Legacies of the Sixties: Advocating Change in Contemporary America Sebastian Zheng
The era of the 1960s was a time for progressive politics and its expression in art; and artists from diverse backgrounds were actively engaged with the times. They conceived of their work not in terms of art for art’s sake, but as a means to push for civil rights and social justice, racial and gender equality, nonviolence and peace. These elements continue to invigorate the work of artists today, with a postmodernist perspective that again brings social activism and awareness to art. Three distinctive artists—Warrington Colescott, Rupert Garcia, and Fritz Eichenberg—and their works, Fundraising Event in a Rose Garden (2005), The First of May (2004), and Peace Endangered (1983), respectively, produce a multifaceted contemporary political aesthetic informed by the spirit of the sixties, but specific to more recent times. Using political caricature, Colescott elaborates a satirical commentary on the decadence of privilege and abuse of power in American politics (figs. 35–36, 39, cat. 27–29). Garcia, a prolific Chicano artist and activist, works with popular culture and reconstructs an excruciating torture scene witnessing the brutality of American military during war, while challenging the viewer on questions of American cultural and political identity. Taking up a spiritual standpoint, Eichenberg depicts a familiar Biblical scene as an expression of his faith in communal love between human and natural elements, while demonstrating his commitment to peace and social conscience. All three artists, stylistically varied yet thematically connected, reiterate issues that artists in the sixties addressed through their art in thinking about aesthetics as a means of creating political awareness and as a vehicle for social change.
Colescott’s Satire “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” —Henry Kissinger, 1973 As an undergraduate art student at University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1930s, Colescott (b. 1921) commenced his artistic career as an illustrator for the Daily Californian and as editor of the humor magazine California Pelican. As the curator Mary Weaver Chapin explains, “The [Berkeley] newspapers appealed to his sense of humor, his literary interests, and his nascent political thinking.”1 The Berkeley campus, long a hotbed of radical politics, was the birthplace in 1964 of radical student protests known as the Free Speech Movement: surrounded by a sit-in of students in Sproul Plaza, Mario Savio, student leader of the campus political party, SLATE, famously jumped on top of the police 46
Fig. 35. Warrington Colescott, Fundraising Event in a Rose Garden, 2005. Soft-ground etching. Gift of Eric Denker, Class of 1975, in Memory of Ann Dykstra (cat. 27).
car in protest against the arrest of another activist, Jack Weinberg, for distributing political literature. It was this atmosphere of activism that shaped a generation of young Berkeley minds and motivated their participation in liberatory politics, fighting for the freedom of speech and civil rights.2 Berkeley influenced Colescott’s decision to pursue satirical art with a political agenda. A convert from painting to printmaking, he became part of the postwar print renaissance, earning a reputation, in Chapin’s words, as a “mad-dog attack artist.”3 He began to construct his imagery under the influence of satirists and political caricaturists such as Honoré Daumier, Gustave Doré, and George Grosz. With the particular influence of Grosz, Colescott’s compositions evolved over time from expressive abstracts in the very early state to graphic fantasies of wit and humor, bite and vulgarity, swinging between “tragedy and high comedy.”4 Fundraising Event in a Rose Garden is a soft-ground etching and aquatint, printed in color on paper. Commissioned by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, it was originally included in the exhibition, Drawn to Representation, in which Colescott was one of twenty-four internationally recognized and celebrated printmakers.5 With sophisticated figuration and satirical intent so central to his work, Colescott pokes fun at the decadence of wealth, the abuse of power, and hierarchies of gender and sexuality in modern American politics. Multiple bold colors reveal a
