Giving New Life to Protests of Yore
WASHINGTON, July 26 - It’s not an unfamiliar tableau these days: people gathered on a grassy expanse of the National Mall here, listening to someone deliver an impassioned antiwar speech with phrases like “aggressive, activist foreign policy,” “the war we are creating,” “vigorous governmental efforts to control information” and “distorted or downright dishonest documents.” At some point, the crowd breaks into applause and a young woman yells out, “That’s right!”
She shouts this, however, just after the speaker behind the lectern refers to men with last names like Johnson, Rusk and Bundy and to the destinies of the Vietnamese people. And at its high point, the crowd numbers only about 30 people, many of them involved in videotaping, recording and photographing the event as flags snap majestically in the wind around the Washington Monument.
In other words, if you had wandered into this spectacle on Thursday evening, you would have found yourself not exactly in the midst of an actual protest but somewhere slightly removed, in the disorienting territory where art meets political engagement.
The firebrand orator was Max Bunzel, a 23-year-old actor from New York, juggling the role between movie auditions - for a fee, although he said that the speech, originally delivered by Paul Potter, the president of Students for a Democratic Society, during the 1965 march on Washington, genuinely moved and affected him. Most of the college-age spectators gathered there in a clutch were fully aware they were witnessing art, but by the end they also seemed not to be simply playing along but to be genuinely engaged by Mr. Potter’s arguments.
Mark Tribe, an artist and assistant professor of modern culture and media studies at Brown University, has organized a series of such re-enactments at sites where important speeches of the New Left originally took place, and he says his intention was precisely to create such a strange cultural and political straddle. The goal was to use the speeches not just as historical ready-mades or conceptual-art explorations of context, he said, but also maybe as a genuine form of protest, to point out with the help of art how much has changed, yet how much remains the same.
Or, in Mr. Tribe’s view, has grown worse since the era when Mr. Potter urged his listeners, with characteristic 1960s deconstructionist fervor, to “name the system” that allowed the Vietnam War to happen.
“Forty years has elapsed,” Mr. Tribe said, “and the system that Paul Potter talked about has gotten so much more sophisticated. The military-industrial complex or capitalism or whatever you want to call it has globalized and intensified.”
The speech by Mr. Potter (who died several years ago) is the third so far in what Mr. Tribe calls the Port Huron Project, named after the New Left manifesto. The first, performed last summer in Central Park, was a re-enactment of a 1968 speech by Coretta Scott King, and the second, this month on Boston Common, was a reprise of a speech given in 1971 by the activist Howard Zinn urging widespread civil disobedience. Creative Time, the New York public-art organization, has agreed to help produce three more speeches next year.
The project fits into a growing subgenre of historical re-enactment as performance art. Among the best-known practitioners is the British artist Jeremy Deller, who won the 2004 Turner Prize. In 2001 he staged a re-creation of a seminal event in British labor history, a 1984 confrontation between the police and thousands of miners in Yorkshire, England, who were protesting layoffs. His epic re-enactment, filmed with the help of the director Mike Figgis, used vintage clothes, hundreds of extras and thousands of fake bricks (to be thrown by the pretend miners).
Mr. Tribe, by contrast, puts inexpensive ads in Backstage and other theatrical publications and hires one actor per speech, after auditioning many. “We get deluged by applicants,” he said, adding with a grin, “We do callbacks.” (Mr. Bunzel, the actor for the Potter speech, who was born almost a decade after the Vietnam War ended, heard about it through friends.)
Mr. Tribe found the plain pine lectern he uses for the speeches through craigslist.com. And, with the help of a handful of his students, he schleps it and some basic sound and video equipment around to the sites, using the Internet to try to draw people whom he hopes will feel the ground shifting a little beneath their feet.
“It doesn’t fit neatly into any category,” he said. “Is it protest? Well, no, not quite. Is it theater? Not really. What is it? Are we in the present tense? Yes, but we’re hearing this speech that was given 42 years ago.”
“There’s a real kind of surreal quality,” he said. “It flips back and forth. It’s unsettling.”
He said he began to think about such re-enactments when he started teaching at Brown, his alma mater, in 2005 and found that students who said they opposed the war in Iraq did little about it. “There were no protests,” he said. “My students didn’t even seem to want to talk about it.”
His motivation for the project was also - as is the case in many artworks - partly personal, he said, a way to connect with childhood memories of his parents’ political involvement. (His father is Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard law professor and frequent champion of liberal causes.)
“I find that time really inspiring, exciting to think about,” he said. “Also kind of sexy.”
Sometimes the historical conjunctions at such events are more than just conceptual. As Mr. Bunzel began to speak, Paul R. Booth, the organizer of the 1965 march, joined the crowd. Mr. Booth, now assistant to the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Washington, said he remembered how the original speech, heard by 20,000 protesters, the largest American antiwar crowd up to that point, “really blew everybody’s mind.”
Some of the spectators in the crowd on Thursday did not describe their reactions to the re-enactment quite the same way. Russell Mann, who showed up after reading about the event in the newspaper and stood at the edge of the crowd, said he served as a mechanical engineer on an air base near Saigon in 1973 and feels the United States should never have abandoned its fight in Vietnam.
“I’m not on the side of these people,” Mr. Mann said, scowling and gesturing toward Mr. Bunzel. “I just came to hear what I missed in 1965.”
© The New York Times
I was here through the sixties and seventies.
I was at the original Woodstock Festival. I marched. I protested. I refused to go to war.
So what?
My generation didn’t finish the job. We thought; wow, we won! We stopped the war! Everything’s cool!
We were wrong.
That was then, this is now.
Anything that doesn’t help is part of the problem, not the solution.
More “bread and circuses”.
non_sequitur@q.com
Like the man said, this really is surreal.
You want art on the National Mall? Go examine the Wall. Now there’s a piece of Art. Notice that the first panel is from 1958 (that’s right, 1958) and the war didn’t end until 1975. Do the math - that’s 17 years it lasted. And 60,000 dead. Dead. And they’re still dead.
I and hundreds of thousands of others (including a lot of people on this blog)protested the damn thing, lost our jobs, infuriated our families and friends, got arrested, and all that stuff. And to think we never realized that we were actors in some cheap street art of the 21st century! We should have asked for salaries. Dumb us.
What does this mean? I really have no idea. Anyone?
This is, in my view, a rather interesting political art project and is affecting the people who take part in it. Try to do that with students these days–it’s not so easy! People, especially young people, are beset by propaganda and gadgets and seem less able to sift through the garbage and construct an activist stance, or so it sometimes seems to me when I attend anti-war meetings of mostly older people. I realize a new SDS is being ‘born’, but where is it, nearly invisible thanks to the monolithic corporate media.
It’s not a put down on those who fought to end the Vietnam war; we need that spirit again. But there is no draft, no student strikes, and the media is far more in-bed with the government.
I’m convinced that the people against the war have the numbers to stop it, but are continually having their will to do so belittled and discouraged by the media, a media hostile to common sense, ruthless, relentless in the pursuit of corporate interests.
The idea of a general strike is a good one. Some day something like that is due. Certainly, Bushco is planning on it; they are preparing for martial law. The system/economy is less stable than it appears. Will it be a spark of an action or a crisis that puts the problem on every doorstep? Who knows; in the meantime, be creative and not discouraged! There is still a chance to rid this country of its profound corruption. We need sweeping change, down to the root….
I like Bladrunner’s idea too. Usually I think it’s all over for us; it’s hard to build up any energy to resist. Programs like these touch & energize us in ways that reason alone doesn’t. Each one of us needs to examine ourselves, what we really stand for, before any change can take place. This transformation takes place through art, more than any other medium.
There is an opportunity for our nation to do such a self-examination: perhaps there is still some decency within us.
“His motivation for the project was also - as is the case in many artworks - partly personal, he said, a way to connect with childhood memories of his parents’ political involvement. (His father is Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard law professor and frequent champion of liberal causes.)
“I find that time really inspiring, exciting to think about,” he said. “Also kind of sexy.”
But won’t this showcase of actors risk minimizing the fire of Obama? I wonder if Tribe realizes he’s treading on part the charming trademark of Obama.
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Trends in popular culture manifest before one’s eyes.
The Big Money octopus got its tentacles on our labor movement, our most promising venue for progressive change. It saw that working people are more visceral and love sports. So it plastered ALL sports with nationalistic and religious symbolism that tied their conglomerates to sports. In this way they coopted much of labor worldwide. To rail against the corporations and banks that advertise liberally in sports events, is to rail against the sports that are the working stiff’s favorite pastime. Sports and players have become Big Money recipients because that’s where Big Money puts most of it’s advertising dollars.
I’m all for political theater and reneactments, anythign to get people to think twice about whats going on around them. But one of the sad things about this article - and this speaks to the problem of corporate media many folks have talked about - is that a reenactment of ONE student antiwar speech is getting more press than the protests of tens of thousands in DC every few months, or the hundreds of protests of 30, 80, or 300 that people have been participating in since 2003 in towns and cities all around the US. Not sure what to do. But I think we underestimate young folks today, even if they tend to be more conservative than their parents on war (which was also true in the late 60s): there ARE students and people of all ages out there making their voice heard, maybe more than ever before. In my mind the question is what’s gone wrong with today’s politicians, who don’t listen at ALL and simply won’t oppose whats clearly wrong, immoral, unjust? Where are McCarthy and Fullbright et al?
R
Sorry, folks, but re-enactments are for things that happened in the past - usually long ago in the past - and with no particular relevance to events in the present. I doubt that even one person in either the audience or the cast will begin protesting our present war or occupation or whatever you want to call it as a result of this program. No, instead they’ll all walk away chatting on their cellphones about where to meet for dinner. Another poster commented “bread and circuses” and he’s right. Just entertainment. And nostalgia too, for those exciting old protesting days their parents talk about.
NON SEQUITUR: Everything builds on everything else… what gives me hope in the face of this unbelievable regurgitation of a Dark Age is the realization that all things cycle; the ocean waves appear to go backwards when they ROLL under themselves in order to acquire forward momentum. We are seeing the US cultural wave roll under itself, but a new momentum is building. We talk about the need for progressive coaltions that address climate change, a living wage, an executive branch held in balance as was the Constitution’s intention, a shift in economic priorities to address the needs of citizens, the rebuilding of cities and their infrastructure rather than the ill-fated investment in war… ALL the disenfranchised groups feel the same angst and see injustice through the prism of their own unique experience. I have used this analogy before since as a former English teacher I place a lot of confidence in the power of drama… George Lucas’ Star Wars Trilogy is to our times what the Illiad and Oddysey were to more Ancient times. Note his use of a very unusual grouping of unlikely citizens who through the power of spiritual force and focused intention found and used the singular flaw in the death star, and Darth Vader’s empire. I believe THIS is the quintessential parable for OUR times, and is a map to what will help us to overcome the beast in our midst.
“George Lucas’ Star Wars Trilogy is to our times what the Illiad and Oddysey were to more Ancient times. Note his use of a very unusual grouping of unlikely citizens who through the power of spiritual force and focused intention found and used the singular flaw in the death star, and Darth Vader’s empire. I believe THIS is the quintessential parable for OUR times, and is a map to what will help us to overcome the beast in our midst.”
It’s interesting that you bring that up Siouxrose. I was watching a documentary not long ago about Star Wars, and one thing that was pointed out that I hadn’t thought much of before was that if you look at the Galactic Empire, you’ll notice that they are very uniform. Everyone looks the same. But the Rebel Alliance was made up of all these different alien races. And therein lies the strength of the left.
Why all the negativity? Yeah, it’s the 2000’s now, and we need to do our own street organizing — and many of us have, and will always continue to do so — but the 60’s *changed the US* and the world, and i think this is actually rather cool, i’d dig being in one of these audiences and seeing these firebrand historical speeches..