In Praise of Pageantry

By Jen Angel

From In These Times

This past January I spent a week in a chilly warehouse in Tacoma, Wash.,
making puppets with 20 other activists to support Army First Lt. Ehren
Watada, the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse deployment to
Iraq. We were creating a play to perform on Feb. 5 at the vigil outside
the gates of Fort Lewis, Wash., where his court-martial—which would end
in a mistrial—was being held.

We spent hours painting, taping, cutting, gluing, eating and talking.
For the characters in our play, we created a 15-foot-tall judge with a
sculpted cardboard head and paper mâché hands, jurors and witnesses,
and, for our finale, doves and suns to end with a vision of a beautiful
future.

But art and activism aren't just about pageantry. Skilled activists use
culture as an entry point into larger discussions of politics and
theory, and use art and culture to celebrate victories and mourn losses.
Art becomes a way to engage the public, reinspire activists who are
tired of the same old marches and chants, and at its best, model a
future world where our lives are both productive and enjoyable.

But connections between art and activism are often tenuous. Individuals
who straddle the two communities face artists who don't care about
politics and activists who don't take art seriously. Realizing the
Impossible: Art Against Authority, a new and beautifully illustrated
anthology edited by Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland, explores these
intersections and contradictions while linking art, culture and
anarchist politics.As most anthologies do, Realizing the Impossible covers a wide
territory. Interviews with pioneers in arts and organizing like the
group Black Mask, which created provocative street theater in the '60s,
Clifford Harper -- well known for his late-80s Anarchy: A Graphic Guide
-- and Crass artist Gee Vaucher sit alongside essays on how social
movements like the Zapatistas use video technology to strengthen their
community. There are historical pieces, like Dara Greenwald's look at
video collectives of the '70s, and theoretical discussions, like David
Graeber's "The Twilight of Vanguardism," covering art for art's sake,
the relationship between alienation and oppression and, of course,
vanguardism. Each of these contributions provides snapshots of a vast
political-cultural movement.

The strength of this anthology is its accessibility, with none of the
authors assuming a deep familiarity with anarchism or art history.
Christine Flores-Cozza interviewed the late Carlos Cortez, an artist,
poet and lifelong activist known for his prints and woodcuts. Cortez,
who went to jail for refusing the draft in World War II, tells
Flores-Cozza, "The artists who are strong enough and courageous enough
can fight, can use their art to fight tyranny, repression, and that."
Asked how someone would study under him, Cortez responds: "You don't
teach art. You open doors. It's one thing to show you how to push an
engraving tool, handle a brush, blend colors, and that. But that only
liberates what is inside of you."

The best piece in the anthology is Morgan Andrews' detailed history of
radical puppetry. The puppet-making in Tacoma, Andrews shows, was just
one more act in a long legacy of social justice puppeting. "Protest
puppetry is any kind of puppet theater that draws attention to the
ironies and flaws in the way things are," Andrews writes, "and hopefully
illustrates a way that things could be instead."

He covers the use of puppets in 18th and 19th century Europe, like Punch
and Judy in England, to criticize the government or satirize local
leaders, and moves on to an in-depth look at modern-day pioneers like
the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont which, as Andrews says, is "the
chief progenitor of modern protest puppetry in the United States," and
Heart of the Beast, based in Minneapolis. Andrews skillfully brings out
criticisms of these groups without diminishing the groups' impact or
significance. The article continues with contemporary groups like Art
and Revolution, which played an integral part in creating the look and
feel of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.

Another great selection is Nicolas Lampert's essay on memorializing the
Haymarket massacre, "Struggles at Haymarket: An Embattled History of
Static Monuments and Public Interventions." In 1886, demonstrations for
an eight-hour workday in Chicago's Haymarket Square turned violent when
an unknown person threw a bomb into the police line, and the police
responded by firing into the crowd. When it was over, the bomb and the
shooting had killed eight policemen and 200 civilians were injured (the
civilian deaths are uncounted). Eight anarchists were tried and
convicted of murder, even though some of them were not even in the
square at the time of the bombing. Four of them were executed, one
committed suicide, and three were later pardoned.

Lampert's essay recounts the long history of the attempts to memorialize
this horrific event with different statues, including the monument to
the policemen that was run over by a streetcar and later bombed by the
Weathermen, and which is now housed at the police academy instead of a
public place. A separate monument remembering the executed anarchists
stands in Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago. Lampert considers the
controversies that can result when groups with competing perspectives
want input on the placement, imagery and message of a permanent monument.

Realizing the Impossible is crowded with photos and illustrations, dark
lines and sometimes-intrusive footnotes. It provides a window into a
hidden history of the world (and it truly is the world, as the book
documents artists and movements in the U.S., Indonesia, Argentina and
Mexico). What you will not find in this book, though, is a cohesive
analysis of how different art and activism movements developed in an
interconnected way over time. A careful and interested reader, however,
will be able to piece together much of this history.

In their introduction, MacPhee and Reuland summarize the purpose of
Realizing the Impossible: "This book is the beginning of an anarchist
art theory . . . as political artists, we believe it is critical that we
understand the history of what we are doing and think of ways we can use
art for our collective liberation. It is no longer enough today to lock
ourselves in our studios and produce culture. We must engage in our
world in as many ways as possible."