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ART CRIMES:
The Ebb, Flow & Dilemma of Protest Art

by Kari Lydersen
03.26.01

On August 1st, 2000, about 180 state police troopers in riot gear surrounded a warehouse in Philadelphia. A police helicopter attempted to land on the roof. Police took a circular saw to the locked door. Once the armed brigade busted into the building, they arrested everyone inside. The arrestees were held on a bus for 10 hours without water or bathrooms; they were told to "piss on the floor" according to Dave Bailey, one of those arrested. Many of them, including Bailey, spent 12 days in detention.

Bailey’s bail was set at $10,000. For five days he was held in segregation, in a two-person cell where he was held for 23 hours a day.

His crime?

Making puppets for the protests during the 2000 Republican National Convention.

After arresting the puppet-makers in Philly, the police proceeded to seize and destroy hundreds of puppets and effigies, the collective fruits of weeks of work by hundreds of people. Only a handful of puppets which had been removed by protesters earlier were saved, including 138 skeletons representing all the people executed in Texas during Bush’s reign as governor.

According to the puppeteers, police initially refused to even tell them what they were being arrested for. Police eventually charged the puppeteers—or puppetistas, as some have humorously dubbed them—with "obstructing a highway" (though they were inside a warehouse), and "possession of instruments of crime"—in this case, puppets. In an even more surreal move, police claimed that the artists were planning to release venomous animals during the convention. A rare animal dealer with a truckload of poisonous animals was indeed passing through the city during the time of the convention, though the dealer was not a protester and had contacted the police in advance asking about the safety of traveling through the city.

"There were all sorts of wild reports the cops put out," said Bailey. "We had taken every pain to make our efforts transparent. Everyone knew about it. Obviously it was very dangerous in terms of ideas."

The charges against most of the puppeteers were finally dropped in December, largely because the undercover police who had posed as union stagehands to infiltrate the puppet-making operation couldn’t make identifications. Some of the artists are still facing serious felony assault charges, however.

The puppetistas currently have civil suits in the works. The American Civil Liberties Union has stated that the raid was one of the most egregious modern examples of preventive detention and First Amendment abuse.

Glimmers

As street demonstrations, particularly those against globalization, have grown over the past year and a half, starting with the massive anti-WTO protests in Seattle in late 1999, political protest art, including puppets, street theater, stencils, posters, murals and graffiti has enjoyed a resurgence. All were in ample evidence at the anti-IMF protests in Washington D.C. in April 2000, the Republican and Democratic Conventions during the summer, at the anti-IMF/World Bank protests in Prague in September 2000, and at the 2001 Presidential Inauguration, where, despite the authorities’ banning of puppets in the protest area, some creative protesters responded by smuggling puppets in as signs that could be reassembled in puppet form.

Looking Back:
A History of Ebbs and Flows

In the US, political street art flourished amid the revolt of the ‘60s. Murals, a staple of the Mexican Revolution and other international movements, gained prominence as a community-based art form in the U.S. in the late ‘60s and burgeoned over the next few years as funding and public support for them became available. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and other mainstream agencies started making significant funds available to muralists and public art projects in the mid ‘60s, making more projects possible but also putting constraints on the content of publicly-funded work. The Art Workers Coalition in New York and the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists were among the activist art groups formed in the ‘60s who used government funding for politically dissident projects. But pressure from city governments and mainstream community groups blunted the political edge of the mural movement by the mid ‘70s, spurring groups like Artmakers to form in the early ‘80s with rejuvenated radicalism.

Though progressive politics muted in the ‘80s, political public art scaled new heights of sophistication, participation and humor throughout the country. Many attribute this to the wealth of artists who came of age in the ‘60s and to the teaching of political and public techniques in mainstream art schools throughout the ‘70s.

The 1980s: A Heyday of Sorts

When black graffiti artist Michael Stewart was arrested and strangled to death by New York police in 1985—and when all the (white) officers involved were acquitted—an army of his fellow political public artists rose to his defense. Political street art in New York City protesting his murder and the climate of police brutality mushroomed almost overnight. "The medical examiner removed his eyeballs so there wouldn’t be evidence of the strangulation," said Seth Tobocman, who created numerous posters and stencils protesting Stewart’s murder and the acquittal of the guilty cops the following year. When a diverse and highly politicized group of local artists called Artmakers Inc. launched the ambitious "La Lucha Continua" mural project at La Plaza Cultural in the quickly-gentrifying Lower East Side where Stewart had done much of his work, his slaying emerged as one of several interconnected themes engaged by the project, including apartheid, evictions, US intervention in Central America, the disappeared in Guatemala, homelessness and the power of grassroots community organizing

Political public art was almost synonymous with life for Stewart, Tobocman and their crowd on the Lower East Side of New York in the 1980s, which included activists and artists from virtually every economic, educational and ethnic background. One typical day found Tobocman with a group in Washington Square Park painting a mural of cuffed hands decorated with the stars and stripes of the American flag—an oblique statement on electoral politics.

"These Rastafarian drug dealers ran the park, so we used their system of lookouts. We had them watching our backs while we did this mural. Then these kids from New Jersey came in and we gave them some black spray paint and they painted all over the arch. It was this amazing moment of all these different people working together."

With Reagan in the White House and gentrification, police brutality, and landlord-induced arson rocking the city, the large and vibrant political artist community responded with anger and joy, putting their creativity to work in both legal and extralegal ways to thwart the system. Musicians, poets, eccentric orators and other creatively-inclined rabble-rousers formed a loose network with professionally-trained and self-taught visual artists, who blanketed the city with unauthorized political murals, stencils, fliers, tagged slogans, impromptu performances, speak-outs and jam sessions.

Tompkins Square Park was an unofficial political art gallery and performance space, with speeches, blues, reggae, drum circles or punk music echoing from the band shell. Stencils festooned the sidewalks and political fliers enveloped the lampposts for blocks around. Graffiti was at its height for much of the ‘80s, still more or less the domain of the ghettos where it was born, but blossoming into new and more sophisticated political and aesthetic styles. Stewart was just one of many graffiti artists working hand in hand with activist artists of other sorts—a synergy seen much less frequently today.

Much of the most powerful work of the '80s combined the efforts of both gallery and activist crowds. The homeless performance group the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) put on street theater about the plight of the homeless, poor and mentally ill. They were hauled away by police to sanitize the city for the 1984 Olympics. Greenpeace activists attached banners to garbage barges, the Statue of Liberty and Mt. Rushmore, jumped from smokestacks, staged mock fashion shows and created other visual and guerrilla theatre works to protest nuclear power, pollution, and animal cruelty, among other issues.

Gran Fury and ACT UP launched biting and provocative AIDS-activism and anti-homophobia crusades in New York, sometimes utilizing corporate advertising methods as with the then-shocking "Kissing Doesn’t Kill" bus and billboard campaign. They also circulated stickers, T-shirts and placards with eye-catching images of penises and slogans like "Sexism Rears its Unprotected Head — AIDS Kills Women," and "The Government has blood on its hands— one AIDS death every half hour." To protest media coverage of AIDS, in 1989 Gran Fury printed a four-page New York Crimes parody of the Times and wrapped it around thousands of Times papers inside vending machines at 4 a.m. The AIDS quilt also made its rounds of the country in the late ‘80s.

Feminist groups were among the most active during the ‘80s: the Guerrilla Girls donned gorilla masks to protest male-dominance of the art world and larger feminist issues. Artist, writer and video producer Suzanne Lacy’s nationwide projects including "In Mourning and in Rage" (actually created in 1977) and "Immigrants and Survivors" placed costumed women in public places to whisper or scream about violence toward women and other feminist issues. In Chicago, New York, Houston, San Francisco and other cities the Women’s Action Coalition used visual and action-oriented art to protest physical and legislative violence against women.

Across the country countless shifting groups and collectives painted overtly political murals with and without official permission. These included an exploding number of Chicano murals in California; anarchist, labor and housing-rights murals along Haight Street and throughout the Mission District in San Francisco; and in New York the "La Lucha" project and Group Material’s excellent and broad-ranging poster and mural campaign.

The 1990s: A Low Point

During the late 1990s, several graffiti artists were fatally shot by police and black and Latino graffiti artists were constantly harassed and physically attacked by police. But none of these incidents drew a response like the murder of Stewart did.

Big Juss, a New York graffiti and hip-hop artist, used to throw his name up all over Manhattan and spend all night riding and tagging the trains. Today, he sticks to New Jersey suburbs because of the draconian laws that slap illegal graffiti and political artists in New York with thousands of dollars in fines and jail time. The only "graffiti" in Manhattan which bears his name—actually that of his hip hop group, Company Flow, is a graffiti-style ad done by his former record label without his knowledge. "I’m not sure how I feel about that," he said, wincing slightly. Much of Manhattan’s public art of the old grassroots political forms—murals, posters, graffiti—is in fact advertising for fashion, music, alcohol, software, food. The murals and stencils of political figures and issues done in the 80’s are largely absent.

Which is not to say protest art isn’t still being done. But the current political art scenes in the major US cities revolve largely around small, close-knit, often male-dominated networks and a limited number of high-profile individual causes, with Mumia Abu-Jamal’s being the trendiest. In New York, the once-raging Tompkins Square Park scene and various other political collectives have largely dropped out of sight, due mostly to quickening gentrification and a spate of stifling "quality of life" laws.

Robert Lederman is one of the city’s most visible political public artists. Lederman is a career artist who was politicized by former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s attacks on street artists and who quickly became one of the mayor’s harshest and untiring critics. The unflattering cardboard caricatures of "Ghouliani", which he carries and passes out at demos have riled Rudy so much that he had Lederman arrested on disorderly conduct charges more than 40 times and even tried to outlaw removing cardboard from dumpsters. Lederman laps up the Mayor’s hatred proudly and points to Giuliani’s persecution of him as a sign of the lack of other political public art going on.

Susan Green, a 20-year fixture in the San Francisco art scene, says she feels "pretty alienated" today in San Francisco because of the lack of a strong political art scene.

"The ripping down [of] posters and painting over things definitely has a dampening effect on people," she said. "There still is a lot of postering going on, but there was a point where it was a much more vibrant form of communication and people were putting up posters not only to advertise events but to express ideas. I haven’t really seen that happening in years, [not] since the neighborhoods started gentrifying."

"There are still quite a few walls being painted, but they’re not as political," added Miranda Richardson, another San Francisco artist who has been working in the Mission community for 25 years and who went to Nicaragua and the West Bank with Green. "Most of it is spray art, which isn’t as issue-based. I wish it was. Part of the reason is that there isn’t an overt movement. There has to be something for it to bounce off of."

Like Richardson and Green, many of the artists of the ‘80s continue doing politically-engaged public art. But a majority of the notable groups have folded, dwindled, lost their oppositional edge and/or become more concentrated in the gallery world than the public sphere. Participation in Guerrilla Girls events dropped drastically through the early ‘90s and became more and more insular. Gran Fury and ACT-UP drifted toward more introspective, less angry works as the nature of the AIDS crisis and public attitudes evolved. Group Material became more gallery-oriented, perhaps a victim of its own success, and most of its members drifted away. The Women’s Action Coalition dissolved from internal struggles and exhaustion. Many individual artists tended toward galleries or books as they grew tired and frustrated with the activist scene, looked for more stability, or started families. The bottom line, as Richardson said, is that the state of the political movement was no longer sustaining the art.

"It has to do with the demise of the left in America," said Greg Sholette, an art teacher and founder of Repo History, a radical New York public art group which continues to put out political public works. "Academia has taken over some of that—people who would have been political leaders have become professors. They’ve taken away the idea of using public space for oppositional messages."

Art Appropriation,
Graffiti & the Protection of Capital

Until the activist resurgence of the past two years, and the obvious potential it has to seize the popular imagination, graffiti, with its greater threat to property values and its exaggerated ties to "gangs" and "crime" struck considerably more fear into the hearts of landlords and politicians.

In 1995, Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell announced that "One of the worst problems facing this city is graffiti," while unveiling a new zero-tolerance anti-graffiti campaign. "While it can’t kill or maim, graffiti is a more insidious problem. It can kill morale." An article by the Kensington Welfare Rights Union notes that Philly spends $3 million a year fighting graffiti and that graffiti artists can end up with $10,000 fines and up to five years in jail. The laws also hold parents responsible for their kids’ graffiti and fine property owners who don’t clean up graffiti on their property.

Bus stop bench advertisements in Oakland say "NO: Drugs, Driving Drunk, Graffiti," equating painting with potentially deadly drug use and drunk driving.

Costly anti-graffiti programs are ironic considering that at the same time cities are spending millions to fight graffiti, they’re pouring money into after-school art programs that serve essentially the same purpose as graffiti—giving "at risk" kids a wholesome creative outlet.

The Debatable Politics of Graffiti

Fifteen or 20 years ago graffiti might have appeared to be the obvious inheritor of the political street art tradition, a new grassroots form produced by the most disenfranchised and oppressed of the country’s youth.

But Tobocman and many other political artists of his generation are skeptical about the artistic and political growth and potential of graffiti. Many say they respect it for what it is and see it as a potential springboard, but they label the current scene as more about ego and trendiness than power or politics.

"As an instructor and youth organizer I see it as something that can be very useful and lead to other things," said Chicago art teacher and political muralist Robert Valadez. "But 90% of it is very uninspired and derivative, mainly about competition and getting your tag up. Ideally, it’s the beginning of a belief system and a part of one phase of their lives that they’ll branch out from."

Casper, a long-time Chicago graffiti artist who, like the political artists has now gravitated to the gallery scene, doesn’t think graffiti artists make any claims to be political, and doesn’t think they should be expected to.

"It’s two completely different realms, it’s a non-issue," he said. "Some artists might be political but their graffiti isn’t about politics. It’s not about changing the world, it’s about being a superstar. This is their way to be a star. I think even for political art you would find that. Though the person might be political, their art is about being a star. Diego Rivera was obviously a political person, he was involved in assassination attempts, but I think his art was his show-off aspect."

Robert Muniz, a teen-age graffiti artist in San Antonio, agrees. He can make a good case for graffiti being political in that it takes back public space from the system, but he readily he admits he does graffiti mainly for the fun and glory. "I do it for myself. I just love it. Someone sees my name over and over, I’ll walk through the mall with my crew and everyone knows who we are."

A survey of the many glossy graffiti magazines shows scant mention of political issues or works among the tales of the street, disses of other artists and misogynistic attitudes.

But there are graffiti artists doing overtly political work, and some of the most visually striking and visible political art in the country, at that. "Eskae" and "Twist" are two Bay Area (California) artists who regularly attack capitalism, the military-industrial complex, corporate advertising and the US government. Twist, aka Barry McGee’s work commonly features bloated, evil-oozing capitalist pigs with dollar signs floating around. One of his pieces shows a flaccid, cowardly boss in a business suit forcing a blindfolded worker to carry him on his back.

"I create graffiti as a political act against the whole idea of property ownership," Eskae is quoted as saying in Michael Walsh’s book Graffito. "Graffiti is a kick in the face to the gallery/museum system, where the artist is pimped like a whore for the capitalist system, made into another commodity for people to buy."

Ephraim, a graffiti artist who painted in Santa Cruz under the name Ripe (as in "the time is ripe") argues that graffiti is intensely political regardless of the message.

"The very act of an individual projecting their identification into the public realm is very political," he said. "It’s about retaining individuality in a society that neither condones nor accepts it, that tries to replace it with a mass corporate identity."

Commodifying Artistic Dissent

Though property owners and government officials are frightened enough of graffiti and what it implies to spend millions of dollars removing it, the corporate advertising industry of America feels just the opposite. They are eager to spend millions on graffiti—to own and use it. With its irresistibly attractive style and status within youth and hip hop culture, advertisers have jumped all over the graffiti bandwagon to hawk clothing, sports equipment, alcohol, soda, music and countless other commodities. Ironically, much of graffiti’s advertising use is to sell over-priced goods from huge (mainly white-owned) companies to the low-income minority kids who started graffiti as a form of protest against this system in the first place. Ephraim sees this as a conscious philosophy, and he partially blames co-optation by mass media and advertisers for the apolitical and self-referential aspects of graffiti.

"There’s infighting, scenism and material bias," he says. "Part of that is because it is attacked by our culture on two fronts, by capitalism co-opting it and the powers that be trying to squash it. (Co-optation by advertising) is one of the insidious structures of control that dominant culture has. It’s like white blood cells, taking what attacks them and trying to transform it into a line of defense, turning it around and making it part of the system."

Redefining the Political

While the Free Mumia movement may be the most "successful" and widespread of the overtly political art campaign, plenty of activists and leftists criticize it for its trendiness, narrow focus and air of white punk cliquishness. Many political artists say that in this day of mainstream political apathy and cynicism, more personal and subtle public art has greater political potential than the lineup of now-commonplace images. They say "black and red" revolutionary imagery has gotten hackneyed and boring, and that images of Malcolm X, Emiliano Zapata, Pedro Albizu-Campos, Che Guevara are so common that they don’t even raise an eyebrow, let alone a dissonant or disruptive idea.

"It’s more inspiring when the politics are mixed in with real art, [where] the political message could be buried on the third layer of meaning," said Andrew Castrucci, a founder of the New York Bullet Space squatter-activist-artist organization. "It’s very boring to have a straight-up political message. The more cryptic it is, the more powerful it is."

Inspired Lunacy

Humor and whimsy, as seen in puppet shows and light-hearted demonstrations going back to the ‘60s, are also effective weapons. The squatter and community garden movements in the US and throughout Europe are experts at pulling off loopy, hilarious occupations and protests. Even before the anti-globalization movement kicked off, microradio and democratic media activists were putting puppets and street theater to good use.

"The garden people have done some amazing things with puppets," said Tobocman. "They give it a less militant tone…If you start playing kazoos, [they don’t] know what to do."

Juan Chavez, a Chicago artist who does both commissioned and guerrilla work and teaches art to youth, agrees. Though he does work on overtly political themes including an anonymous anti-police brutality mural, he prefers to break the status quo and challenge people to think with illegal works which are unexpected, abstract, and often funny and thought-provoking.

"How many Boricua (Puerto Rican) pride murals do you need?" he asks. "I try to get the kids to think in new ways, to do things that people haven’t done millions of times before."

In 1999 Chavez and a friend placed a life-sized plaster cast of a homeless person on Chicago’s Lower Wacker Drive, where many homeless people would survive the freezing winters huddled on heating grates until the city swept them out and fenced in the grates. The sculpture was soon smashed to bits and Chavez found it with a rat inside the obliterated hollow shell.

"We don’t know if it was a cop or someone who hated homeless people or a homeless person who thought we were making fun of them," he said. "The reaction was fitting considering what’s been happening to the real homeless people there."

Artistic Dissent Today and into the Future

If Tobocman and the Tompkins Square crowd epitomized the New York political art scene of the ‘80s, it may be James de la Vega with his less political but more personal, subtle, pop-cultural and even spiritual style who personifies the contemporary movement. A 27-year-old Cornell graduate of Puerto Rican descent, De la Vega returned to his economically-depressed Spanish Harlem neighborhood in 1994 to open a studio at 103rd and Lexington Avenue and proceeded to blanket the surrounding blocks with paint, chalk and tape collages. He sees his political role as waking people up, and stirring them from the alienated routine and torpor of the work-to-home-to-sleep-to-work grind.

"Working here I see all these people walking back and forth every day with their heads down, in a total routine," he says. "My job is to snap them out of that. You see something that says something about the conditions around you and it makes you think. It’s not in a gallery, it interrupts what you’re doing so you have to deal with it."

In the winter he uses tape to create huge images on the sidewalks and streets. He does murals of black and Puerto Rican musicians. Though De la Vega doesn’t talk much about religion, he also creates spare, dramatic masking-tape and paint renditions of the crucifixion and the Last Supper. One of his masterpieces is a huge version of Picasso’s Guernica, which included a needle in an arm until local residents demanded he paint over that part.

De la Vega is clearly conscious of and engaged with broad political issues, but prefers to use his art to directly empower his immediate community. He feels he does this by brightening and decorating the area, and just by working in what he calls his "fishbowl studio," with a window on the street inviting people to come in and participate or just talk. It was his father’s dream to be an artist, a dream that was crushed by poverty and long hours of low-wage labor before his death from AIDS. De la Vega feels he has transcended those circumstances and fulfilled his father’s dream. His politics are manifest in his desire to inspire and teach other poor Spanish Harlem kids to do the same.

San Francisco’s Susan Green likewise believes that the act of creation and statement for oppressed people and especially youth, whether in apolitical graffiti or community murals, is the true political statement. The kids in her program at the Oakland projects aren’t much interested by politics or the history of struggle. She says they were thoroughly bored by a local "Huey Newton Historical Tour" led by Bobby Seale himself. Whatever the subject matter, she says the fact that these kids are doing art is political.

"The powers that be want these kids to go to prison," she said. "They need them in prison to keep the system going. They would much rather have them in prison than in college. So the most intensely political act is for them to be doing something like this that gives them an identity and confidence, where they get the sense that ‘Fuck no, I can do whatever I want.’"

In other words it isn’t works of art about oppressed people but rather oppressed people out there doing art that has potential to change the system. The wave of art at the protests against the WTO, IMF, DNC, RNC and plans for more of the same at the protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) meetings in Montreal has re-invigorated certain sectors of protest art, and draws on a long international tradition of artistic opposition to power and injustice. Murals, posters and street theater can often inspire, involve and move people in ways that rhetoric simply cannot.

Now it remains to be seen if this resurgence will be integrated into an ongoing artistic rebellion, if it will foment a creative dialogue, in the ghettoes, suburbs, universities and financial districts of America and the world. It also remains to be seen if the "movement," such as it is, can deepen and strengthen that dialogue while developing an awareness and set of values coherent enough to insulate it, too, from eventually becoming a tool for commerce. [ L i P ]

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