’s autobiography, Living My Life, as well as Labor’s Untold Story [by Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais] during that time.
People I knew in SDS who identified as anarchist included Shero from Austin SDS (the “Texas anarchists”), who turned me away from the Rat when I asked to do artwork there. Unfortunately, other self-identified anarchists in New York, all of them male, came across as in-tensely chauvinist. Many of them were associated with the 1950s Beat poets who were as infamous as the male artists among the abstract expressionists for treating women like dirt. So I did not really identify with anarchism as a contemporary movement.
So sexism, a generational disconnect, and your own prioritizing of “class struggle” over “culture”—in retrospect a false dichotomy, obviously—were factors: was there anything else?
At the Guardian, how people labeled themselves politically often bore little connection to how they behaved. Pockets of anarchist ideas about decision-making existed in various departments. Work styles and networks within the staff defied political self-definitions as anarchist, socialist, new left, feminist.
The “anarchists” at the Guardian were in affinity groups that carried National Liberation Front flags at anti-war demonstrations and actual pigs’ heads on pikes labeled with the names of prominent liberals, like Bobby Kennedy.39 I marched with them on more than a few occasions, but kept my distance because of their uncritical hero worship of the Black Panther Party and loyalty to “fearless leaders” like Walter Teague and his Committee to Aid the National Liberation Front.40 eague was a one-man “organization” who recruited younger, blindly loyal kids to work for him. There was no consciousness of working collectively there whatsoever. My position was that the best thing that people could do was to continue to build a powerful movement against the government and to limit its ability to conduct unjust wars like the one in Vietnam in the future. Idolizing the Vietnamese “liberation fighters” was not the way to actually help people in Vietnam.
Not the typical activist position—there was a lot of messy thinking back then that, in the absence of an anarchist critique, led to some serious contradictions. Marxists and the movements influenced by them argued for social liberation via authoritarian party organizing and the establishment of state dictatorships.
“Dictatorships of the proletariat” to overthrow capitalism—dictatorships which were supposed to eventually wither away. At the Guardian, most of the staff, including the outspoken anarchists, were uncritical toward the hierarchical structures of the Black Panther Party and the NLF. I certainly supported both, but not as a “true believer” looking for a perfect leader. Many among the affinity groups were just as eager as the Weathermen to prove to the Panthers that they were “heavies” and “down” for the revolution which they expected to happen momentarily.41I was vocal in criticizing these ideas as being out of touch with reality, but few were listening. A lot of “revolutionaries” were driven by guilt about their own “white privilege” and did not want to recognize [that] class oppression existed among white people. I had a few close friends who also came from blue-collar backgrounds who had similar criticisms of these trends and had less patience than I did, or less incentive to engage in the argument at all. We were often a distinct affinity group at demonstrations.
What about the Rat during this time?
Working on Rat became more and more contentious by the week. The collective members had diverse political views. Some had been in SDS, and among them were women aligned with opposite sides of the divide when SDS split into the Revolutionary Youth Movement factions, some aligned with the Weathermen and others with the groups looking to organize the working class. Then there were women who were in New York Radical Women and Redstockings—the feminist theorists involved in “consciousness-raising” groups.42 There were lesbian activists who were to soon be part of the formation of the Gay Liberation Front [founded in New York in 1969] and women from Third World support movements, anti-imperialist and radical movements. Many of us were in anti-imperialist circles as well as feminist consciousness-raising groups.
My disaffection with the Rat came with the first wave of identity politics. By August 1970, there was pressure to have an editorial quota system—so many pages of the paper devoted to women of color, so many to lesbians, etc. I believed that there ought to be a unified movement to fight against all oppression and saw identity politics as divisive and depressing. Many of the women at the Rat came to believe that working exclusively within the women’s movement was the only revolutionary path, and accused women who gravitated toward activism in other movements as lacking adequate political consciousness and being traitors, rather than simply having a different analysis of how to change society. So I left the Rat collective before the divisiveness became even more demoralizing.
Returning to art, how was visual art looked upon during that time in relation to radical social change?
That’s a whole other can of worms, I would say. On the one hand, there were artists who were doing political work, but in the main-stream of the political movement, art was an afterthought. The big olitical debates were about the war and US imperialism, that sort of thing. The general values enacted in the dynamics of SDS and the publications, even feminist publications, were that days and sleepless nights were spent haggling over wording.
During your last year at college, you exhibited your political artwork, but it was not well-received.
I recall having no real preparation for my thesis show, which took place in late 1968. It seemed a spur-of-the-moment thing. I was working at the Guardian, with a weekly thirty-six-hour marathon to produce each issue, carrying a full course load of very facile education classes with the idea of teaching high school art, and dating a jazz musician who was playing clubs until two a.m. There was no one to advise me about how to mount a show.
The exhibition was in La Guardia Hall. Art was hung on movable display structures with panels. It was dimly lit—the only light source came from the ceiling towering above. I had one or two of these panels on which to hang my work. I deliberately chose work from the Guardian. I also exhibited my prints, which were figurative but without obvious narrative. All these prints would be published in the Guardian, Rat, or Liberation Magazine over the next three years.
Most prominently displayed was the photo-collage and painted Guardian cover with the presidential heads. This was obviously an intentional protest against the separation of politics and art, but even more directly a defiance of the prohibition against exactly the kind of work which the faculty defined as not fine art—art with topical narrative, art with intent to communicate, art with an obvious political message. The quality of art I displayed didn’t matter; the cant was, “political art isn’t fine art”—any art which commented on contemporary events would be obsolete the next day whereas “real” art, “fine art,” “high art”—is eternal.
To my best recollection, the most hostile reaction to my art was from Jimmy Ernst, who refused to talk to me at the exhibition opening.He looked very angry. I came across several documents which shed light on Ernst’s thoughts on art and politics at the time. There are two articles, one titled “A Letter to Artists of the Soviet Union,” published in the Art Journal after Ernst was sent on a tour of the Soviet Union by the State Department in 1961.43 His mission was to condemn socialist realism and promote the virtues of abstraction—abstraction is equated with “freedom.”44 Quite the Cold Warrior. He also wrote a manifesto for UNESCO, “Freedom of Expression in the Arts,” published in a 1965 issue of the Art Journal.45
He repeats many principles with which I would strongly agree in theory, but in his context are highly questionable. He is against artists being “forced to serve a ‘revolution’ which was lost long ago to those who fear the open mind and find comfort only in the various practices of anti-intellectualism.” His statement is a thinly veiled dia-tribe against the Soviet Union at a time when identical criticisms of McCarthyite censorship in America were long overdue. He writes:
Art is indeed a means of communication which knows no border and is above the barrier of the linguistic.... No society or state has ever been able to hide its own shortcomings behind the screen of a carefully nurtured and directed culture.... A state that fears and represses its own intellectual minority can ill afford to stand before the world as a champion of international peace.
He advocates a “world community” of artists and asserts that “Art as a cohesive core of culture ... [is] at all times the open enemy of political or intellectual intolerance.” He writes this but then a few years later, he is fuming over art which takes aim at the very forces he claims to oppose. The party line at Brooklyn College—the denigration of politically charged art and the elevation of so-called “fine art” devoid of socially-engaged import—strikes me as an ethical dead end, riddled with inconsistencies.
Reinhardt and Ernst had both painted themselves into very conflicted positions, no pun intended. And there I was, supposedly the “star” pupil, seeing the hypocrisy and stifled by it. The thesis show was a declaration of my own identity as well as an attempt to force some sort of truth out into the open. Compulsory abstraction in art and the separation of “fine art” from “poster art” was the opposite pole of the same stupidity dominating the arts in the Soviet Union—the Cold War in art theory. I was looking for a way to express my anger and make art which spoke to the present world situation. At the time, I knew little of the history of the betrayal of the anarchist movement in Spain by the Communists and its effect on the intellectual left in New York, which was of course a major influence on the politics of abstract expressionism. But I knew a lot about McCarthyism and felt that this was the cause of the Art Department’s extreme narrowness of discourse. The Guardian artwork in my senior thesis was no doubt art serving the revolution, albeit an altogether different kind of “revolution.” The line had been drawn in the sand and I crossed it.
So that was the treatment you received from the Brooklyn College-based art establishment. How was your art treated at the Guardian, the Rat, and by activists generally?
When I started doing art for publications, there was little understanding that there was any importance to it, and no understanding of my idea that you could have political discussions about imagery. Art work itself came way after the debate of the issues and the politics, rather than being part of a single fabric, whereas I had an image in my mind of a real synthesis of politics and art—that there could be a language of imagery that was meant to communicate. Using metaphor, the his-tory of images, referencing the history of art, I would come up with powerful art that could be read and understood.
There was no sophisticated discussion of your art in the radical scene?
It never happened at the Guardian or at the Rat. There were groups who were thinking about literature and theater critically, but visual art was a kind of stepchild of it all.
Your work for the Rat is really distinctive and has an incredible energy to it. I’d like to learn more about some of your specific illustrations. In the “Conspire-In” poster for the Yippie “Be-In” at the Sheeps Meadow, Central Park gathering of Easter Sunday, 1970, reproduced in one of Rat’s March 1970 issues, I see various symbols with text incorporated into it, along with an interesting negative/positive dichotomy involving clenched fists and open hands. Then there are the “Trading Cards” fea-turing political “outlaws” of the era, which were reproduced in the Rat and intended to be cut out and passed around like trading cards.
It’s really hard to remember what was going through my mind when I was doing the “Conspire-In” poster or the “Trading Cards” page. What I can say with certainty was that I was asked to do the Yippee’s poster for their Central Park Be-In by one of the guys in the loose affinity group network on the Lower East Side. There was no particular request as to the imagery, and I thought that cut-outs would provide a stark eye-catching device. The demonstrators’ posture and dress was an accurate rendering of how we looked when we went to a demonstration. The tepee emblem [which later served as a squatters’ symbol in the 1980s] was likely lifted from whatever sheet of information I was given with the text needed on the poster. It was not my own creation.
The “Outlaws of America Trading Cards” was a group project at the Rat. I did most of the drawings, but the text and selection of characters was the result of free-ranging discussion into the late night by any and all participants during the layout of the issue. The general process was that the collective would meet to decide on the stories for each issue. The Rat women and some male friends would return with their articles at the arranged time, which they would type out on manual typewriters. Each woman doing layout would be given the blank layout boards for two facing pages and the columns of the articles clipped to them. She was free to design the pages and to choose or create the artwork. Headlines were sometimes provided by the author and at other times decided on by whoever was interested in participating in the decision; these were either hand-lettered or placed down on pages with press type. The office was one large room with tilted tables built along the walls to work on the pages. It was therefore possible to stroll around the room and glance at the entire paper as it was being created. Once the copy was assigned to each page and space was allotted for the articles, the size dimensions of the artwork and which articles they were to accompany became apparent.
Moving on to present-day, you’ve been busy. Your art has appeared in World War 3—Illustrated, a political graphic arts magazine, and you contributed to Wobblies!, an immensely popular illustrated history of the anarchist-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World union; your photographs have appeared in a number of anarchist publications; you co-curated Drawing Resistance, a traveling exhibition of anarchist/activist art that toured across Canada and the United States between 2001 and 2005 (see color plate 12); and you’ve been involved in puppet-making and some very innovative demonstrations. It seems to me there are a whole range of opportunities for an artist within the contemporary anarchist scene. Is it fair to say that current activism is healthier, from an artistic point of view, than it was in the 1960s?
Yes! The current scene is much healthier, and everything I’ve been doing has led to even more exciting possibilities. There are so many more ways for my art to get into the world—so many ways to collabo-rate, so many ways for art to find its way to people who are interested and appreciative. I have continued to do artwork in collaboration with activist groups and for publication and exhibition continuously, but the past ten years are far better than anything I have experienced before.
But my purpose is not to do art within the anarchist scene, al-though I am certainly nurtured by it in the broad sense. Anarchism needs to be more than a self-limited subculture. Art should inspire critical thinking and operate in the public sphere—be seen, understood, and embraced by a much wider audience—by people who agree and are inspired as well as those who disagree. Actually, I see a great danger in making art which is meant primarily for insiders within a “scene,” especially when that scene is largely a self-segregated youth counterculture, which is the case where I live.
Susan Simensky Bietila and others, Outlaws of Amerika Trading Cards, Rat, March 7-21, 1970. Pen and ink.
To clarify, when I refer to “the contemporary anarchist scene,” I have in mind the larger anarchist community, including people like yourself in Milwaukee or the World World 3 artists in New York, for example—which is strong, dynamic, intergenerational, and definitely activist, and outward looking, not “subcultural,” as you describe it. But tell me more about your recent art-making.
I was involved in lot of street theater in the late 1980s—performance with puppets and stilt-walkers protesting against American imperialism in Central America, against CIA recruitment on a college campus, for women’s reproductive rights and more—and in the ‘90s against the destruction of urban green space and against threats by mining companies taking over indigenous people’s land and resources. So the flowering of political performance worldwide in recent years, involving giant puppets and floats, especially inspired me. I’ve been photographing political street theater and treasure the opportunities to document it. I’m someone who lives very much in the present, and only with much time have I come to the realization of how important it is to preserve the history of radical movements.
I started graduate school during this period, and approached print-making and photography with greater sophistication in imagery and metaphor. I started to do art which worked on multiple levels, with art historical and philosophical references instead of straightforward agitational pieces. I found that even straightforward political work was no longer excluded dogmatically from gallery shows. But what really made a difference for me was going to the Active Resistance gatherings in 1996 and 1998. I went at the urging of one of my children, who was involved and thought that I would meet people I really liked there, and he was right. It was through these gatherings thatI met many of the political artists with whom I continue to collabo-rate. In addition, I was invited to photograph these gatherings and the photographs continue to ap-pear in wonderful publications.
Susan Simensky Bietila, Self Portrait, 2006. Pen and ink wash.
It was at the Chicago AR gathering that I met David Solnit, and people from the Fifth Estate journal, the Beehive Collective of artists, the A-Zone anarchist social center ... and I began to learn about the new wave of anarchist activism and art. At the 1998 AR gathering in Toronto, things only got better.
In 1998, I was in New York visiting family and went to the art opening of Seth Tobocman’s show of work from “War in the Neighborhood.” I had visited some of the artists from World War 3 in the early 1980s, soon after it was started, when I was part of a poetry and art zine called The Stake, but had never met Seth before. He introduced me to other artists who drew political comix and invited me to do art for the magazine. I had been working almost exclusively with photography and was really into photo-collage, but he insisted that drawn narrative was the only format for the publication. I was surprised when he said that he was familiar with my work from the past and on that basis knew that I would be able to do story-board work. I was really delighted, and more than a bit surprised at the invitation. I continue to hold the artists who draw for World War 3 in great esteem.
At this same time also, I was active at home in Wisconsin opposing the Crandon Mine, inspired by the amazing diversity of the groups involved—from indigenous communities and environmentalists to duck hunters and fishermen. We were all part of a coalition against Exxon, Rio Algom, and then Billeton and their attempts to build a zinc and copper mine along the pristine Wolf River, next to where the Mole Lake Chippewa harvest wild rice, in the midst of beautiful national forests and directly upstream from the Menominee Reservation. In addition to the usual graphics, posters, banners, and flags for demonstrations and photo documentation, there were more innovative projects. After David Solnit and Alli Shagi Starr visited Milwaukee, we built a giant puppet of Tommy Thompson, the pro-mining Governor, and dressed him in a fool’s cap. The puppet is still around ten years later, and has been passed around from group to group. After that I made a movable installation—thirty gravestones dedicated to rivers poisoned by mining around the world. Several wonderful anti-mining activists provided the research and helped conceive the project. The tombstones were only cardboard mounted on the wires used for election yard signs, but the show traveled for years to roadsides near sites threatened by mining in Wisconsin. It was important to me because it was effective for rural and reservation settings, places where installation and political art are not common.
My family and I had lived communally for many years, and I met [graphic artist] Nicolas Lampert when he and [film artist] Laura Klein answered our posting for housemates when they first moved to Milwaukee. We collaborated on a block print, “I need community,” shortly before he went to the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization demonstration in Seattle and returned full of ideas. We decided that a traveling art show was an immediate possibility. We wanted to put together a show of all of our favorite artists and at the same time to make the point that political art is quite diverse in “look” and strategy of communication. We named the show, Drawing Resistance, stealing Emily Abendroth’s phrase to “Celebrate Communities of Resistance,” and wanted to bring it to people who would never ordinarily be ex-posed to art with this sort of content. We decided that the show’s tour must be compatible with the politics it displayed, and Nicolas’s experiences touring with his band Noisegate provided the model for an art show as DIY punk-band-on-tour. Almost every artist we invited agreed to lend work, despite no assurance that the art would return from tour intact. The hosts for the show in each city had to transport the works to the next stop on the tour. There was no funding other than collections taken up at the door to provide gas money, etc. Drawing Resistance had thirty-three exhibitions across the United States and Canada and traveled for four years.
Installation of “Tombstones” at Wisconsin Capitol. Monuments to rivers poisoned by mining. April 2000.
It was a great deal of work assembling the show, but what is important to me is that it happened. The show helped build networks of artists and communities as well as get excellent art out to people who had enthusiasm for it. It tapped potentials for collaboration and articulated our politics in practice. I wish that more people were thinking this way.
For me, making art is driven by collaboration with political movements. Invite me to be part of a worthwhile project where there is real collaboration and I’m ready to do my part and more. What inspires me is knowing that the art will be seen and travel to places that I will never go. It is part of me, but takes on a life of its own, going out into communities where it seeks out people ready to engage. So my strategies include making art which is easy to reproduce as opposed to work designed to be site-specific or function primarily in a gallery space, even though I enjoy curating gallery shows as well as collaborating on shows with provocative themes. But, no surprise, this involves working pretty much outside the “art as commodity” system. So I work with alternative galleries and other community spaces.
Drawing Resistance opening at the Babylon in Minneapolis, March 2003.
Any thoughts for anarchist artists starting out today?
My experience has proven to me beyond my wildest expectations that artwork about contemporary issues does not become tomorrow’s trash. The topical artwork that I did between 1968 and 1970—work that was supposedly due for “next day disposal” according to the Brooklyn College Art Department—has not disappeared. It has been reprinted and exhibited over and over since then with no effort on my part. Most important is the obvious: you don’t need to choose between your activism and your art. Make art as part of the discourse. Create your own opportunities.
1 Murray Bookchin, “The Youth Culture: An Anarchist-Communist View,” Hip Culture: 6 Essays on its Revolutionary Potential (New York: Times Change Press, 1970): 57.
2 Ibid., 59.
3 The Student Peace Union (1959-1964) was an intercollegiate group organized by socialist, pacifist, and other anti-war students that was critical of the foreign policy of both the United States and the Soviet Union, and protested against the arms race, nuclear weapons testing, racial segregation, the American government’s position during the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962), and its involvement in Vietnam.
4 In October 1960, a wave of African-American-led sit-ins protesting segregation in restaurants, public parks, and government institutions culminated with the founding of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Adopting non-violent direct action as its credo, SNCC played a leading role in the civil rights movement which sought to end segregation in the United States. In 1966, black power advocate Stokley Carmichael, who was critical of the organization’s non-violent tactics, was elected chairman. Thereafter, SNCC fell into rapid decline and was officially disbanded in 1970.
5 Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1960 as an outgrowth of stu-dent participation in the civil rights movement. SDS membership mushroomed as a result of the Vietnam War. The turn towards more militant tactics by many leading figures in SDS, coupled with internal infighting, led to dissolution in 1969.
6 The Free Speech Movement, which began at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964, sought to establish academic and student freedom of speech and expression on campuses across the United States.
7 Freedom House was founded in 1941 to promote electoral “democracy” and the capitalist “free market” system throughout the world. It gets two-thirds of its funding from the American government.
8 Détournement is a term coined by the French situationists (see note 13) to describe the appropriation of mass media imagery to create new work with a politically subversive message.
9 Trotskyists is a loose term for numerous political parties claiming allegiance to Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky (1879-1940).
10 Founded in 1961 by former members of the Communist Party USA, the Progressive Labor Party advocated armed revolution under PLP leadership. During the 1960s, it sought to infiltrate and manipulate the militant student movement, primarily by gaining control of SDS.
11 The House of Un-American Activities Committee was created under the mandate of Public Law 601, passed by the United States Congress in 1946. A committee of nine representatives investigated suspected threats of subversion or propaganda that “attacks the form of government guaranteed by our Constitution.” In 1969, the committee’s name changed to the Committee on Internal Security.The House abolished the committee in 1975 and its functions were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee. At the hearing witnessed by Simensky Bietila, Rubin showed up in an American War of Independence costume and attempted to hand out copies of the American Constitution while mocking the committee: this widely publicized guerrilla theater tactic effectively ended HUAC’s reign of intimidation. Yippie—short for “Youth International Party”—was founded in New York in 1968 as a loosely affiliated network of anarchist direct action/guerrilla theater oriented collectives.
12 On October 2, 1968, a student uprising in Mexico City protesting the dictator-ship of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party was brutally put down by the Mexican military.
13 The situationists were a small Paris-based organization led by the theorist Guy Debord. Formed in the late 1950s and active through the 1960s, the organization was officially disbanded by Debord in the early 1970s.
14 The Bread and Puppet Theater is an activist group founded in the early 1960s by Peter Schumann in New York. During the Vietnam War, the group gained notoriety for staging dramatic puppet pageants at demonstrations.
15 The petitions are discussed in Francis Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999): 23-24.
16 McCarthyism is a term referring to the social repression of the early to mid-1950s, when American Senator Joseph McCarthy spearheaded a campaign to criminalize political radicals in every walk of life, from the civil service to the film industry.
17 The German-based Bauhaus was an innovative arts and design school, founded in the 1920s, which disbanded after the Nazis came to power in 1933.
18 Arno Hauser, The Social History of Art (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951).
19 Ad Reinhardt cited in Frascina, 82.
20 Angry Arts was a New York-based group formed in 1967 to stage a week of art events protesting the war in Vietnam.
21 Jeanne Siegel, ArtWords: Discourse on the 60s and 70s (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985): 105.
22 Ibid., 112.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 116.
25 Ibid., 113.
26 Ibid., 112.
27 Ibid., 105.
28 Ibid.
29 The draft was a system of selection for mandatory service in the United States military. During the 1960s every able-bodied male over the age of eighteen had to register for the draft. College and university students were given draft deference until they graduated or reached age twenty-four. In 1966, the military instituted a “Selective Service College Qualification Test”; those students who scored low lost their draft exemption.
30 The British-based Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) organization, founded in 1958, was one of the most important activist movements of the 1960s. The CND called for the unilateral disarmament of Britain’s nuclear arsenal.
31 Journalist Peggy Duff was a leading activist in the British peace movement, as was academic Bertrand Russell, who helped found the War Crimes Tribunal in 1966 to examine the conduct of the American army in Vietnam.
32 Provo (1965-67), short for provocateurs, was an Amsterdam-based anarchist group known for imaginative tactics of social disruption.
33 Be-ins were mass gatherings to celebrate counter-cultural values. The name was a variation on the civil rights “sit-in” and, like the sit-ins, be-ins were a peaceful form of protest against the status quo.
34 Roel van Duyn, author of Message of a Wise Kabouter (1972), was the group’s leading theorist and tactician.
35 General Francisco Franco (1892-1975) was the self-appointed “supreme leader” of a fascist Catholic regime that ruled Spain from 1939 until his death. He led the insurrection against the Spanish Republican government during the civil war.
36 Robin Morgan, Going Too Far: The Chronicle of a Feminist (New York: Vintage, 1978): 72.
37 Abbie Hoffman, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture (New York: Perigee, 1980): 120.
38 “The Antiwar Movement in New York City 1965-67,” updated and revised from Les Temps Modernes (September 1968), http://www.fermentmagazine.org/Bio/newleftl.html
39 The National Liberation Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, also known as the “Vietcong,” was an alliance of religious and political groups formed in 1960 to fight a guerilla war against the United States-supported government of South Vietnam.
40 The Black Panther Party, founded in California in 1966, was a militant political organization that propagated the right to self-defense and self-determination for African-Americans. Police and FBI covert actions, including assassinations, destroyed the Black Panthers by the late 1970s.
41 The Weathermen, formed in 1968 during the breakup of the SDS, operated as an underground organization dedicated to “bringing the war home” through street protests and the bombing of symbolic and operational targets in the American political and military infrastructure. Active into the 1970s, the Weatherman underground collapsed in large part due to numerous arrests, internal dissention, and the waning of American radicalism after the war in Vietnam ended.
42 New York Radical Women was the city’s first feminist liberation group, founded in the fall of 1967 by Shulamith Firestone and Pam Allen. It dissolved in the winter of 1969. Redstockings was founded in 1969 by Firestone and Ellen Wallis as a more militant successor to NYRW. It folded in the fall of 1970. See Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1989): passim.
43 Jimmy Ernst, “A Letter to Artists of the Soviet Union,” Art Journal 21, no. 2 (1961): 66-71.
44 Codified in Russia during the 1930s, socialist realism combined a realist style with “socialist” content that reflected the leading role of the Communist Party and the positive transformation of society under its guidance.
45 Jimmy Ernst, “Freedom of Expression in the Arts II,” Art Journal 25, no. 1 (1965): 46-47.