CUP161 08 Frizzell 1pp

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 SEARCH AND DESTROY Nancy Spero’s War Series, 1966 – 70 Deborah Frizzell Abstract This article is an analysis of artist-activist Nancy Spero’s War Series paintings, 1966 – 70. The author analyzes her paintings from this crucial time period within the context of significant historical events that impacted her artistic development of themes, formal devices, and radical breaks from numerous canonical art tenets. Within the emergence of the American political and artistic Left, Spero’s political radicalism became the foundation of her artistic content and studio practice. From this foundation, as an early feminist artist, Spero produced a wide-ranging figurative oeuvre that pioneered a new lexicon of image/text and figure/ground conjunctions, overturning the prescriptive universalist ideals of modern art. Keywords Nancy Spero, Vietnam War, protest art Napalm and black clouds emerging in newsprint Flesh soft as a Kansas girl’s ripped open by metal explosion — three five zero zero on the other side of the planet caught in barbed wire, fire ball bullet shock, bayonet electricity bomb blast terrific in skull & belly, shrapneled throbbing meat — Allen Ginsberg, “Wichita Vortex Sutra” N ancy Spero’s (1926 – 2009) gouache and ink on paper painting Kill Commies/Maypole (1967b) is one of nearly two hundred images that compose her War Series to which she dedicated herself from 1966 until 1970. Decisive red and 111 Cultural Politics, Volume 16, Issue 1, © 2020 Duke University Press DOI: 10.1215/17432197-8017298 CUP161_08_Frizzell_1pp.indd 111 1/2/20 1:14 PM 112 CULTURAL POLITICS • 16:1 March 2020 Deborah Frizzell 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 blue brushstrokes invade the space of white paper bifurcated by the red maypole topped with the blood- soaked image of an American flag, overwritten with words plucked from tabloid newspaper headlines, “Kill Commies.” Severed heads with snarling, crying, spitting, and screaming faces hang from ribbons of red, white, and blue brushstrokes executed rapidly. The symbolic maypole conjures an ancient pagan form: a playful axis linking earth and sky in springtime and a communal symbol of renewal. Here it perpetuates a dance of death. With her painting Kill Commies/Maypole the artist unhinged her figures from the course of ordinary life and inserted them into a whirlpool of history. Instead of being inextricably embedded in a large- scale picture plane of viscous oil paint, her tortured figures on sheets of Japanese paper are brutally hurled outward, bodiless, into an intimate encounter with the viewer who must get close to see details of the thirty- six- by twentyfour- inch image. Themes of the violence and oppression of war would continue to inform Spero’s work until her death. She knew that the resonance of these themes to contemporary politics would always be unmistakable: the apocalypse would always be now. Spero’s War Series holds an honored place in the history of great, sustained protest art statements from the 1960s and beyond, especially powerful for its unmonumental scale and its exclusion from canonical discourse and major exhibitions at the time.1 Paintings from Spero’s War Series were featured among over one hundred of her artworks from six decades installed at MoMA PS1 in the major survey exhibition Nancy Spero, Paper Mirror (March 31 to June 23, 2019). Curated by artist, writer, and cofounder of the activist collective Group Material, Julie Ault, and organized CUP161_08_Frizzell_1pp.indd 112 by the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (October 6, 2018, to February 17, 2019), the large- scale exhibition focused on Spero’s key transitional series, which broke with modernist tenets on every level, including “acceptable” content, medium, aesthetics, and underlying conceptual approach. As an activist and feminist artist, Spero created her own pictographic language, a kind of visual/textual hieroglyphics, while appropriating representations of iconic meaning from the totality of multiple cultures and eras, decontextualizing and refiguring them across space and time. Spero began her career in Chicago, where she grew up in a middle- class household in the suburbs. Her father Henry owned and operated a company that purchased, repaired, and sold printing presses for the city’s many newspapers and publishers, while her mother Polly concentrated on raising their two daughters. Nancy wanted to be an artist from a young age and was encouraged by her high school art teacher to apply to art school. Spero entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1945 at the end of World War II and graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1949. She found her place among like- minded creative artists, including many young GIs just returning from the war. Her studio professors, fellow students, and the collections of the AIC would inform her artistic practice. The AIC’s renowned international collections included Greek, Roman, and Egyptian art; paintings, sculpture, prints, and decorative arts from the Middle Ages to the present; Asian art; and textiles and drawings. Among the special exhibitions featured at the AIC during Spero’s student years were paintings and prints by Francisco Goya (including his Disasters of War, 1810 – 20), Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Max Beckmann and André Masson, 1/2/20 1:14 PM and international collections of textiles and Asian art.2 The contexts influencing Spero’s subject matter and visual language during these years were multiple, a constellation of ideas emerging from the trauma of the post- Holocaust, post- Hiroshima world. In the late 1940s, distorted and tortured images of human forms appeared simultaneously in the work of artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, and Henri Fautrier.3 Within a figurative vocabulary, these artists sought a pictorial means to symbolize the scope and character of the horrors encountered during World War II that would reverberate historically but would speak in contemporary artistic terms. Art historian Peter Selz (1985: 304), a graduate student during this period at the University of Chicago, wrote, “Auschwitz and Hiroshima were fresh in people’s minds.”4 For both Spero and her future husband, Leon Golub (1922 – 2004), a fellow artist and returning GI studying at the SAIC, these ontological questions- ofbeing in the modern world and the quest for social justice would be their shared, compelling artistic motivation. Their formative years were characterized by learning of the Holocaust and the consequent moral and ethical crises in the culture of the 1940s and 1950s. Although Spero and Golub were not religious Jews, nevertheless, contemporary and historical cultural memory became essential themes in their work. The dynamic forces of solitary questioning and the critical links to a broader public discourse and community of judgment were integral to both artists from their student years onward. Spero was drawn to European expressionism, especially the paintings and prints of Otto Dix (The War [Der Krieg], 1924), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, and Max Beckmann, encompassing the CUP161_08_Frizzell_1pp.indd 113 extremes of emotional intensity and an exploration of inner psychological states and sociopolitical conditions. Aspects of international surrealism in the work of Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and Matta (Roberto Matta Echaurren) offered the technique of automatism as a visual parallel to Sigmund Freud’s method of free association to mine the subconscious. Spero (1994: 42) described her artistic relation to her peers’ concerns: “I was in a loosely knit group then, and we were interested in German Expressionism, Insane Art, so- called Primitive Art . . . Outsider Art. But I had this natural expressionist impetus in the work.”5 In common with other artists working in Paris after the Nazi occupation, such as Fautrier and Giacometti, Dubuffet was drawn to a style of rawness, energy, and directness that often incorporated found materials and detritus. Dubuffet’s art brut signified this gritty, raw art form, which owed much to the spontaneity of children’s art and to the scatology of graffiti adorning postwar Paris. He offered an alternative figurative and antiaesthetic interpretation of the trauma of postwar alienation. Graffiti’s convulsive disarticulations and random scrawls dispersed disorder, subverting notions of authority, permanence, and continuity. Graffiti testified to the paroxysm of life, wagging its tongue at oblivion in defiance. In his personal, anarchistic treatise delivered at Chicago’s Arts Club in 1951, Dubuffet (1979) decried as specious the notions of beauty and harmony dominant in Western art.6 While taking his inspiration from the streets to attack the complacency and bourgeois values that had failed to halt the spread of Nazi terror, his mocking polemic referenced the semiotics of language, which he characterized as an arbitrary, “rough system of signs” (157). Dubuffet embraced the directness 113 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 CULTURAL POLITICS NA NC Y SPERO’S WAR SER IES 1/2/20 1:14 PM 114 CULTURAL POLITICS • 16:1 March 2020 Deborah Frizzell 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 of visual art as a means of immediate and profound communication: “Painting manipulates materials which are themselves living substances. That is why painting allows one to go much further than words do in approaching things and conjuring them” (157; italics mine). Dubuffet’s emphasis on the transformative qualities of primal matter and embodiment, of conjuring and visualizing emotive states, appealed to Spero. She eventually came to intuitively focus on these performative, discursive, and initiatory aspects related to Dubuffet’s ideas, much discussed by Chicago artists. In December 1951, Spero and Golub married and settled in Chicago, living and painting in a converted two- story garage. There they had two sons, Stephen (b. 1953) and Philip (b. 1954). While caring for her two young sons, Spero tried to paint at night and Golub taught painting at various institutions. Spero positioned the parameters of her work against the predominant tenets of Greenbergian Modernism and the idiom of abstraction, allying her painting with the figurative expressionism emerging in Chicago of the Imagists, among them were Golub, George Cohen, Cosmo Campoli, June Leaf, Seymour Rosofsky, and H. C. Westerman. Spero’s painting was self- admittedly “expressionistic. It was also ‘Frenchified’ — there were some French elegances in the work. I was interested in masks, existential personas, obscure, distorted, sometimes frenetic gestures” [Spero 1983: 3]. Spero aimed to incorporate the emotional pitch and psychological dynamics of expressionism within contemporary figuration. Through the sale of their paintings and a generous gift from a patron, Spero and Golub were able to live in Italy from 1956 to 1957, while raising their two sons.7 Finding a more artistically varied and receptive atmosphere for their figurative painting CUP161_08_Frizzell_1pp.indd 114 in Europe than in the New York art world dominated by second- generation abstract expressionism, color field, and pop art, Spero and Golub left for Paris in 1959, where they remained until 1964. They lived in what had been the vacant ground floor of a house with a basement off the Bois de Boulogne in the sixteenth arrondissement. Spero flourished in Paris, making work for three major solo exhibitions at Gallery Breteau in 1962, 1964, and 1968, and giving birth to her third son, Paul (b. 1961). Spero painted a series of works that would become known as her Black Paris Paintings (1960 – 64) comprising oil on canvas and works on paper.8 Their nuanced, dark surfaces appear carbonized, like emerging archaeological fields in which bodies and earthen ground are intertwined, as in the digs at Pompeii that Spero had visited. Spero delved deeper into her primary themes in Paris: “These paintings are about timeless subjects which continually appear in our society. They dealt with lovers, great mothers, children and prostitutes; women have been an important part of myth and women continue to be important subjects in art. I have always felt this, since I was a student looking at artifacts at the [Chicago] Field Museum [of Natural History]” (King 1985: 11). Mothers and children and couples are a main focus, inspired by her life experience, her study of Tarot images, and Etruscan sarcophagi in Italy and in Paris museums. Returning to New York in 1964, Spero found a very different America from the one she had left. The Vietnam War was raging and the civil rights movement was rapidly gaining momentum, while the Black Panther Party emerged as a younger generation that sought to challenge police brutality and to protect the African American community from attack. The disillusionment with democratic institutions 1/2/20 1:14 PM and capitalism and the effects of governmental corruption and systemic racism and inequality became a part of everyday conversation for Spero and Golub and their friends. Americans watched on TV as rows and rows of caskets arrived at US airports from Vietnam; photographs appeared in newspapers of Buddhist monks immolating themselves to protest the war and of naked children with napalm burns running and screaming in pain and terror. Racial unrest surged nationally because of continued discrimination, segregation, and the escalating killings of blacks and civil rights workers. Disproportionately large numbers of African Americans and Latinos were drafted to fight in Vietnam, connecting the civil rights movement with the Vietnam War as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. became the moral leader of the anti – Vietnam War Movement.9 Spero sought a contemporary eschatological language to record and bear witness with artistic fidelity. She joined the Artists and Writers Protest Group, at once immersing herself in antiwar projects as she and Golub settled their family into a loft on the Lower East Side. After the Watts riots of August 1965, Irving Petlin — a fellow artist, friend, and resident of Paris during the 1950s — proposed building a collaborative antiwar project in the devastated neighborhood of Watts, the LA Peace Tower. In February 1966, the huge collaged LA Peace Tower rose as an international symbol of protest and outrage, with over four hundred artists contributing artwork. Spero’s contribution was a painted image of a US military helicopter, a ubiquitous sight in newspaper photographs. The artist anthropomorphized a bloated green helicopter as a giant, insect- like killing machine, consuming and spewing out terrified fleeing people, bleeding on the ground, as in The Bug, CUP161_08_Frizzell_1pp.indd 115 Helicopter, Victims (1966a). Spero’s War Series was born of the LA Peace Tower.10 Affected by the horrific images of the war broadcast nightly on television, Spero began painting startlingly immediate works with gouache and ink on paper using handmade Sekishu white Japanese paper. Used for traditional Asian paintings, it is one of the oldest handmade papers. Made from Kozo fibers, it is unsized and thus amply absorbent, allowing for the artist’s slightest subtleties with a brush. The artist’s strokes were “captured” uncensored and unedited, while Spero developed her collage technique to free up the figures in relation to ground, affording them a fluidity within unplanned configurations and relationships. The patches on the back of the artist’s War paintings, as well as the passages of burnishing and rubbing, manifest the temporality of process existing in tension with Spero’s more immediate traces of mark making and brushwork Combined with the scatological language of war and politicalspeak of government, Spero painted and collaged defecating, phallic bombs, anthropomorphic helicopters pointing like forefingers to targets below, and mutant humans spewing paroxysms of death and chaos as in G.L.O.R.Y. (1967a), one of the most disturbing and brutal images of the War series. Bloody, mutilated body parts hang from merciless helicopter blades spinning in space, while a flag waves emblazoned with the image of a helicopter and the letters G.L.O.R.Y. Spero found a public voice in a pivotal form pointing directly to political reality. By working in the less precious, sketchy medium of paper, Spero declared an antiheroic stance from the margins, against the prevailing, commercially viable, deadpan idiom of pop art and the masculinist rigidity of minimalism’s cool opacity and gestalt abstraction. Although Spero had found an ostensibly broader public voice 115 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 CULTURAL POLITICS NA NC Y SPERO’S WAR SER IES 1/2/20 1:14 PM 116 CULTURAL POLITICS • 16:1 March 2020 Deborah Frizzell 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 in the paper collage format, it was difficult for her to get this voice out into the public sphere, except in antiwar, activist group exhibitions.11 From January 29 to February 8, 1967, “Angry Arts Week” took place in New York, an antiwar collaborative program of cultural events, including Collage of Indignation I, to which over 150 artists, including Spero and Golub, made contributions.12 Organized by the Artists and Writers Protest Group and installed at Loeb Student Center Gallery at New York University, the 122-foot Collage was a single facet of a many- pronged project, which included street theater, film, and performances as a collective political/cultural expression with its roots in precedents including Dada, happenings, and the beginnings of performance art (Frascina 1999: 108 – 59). Critics Dore Ashton and Max Kozloff had sent letters of invitation to participate in the Collage to artists, specifically requesting “whatever manner of visual invective, political caricature, or related savage materials you would care to contribute” (Ashton 1967).13 Inserting critical intervention, collectivity, and the theatrical, burgeoning groups such as the Bread and Puppet Theatre organized radical political productions with enormous puppets and masks; there were films and recordings of stories from Vietnamese civilians, while agit- prop caravans circulated the city streets during the week. Oppositional practices were the tactics featured at numerous venues downtown, invading and disrupting the regular flow of life.14 These multimedia collaged elements could not be curated, exhibited, and conserved in the conventional sense; they represented a transience and fluidity as guerilla protests in dissent arose everywhere. Golub described the performative and contemporary cultural significance, as well as the political origins, CUP161_08_Frizzell_1pp.indd 116 of the activist collage in a position letter published in Artforum in 1969. He characterized and championed the disjunction and fragmentation of collage (which Spero was deploying in her War Series): “And as action, spontaneous and casual, the collage became a carrier of indignation, harking back to street art, graffiti, burlesque, the carnival, the dance of death” (Golub 1969: 4). In March 1968, US soldiers of Charlie Company, an infantry brigade, arrived in the village of My Lai in the northern part of South Vietnam. They were on a “search and destroy” mission to root out the 48th Viet Cong Battalion thought to be in the area. In three hours, Charlie Company killed 504 Vietnamese civilians. Some civilians were raped, mutilated, or lined up in a drainage ditch before being shot. In April the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In June Robert Kennedy was murdered. The apocalypse in Vietnam had arrived in the United States. Spero joined the Art Workers Coalition (AWC) in 1968, an antiwar Leftist group formed to pressure art institutions into implementing economic and political reforms to establish racial, class, and gender equality.15 But women and people of color were marginalized and overlooked in AWC, so in the fall of 1969, Spero joined a splinter group, Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), the radical antiwar group that also addressed the particular roles of women in society and culture, and where Spero regularly wrote pamphlets and appeared in panel discussions.16 She joined the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists in 1970, organizing actions, sit- ins, and picketing at the Whitney Museum of American Art (Lippard 1976: 47). The rise of the New Left, feminism, civil rights, gay rights, and other social movements involved artists and critics strategizing how 1/2/20 1:14 PM NA NC Y SPERO’S WAR SER IES CUP161_08_Frizzell_1pp.indd 117 transition into debasement — mutating excrement, urine, and vomit — a result of an inchoate, savage violence taking on a life of its own in cycles of sexualized destructive impulses. In her War Series Spero painted grotesque female as well as male bombs, and she did so from the point of view of a woman raising three sons on the home front. Realizing the unpredictability of mass insanity unleashed in war, Spero (1983: 6), in a sense, presaged in her War Series the massacre of civilians at My Lai two years before it took place: I started to do a war series in 1966. The Vietnam War was going on, so it was both personal and a political crisis. . . . And at first I started doing atom bombs because that was and can be and is total destruction. What happened was this terrific outburst — that the bombs became very sexual and very phallic. Mostly male bombs — a long penis with heads at the end of the penis. Something that was once again unacceptable art! On top of the bomb cloud there were heads spewing out poison or vomiting or sticking their tongues out. It got really violent; the implication of sex and the power of the military, the power of a country having the atom bomb. But it had to do with male power. . . . But my idea in using sex with the bomb, with the power thing, was that I couldn’t think of any other way of showing the obscenity of the bomb, except through this expression of sexual obscenity. . . . What could be more obscene and really connected to these obscene images? And as horrified as people were at this work, reality was much worse. That has always been my rationale, that reality far overrides anything that I might be able to do.” In Female Bomb (1966b) Spero personified the bomb’s mushroom cloud growing from a woman’s upper torso. Several vicious- looking heads extend from the body, blood spouting from their mouths CULTURAL POLITICS art would play critical roles within political discourse. To Spero and activist artists it seemed that the period had urgently revolutionized art making, bringing about an entirely new conception of art’s potential power to spur action. Spero’s terrifying heads hanging from the maypole in Kill Commies/Maypole first appeared in her early dark oil paintings made in Paris, Les Anges, Merde, Fuck You (1960) and Nightmare Figures II (1961). These heads were stormy demons, disembodied, taunting and cursing with hyperbolic fury. Like the painted heads dangling on a maypole, red tongues flicking, these nightmare- black angels spit and snarled, their streamlined “wings” flapping at their sides. Some had deathly white heads outlined in black as they swooped downward or upward. Often these dark angels were doubled, with two menacing heads careening in opposite directions, Janus- headed, reinforcing the metaphor of the threshold from one realm to another, beginnings and endings, duality and cyclical recurrence.17 These gruesome heads appeared again in Spero’s War Series. The paintings had an immediacy and the swift assuredness of calligraphy. With both a finely tuned delicacy and boundless rage, the artist’s images often combined with the nomenclature of governments: pacification and search and destroy. Spero highlighted the Orwellian double- speak of governments, calling into question the actual meanings or subtexts of throw- away terms and mass media representations of the war depicted on TV, representations that had become synecdochic expressions in the larger culture. She exposed from the inside out, not a science fictional morphing of men into killing machines, but anthropomorphic machines designed by men to dehumanize and terminate life. Thus Spero graphically depicted war’s inevitable 117 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 1/2/20 1:14 PM 118 CULTURAL POLITICS • 16:1 March 2020 Deborah Frizzell 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 and from the figure’s breasts and genitals. In Female Bomb Spero collapses distinctions between a weapon and a body that has been destroyed by it, highlighting the devastation caused by the tools of warfare that give birth to the posthuman cyborgas- killing machine. Spero was fiercely committed to the representation of women in art and portrayed them as both victims and angry warriors. She said of her work at the time, “I was literally sticking my tongue out at the world — a woman silenced, victimized, and brutalized” (Spero 1992: 39). While painting, cutting, and collaging on a “domestically” intimate scale, her work easily whisked out of sight when her children entered the studio, Spero paradoxically tapped into a more public, emphatically political voice. These first images in the War Series were bombs wreaking havoc and total destruction. Spero (2000: 33) explained: The bomb assumes many aspects; terrible angels of death and destruction emerging from the clouds of the bomb — either their tongues or blood gushing from their mouths; the bomb sometimes assumes the form of a canopic vase, or the bomb’s pillar becomes a human torso with obscene angels emerging, etc. Too, I have done scenes of the bomb at the horizon of the earth with the suggestion of dead drowned people strewn about (I had in mind the apocalyptic manuscripts of tenth century Spain). The artist remembered artworks featured at the AIC in traveling exhibitions, such as an apocalypse tapestry from France, the fourteenth- century Apocalypse of Angers, with its registers of unearthly hybrid beasts with gaping mouths and the many- headed dragon slain by St. George (Lyon 2010: 97 – 99). Most important, she remembered copies of the tenth- century Spanish medieval illumination Beatus of CUP161_08_Frizzell_1pp.indd 118 Gerona Commentary on the Apocalypse, which depicted the end of the world and the Last Judgment. In a 1963 Art News article, Meyer Schapiro (1979: 326) discussed at length The Beatus Apocalypse of Gerona. From the review, Spero learned of the two illuminators, a monk and a nun, Ende, a historical figure who became Spero’s lodestar. (Later, in 1976, she gave a lecture titled “Ende — The Beatus Apocalypse of Gerona” at A.I.R. Gallery, the first all-women’s cooperative gallery in New York of which Spero was a cofounder.) Ende’s illuminations of the Last Judgment, particularly the victims writhing in hell, informed Spero’s war content as an apocalypse. In addition, Spero was influenced by the Mozarabic style and its formal qualities: the hierarchical arrangements and registers, simplified or stylized figures, and hybrid human- animal grotesques, all of which emerge in her later scrolls. Spero critically referenced the deepseated psychological power of cultural symbolism from many different ancient mythologies — such as the Medusa head, an apotropaic image of terror, chaos, and instantaneous destruction that she coupled with an image of the imperial Roman/ American eagle. She aimed to translate into her pictorial language symbolic objects that she remembered from Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and at archeological sites in Europe: “When I did the War Series I felt, at a primitive level, that if I revealed all this nastiness in some way to the world, then I would be exorcising the evils. The art was, in a way, shamanistic” (Hutchinson 1987: 31). Spero’s (2000: 30) physicality of approach to materials reverberated in her struggle to embody all- out war and its effects: To exorcize my vengeful feelings about the war, I had to be extreme. The way I think of it, an 1/2/20 1:14 PM exorcism is pretty primitive but it’s something outside myself that results in some kind of action. . . . I used bloody colors, and literally a lot of spit with gouache paint. I used it to thin the gouache like watercolor — to correct anything I would rub spit in with my finger. Even though they seem delicate, they are violent: a lot of them are patched on the back from all this rubbing. Spero winnowed down the plethora of news images to a lexicon of emblems that represented her outrage at the mindless destruction of a people, their homes, and their land. Bearing the ethical stance of witnessing, she evoked the physical agony of witness in her images, triggering viewer revulsion and disgust by revealing complete abjection. Spero’s River of Victims (1966c) makes a deep diagonal slash across the paper, sweeping the drowning victims to their death in a cataract of blue and sickly- green water. The artist’s eschatological vision is a war apocalypse, an image reverberating into present- day news cycles depicting Syrian refugees caught between North Africa and the shores of Mediterranean Europe. Finally, US military crew members may also become victims as they are expelled dangling or crucified in Spero’s painting F111 (1968; see Banks 2014).18 She depicts the streaking- off-the- paper high- speed F-111 Aardvark aircraft and its ejectable crew modules dropping in midair toward the earth. The F-111 made its debut in Vietnam, but there were many serious flaws in the design, according to Robert Bernier (2018), writing in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space magazine: “We all looked at each other and said, ‘Well, first guy that uses that is gonna be dead.’ And sure enough, that’s what happened. It killed one of my friends. The capsule separated [from the fuselage], but the ’chute didn’t deploy.” CUP161_08_Frizzell_1pp.indd 119 Although the Navy brass at first reluctantly supported the aircraft, the Senate Armed Services Committee scuttled the F-111 program in 1968 after the scathing testimony of Vice Admiral Tom Connolly. In Spero’s painting, featuring an aircraft often pictured in newspaper photographs because of its sleek design and massive outstretched wingspan, the silver grey killing machine’s jet streams become daggers that impale humanity. Printed on the plane’s wingspan in black ink is a Madison Avenue Mad Men – like slogan: “Can Fight Anyplace in the World in 24 Hours.” Leon Golub (1967: 52) wrote of the scope and nature of Spero’s War Series, “The whirlybird becomes the Beast of the Apocalypse, the machine becomes the technological equivalent for metaphysical nightmare. . . . The eschatological is as real as a Chrysler or a tank.” Nancy Spero’s themes explore the full range of power relations: unraveling the political in a manifestation of individual histories and tracing the psycho-topography of collective memory and ethical witnessing. She consistently created socially engaged figurative art, valuing subtext and layering sociopolitical meanings manifest in an aesthetic commitment to experimentation with image/text and figure/ ground conjunctions. Spero produced a wide- ranging figurative oeuvre that developed within the historical conditions of the American political and artistic Left, especially during the Vietnam War. Both her work and her life argue for a culturally dynamic, open- ended critical trajectory as an integral part of public discourse via aesthetic form, allowing for the possibility of activist engagement. Acknowledgments Many thanks to editors John Armitage, Ryan Bishop, and Mark Featherstone. 119 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 CULTURAL POLITICS NA NC Y SPERO’S WAR SER IES 1/2/20 1:14 PM 120 CULTURAL POLITICS • 16:1 March 2020 Deborah Frizzell 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Spero’s War Series paintings were finally exhibited in Documenta X in 1997 and in Nancy Spero: The War Series at Galerie Lelong in Manhattan in 2003. In 2007 Spero created a three- dimensional sculpture based on Kill Commies/Maypole that depicts grisly heads in profile, painted on double-sided cut-metal silhouettes, hanging by ribbons and chains in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, entitled War Maypole: Take No Prisoners. See Spero and Frizzell 2009. See a discussion of Spero’s years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Frizzell 2004: 27 – 52. Stephen Polcari (1993) analyzes the facets of European and American modernist interchange and the intellectual climate informing postwar avant- garde movements. See also Dore Ashton (1999), especially her discussion regarding the emergence of European “art informal” or “unformed art.” See also Selz 1956: 292, 1959; Malone and Selz 1955: 36 – 37; and Schulze 1972. Spero’s most important professors at SAIC were the Bauhaus-trained Paul Wieghardt (1897 – 1969) and printmaker Stanley William Hayter (1901 – 88); Hayter was an artist of strong political and social convictions who enlisted his passionate graphic language in support of the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War and in other antifascist causes. Spero also knew about Hans Prinzhorn’s collection published in his Artistry of the Mentally Ill ([1922] 1972) via art journals and magazines. Prinzhorn believed in the curative power of personal expression and the therapeutic benefits of the act of drawing. The images made by his psychiatric patients chronicled the painful struggle to reconcile personal, interior existence with the demands of external forces, familial and societal forces that Freud had charted in his patients earlier (i.e., Civilization and Its Discontents and Totem and Taboo). Originally published in Feigen 1969. Dubuffet’s paintings Will to Power (1946) and Triumph and Glory (1950) were collected by the Guggenheim Museum. CUP161_08_Frizzell_1pp.indd 120 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. “A decisive moment for both Spero and Golub came in 1956 when a patron, Herbert Greenwald (known as ‘Squiff’), a prominent developer and builder who had brought Mies van der Rohe to Chicago, offered to finance a break from teaching for Golub, whom he had known years earlier; Greenwald had been completing a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago while also working as the Principal at a synagogue where the young Golub had taught art classes as a teenager. The two reconnected courtesy of Pat Malone, a former AIC student and junior curator at the Institute. With a $4,500 check, Greenwald made it possible for the artists to travel to Italy to work undistracted. Simultaneously, Golub had sold three paintings to a businessman who was a student in his night class at Northwestern University, allowing both artists to live in Ischia and Florence for an entire year: June 1956 – June 1957” (Frizzell 2004: 64). For more on the Black Paris Paintings, see Lyon 2010: 45 – 71. For a full analysis of the artistic Left in the 1960s, see Frascina 1999. For a detailed discussion and analysis of these themes, see Bryan-Wilson 2009: chaps. 1 – 2. Spero exhibited her War paintings only in antiwar group shows such as Colgate University’s Viewpoints (1969), New York Public Theater’s Mod Donn Art (1970), and Judson Memorial Church’s Flag Show (1970). For details and interviews with participants, see Sundell n.d. For a discussion of the antiwar arts movement strategies and tactics as well as the emergence of a women’s art movement from the peace movement, see Taylor and Ng 2002: 9 – 14. See also a detailed discussion of the roots of the genres of activist practices in New York and Spero’s relationship to these genres and the feminist and antiwar movements, Schlegel 1997. Both Bertold Brecht’s techniques in “epic theater” (Spero’s library included Walter Benjamin’s Understanding Brecht [1973]) and Guy Debord’s strategies for the situationists were familiar to Spero. Spero was painting on paper and deploying text in Paris when Gil J. Wolman and the Lettrist International 1/2/20 1:14 PM NA NC Y SPERO’S WAR SER IES 16. 17. 18. CUP161_08_Frizzell_1pp.indd 121 References Ashton, Dore. 1967. “Report of Angry Arts Week.” May. In Rudolf Barnick and Dore Ashton Files, Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D) Archives, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Ashton, Dore. 1999. A Rebours: The Informal Rebellion. Exhibition catalog. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Banks, Grace. 2014. “ ‘Venus Drawn Out’ at the Armory Show, New York.” Apollo, March 3. www.apollo -magazine.com/venus- drawn-armory-show -new-york/. Benjamin, Walter. 1973. Understanding Brecht. Translated by Anna Bostock. London: New Left Books. Bernier, Robert. 2018. “Was the Navy’s F-111 Really That Bad?” Air and Space Magazine, September. www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/13 _sep2018- cancelled-f111b-1-180969916/. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. 2009. Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dubuffet, Jean. 1979. “Anti- cultural Positions.” Arts Magazine 53, no. 8: 156 – 57. Elligott, Michelle. 2016. “From the Archives: Faith Ringgold, the Art Workers Coalition, and the Fight for Inclusion at the Museum of Modern Art.” Inside/Out (blog), July 29. www.moma .org/explore/inside_out/2016/07/29/from-the -archives-faith-ringgold-the-art-workers - coalition-and-the-fight-for-inclusion-at-the -museum-of-modern-art/. Feigen, Richard. 1969. Dubuffet and Anti-culture. Exhibition catalog. New York: Richard L. Feigen. Frascina, Francis. 1999. Art, Politics, and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Frizzell, Deborah. 2004. “Nancy Spero’s Installations and Institutional Incursions, 1987 – 2001: Dialogues within the Museum, and Elsewhere.” PhD diss., City University of New York. Golub, Leon. 1967. “Bombs and Helicopters: The Art of Nancy Spero.” Caterpillar 1: 46 – 53. Golub, Leon. 1969. “Letters.” Artforum 7, no. 1: 3 – 4. Hutchinson, John. 1987. “Nancy Spero/Leon Golub: In Conversation with John Hutchinson.” Circa, no. 36: 29 – 33. King, Elaine. 1985. Nancy Spero: The Paris Black Paintings. Exhibition catalog. Pittsburgh: Hewlett Gallery, Carnegie-Mellon University. CULTURAL POLITICS 15. with Guy Debord (who formed the Situationist International movement, which would have a great influence on the protests of the 1960s) pioneered research into the nexus and alteration of visual and textual languages in a critique of social and political life in France. Detournement (rerouting or hijacking) was the Lettrist technique of altering and undermining the meanings of deliberately appropriated materials such as phrases, parts of books, and images from books and magazines. By 1957 Wolman used paint, wax, paper-mache, and graffiti to his more pictorial work, and he exhibited these canvases in Paris at Galerie Weiller (1961) and Galerie Valerie Schmidt (1963). His Scotch Art consisted of his process of using adhesive tape to tear off bands of text and to reposition them in layered lines on different supports, such as paper or wood. With this process he appropriated text but made it nearly illegible or completely illegible, while filling the picture plane with words that renounced meaning. Wolman’s techniques, which Spero may have encountered in Paris galleries or French magazines, questioned the very nature of representation and the relations between word and image and meaning. Spero’s evolving artistic strategies — her use of graffiti as a physical, somatic dimension of writing, and her interest in the effects of ink and paper in her scatological paintings — became all the more critical in her War paintings and scrolls. AWC members included Robert Morris, Gregory Battcock, Hans Haacke, Mark DiSuvero, Faith Ringgold, Irving Petlin, and Lucy Lippard. For details of the AWC, see Frascina 1999; BryanWilson 2009: 1 – 39; and Elligott 2016. These are found in the archives of Women Artists in Revolution (n.d.). These paintings were primarily existential, individual cries linked to Spero’s reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex (1949) and other existentialist writings, but not those related directly to the French protests over the Algerian War. Renowned pop artist James Rosenquist had made his painting F111 in 1965. See Rosenquist 1965. 121 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 1/2/20 1:14 PM 122 CULTURAL POLITICS • 16:1 March 2020 Deborah Frizzell 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Lippard, Lucy R. 1976. From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art. New York: E. P. Dutton. Lyon, Christopher. 2010. Nancy Spero: The Work. New York: Prestel. Malone, Patrick, and Peter Selz. 1955. “Is There a New Chicago School?” Art News 54, no. 6: 36 – 37. Polcari, Stephen. 1993. Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience. New York: Cambridge University Press. Prinzhorn, Hans. (1922) 1972. Artistry of the Mentally Ill: A Contribution to the Psychology and Psychopathology of Configuration. Translated by Eric von Brockdorff from the second German edition. With an introduction by James L. Foy. Vienna: Springer. Rosenquist, James. 1965. F111. Museum of Modern Art. www.moma.org/collection/works/79805 (accessed October 2, 2019). Schapiro, Meyer. 1979. “The Beatus Apocalypse of Gerona.” In Late Antique, Early Christian, and Mediaeval Art, 319 – 28. New York: George Braziller. Schlegel, Amy Ingrid. 1997. “Codex Spero: Feminist Art Practices in New York since the Late 1960s.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Schulze, Franz. 1972. Fantastic Images. Chicago: Follett. Selz, Peter. 1956. “A New Imagery in American Painting.” College Art Journal 15, no. 4: 290 – 301. Selz, Peter. 1959. New Images of Man. Exhibition catalog. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Selz, Peter. 1985. “Surrealism and the Chicago Imagists of the 1950s: A Comparison and Contrast.” Art Journal 45, no. 4: 303 – 6. Spero, Nancy. 1966a. The Bug, Helicopter, Victims. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. www .pafa.org/collection/bug-helicopter-victim. Spero, Nancy. 1966b. Female Bomb. Institute of Contemporary Art. www.icaboston.org/art /nancy-spero/female-bomb. Spero, Nancy. 1966c. River of Victims. Colby Museum of Art. www.colby.edu/museum/exhibition /nancy-spero-unbound/. Spero, Nancy. 1967a. G.L.O.R.Y. www.sampratt.com /sam/2011/02/saturday-artist-nancy-spero.html. Spero, Nancy. 1967b. Kill Commies/Maypole. Galerie Lelong. www.galerielelong.com/exhibitions /nancy-spero3. Spero, Nancy. 1983. “On Art and Artists: Nancy Spero.” Interview by Kate Horsfield. Profile 3, no. 1: 2 – 24. Spero, Nancy. 1992. “Creation and Pro- creation.” M/E/A/N/I/N/G, no. 12: 38 – 40. Spero, Nancy. 1994. “Word into Image: Interview with Nancy Spero.” Interview by Marjorie Welish. Bomb, no. 47: 36 – 44. Spero, Nancy. 2000. “Other Side of the Mirror: A Conversation with Nancy Spero.” Interview by Robert Enright. Border Crossings 19, no. 4: 18 – 33. Spero, Nancy, and Deborah Frizzell. 2009. “Nancy Spero’s War Maypole/Take No Prisoners.” Cultural Politics 5, no. 1: 118 – 32. doi.org/10.2752 /175174309X388518. Sundell, Nina Castelli. n.d. “The Turning Point: Art and Politics in Nineteen Sixty-Eight.” Lehman College Art Gallery. www.lehman.edu/vpadvance/art gallery/gallery/turning_point/sundell.htm (accessed September 18, 2019). Taylor, Simon, and Natalie Ng. 2002. Personal and Political: The Women’s Art Movement, 1969 – 1975. Exhibition catalog. East Hampton, NY: Guild Hall Museum. Women Artists in Revolution. n.d. Records, 1970–78. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian. www .aaa.si.edu/collections/women-artists-revolution -records-9361 (accessed September 18, 2019). Deborah Frizzell is the Arts Section editor of Cultural Politics. She is adjunct professor of art history at William Paterson University in New Jersey, where she teaches modern and contemporary art history and theory. She has written numerous articles on Spero, including “Nancy Spero’s War Maypole: Take No Prisoners” (2008), “Nancy Spero’s Museum Incursions: Isis on the Threshold” (2006), and “Alchemical Secrets: Spero’s Fragmentation and Recreation” (2002). She is writing a manuscript on Spero’s influences on younger generations of artists. CUP161_08_Frizzell_1pp.indd 122 1/2/20 1:14 PM