1966 (1965) (1967) (1960-1970) (1970-1980) Table of Contents
Francis Frascina Art, politics and dissent: Aspects of the art left in sixties America, Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York, 1999, 248 pp., 1999, 1997, 1965, 1964, 1960s, 1948 See Text
James W. Lunsford The Ocean and the Sunset, The Hills and the Clouds: Looking at Santa Monica, illustrated by Alice N. Lunsford, 1983, 1966, 1949, 1933, 1913 See Text
Walter Mosley Cinnamon Kiss, Warner Books: NY, 2005. 313pp., 2005b,1966 See Text
Michael Palmer Active boundaries: selected essays and talks, New Directions, 2008, 2008a, 1966, 1965 See Text
Horst Schmidt-Brümmer Venice, California: An Urban Fantasy, Grossman Publishers: NY, (English trans., Feelie Lee) 1973 (Original German Text Verlag Ernst Wasmuth: Tubingen, 1972), 108pp., 1966, 1925 See Text
Grant H. Smith The History of the Comstock Lode 1850-1920, Geology and Mining Series No. 37, University of Nevada Bulletin: Reno, Nevada, vol. XXXVII. 1 July 1943, no. 3, (revised 1966), Ninth printing, 1980. 305pp., 1966 See Text
Stephen Westfall Diebenkorn, Art in America, Oct, 1998, 1966, 1914 See Text
Notes
Horst Schmidt-Brümmer Venice, California: An Urban Fantasy, Grossman Publishers: NY, (English trans., Feelie Lee) 1973 (Original German Text Verlag Ernst Wasmuth: Tubingen, 1972), 108pp., 1966, 1925
"In 1925 Venice was incorporated into the City of Los Angeles. Thomas H. Thurlow, the last mayor of Venice, commented . . . in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1966: "We committed suicide. That's what we called it, and that's what it was."
Documents
Francis Frascina Art, politics and dissent: Aspects of the art left in sixties America, Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York, 1999, 248 pp., 1999, 1997, 1965, 1964, 1960s, 1948
" . . .
. . . February 1966, the Artist's Tower of Protest, of Peace Tower, at the junction of La Cienega and Sunset Blvds. was dedicated with speeches by the artist Irving Petlin, ex-Green-Beret Master-Sergeant Donald Duncan, writer Susan Sontag, and the releasing by children of doves . . . Including work by 418 artists, this collective memorial had to be defended night and day against attacks by those who regarded such manifestations as un-American and at best a collusion with the "Communist menace," in Vietnam . . . Several of the defenders of the Tower were young men from Watts . . . In June 1965, two months before the outburst of dissent in Watts, the journal Ramparts observed that American neo-colonialist ambitions were mirrored by injustices and oppressions at home.
[p. 5] . . . .
[p. 6] There were thousands of visitors to the Artist's Tower of Protest which was significantly 'other' both to art institutions, such as the Los Angeles County Art Museum, and to the creative institutions of corporate capital, such as the RAND Corporation. Some visitors drove up from the galleries along La Cienega Boulevard having seen recent exhibitions of artists active in the Tower project, for example Mark di Suvero, Irving Petlin and Judy Gerowitz (Judy Chicago). Others came to see what artists associated with the radical Ferus Gallery and "Beat Culture," such as Wallace Berman, Jess (Collins) and Jay de Fero, were doing with Abstract Expressionists, Pop Artists and realists from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) era of the 1930s. Some of them were recipients of Wallace Berman's Semina, an alternative manifestation to the world of art journals such as Art Forum, then with its offices above the Ferus Gallery. Other visitors included Ken Kesey and his "Merry Pranksters" with their Day-Glo bus travelling around the West Coast conducting public "acid-tests," accompanied by amplified rock music, strobe lights and free-form dance. Yet others were Marines from San Diego wanting to smash the whole thing down. [When Ed Kienholz's retrospective [opened] at the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art with large controversies about pornography, sedition and censorship, the debate never included the threatened Tower of Protest. Similarly artist's protests in New York over the next few years have failed to be represented in the canonical processes of journals, museums, galleries, critics and art dealers. This book seeks to redress these failures and to examine "reconstruction" and "memory."]
" . . .
James W. Lunsford The Ocean and the Sunset, The Hills and the Clouds: Looking at Santa Monica, illustrated by Alice N. Lunsford, 1983, 1966, 1949, 1933, 1913
Ocean Park
"53. Sculpture, Oneness, Eino Romppanen, 1966. This large sculpture, located at the Third Street frontage of Mary Hotchkiss Park, was the gift of Mr. Romppanen to the City. Most of the work on the statue was done in the Del Mar Club."
58. Los Amigos Park, Fifth and Ocean Park. This three-acre city recreation park is the former site of John Adams Junior High School, which was built in 1913 and abandoned after the 1933 earthquake when the new junior high school was built at 16th and Pearl. The land was leased to the city for park purposes in 1949 after having been used by the Army as a recreation center and by the Navy as a training site. It was for many years the location of the Morgan Theatre, which occupied the former Army recreation hall as a community theater until it was destroyed by fire in 1966."
Walter Mosley Cinnamon Kiss, Warner Books: NY, 2005. 313pp., 2005b,1966
"I parked my low-rider car across the street from an innocuous-looking place on Ozone, less than a block away from the Santa Monica beach. It was a little after seven and there was some activity on the street. There were men in suits and old women with dogs on leashes, bicyclers showing off their calves in shorts, and bums shaking the sand from their clothes. Almost everyone was white but they didn't seem to mind me sitting there. They didn't call for the police." p. 277
Michael Palmer Active boundaries: selected essays and talks, New Directions, 2008, 1966, 1965
Irving Petlin:
" . . .
Despite all this, we still got no press, no larger resonance in the public's awareness of the widening war. That's when we decided to build something in a prominent spot-something physical that couldn't be avoided, that would be itself a kind of beacon for attention. As it happened, Mark di Suvero was having a show at the Dwan Gallery in LA, and he got on board and agreed to design and make the tower. We signed a lease on an empty lot at the intersection of La Cienega and Sunset Boulevard and began fencing it in and assembling the tower. We sent out a printed letter, "A Call from the Artists of Los Angeles." We sent it in five languages to artists all over the world, not just the United States, asking for contributions of work, small panels. The tower started to go up and paintings began to come in, but they all had to be mounted inside the fence, because everything outside was being attacked. The fence was very quickly painted to say ARTISTS PROTEST VIETNAM WAR in big letters and people tried to burn it down, people from the local military bases. We were already getting visited by groups who were hostile, people driving by and swearing and cursing. And eventually it turned into physical attacks, so we got guys from Watts to help defend the tower, day and night. They understood what they were doing. They weren't being paid; they just knew and they came and they helped. And they were tough. For the opening, I invited Susan Sontag to speak, and Master Sergeant Donald Duncan, who was a Green Beret, a Special Forces man who came out against the war. I spoke. We opened the tower and we released white doves. Hundreds of people came to the opening and continued to visit over the three months the tower was up.
" . . . we finally broke through the news blackout-we were on television practically nightly in LA, though the coverage was very critical and hostile. But at least it was being reported, and people were finding out about it. For example, one night I was attacked and was defending myself with a broken lightbulb and the end was sparking as somebody came at me. Anyway, Frank Stella heard about this and sent a check for a thousand bucks, writing, "Anybody who puts their life on the line defending a work of art of mine, I'm going to send a thousand bucks to." There were all kinds of crazy stories like that. And in the end, of the 418 pictures we received from around the world, not a single one was damaged or destroyed, even though we were attacked almost nightly. At the conclusion of the project, the works were auctioned, and the money was used to continue fighting against the war.
Michael Palmer:
I found out about the new project when Mark called me in Paris recently-we had lost track of each other. He said, "We've got to get you involved. Would you come to New York?" and I agreed. I mean, we're in a worse situation now than we were then, in that we've lost the art of the communal protest-the capacity, which you see with Mark and Rirkrit, to submerge one's ego and join a project like this. And it's different this time around. Back then, we were operating in an atmosphere of total hostility that was just unrelenting. A number of our people were seriously injured defending the tower. One of our guards, a young artist by the name of Haggerty, had his eardrums punctured by a vicious kick from a policeman. We had our victims, but nothing like what was being done to the Vietnamese people, and similarly nothing like what is now being done to the people of Iraq. But that was then and this is now. I hope the new tower will be just as controversial as the old one was back then. Because, you know, indifference is almost worse than hostility.
Mark di Suvero:
The first Peace Tower was Arnold Mesches and Irving Petlin's idea. They asked me to build something. I didn't really understand the impact at the time. I was living in New York and very much occupied with my sculpture. But I had one of these polyhedrons that I had built in New York, and I said that I could make it into a tower.
Once I got to LA, everybody worked on it-people like Judy Chicago and Lloyd Hamrol; Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters stopped by. There were artists who would come and work for days or hours, and the amount of support was incredible. There must have been several hundred artists who sent in uniform-size paintings. The building of the tower itself was pretty straightforward, except the city said it was structurally unsound. We proved the strength of the tower by picking up a car inside it-a big Buick. But their problem with us was really political. The police beat us up; the Marines attacked us. There was a real sense of war there.
The Peace Tower showed the will of many artists to fight against the war-against the gunning down and napalming of women and children in Vietnam. If you were an artist at the time, you were a radical. As for my work, people were very threatened by abstract art. I believed that the ability to think abstractly necessarily led one to refuse the reactionary attitudes that were so prevalent then. And I don't think most artists today are fooled by the neocons either. The whole thing that's happened with the art market has certainly changed the attitude of a lot of artists. But the response of artists to the new Peace Tower has already been immense, and I think it's just going to grow by unifying all of the people who want peace and who would be willing to act. You know, six million people around the world marched against the Iraq War just before the invasion. The artists who built the original Peace Tower saw what was going to happen. Now, even somebody like Robert McNamara, who ordered the carpet bombing and killing of civilians, totally accepting the idea of killing innocents in order to achieve American policy goals, has moved away from that kind of thinking.
" . . .
Grant H. Smith The History of the Comstock Lode 1850-1920, Geology and Mining Series No. 37, University of Nevada Bulletin: Reno, Nevada, vol. XXXVII. 1 July 1943, no. 3, (revised 1966), Ninth printing, 1980. 305pp., 1966
[p. 289] Chapter XXIX The Balance Sheet of The Comstock
[p. 289] "An unfavorable feature that was an integral part of the history of the Comstock was the disastrous stock gambling fever with its record of self-deprivations, broken hopes, and shattered lives. Along with this was the unsavory assessment record, often for the benefit only of the few in control of the mines. These debits have been dwelt upon in the preceding pages. The credit side of the balance sheet needs to be emphasized to the reader as he closes this history, that he may take pride in his newly won knowledge of the Comstock Lode.
"The Comstock was the first silver mining camp in the United States, and its discovery brought a new era not only to California and Nevada, but to the entire West.
It lifted California out of a disheartening depression. It rejuvenated San Francisco, which in 1860 was but a ragged little town of fifty-two thousand people. In 1861 more substantial brick buildings were erected there than in all of the preceding years, nor did that growth ever cease. The opportunity for investments in the early years was limited, and nearly all of the profits from the Comstock were invested in San Francisco real estate and in the erection of fine buildings. However, the entire State shared in the benefits. California was the source of all supplies, from fruit to mining machinery, and every industry thrived. Even the money that the Californians had contributed for assessments was returned in purchases.
[p. 289] "The discovery of the Comstock led men to look for mines throughout Nevada and its distant regions. Rich placers were found in Colorado in 1860, and soon afterward in Idaho and Montana. In Nevada, the thriving producing camps of Austin, Hamilton, Eureka, and Belmont sprang up, along with many smaller ones over the State. Mining for the first three decades in the State's history was the main industry, accompanied by the slow growth of the grazing, agricultural, and transportation industries. Mining was the economic factor that caused the separation from Utah of Nevada as a Territory, and later justified and supported statehood for Nevada.
[p. 289] "During the Civil War the production of the Comstock mines of over fifty millions in silver and gold was a distinct aid to the [p. 290] National Government. When Senator Stewart went to Washington in 1865 President Lincoln said to him: "We need as many loyal States as we can get, and the region you represent made it possible for the Government to maintain sufficient credit to continue this terrible war for the Union."
"The continued production through the Bonanza days of the '70s aided in the Nation's recovery and its great industrial expansion.
[p. 290] Epilogue
"The romance of the Comstock will never die. The story is an epic. It was the last stand of the California pioneers where they rose to the height of their brilliant and adventurous careers; and a robust and optimistic people throughout Nevada, many of whom were also pioneers, shared in making unforgettable history. Life was never the same for many of them in the after years, but nothing could take from them their golden memories of the Comstock Lode.
Stephen Westfall Diebenkorn, Art in America , Oct, 1998, 1966, 1914
"The arc of Diebenkorn's career up until that point would be enough to ensure his place in art history. But the most profound developments in his painting lay ahead. The will to abstraction was never far from his figurative work. John Elderfield has pointed out that the anonymity of his figures, especially in their blankness of expression or entire lack of facial features, helped redistribute expressive energy throughout the surface of his pictures. (3) The master of this figurative formalism is Matisse. In early 1966, a year and a half after visiting the great Matisses at the Hermitage and Pushkin museums in Russia, Diebenkorn saw a Matisse exhibition at UCLA, where he was weighing an offer to come teach. Two paintings in particular bowled him over, View of Notre Dame and French Window at Collioure, both from 1914. The first painting interposes a shadowy blue wash over a view from the studio window of the Cathedral across the Seine; each element is roughly indicated with minimal linear gestures that leave their corrective adjustments exposed. The second painting is almost totally abstract, divided into essentially four vertical planes of color that indicate a space receding into interior shadow. These paintings clarified the principal elements-the architectural delineations and perspectives, and the shifting atmospheric planes of color-that distinguish Diebenkorn's epic Ocean Park series, which he began in late 1967, a year after moving to Santa Monica."