by students who wanted to turn the gallery into “campus central” for the printing of posters and the mimeographing (since this was before the time of the photocopier) of position papers. I felt that this action was called for, even though the gallery was just then the venue for two major sculpture exhibitions. . . . I placed the sculptures behind a screen to make room for silkscreen presses and mimeograph machines, feeling that, just as art is often political, politics is sometimes art.69
At the time, of course, these posters were not presented in any particular groupings, though perhaps the recurrence of themes would have helped some of them become recognizable while framing the others. The posters are primarily antiwar, at least by context if not by direct reference; a few refer to civil rights or the larger political process. In any case, the political themes raised in the posters do not divide neatly into mutually exclusive categories; instead, they overlap and intertwine along a variety of dimensions. Our groupings here should thus be regarded with some reservations, to avoid political or rhetorical reductionism. In any case, though the “arguments” of the posters are crucial to their meanings, the posters are not, taken one at a time or together, reducible to any single proposition.
Most of the posters are original art on silk screen; some are based on photographs, and some are produced by photo offset. Some of the art is purely typographic. The color palette is typically limited, giving the posters a simplicity, directness, immediacy, vividness, and in some cases a beauty that is striking. All of it provides symbolic dimensions through pure design by creating tone and stance.
One cluster shows a variety of Vietnamese or more broadly Asian themes, with strong appeals for identification. In “This Is Life—This Cuts It Short” (see fig. 18), a mother and child (life) are juxtaposed against a rifle (this cuts it short) gripped in an unknown hand. The mother and child are clearly Asian but are also familiar, in a pose that might suggest a Madonna and child. The child directs its gaze at the viewer, with a look that, in context, must suggest alarm, even fear. The theme of violence directed against women and children recalls the My Lai massacre of the previous year, and of continuing stories of civilian deaths in Vietnam, which was the subject of the widely circulated “And Babies? And Babies” poster created in December 1969 by members of the Art Workers Coalition. “And Babies” reproduces a photograph of the My Lai massacre showing a row of bodies, including several babies; printed on the poster is the question “And babies?” and the answer, “And babies,” from an interview of Paul Meadlo, one of the US soldiers involved at My Lai, conducted by Mike Wallace of CBS News. The “And Babies” poster had been commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and the Artist Workers Coalition; when a proof copy of the poster was shown to William Paley and Nelson Rockefeller, trustees of MoMA, the poster was rejected and the MoMA director was fired. The Artist Workers Coalition printed the posters on its own, and they were quickly circulated in New York and around the world. Copies of the poster apparently arrived in Berkeley in late December 1969 or early January 1970.70
FIGURE 18 “This Is Life—This Cuts It Short.” Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection, Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Eberly Family Special Collections Library, University Libraries, The Pennsylvania State University.
“Does He Destroy Your Way of Life?” (fig. 19) repeats the appeal to identification, but adds a theme of distance. A peasant farmer, shown in silhouette, follows a buffalo pulling a plow. The viewer may identify with this homely, harmless figure as a fellow creature, but, with the buffalo and the conical straw hat, the poster also denotes something exotic and remote, amplifying the question “Does he destroy your way of life?”—a question clearly addressed to an American viewer who has been told by his government that the Vietnam War is required to halt worldwide Communist aggression. On the contrary, the poster seems to assert, this is a figure whose simplicity should prompt us to identify with his humanity, but whose remoteness should convince us that he is not a threat to us, on the other side of the world.
FIGURE 19 “Does He Destroy Your Way of Life?” Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection, Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Eberly Family Special Collections Library, University Libraries, The Pennsylvania State University.
The danger to the Vietnamese implied by figures 18 and 19 is more directly asserted in plate 4, “Vietnamization,” which shows a photograph of a bloodied mother and infant, apparently collateral damage from a US attack. These depictions of victims of war’s violence are a counterpart to a common theme of war posters, in which images of victims or potential victims are offered as justification for war (compare plate 4 to fig. 11, “Don’t Let That Shadow Touch Them”). The “Vietnamization” poster also uses the trope of irony by juxtaposing a verbal quotation with the actuality that it implies—a trope also at work in “And Babies.” Such comparisons appear frequently in the posters, sometimes by using contrasts within the imagery, sometimes in contrasts between the image and the words. Juxtaposition is a key rhetorical structure in generating meaning. Ironic juxtaposition motivates plate 5, “It Became Necessary to Destroy the Town to Save It”—the title draws on a quotation from an on-camera interview between a US Army major and AP reporter Peter Arnett. The poster features a photograph by Paul Avery of a terrified, elderly Vietnamese couple.71
Other posters showing Vietnamese or Southeast Asian settings are “Nature Is Beautiful (So Is Human Nature) Conserve It” (plate 2), one of several posters gesturing toward the developing environmental movement, and in this case suggesting a link between the environmental movement and the peace movement from which it seemed in danger of diverging; and “Free Asia—U.S. Get Out Now” (plate 6); “Asia for Asians!!” (plate 7); “Her Suffering for Our Comfort? STRIKE” (plate 8); “Vietnam: Spilled Blood Split the Country” (plate 30), again an image of a Vietnamese mother, this time with a dead or injured baby—the country split is the United States; and “Unity in Our Love of Man” (plate 33). “Did You Vote for This? Who Did?” (plate 13) is based on a 1968 AP photograph of the bodies of US Marines on Hill 689 in Khe Sanh, South Vietnam.72 The image of a woman carrying a child in plate 30 is apparently based on a news photograph of a Vietnamese woman carrying a horribly burned baby “after an accidental napalm raid twenty-six miles southwest of Saigon.”73
“Did You Vote for This? Who Did?” is an indirect invocation of the political order in the United States, and, for those who remember, a reminder that both Lyndon Johnson (in 1964) and Richard Nixon (in 1968) won the presidency with promises of peace—which were then contradicted by their actions—and that the evident futility of the war drove Lyndon Johnson from the presidency in 1968. The “Who Did?” is a rhetorical question, implying that because both winning candidates—and in 1968 both Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon—promised peace, in effect no one voted for “this.” Similarly, “Vietnam: Spilled Blood Split the Country” refers to the double collateral damage of the war—to innocent civilians in Vietnam and to the civic peace of the United States. Implicitly, such appeals are not a rejection of the political order in the United States but a lament for its weakening by the war. plate 26, “War Is Unhealthy for America,” similarly implies that the war is damaging the people and America itself, including its civic life.74
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