This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
After The Fall-Fred Astaire and Jane Powell’s “Royal Wedding” (1951)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Bart Webber
Royal Wedding, starring Fred Astaire, Jane Powell, Peter Lawford, directed by Stanley Donen, 1951
Everybody loves a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie what with the pair dancing gracefully across the whole set usually some ballroom doing amazing coordinated movements and fancy footwork accompanied by the singing of classic show tunes like “dancing cheek to cheek,” “the way you look tonight” and a million other hum the tune catch a verse here and there from ancient memory form works by the likes of venerable Cole Porter, the catchy tune Gershwins, a hot of Jerome Kern and Mr. American Broadway Irving Berlin. Everybody, well maybe not everybody, but at least fellow film reviewer Phil Larkin and me, loves Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth going through their dancing routines although I confess that I only have eyes for Rita ever since she tore up the screen in Gilda and proved why to the guys who fought and bled in World War II, the parents of my generation had her pin-up girl photo on their locker doors or in their duffle bags so I don’t know if Fred is dancing of not. Then there is this late Astaire turkey from 1951 with Jane Powell in the Technicolor-etched Royal Wedding where Fred and partner fall through the cracks in the Astaire pantheon.
Turkey you say let me count the ways. First maybe the whole idea of Technicolor is the villain. Maybe the magic of Astaire and previous partners is lost against the colors clashing with whatever it is they are doing. The black of Fred’s tux, suit, whatever he was wearing while dancing and the white of the dresses let you focus on the dance not the distractions of the backdrop. Secondly our boy has lost a step or seven by 1951 and it was noticeable that while he had the small circle steps down as usual the pair never swept the vistas as he had with his previous partners. Or maybe he just didn’t trust Jane to go the distance with him. (Even the so-called legendary dancing with the walls, a solo by Fred, toward the end of the film was done in one room, or the walls of one room.) Thirdly there was nothing memorable, meaning hummable or catch a verse on the tip of your tongue, in the various songs sung by either partner and it was almost laughable that Ms. Powell (or the director) couldn’t lip-synch to any of the operatic songs that she was supposedly singing although everybody knew, or should have been presumed to know, that she was barely opening her mouth at times (and was caught at least one time so shame on the editing crews bursting into dance before she was supposed to be finished with her number).
Worse, worst of all was the tripe storyline which I, and fellow film critic Laura Perkins, watched together to determine who was to do the review could never figure out at least trying to coordinate the storyline with the song and dance routine. To not hold you in suspect any longer Laura “passed” on this one from about the first five minutes, said so, and so against my better instincts I was forced to actually pay attention to this dog in order to warn the reader what to expect. (Seth Garth, yet another film reviewer here, a longtime one, had the whole place in an uproar of laughter when he mentioned that it was easier in the old days on dogs like this one just to rewrite whatever the studio sent out in a press release, sign you name at the top and past in as your considered wisdom on the matter and not actually have to watch the thing.)
Here is what happened or I think what happened. Tom, played by Astaire, and Ellen, Tom’s sister played by Jane Powell are a song and dance team doing grand business on Broadway. ( A third contender to do this review the previously mentioned Phil Larkin dropped out when he found out the much older Astaire and Powell were tagged as brother and sister and not to be the “romance” distracted team of the musical so he could go forth on his intergenerational sex kick.) Their agent gets them booked in London for the royal wedding of Princess (now ancient Queen) Elizabeth and still consort Prince Philip although how the shows, the song and dance shows, have anything to do with to with the wedding other than by coincidence is beyond me.
Tom and Ellen while loving to play the romance field in order to add to add to their respective trophy rooms are all business-everything for the theater and the rest be damned. Except the wedding fever must have been catching since Ellen was smitten by a world weary Lord, played by Peter Lawford and Tom by a fetching dancer in the show. After the usual denial of love both are caught by the throat of Cupid’s grip and on royal wedding day, a day when everything comes together about why this thing has that title as the dance team watch the royal wedding procession pass by about two hundred yards away from their hotel room. On the basis of that spectacle both jump the marriage hoop and live happily ever after-I guess.
As for the dance routines-a mock royal wedding act, a solo by Fred dancing with a hat stand, a ballroom dance on the rolling seas which aboard what might have been the Titanic for the amount of list they had to fight (and which reportedly and I can believe this took 150s takes), a red-light district “romance,” the aforementioned legendry walking the walls shtick, and then a politically incorrect, today, and one would have wished then as well a dance set in Haiti with an all- white cast of ensemble dancers and singers. And Haiti was not even a British colony but French before the 1789 revolution. How does this logjam fit together? Not.
The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-When Gary Ladd Danced The North Adamsville High School Be-Bop Hop Dance Night Away
A YouTube film clip of The Shirelles performing their 1960s teen angst classic Mama Said
Introduction by Allan Jackson
[On reflection a lot of what went on in high school, what drove guys like me crazy, guys who had no sisters, maybe had no close girl friends was the very subject of chasing women. There is no other way to put the matter. Strangely enough everybody, every guy was on his own (I will let the women of our generation speak for themselves but I have on anecdotal evidence the distinct thought that also from different biological needs their social stories don’t differ too much from the guys)on the subject, had to learn the hard way what was what. I don’t know how much things have changed in the last fifty years concerning parental guidance through the sexual thicket but I suspect, again on anecdotal evidence, that some things have stayed pretty much the same despite the tremendous amount of information out there. Of course a lot of our Tonio’s Pizza corner boys being on our own was self-imposed since we neither wanted to be thought nor really have much going on since we got a lot of very bad, or erroneous information from the “street. Since parents were books sealed with seven seals the only real way to get any information about sex, or anything else that might interest a teenager was from older brothers, sisters or stuff heard out on that street. Many a guy got some kind of social disease and many a girl had to visit faraway “Aunt Emma” shorthand for pregnant based on that erroneous information. The other coin thought was that we, individually were lying our asses off half the time about sexual conquests and the like. That too on anecdotal evidence gained many, many years later when the smoke and fog had cleared.
Despite the shortcomings of our knowledge about sex, about how to approach girls you could almost take it to the bank the information, the intelligence we called it that the late Peter Paul Markin, the Scribe, gathered in other areas, areas like what girl was interested or not interested in what guy or guys, and the crucial information about who was “going steady,” taken, or however you wanted to call unavailable in your neighborhood. This critical information saved many a guy from making a social faux pas and going even further down the high school social hierarchy. See what that situation meant that you were duty-bound and maybe depending on the guy to keep “hands off” if that was the information Scribe handed you. And except for one very embarrassing time when Scribe didn’t know that a girl Seth Garth was interested in had a steady guy who was in the Navy and he wound up calling the girl up and got an irate slap down Scribe knew his stuff. Again, later based on anecdotal evidence, this tradition, this point of honor so-called was honored more in the breach than the observance. (By the way on that misstep by Scribe with Seth that girl had been interested in him earlier in the year and not getting any response from her signals went on to that sailor boy and when he called she was just kind of paying him back for his lateness on the matter. Yeah, life was, is like that sometime. Seth said damn when he found out about that a couple of years after our high school graduation.)
How Scribe got his information, why girls were free to talk to him about stuff that they might not talk to their girlfriends about was always a mystery. Maybe they thought he was a eunuch, or more likely in those times “light on his feet” and no threat to whatever they were interested. Part of it might have been his two million facts which he would spout at the drop of a hat and that impressed many girls from what I came to understand later although not enough to strike up a romance. For a fact, Scribe, and I, although I always lied about it, never in high school had a date with anybody from North Adamsville High or even the town in general so it wasn’t about getting dates for himself. Maybe too it was that he had a reputation for knowing who and who not to approach and maybe that held him in good stead. The funny thing is that if Gary Ladd had been a couple of years younger he could have scooped up his honey, the one e was able to “dance” the night away with once things got clear a lot faster than he did. Allan Jackson]
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Saturday night from seven to eleven, any third Saturday of the month from September to May, every red-blooded teen boy and girl in the 1961 North Adamsville High School be-bop, be-bop night could only be in one locale, or want to be. That was the night of the monthly seasonally-themed high school hop. The Fall Frolic, Pumpkin Ball, Mistletoe Magic, Frozen Frolic, and so on themes with hop at the end to give the old-timey innocent high school feel to the night in a town which had had such dances since the school’s founding in the 1920s. Although the term “hop” had been of more recent vintage reflecting the effect that such cultural phenomena as the afternoon television program American Bandstand and Danny and the Juniors classic song At The Hop had invested the word with significant teen meaning. More importantly this monthly hop, unlike the more exclusive Autumn Leaves, Holly Hock and Spring Fling dances which were meant solely for juniors and seniors and their guests and which were not designated hops or any other such shorthand reflecting the new rock and roll breeze that had been stirring through the nation for some time by then, anyone, even freshmen and sophomores, could ante up the dollar admission and dance the night away.
There had been a large attendance of wallflower-like freshman, girls and boys alike, all red-faced, all sweaty palms, all trying to look nonchalantly like they had been going to these things for ages to hide their wallflower fears who were hanging off the walls in the transformed festooned gym. As were most of the sophomores, a little more self-assured and hovering around the gym bleachers which had been extended to provide some seating, but still worried about whether they, the boys, had put on enough underarm deodorant, had swigged enough mouthwash, had combed enough parted Wild Root-infested hair, and the girls, whether that stolen mother’s perfume would seem too strong, their permed hair was still in array and that that padded dress showed their figures to good effect were witness to the fact that anyone, sweaty palms or not if they had enough moxie could dance the night away.
Well almost everybody in attendance had the chance to dance the night away. And that had been the dilemma confronting one freshman, Gary Ladd, he the “wallflower” way off to the side of the gym almost into the wall if you didn’t think you had seen him on one of the third Saturday nights in question. And right next to him is another guy, Sam Lowell, hair-slicked, underarm-protected, Listerine-inhaled, his best friend since junior high days when he moved to town from Clintondale and they have since tried to defend each other against the hardships of American wayward youth times, times when they both would have rather just that moment had cool sunglasses on to stifle their fears. But let’s get back to Gary because the night Sam was referring to was his night after some many failed efforts and Sam’s story can be simply stated. He will wind up going home at intermission kind of defeated since nobody, nobody at all had asked him to dance, believing that he had not put enough deodorant on, enough Wild Root or swilled enough mouthwash and had been defeated by the ever-present bane of the wallflowers-personal hygiene.
[Sam would find out a couple of days later when he mentioned his defeat to Emma Wilson in History Class that most of the freshman girls that she knew kept an arm’s distance from him not for personal hygiene, some girls thought that he was “cute,” but no girl, no self-respecting girl could permit herself to be barraged by the two thousand odd-ball facts that he would spew out in order to impress them during the dance. Sam has since decided to take her comment under advisement. But back to Gary.]
What had been bothering Gary, though, we might as well have our moment of truth right up front since this is a confessional age and the truth would have come out anyway, is that he can’t dance. Can’t dance a damn, to hell, heaven or any place in between. Couldn’t dance in junior high when Sam tried to shadow-box teach him a few steps and when the moment of truth came he almost broke poor, beautiful Melinda Loring’s big toe. Such a reputation in a small town is hard to break. Sam’s corner boy Gary’s problem: two- left feet. Two left-feet despite the more recent best efforts of one Agnes Ladd, North Adamsville Class of 1961 Vice President, whose own feet have taken a terrible beating, and has earned some kind of medal for service above and beyond the call of duty, trying to teach little brother Gary the elements of the waltz, the fox trot, and hell, even two feet away from your partner rock and roll moves and the twist to no avail.
All of this teaching done under the cover of tight security since Gary had sworn Agnes to secrecy about their doings. Agnes, for her part, one of the smartest and most popular girls in the senior class, had no intention of telling anybody that she was talking to, much less teaching dance to a freshman even if it was her own brother. Those are the school conventions, and nobody, nobody who is smart and popular is going to defy conventions like that. The freshman, as Agnes told Gary, would have their day in a few years and would in turn snub their subordinate freshman. That is the way it is. But Gary, no twerp under his two left-footed exterior, has always, as he put it, exercised his democratic right as a freshman in good standing to be at these universal dances, come hell or high water.
But that night, that warm April Bring Spring Hop night Sam was talking about, things were destined to be a little different as Gary has already staked his place against the far wall (the wall farthest away from the girl “wallflowers” just in case you wanted an exact location. Mostly wallflowers, boy or girl, although not Sam, were keeping their respective distances on the odd chance that someone may actually come up and ask them to dance. First off this month, unlike most months when some lame student DJ from Communications class spins platters on a feisty school record player, the local craze rock band sensations, The Rockin’ Ramrods, were performing live on the makeshift bandstand and were guaranteed to have everybody who gets to dance rocking before they are done, including Gary and Sam who are scared but still hopeful. Just that minute as Gary shifted his weight and placed his back to the wall they were tuning up before their first set of three with the appropriately named Please Stay by the Drifters. Secondly, but in line with that Gary hopeful, a new girl in town, Elsie Mae Horton, had told Gary that she would be coming to the hop, her first since moving to town a couple of months before. Naturally the mere fact that she said she would come was an added reason why Gary was there all that exercising democratic rights stuff be damned (and also why he had tortured his sister Agnes to try, try in vain, to teach him some dance steps). See Gary has the “bug” for Elsie Mae, Yeah, as Sam well knew since he had taken a failed and fruitless run at her with his two thousand facts in Civics class and had gotten the deep freeze, Gary was smitten.
Now this Elsie Mae was maybe, on a scale of one to ten, about a six so it is not looks that had Gary (and about six other guys, five and Sam), well, smitten. An okay body, fair legs, nice brown hair and eyes, a so-so dresser like Sam said a “six” (and Gary agreed with Sam in that department although if you see Elsie Mae Sam never said that, nor did Gary). See what Elsie Mae had was nothing but smarts, book smarts which had been how Sam had made his approach to her in Civics class talking about this book they were reading about President Andrew Jackson and how he broke the back of the aristocrats like the Adams family who wanted to keep political power in the hands of some self-selected elite, themselves, and forget the guys going west, yeah Sam confessed not exactly the smoothest move. Idea smart too which enthralled Gary since he liked to talk about novels and such which was what Elsie Mae was into, talk smarts you name it smarts and one of the sweetest smiles this side of heaven. And, as Gary found out early on in one of their shared classes, very easy to talk to about anything, if she wanted to talk to you. Yes, he was smitten; the only unknown in his mind is whether she could dance good enough to stay out of his way if it came to that. That is if he got up the nerve to ask her. And as the Ramrods started their first set with Gary Bonds’ School Is Out (praise be) he noticed her coming in the door. Heart pounding he started sinking into the wall again.
As they finished with Brother Bonds the Ramrods started in on The Impressions’ Gypsy Woman before Gary realized that Elsie Mae has drawn a bee-line straight for him and was standing right in front of him, turning a little red after he did not greet her. “Oh, my god,” Gary whispers under his breathe, “she is going to ask me to dance. No way.” The usually easy to talk to Elsie Mae though said nothing, nothing but turned a little redder as the Ramrods covered the Pips Every Beat Of My Heart (nicely done too). She stood there waiting for Gary to ask her, if you can believe that. Well, two-left feet or not, he did ask her. And she smiled a little smile as she “accepted.” Relief.
Needless to say when they did their dance, The Edsels’ Rama Lama Ding Dong, it was nothing but a disaster. A Gary disaster? Yes. Although you can use fake moves galore on such a tune Gary, maybe nervous, maybe just trying to show off started moving all his arms all over the place so he looked from Sam’s wall position like one of those devilish Hindu gods with a ton of arms. And while in motion he had hit Ella Mae a couple of times, not hard but not cool either. Once she came close to him and he moved back into another couple, a senior couple and Sam thought the senior, Bill Daley from the football team, was going to level poor Gary but he just moved away with his date with the meanest look of scorn Sam had seen in a while.
So disaster was the right word. But here is the funny part. Elsie Mae Horton, formerly of Gloversville, a town in farm country a few miles away and known for the Gloversville Amusement Park on Route 9 and nothing else really, and new to North Adamsville so of unknown dance quality, had two-left feet too. When she had been closing in on Gary it was because she had lost her balance and was ready to careen into him. Get this though. When the dance was mercifully finished, and the two had actually survived, Elsie Mae thanked Gary and told him that he was a wonderful dancer and said she wished that she could dance like him. Whee! Here is the real kicker though. Elsie Mae had also been taking dancing lessons on Saturday mornings at the YWCA, unsuccessfully. Dancing lessons solely so that two-left feet Elsie Mae Horton could dance with Gary Ladd. See, she was “smitten” too. And so if you did not see Gary or Elsie Mae at the Mayfair Dance last month you have now solved that mystery. That night they were sitting, sitting very close to each other, on the seawall down at Adamsville Beach laughing about starting a “Two-Left Feet” Club. With just two members.
[As for Sam’s fate at the Mayfair Moon dance he went to the hop with Emma Wilson. See after she clued him in to “what was what” that time in class about his style Sam ran into her at the library and they talked, or rather she talked, not two thousand facts, talked but talked. And Sam let her. And right after that she asked Sam to escort her, her words, to the hop.]
When It Rains Pennies From Heaven-Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor and Gene Kelly’s “Singing In The Rain” (1954)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Leslie Dumont
Singing in the Rain, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor, Gene Kelly, 1954
An old associate of mine in this wacky journalism business once told me that when writers, meaning in that case reporters but here commentators and reviewers, start airing “their dirty linen in public” that usually means some problems are congealing up the ladder, up in the administrative offices, when decisions such as assignments and plum pieces get decided. That old associate also pointed out that when things get dicey it is much easier to put one administrator under the bus than fire a whole raft of writers who make the whole thing hum. We shall see, we shall see. Here is my gripe. I seem to be getting a whole raft of these silly feel good musicals, song and dance ones a specialty. I just got this one, this silly Singing In The Rain, which is so corny it could not possibly be made today and not just because song and dance films are passe, quite passe, but because would try the patience of an eight year old if an eight year could be wrestled into the theater something in my day which could be done since there was nowhere else to put us if Grandma had other business to attend to and we were force fed this stuff which we couldn’t understand then, or now. These musicals other than endless songs and dances at the drop of a hat, and maybe you didn’t even need to do that with a song bursting at the seams or some guy dancing up the walls to show his prowess. With that in mind this thing is a loser despite its future post-release iconic status which must have been led by those poor wrestled kids brainwashed into sitting through this turkey. One of these days I will kindly refuse to swallow yet more pride and say no.
For now though as Laura Perkins, who got the saying from Sam Lowell who used to be the head honcho in the film room here, and who said it was okay for me to use when I mentioned that I would not because she had it “patented” “here is the skinny.” Don, Gene Kelly’s role, is former vaudeville duo with Cosmo, played by Donald O’Connor, who have played every venue without coming up roses. Hard times indeed in the 1920s when vaudeville was losing it grip to surging Hollywood. They, mainly Don, once they hit Tinsel Town tried everything to get into the movie business from go-for to stuntman. Finally he got and finally he got his
Big chance with a big star, Lina, who made all the men weep for her hand-in the “silent film” era. Don made it big on Lina’s say so and both rode the stardom trail until the advent of “talkies.”
That is where Lina had a little problem. Her low-rent Brooklyn-Bronx-Yonkers someplace in urban New York anyway accent and manner were zero when The Jazz Singer ruined many a lucrative career by making actors more than mimes and forced then to talk the King’s English. Don and Lina had been touted by the studios and egged on by Lina as a Hollywood star pair but that was strictly for show. Strictly PR stuff but Don had Lina tagged as from nowhere in his dream girl nights. What did get Don in a dither was meeting Kathy, played by all-American “girl next door” Debbie Reynolds who was star-struck and stage-struck but before some big break was getting by as a chorus girl showing her gams for the nightclub set. Strictly second-rate stuff but better than being beaten back to Boise or Omaha on some one-way Greyhound bus. For a while as is almost standard in these older films she gives Don the big chill but only for a while, made him burn like a firecracker but eventually she defrosted after he rushed her.
The influence of Mexican folk art on Kahlo’s work and life
Like many artists in Mexico City’s vibrant intellectual circles, Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) avidly collected traditional Mexican folk art—arte popular—as a celebration of Mexican national culture. She drew inspiration from these objects, seizing on their political significance after the Mexican Revolution and incorporating their visual and material qualities into her now iconic paintings.
Following the recent acquisition of Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia) (1928), this is the MFA’s first exhibition on Frida Kahlo. It tightly focuses on Kahlo’s lasting engagements with arte popular, exploring how her passion for objects such as decorated ceramics, embroidered textiles, children’s toys, and devotional retablo paintings shaped her own artistic practice. A selection of Kahlo’s paintings—including important loans from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin—is brought together with representative examples of arte popular. Bringing fresh attention to Kahlo as an ambitious, ever-evolving painter, this exhibition also opens broader discussions about the influences of anonymous folk artists on famed modern painters.
The MFA’s mission is to be a meeting place of world cultures. Acknowledging the cultural heritage of the artist, gallery labels for this exhibition are provided in both English and Spanish.
Honestly although I have known the name Frida Kahlo since back in the 1970s when we down to Mexico and along the way went to the famous Blue House Frida and Diego Rivera shared I was not familiar with her work as I was with Rivera and the other male muralists for which Mexico was then famous. I got more familiar with her work indirectly through the film Frida although I would not say I was well versed even then. What I connected Frida to more than art, or rather who I connected Frida to, was the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky who persecuted by Stalin and his agents was on the planet without a place to stay. Frida and Diego through their connections got Trotsky into the country. Although I had a Trotskyist boyfriend at the time I went to Mexico I was unaware, as I believe he was since he never mentioned it then, of the short love affair between Frida and Trotsky (which would culminate in a Frida painting dedicated to Trotsky now in the Women’s Art Museum down in Washington).
My real introduction to Frida, live and in person, was several years ago when the MFA displayed (as in this exhibit) her famous Two Peasant Women painting which in many ways shows her artistic skills to advantage and has the addition advantage of showing how close she was to her deeply held Mexican roots. That alone is reason enough to see this exhibition at the MFA if you are in or near Boston between now and June.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Winter 1990-91, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
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Culture, Class and Censorship-Forbidden Art
By Helen Cantor
"Modern art is Communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people, and our material progress. Art which does not glorify our beautiful country in plain, simple terms that everyone can understand breeds dissatisfaction. It is therefore opposed to our government, and those who create and promote it are our enemies." —Rep. George A. Dondero
Back in the McCarthy witch hunt days, abstract art was supposed to be a Commie plot, subverting and/or making fools of the American people, as the above 1949 quote from Michigan Representative George A. Dondero indicates. Today, when you can tell exactly, precisely, down to the last hair follicle, what's happening in certain works of art, the same generic yahoo Congressmen still don't like the stuff. Today it's North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms ranting against the late Robert Mapplethorpe's classic, precise photographs because they have sexual themes he doesn't happen to like. Back then it was Dondero and his ilk howling against works they charged were deliberate gibberish done by "germ-carrying vermin," "international art thugs" and "human termites" they darkly claimed were Communist agents boring from within.
Then and now, such hysterical assaults serve the same purpose, which isn't art appreciation but an attempt to ensure the government's social control over the population through intimidation and witch-hunting. In the first Cold War, the focus was on "the Commie menace" and fluoridation; in the past decade it's been sex (it was a/so sex then, of course, and some anti-homosexual campaigns rivaled the anti-Communist hunts in their hysteria). Having pretty successfully expunged the "Reds under the beds," during the Reagan/Bush years the government has turned directly to the beds, unleashing an army of sex police to try to overturn the '60s "sexual revolution" and return Americans "to their places," passive and socially obedient. They even tried to shut down the art museums this past summer. But the American public is pretty fed up with this reactionary assault, as the recent stunning jury decisions in favor of the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center's Robert Mapplethorpe show and for the black rap group 2 Live Crew demonstrate.
Artists need support, and should try to get all they can ' out of this government, which is supposedly a democracy. The government has no business telling us what we can look at—or telling artists what they should paint. As New York artists rudely and aptly put it in protests at the Metropolitan Museum last year, "Jesse Helms, You Old Fart! Keep Your Hands Off Our Art!"
Congress' current deal is that the National Endowment for the Arts will give you grant money, and you don't have to sign the "no dirty sex" Jesse Helms pledge. But if a local sheriff finds your work "obscene," you have to pay it all back (not to mention possibly going to jail). Joseph Papp, impresario of New York's renowned Public Theater complex, turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars in NEA grants as a protest against this policy, which continues government censorship in only slightly disguised fashion. This is a courageous act, even if he can afford it. For poorer struggling souls, however, it may come down to a Woody Allen "Take the Money and Run" guerrilla approach. But don't kid yourself—they are not nice guys handing out free money up there. As Lenin used to say, "If you're going to sup with the Devil, you'd better bring a long spoon."
Of course performance artists like Karen Finley and Holly Hughes, with their feminist and lesbian themes, have just as much right to NEA grants as anybody else. But it is hard to imagine government policy, wedded to the concept of the monogamous family as the cornerstone of society, really going for "gay and lesbian art." It's unlikely there will be enthusiasm in Congress for some of the works, for example, in a recent Soho exhibition titled "Queers"—for good or ill, the gigantic lavender plastic male with the big purple penis is never going to grace the Senate lobby. Judy Chicago's equally massive Dinner Party, with its plates representing the vaginas of historical women, lost its home at the University of the District of Columbia. Congress, which still rules over D.C. like a feudal plantation, vindictively cut $1.6 million from the University's appropriation as punishment for accepting what one Congressman called "ceramic 3-D pornography" (meanwhile, students' protest over their rotten education and lack of funding led the artist to withdraw her work in sympathy with their demands).
As the sordid history of official support to the arts shows, the' politicians, even when they appear to be totally disinterested and liberal, dole out their crumbs with careful control. From the Depression era WPA (Works Progress Administration) up through the Rockefellers' sponsorship of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s, official interest in art has been reluctant or self-interested. This history hasn't been raised much in the current fights over the NEA, but then, neither the "progressive" artists nor the government bureaucrats come off too well in what's been a tentative, awkward relationship rich with embarrassment, farce and sheer McCarthyite terror.
The WPA: "A sound, fresh ear of corn"
What I want, said Edward Bruce, one of the early advocates of massive public arts projects during the Roosevelt administration, is work that has "the same feeling I get when I smell a sound, fresh ear of corn," things that "make me feel comfortable about America." Well, he got the corn anyhow. If American "progressive art" of the 1930s tended toward self-righteous preaching, and state-sponsored "official art" tended toward the horribly dull and morally uplifting, the combination was practically fatal, at least aesthetically. The American Stalinists of the Communist Party, solemnly proclaiming "Communism is 20th Century Americanism" during the heyday of the "Popular Front," contributed their share of turgid murals, all of which seem to be variations on Davy Crockett and Babe the Blue Ox leading oppressed Indians, Negroes picking cotton and starving coal miners reading volumes of Marx by flickering coal lamps as huge tornadoes rage in the dust bowl and floods carry scrawny chickens downstream. As we noted in "Women, Culture and Class Society," an earlier article on feminist art, "The caricatures of 'womanhood' (either the eternally strong or eternally suffering woman) are necessary to their art in the same way that caricatures of the proletariat and bourgeoisie are necessary for Stalinist propaganda" (W&R No. 6, Summer 1974).
Some people claim there's such a thing as "totalitarian art," massive, relentlessly upward stuff churned out in Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. But examination of the work of Roosevelt's WPA reveals the same styles and themes—the aluminum horses, monster eagles, heroic workers rebuilding society, simple-minded peasant families. Bruce's "fresh ear of corn" line isn't so different from the Nazi historian who said, "Pictures have to have a certain smell of the soil." The heated rhetoric of the self-styled "American regionalists" like Thomas Hart Ben-ton and Grant Wood versus Communist Party sympathizers is hard to grasp 50 years later, as they all dug into that same soil stylistically.
"Any artist who paints a nude for the Public Works of Art Project should have his head examined," another Roosevelt honcho proclaimed. One of the few artists whose works were openly, even grotesquely, sensual was one of the first to be censored and, ironically, at the very same Corcoran Gallery in D.C. that canned the Mapplethorpe show. Paul Cadmus today enjoys a renewed reputation as a kind of pioneer of "lesbian and gay art." His work, The Fleet's In, was initially chosen as one of the 500 paintings for a 1934 show of state-sponsored art. While the bulging, randy sailors, arms around one another, and the equally bulging females, were enjoyed in the Navy Department's salons without incident, one high-ranking narrow-minded admiral spotted the picture and had a fit. After much protest, the offending picture was removed, and Eleanor Roosevelt opened the affair to music by the Navy Band Orchestra. The president praised show as "robust and American."
It was hardly "the greatest art event in this country since the Armory," as one of the organizers had hoped. The faithful members of Roosevelt's court had comfortably forgotten that the 1913 art show in New York's Armory, which introduced the American public to modern European art, had horrified another Roosevelt. The show, including Marcel Duchamp's infamous Nude Descending a Staircase, set off the former president, according to exhibitor William Zorach, who recalled Teddy "waved his arms and stomped through the Galleries pointing at pictures and saying 'That's not art!'"
Other artists had better luck at subverting the nitpicking rules and pompous censors of the WPA agencies. Among the first big projects of Edward Bruce's Treasury "Section of Fine Arts" were murals for the Justice and Post Office buildings. The jury looked at 91 designs —mainly of chain gangs, evictions, third degrees, electrocutions, battling juvenile delinquents and gangsters—and promptly rejected them all. Rockwell Kent, however, got a commission for a Post Office mural. He painted a mailman delivering a letter to delighted Puerto Ricans with the words (in Eskimo language): "To the people of Puerto Rico, our friends! Go ahead. Let us change chiefs. That alone can make us equal and free." When no one noticed he finally called up a newspaper columnist and broke the story. Delighted by the resulting tempest, he cheerfully told reporters, "I think it's a swell thing when people want independence and I think it's the most American thing one can do to wish them luck." The seething bureaucrats demanded he change it, but rejected his suggestion for a quotation from Lincoln's first inaugural address on the right of oppressed minorities to revolution. The unamused Treasury officials insisted the only motto he could paint was "To commemorate the far-flung front of the United States Postal Service." Kent properly refused to paint this bombast, and so the letter is blank to this day (see The New Deal for Artists, by Richard D. McKinzie, Princeton University Press, 1973).
The Communist Party "Popular Front" and Artists
The WPA did give work to thousands of artists on relief. In its first year alone (1935), over 5,300 artists joined the WPA's Federal Art Project (FAR). About half the artists in the FAR were in New York City, home of the large and influential Communist Party-inspired American Artists' Congress, also formed in 1935. Earlier New York State and federal art relief efforts had sought to exclude known Communists, by not inviting the "Unemployed Artists Group," connected to the CP's John Reed Clubs, to participate.
The noblesse oblige of Roosevelt's cultural overseers was often severely strained, especially in New York, where militant artists' actions sought to extend the benefits of the WPA. In December 1936 (after the national elections), Roosevelt tried to cut the relief programs, but artists packed the Art Project offices in a sit-down strike. Police waded in and arrested 219 of them. In May of 1937, another protest and sit-in was called. Though it didn't win its demands, this protest finally pushed FAR director Holger Cahill, a former bohemian fellow traveler, over the edge: "These people are psychopaths, they are basically unemployable, and you can't do anything with them," he fumed, stating later that "these people were pretty wild...they were left-wingers who thought that if they could get a portrait of Marx or Lenin into a meeting, this somehow would bring about the revolution."
In fact, the American Artists' Congress was not for "red revolution," but was formed precisely because the Communist Party's previous artistic groups, the John Reed Clubs, were too radical for the "Popular Front," proclaimed in August 1935 at the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. This "front" was supposed to enlist the "Western democracies" (formerly known as capitalist swine) in the fight to defend the Soviet Union against fascism—which for the CP meant in practice calling off the class struggle against the bourgeoisie. The John Reed Clubs were summarily disbanded during the winter of 1935-36, while their emphasis on class struggle and "proletcult" (proletarian culture) was abandoned.
"By building an alliance among Communists, Socialists, independent leftists, and Democrats, artists could feel as if they were part of American society," noted the editors of Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists' Congress (Rutgers University Press, 1986). This novel feeling^—both for artists and Communists—was not to survive the war. The organization reached over 900 members by 1939, with exhibits like "To Aid Democracy in Spain." Though the group took no official position on what style of art it preferred, a paper by Max Weber on "The Artist, His Audience and Outlook" outlined a view close to the party line:
"We must cast away therefore chameleon cleverness, and discard mental and optical illusions born of bourgeois decadence and ennui of a fast expiring civilization.... Let us, instead, turn to the gladiatorial heroism, ambition, and tempo of modern beneficent and yielding industry, science and technology, to scenes of joy and verve of happy toilers in their own made environments, to the new home-life, nursery and school, to the new comradeship and brotherhood hitherto unknown."
Yech. Following the twists and turns of Stalinist politics, artists in the group put out a letter defending the Moscow Trials, signed by president Stuart Davis as well as Raphael Soyer, William Cropper, Max Weber, Harry Gottlieb and other well-known artists of the period. But the increasing strain of following the Moscow line, especially when in 1938 "modernist" influences in art were officially banned in the Soviet Union, took its toll, as did the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact in August 1939. As well, artists and writers around Partisan Review and others were coming to the defense of Leon Trotsky, Stalin's Bolshevik opponent; the 1937-38 John Dewey Commission exonerating Trotsky of Stalin's slanders had an important impact.
The bureaucratic perversion of "socialist realism" imposed by Stalin in the USSR was an especially bitter blow to artists, because the triumphant Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 had been associated with the great cultural upheavals that gave birth to modernism and abstract art. Recalling the heady atmosphere of those days of artistic experimentation and enthusiasm in the midst of poverty and civil war, Trotsky sought to re-establish what had been the Marxist norm when he and Lenin were leading the young workers state. As he wrote in a 1938 letter to Partisan Review:
"...a truly revolutionary party is neither able nor willing to take upon itself the task of 'leading' and even less of commanding art, either before or after the conquest of power. Such a pretension could only enter the head of a bureaucracy—ignorant and impudent, intoxicated with its totalitarian power—which has become the antithesis of the proletarian revolution. Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them. Artistic creation has its laws—even when it consciously serves a social movement. Truly intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy and the spirit of conformity."
Essentially it was World War II that swept away the CP's art groups and the WPA. The war finally got American capitalism out of the Depression, ending all the Rooseveltian experiments in subsidizing artists. Its conclusion, with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ushered in a new era of American world imperialism.
"Advancing American Art": Censorship and McCarthyism
In 1947 the State Department organized a big art show, "Advancing American Art," to prove to the not yet totally grateful Europeans and South Americans that the American conquerors were not really the new barbarians. Instead the State Department ended up with egg on its face when it was forced to cancel the successful show in mid-tour by an outbreak of nativist yahooism and anti-Communism in Congress and the Hearst press.
The paintings themselves, bought in 1946 for the show by the State Department, represented a fairly broad range of American painting at that time (a 1989 paperback, Advancing American Art: Painting, Politics, and Cultural Confrontation at Mid-Century, published by the University of Alabama Press, includes 36 of the paintings). This was before the smashing success of Abstract Expressionism, so most works had recognizable subject matter, some mildly surrealistic, some still carrying on the '30s and early '40s themes of social injustice, like Ben Shahn's painting of a gaunt boy titled Hunger. There was a Georgia O'Keeffe landscape, a seascape by John Marin, a Marsden Hartley, a painting by the black artist Romare Beardon—all artists accepted today as standard figures of American modern painting.
William Randolph Hearst's papers went wild during a preview of the show in New York City. His New York journal American carried a series on the "Red Art Show," attacking "left-wing painters" like Stuart Davis, William Cropper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and others as "a lunatic fringe." With slashing sarcasm, the Hearst writers denounced works like Karl Zerbe's Around the Lighthouse: "SHEER LOVELINESS...Is there anything more beautiful than a dead fish? Of course there is: Two dead fish, for example, or three or five. That's what makes this painting...so wonderful. You get five dead fish. And so did the State Department!"
Look magazine ran seven of the paintings under the provocative title "Your Money Bought These Pictures," while Newsweek ran a spread originally widely distributed by the Republican National Committee, which claimed that five of the seven works were by artists with Communist connections. The Republican majority in Congress, along with some nativist Democrats, seized on the show to settle scores with old New Deal enemies. Congressmen passed reproductions around the floor to raucous laughter, amidst charges it was a Communist plot because the faces of people in the paintings "are always depressed and melancholy. That is what the communists and other extremists want to portray. They want to tell the foreigners that the American people are despondent, broken down or of hideous shape—thoroughly dissatisfied with their lot and eager for a change of government. The Communists and their New Deal fellow travelers have selected art as one of their avenues of propaganda."
Finally President Truman was moved to denounce the show as "so-called modern art" and "merely the vaporings of half-baked lazy people." He said of Yasuo Kuniyoshi's Circus Girl Resting, "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." On 4 April 1947 the Hearst papers triumphantly screamed "Marshall Halts World Tour of Red-Linked U.S. Art." Secretary of State George C. Marshall had the 79 art works brought back and sold as government "surplus property" at a gigantic loss—a Romare Beardon painting went for as little as $5.00!
Enter the evil age of Richard Milhouse Nixon, of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, "the Great Fear" era dominated by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. "I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy in the State Department," he charged in his famous scare speech of 1950. He never had such a list, but the "Red Scare" rolled on to full, raging hysteria, as loyalty oaths, flag salutes, enforced finking, "confessions" and witch hunts sought to drive CPers and other leftists out of the trade unions, the schools and every other field of American life, while crushing any sympathy for them. A 1949 Life magazine photo spread of "Dupes and Fellow Travelers" of the "Red Peril" was practically a who's who of famous people, including Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein, Norman Mailer, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller.
This was the heyday of Republican Representative George A. Dondero of Michigan, who served an incredible 25 years in Congress. He was honored by Vice President Nixon at a 1957 dinner saluting Dondero's many contributions to alerting the public to "the Communists' evil designs for pollution of American art." This McCarthy of the art world had a genuine obsession with modern art: "Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder. Futurism aims to destroy by the machine myth.... Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule. Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane. Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms.... Surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason," he explained.
The CIA, the Rockefellers and Abstract Expressionism
This uncontrolled ranting was viewed with dismay by more rational bourgeois ideologues, who knew perfectly well it was making American society look like the revolting combination of terror and idiotic cultural boorishness it in fact was, a dippy "hula hoops from hell" suburban nightmare where a Picasso print on the wall was proof you'd made a pact with the Commie devil. (The FBI, in fact, kept a huge file on Picasso, extending on for years even after his death!) The United States Information Agency, perhaps hoping the worst storms had subsided, tried later in the '50s to present some international shows of American artists, but with similar disastrous results, as William Hauptman detailed in "The Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade" (Artforum, October 1973).
The USIA supported a show on "Sport in Art" (partially funded by Sports Illustrated), scheduled for the 1956 Olympic Games. A preview in Dallas, Texas was vehemently protested by Colonel Owsley, the Dallas County Patriotic Council and other art-loving ladies of Dallas, because it contained paintings by supposed Communist or Commie dupe painters like Pablo Picasso, George Grosz, Max Weber, Diego Rivera and the seemingly ubiquitous Ben Shahn. The USIA canceled that one. They tried again with "100 American Artists of the Twentieth Century." Again, it was claimed that ten of the artists were politically "unacceptable" and "pro-Communist." The USIA had to cancel that one too. Shortly afterward, the USIA announced in exasperation that it would ban from any of its traveling exhibitions any "American oil paintings dated after 191 7"—that is, after the Russian Revolution—to avoid any possible Communist taint!
Somebody had to rescue America's international reputation on the cultural scene, to win over European intellectuals in the Cold War—and it turned out to be the Rockefellers, the Museum of Modern Art and the CIA. A fascinating article by Eva Cockcroft, "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War," in Artforum (June 1974) lays out the connections. The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) was founded in 1929 by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller. In 1939 Nelson Rockefeller became its president, going on to become Roosevelt's coordinator for South and Latin American affairs, and returning to MOMA in 1946. A 1941 wire story called the museum the "latest and strangest recruit in Uncle Sam's defense line-up," quoting the museum's chairman John Hay Whitney on MOMA's mission to "strengthen the hearts and wills of free men in defense of their own freedom." Whitney (a veteran of the OSS, predecessor of the CIA) himself set up a trust exposed as a CIA conduit in 1967. Cockcroft details:
"Primarily, MOMA became a minor war contractor, fulfilling 38 contracts for cultural materials totalling $1,590,234 for the Library of Congress, the Office of War Information, and especially Nelson Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. For Nelson's Inter-American Affairs Office, 'mother's museum' put together 19 exhibitions of contemporary American painting which were shipped around Latin America, an area in which Nelson Rockefeller had developed his most lucrative investments—e.g., Creole Petroleum, a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, and the single most important economic interest in oil-rich Venezuela."
Rockefeller's Latin American experts were bodily transferred over to MOMA after the war, including Rene d'Harnoncourt, who had helped cultivate the Mexican muralists at the time Mexico's oil nationalism threatened Rockefeller oil interests. Head of the art section of Nelson’s Office of Inter-American Affairs in 1943, he was brought to MOMA as vice president in charge of foreign activities, and in 1949 d'Harnoncourt became MOMA's director. In 1952 MOMA launched its international program with a $625,000 grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Under the direction of Porter A. McCray, another Office of Inter-American Affairs veteran, MOMA added its International Council. Reassuringly "modern" exhibitions of contemporary American art were sent to Europe, South America and Japan, as MOMA "assumed a quasi-official character, providing the 'U.S. representation' in shows where most nations were represented by government-sponsored exhibits," Cockcroft points out. At the Venice Biennale, the most important European international art show, MOMA took over the U.S. pavilion, the only privately owned booth, from 1954 to 1962.
Abstract Expressionism, the slashing, dripping, floating huge canvases whose primary subject is the world of paint and canvas itself, became MOMA's favorite art. Not only was it new and artistically avant-garde, in refreshing contrast to the stale old "smell of the soil" Thomas Hart Benton "regionalism" pushed by more primitive anti-Communists, but it was really "American." Many of the leaders of the movement had past left-wing connections: Jackson Pollock was influenced by left-wing Mexican mural painting, Mark Rothko had done paintings of the city poor, Willem de Kooning did work for Artist Union protests, while Ad Reinhardt and Robert Motherwell had "dabbled in Marxism," according to art critic and "Action Painting" advocate Harold Rosenberg. While this may have kept them from getting Congressional approval, it wasn't entirely bad from the more sophisticated Cold Warriors' viewpoint. It heightened the propaganda value of these artists in demonstrating the supposed "freedom of expression" of America, since they ostentatiously avoided "politics" in their new work. Though as Rosenberg noted in The Anxious Object, the old impulse wasn't entirely gone: "It is hard to imagine a Johnson campaign billboard in the manner of the late Franz Kline, though in 1952 the Action Painters of the Artists Club in Greenwich Village turned out placards for [Adlai] Stevenson (how much these contributed to his defeat is not known)."
Of course, totally abstract art was safer for the Rockefellers too. Those earlier attempts to woo the Mexican muralists were not a total triumph. In 1933 the Rockefeller family ordered Diego Rivera off the scaffolding at Rockefeller Center, because the artist refused to remove a head of Lenin from his mural Mankind at the Crossroads. Later the entire mural was pulverized. At least with a Pollock drip painting or an Ad Reinhardt black-on-black, there was no obviously subversive, rude content. In any case, MOMA began showing the Abstract Expressionists early and often, in 1956 touring a "Modern Art in the U.S." show with works by de Kooning, Franz Kline, Motherwell, Pollock, Rothko and others through eight European cities, including Vienna and Belgrade.
MOMA also sought to influence intellectuals behind the so-called "Iron Curtain." In 1961the museum gave the Polish painter Tadeusz Kantor and other "nonobjective" Polish painters an exhibition at MOMA. The CIA funded cultural institutions like the National Student Association, Encounter magazine and even a 1952 Paris tour by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Gloria Steinem, one of the founders of the bourgeois feminist Ms. magazine, knowingly took CIA money as director of the "Independent Research Service," which sponsored young Americans going to youth festivals in Vienna and Helsinki in 1959 and 1962. "I found them liberal and farsighted and open," she said of the CIA agents with whom she collaborated, according to the Washington Post (18 February 1967).
MOMA's executive secretary from April 1948 to November 1949, Thomas W. Braden, joined the CIA in 1950, supervising its cultural activities from 1951 to 1954. In "I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral'," in the 20 May 1967 Saturday Evening Post, Braden said that "dissenting opinions within the framework of agreement on cold-war fundamentals" made effective propaganda abroad, and in any case "the idea that Congress would have approved of many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch society's approving medicare." This initial suave CIA impression was later buried in the swamps of Vietnam, as they were revealed as the bloody killers they were and are. And Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York in 1971, will go down in history as the "Butcher of Attica."
One of the few bright lights in this sick period between McCarthyism and the explosion of the New Left was the stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce. "The most beautiful body I've ever seen was at a party in 1954," Lenny would occasionally muse on stage, "I was in the bedroom getting the coats...and I viewed the most perfect bosom peeking out from the man-tailored blouse above a tweed pegged skirt. 'You like what you see? They are nice, aren't they?' she said, caressing the area near her medallion. 'Yes, they are very nice.' 'Would you like to touch them?' 'I'm—I'm—' 'You're shocked,' she said, 'aren't you?' Indeed I was. Eleanor Roosevelt had the prettiest tits I had ever seen or dreamed that I had seen." For this gentle satire, Lenny was arrested at Greenwich Village's Cafe Au Co Co for giving an "indecent performance." The legal complaint was headed "Eleanor Roosevelt and her display of tits"! Lenny Bruce died on 3 August 1966, after having been unable to get work for months, harassed and hounded by the state's vicious censors.
No to Censorship!
The current debate over whether the National Endowment for the Arts, itself a creation of the Kennedy-Johnson "Great Society" days, should place conditions on its grants seems like a somewhat paler repeat of this turbulent past. The total amount of money being debated isn't much—military bands get more money than the entire arts budget—but the point, as we've said, is attempted political repression. Jesse Helms is every bit as reactionary a piece of work as the Donderos and McCarthys of the 1950s, and the spectacle last summer of Senator Alfonse D'Amato ripping up an Andres Serrano art catalogue on the Senate floor was a chilling replay of earlier witch hunts.
There are encouraging signs that the "heartland of America" is finally getting fed up with the lying cant and censorship shoveled down its throat for the past decade. The six-year-long ghastly expensive trial against teachers at the McMartin Preschool in Southern California finally ended early this year as a jury acquitted the defendants of some 52 counts of child abuse, renouncing the prosecutors' witches brew of hysteria over the devil, drugs and day care. The jury in the Washington, D.C. Marion Barry trial refused to be suckers for the feds' attempted frame-up of the black mayor in a drug/sex sting.
And in early October an eight-person jury in Cincinnati, Ohio, acquitted the city's Contemporary Arts Center and its director Dennis Barrie of obscenity charges for its retrospective exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's photos. "High art" devotees had plenty to cheer about, since this was the first-ever obscenity case against an art museum. The prosecution strategy of picking people they thought were hicks from the sticks backfired, as one juror said afterward: "We thought the pictures were lewd, grotesque, disgusting. But like the defense said, art doesn't have to be beautiful or pretty."
Then "low art" got its licks in, as a jury in Broward completed the one-two punch, acquitting the rap group 2 Live Crew of obscenity charges on October 20. "You take away one freedom, and pretty soon they're all gone," said one juror in that case, while others noted they thought the black group's raunchy lyrics were really a gas. This tendency toward common sense, decency and tolerance on the part of ordinary citizens is deeply disturbing to our rulers.
Government censorship is going to continue as long as this capitalist government goes on. The heart of it is that this system of government is not neutral. It was created to uphold capitalism, the system of private ownership of the means of production. Pared down to its essentials, the state is an executive committee of the capitalists as a whole, for keeping the ruling class on top through state coercion of those at the bottom, mainly through the selective use of cops and prisons and murder. State subsidies for health care, education and the like are given reluctantly, as part of the necessary overhead to keep the population minimally content and at least a section of it competent to work. Subsidies for artists are extra frills, given or taken away depending on how the political winds are blowing. It's especially so in this country, where the Puritan legacy still hangs heavy with its dour suspicion of the arts, especially live theater, as agencies of sin and the devil.
Meanwhile, as the hogs at the public trough complain they don't want to spend our "taxpayers' money" on sexy art, but would really rather use it for strange new weapons and to bail out their buddies in the savings and loan scandals, there is some poetic justice around to relish. While the Mapplethorpe show's director was acquitted, the man who gave "Censornati" its nickname, the founder of various Cincinnati Legions of Decency, is himself under indictment today, the Lincoln Savings & Loan's own Charles H. Keating Jr. And another figure in this latest farcical episode in American cultural life has met her appropriate end as well: Christina Orr-Cahall was the curator who canceled the Mapplethorpe show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., ostensibly to avoid Congressional ire, in the Vietnam-era spirit of "bombing the village in order to save it." She was last heard from in a New York Times Travel Section, down in the Nancy Reaganland of West Palm Beach, curating the no doubt culturally deep show "Pools," a survey of swimming pools in recent American art.
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I Paint What I See
It's no good taste in a man like me,
Said John D's grandson, Nelson.
To question an artist's integrity Or mention a practical thing like a fee,
But I know what I like to a large degree,
Tho art I hate to hamper.
For twenty-one thousand conservative bucks You painted a radical.
I say, shucks,
I never could rent the offices—
The capitalistic offices.
For this, as you know, is a public hall And people want doves, or a tree in fall,
And tho your art I dislike to hamper,
I owe a little to Cod and Cramper,
And after all,
It's my wall ....
We'll see if it is, said Rivera.
— E.B.W.
Excerpt of poem printed in The New Yorker, 20 May 1933
Click on title to link to Karl Marx's 1850, yes that is not a misprint the question has been with us for a long time, 1850 "Address Of The Central Committee Of The Communist League" which deals with the popular fronts of his day in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848.
COMMENTARY
DOWN WITH THE WAR! DOWN WITH THE WAR BUDGET!
Radicals and revolutionaries, including Marxist revolutionaries, have been struggling with the implications of popular front politics at least since the European Revolutions of 1848. At that time, due more to the question of political immaturity and inexperience, left-wing working class militants and their allies tried to line up with, and in most cases in subordination to, their national bourgeoisies in the fights for the demands of the classic bourgeois revolutions. And for their troubles these same ‘allies’ suppressed these militants and their demands once the situation became too ‘hot’ and the various capitalist parties made their peace with the old regimes. One of the great lessons that Karl Marx (and his co-thinker Frederich Engels) derived from that turn of events was an understanding that an essential ingredient to successful socialist revolution was the need for independent working class organization and action and a political break with the capitalist parties.
Of course, as latter working class history has made painfully clear that seemingly elemental task has been easier said than done. Since Marx's time time endless numbers of ‘socialist’ politicians and ‘vanguard’ political organizations have broken their teeth on denying the truth of his assertions. One need only think of the classic Popular Fronts in Spain and France the 1930’s and Chile in the 1970’s created explicitly by leftwing forces to act as brakes on developing revolutionary situations to know that such a strategy means political death for the revolution and the physical destruction of revolutionary cadre for decades.
What gives? What do those historic events have to do with today’s opposition to the war in Iraq? Simple, while not all popular fronts are created equal they all serve the same ends. As a primer one should know that the popular front is a left-wing political strategy where its advocates call on all ‘progressive’ forces and people of ‘good will’ including capitalist parties and politicians to unite around some ‘good old cause’. Well, what is wrong with that? On democratic issues such as the right to vote or opposition to government snooping and in political defense cases not a thing. Except we call that a united front. Why? Because depending on the case the fight is a limited one, the time is short and there is no political reason not to gain the support of as many people as possible. No, the popular front is a very different animal. It is a conscious strategy on the part of some left-wing forces to limit the aims of any particular fight to those acceptable to the capitalist parties.
For those who do not believe the import of such distinctions let me give one example. Take a simple slogan like –STOP THE WAR. In the build-up to the Iraq War that did not have a bad sound, if not particularly poliitcally sophisticated. Big burly former football linebackers and pacifist little old ladies in tennis shoes could agree to that. However, until early 2006 this was still the central slogan of the anti-war movement. The more appropriate IMMEDIATE, UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF ALL UNITED STATES AND ALLIED TROOPS FROM IRAQ did not get official sanction until that time. Why? Because those big burly football players and gentile old ladies did not want to go that far? Hell, no. The real reason was no ‘respectable’ capitalist politician, except maybe Congressman Kucinich on a good day, was making that call. And that is the rub. The case of the various umbrella anti-war coalitions such as the ANSWER Coalition and United For Peace and Justice here in America (and elsewhere as this is decidedly an international phenomena) are classic examples of a non-parliamentary popular front. Any thoughtful militant who wonders why the anti-war movement here is spinning its wheels can look to that conscious strategy on the part of the current anti-war leaderships as the root cause of the dilemma.
I have noted above, at least twice, the fact that the popular front strategy is a conscious one on the part of those ‘progressives’ who pursue it. And for those who do not want to make a revolution or are just serious about 'pressure' politics on the face of it that policy makes sense. The capitalist parties and their politicians have no need, except as electoral cannon fodder, to seek an on-going bloc with non-parliamentary leftwing forces. One should note that it has only been this year (2007) that even minor league Democratic politicians have gotten on the platforms at anti-war events. No, this is strictly a strategy pursued by 'get rich quick' artists of the left who pursue this course in order to be at one with the ‘masses’ or not get ‘isolated’ from the political consciousness of the masses. That at the end of the day the wily (and in some case not so wily, take John Kerry in 2004, for example) capitalist politicians reap the rewards of this political treachery seems not to have occurred to these same artists. The next battleground on the fight against the popular front will be on the upcoming war budget. It will not be pretty. However, those are the central slogans for the immediate future. You will definitely see the limits of popular front politics on that one. DOWN WITH THE WAR, DOWN WITH THE WAR BUDGET, BREAK WITH THE CAPITALIST PARTIES.