1000 words: Peace Tower; Irving Petlin, Mark di Suvero, and Rirkrit Tiravanija revisit The Artists' Tower of Protest, 1966.

FOR A CONTEMPORARY ART WORLD already engaged in a productive critical reassessment of the practices of the 1960s, the 2006 Whitney Biennial, which opens March 2, offers yet another welcome opportunity to compare and contrast that cultural moment and our own. The Peace Tower, 2005-2006, a joint project created by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Mark di Suvero for the Whitney's Sculpture Court, resuscitates a curiously underexamined watershed in the history of cultural activism in America--the creation, in the winter of 1966, of a dramatic collaborative artwork in the West Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles to protest US involvement in Vietnam.

Organized by a group led by Irving Petlin, an artist and activist who is also collaborating on the new work, the original project--The Artists' Tower of Protest, informally called the "Peace Tower"--featured a nearly sixty-foot-high tower designed and built by di Suvero; around it were arrayed more than four hundred individual paintings (each measuring two feet by two feet) donated to Petlin et al.'s Artists' Protest Committee (APC) by figures such as Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, Elaine de Kooning, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Leon Golub. Despite frequent acts of vandalism at the site, and violent physical attacks on the artists working there, the Peace Tower was dedicated at a ceremony on February 26, 1966, and stood for some three months, functioning as a galvanizing symbol of dissent aimed at a government whose "constant use of force" and "irresponsible tactics," as an APC broadside charged, undermined the role of international bodies the US had itself helped create, while acting to "weaken and make hypocritical our struggle for freedom at home."

Installed in the Whitney's courtyard, the new Peace Tower--which di Suvero is again building and which, like the original, is designed to be accompanied by what the organizers expect to be hundreds of newly donated two-by-two-foot protest artworks--is a reminder of the eerie applicability of such political discourse to today's situation, just as it demonstrates how the questions it provokes about collaboration, activism, and institutionalism remain as central to today's artists as they were to their predecessors four decades ago. Both a pragmatic attempt to provide a platform for an increasingly widespread oppositional movement and a utopian gesture aimed at promoting unity among its diverse adherents, the Peace Tower proposes at least one intriguing answer to the question of how art has been, and might again be, made during a time of war.

Irving Petlin

I LIVED IN FRANCE during the years of the Algerian War of Independence. I had seen France transformed by that colonial war and had suffered along with many other people in Paris during the demonstrations. Having witnessed all the methods the French government used to try to suppress dissent against the war, I saw the same thing coming in the United States with Vietnam. I left Paris in 1964 and got to Los Angeles the following year. The Vietnam War was really beginning to heat up. I knew America was headed in exactly the same direction as France.

I was at UCLA, with Richard Diebenkorn, as a visiting artist. I came to realize that LA was a very conservative place, that the artists there seemed generally apolitical. I said, "Let's do an experiment. Let's call Craig Kauffman," who was the most nonpolitical person I could think of in Los Angeles, "and let's call Ed Kienholz, and see how they feel about some form of coordinated political activism." So I called Kauffman and he said, "Yeah, I would be interested in joining that," and we were stunned. And then we called Kienholz and he said, "You guys are letting our troops down." And I said to myself, You know something? It's impossible to predict what's going to happen here. So I thought, Let's call a meeting and see.

I called a meeting at the Dwan Gallery. About sixty people showed up, artists and others, including Phil Leider, who was then just beginning his editorship at Artforum, Walter Hopps, several dealers, and our host, John Weber, who was the gallery director. This was very much a group effort and a wide variety of artists from LA were also very involved, among them Lloyd Hamrol, Eric Orr, Tanya Neufeld, Twila Wilner, Harold Dreyfus, and Melvin Edwards. We had an open meeting to discuss the possibility of organizing events that would begin to challenge the war, and we decided to call ourselves the Artists' Protest Committee. We quickly adopted a symbol, which was a diminishing ladder--larger at the bottom than at the top. At the bottom it said STOP, and at the top it said, in smaller letters, ESCALATION. It was a simple logo, but it got all over Los Angeles in various forms. We organized several small events, all of which built up a kind of momentum. Meanwhile, the press ignored us. And some of the people in the group got frustrated because we were having an effect locally, but none outside of Los Angeles. So we decided to do something more spectacular and at the same time more specifically targeted at policymakers involved directly in the Vietnam War.

At that time, the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica was known as a wonderful place where nice liberal academics were doing research, going to the galleries and buying art, supporting all the liberal causes, civil rights, and so on. But unbeknownst to most people, all these RAND researchers were planning the most horrible things going on in Vietnam. The company was under contract with the Department of Defense and was developing the protected-hamlet concept, in which soldiers rounded up Vietnamese peasants, put them behind barbed wire, and declared the rest of the countryside a free-fire zone. We decided to organize a picket of the RAND Corporation. A lot of artists showed up at John Weber's place and we thought we had done everything possible to keep the meeting confidential--we didn't use the telephone, we communicated only by word of mouth and written notes. But just as we were about to leave for the RAND headquarters, the door burst open and the LA cops were upon us in John's apartment, photographing us as they came in. I got pushed to the floor. We don't know how they found out--maybe somebody among us was a plant. But when they left, we decided to march anyway. We went to the RAND Corporation and circled the building, carrying signs accusing the nice liberal academics of genocide and of planning the "safe hamlet" policy. And they came rushing out and said, "But there must be some mistake!" We said, "No, we know who you are and what you're doing."

The company was very embarrassed, obviously. The president of RAND came out and asked to speak to me and said, "We would like to hash out these issues with you. Create a committee and come and debate us inside the RAND Corporation, and we'll record it and make a tape available for you." And so I said, "Yes, we'll do that, but you have to debate us in public." We had already contacted the Warner Theater on La Cienega Boulevard, which had agreed to let us use its space if we could get RAND in an open debate. So the RAND people went back inside and came out again and said, "We accept." A source I had inside RAND told me that, while the discussions were going on, RAND got a telegram--actually a coded message--from Robert McNamara, then secretary of defense, telling the company to go ahead with the debate because the Johnson administration wanted to know what Americans who might become critical of the war might be thinking six months from now. And when we demanded a public forum, McNamara apparently sent back a cable saying, "Accept it. It's still more valuable than not having the debate." We were the radar, and they wanted to know what the radar was thinking. The Warner Theater had seats for four hundred people, but eight hundred showed up. We set up a loudspeaker system in the courtyard and people stayed, sitting outside or leaning against the wall, listening in. It was a really tumultuous occasion.

Despite all this, we still got no press, no larger resonance in the public's awareness of the widening war. That's when we decided to build something in a prominent spot--something physical that couldn't be avoided, that would be itself a kind of beacon for attention. As it happened, Mark di Suvero was having a show at the Dwan Gallery in LA, and he got on board and agreed to design and make the tower. We signed a lease on an empty lot at the intersection of La Cienega and Sunset Boulevard and began fencing it in and assembling the tower. We sent out a printed letter, "A Call from the Artists of Los Angeles." We sent it in five languages to artists all over the world, not just the United States, asking for contributions of work, small panels. The tower started to go up and paintings began to come in, but they all had to be mounted inside the fence, because everything outside was being attacked. The fence was very quickly painted to say ARTISTS PROTEST VIETNAM WAR in big letters and people tried to burn it down, people from the local military bases. We were already getting visited by groups who were hostile, people driving by and swearing and cursing. And eventually it turned into physical attacks, so we got guys from Watts to help defend the tower, day and night. They understood what they were doing. They weren't being paid; they just knew and they came and they helped. And they were tough. For the opening, I invited Susan Sontag to speak, and Master Sergeant Donald Duncan, who was a Green Beret, a Special Forces man who came out against the war. I spoke. We opened the tower and we released white doves. Hundreds of people came to the opening and continued to visit over the three months the tower was up.

This time, we finally broke through the news blackout--we were on television practically nightly in LA, though the coverage was very critical and hostile. But at least it was being reported, and people were finding out about it. For example, one night I was attacked and was defending myself with a broken lightbulb and the end was sparking as somebody came at me. Anyway, Frank Stella heard about this and sent a check for a thousand bucks, writing, "Anybody who puts their life on the line defending a work of art of mine, I'm going to send a thousand bucks to." There were all kinds of crazy stories like that. And in the end, of the 418 pictures we received from around the world, not a single one was damaged or destroyed, even though we were attacked almost nightly. At the conclusion of the project, the works were auctioned, and the money was used to continue fighting against the war.

I found out about the new project when Mark called me in Paris recently--we had lost track of each other. He said, "We've got to get you involved. Would you come to New York?" and I agreed. I mean, we're in a worse situation now than we were then, in that we've lost the art of the communal protest--the capacity, which you see with Mark and Rirkrit, to submerge one's ego and join a project like this. And it's different this time around. Back then, we were operating in an atmosphere of total hostility that was just unrelenting. A number of our people were seriously injured defending the tower. One of our guards, a young artist by the name of Haggerty, had his eardrums punctured by a vicious kick from a policeman. We had our victims, but nothing like what was being done to the Vietnamese people, and similarly nothing like what is now being done to the people of Iraq. But that was then and this is now. I hope the new tower will be just as controversial as the old one was back then. Because, you know, indifference is almost worse than hostility.

Mark di Suvero

THE FIRST PEACE TOWER was Arnold Mesches and Irving Petlin's idea. They asked me to build something. I didn't really understand the impact at the time. I was living in New York and very much occupied with my sculpture. But I had one of these polyhedrons that I had built in New York, and I said that I could make it into a tower.

Once I got to LA, everybody worked on it--people like Judy Chicago and Lloyd Hamrol; Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters stopped by. There were artists who would come and work for days or hours, and the amount of support was incredible. There must have been several hundred artists who sent in uniform-size paintings. The building of the tower itself was pretty straightforward, except the city said it was structurally unsound. We proved the strength of the tower by picking up a car inside it--a big Buick. But their problem with us was really political. The police beat us up; the Marines attacked us. There was a real sense of war there.

The Peace Tower showed the will of many artists to fight against the war--against the gunning down and napalming of women and children in Vietnam. If you were an artist at the time, you were a radical. As for my work, people were very threatened by abstract art. I believed that the ability to think abstractly necessarily led one to refuse the reactionary attitudes that were so prevalent then. And I don't think most artists today are fooled by the neocons either. The whole thing that's happened with the art market has certainly changed the attitude of a lot of artists. But the response of artists to the new Peace Tower has already been immense, and I think it's just going to grow by unifying all of the people who want peace and who would be willing to act. You know, six million people around the world marched against the Iraq War just before the invasion. The artists who built the original Peace Tower saw what was going to happen. Now, even somebody like Robert McNamara, who ordered the carpet bombing and killing of civilians, totally accepting the idea of killing innocents in order to achieve American policy goals, has moved away from that kind of thinking.

Unlike the original project, the new Peace Tower is protected by an institution. The Whitney has accepted the idea that artists are involved in the peace movement and that the movement is against the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about so long ago. Our hope, I think, is to awaken people, to have our numbers multiply. I was part of the demonstrations against the war in Iraq. Being handicapped didn't make it easy for me. I protested during the Republican National Convention in New York City. I was jailed because I said over a loudspeaker that Bush lied. They arrested me for telling the truth. Bush was lying on television and they didn't arrest him. This happened to me in the '60s, too. I was arrested in Chicago, in Washington, DC. Eventually I left the country. But, you know, I think people have to unify in order to stop this killing, this colonialist thinking.

I feel the Peace Tower has that capacity for pulling all the people together through art, which is, I think, the reason why Rirkrit and I are working on it. I think that's really Rirkrit's central wish, and when he described that to me, I immediately wanted to participate. Whatever we can do for peace, I think we should do. And so I have been building the tower with my team--a group of young artists who come to work with me in Long Island City. And their enthusiasm for the piece is incredible. I've allowed them to a do a lot of the decision making. At this point in my life, I typically have my pieces finished for years before I show them. But finishing a piece just a week before you show it! At this point I'm exhausted, but it's been wonderful--it is real beauty that we work for, which is to say bringing everybody together in order to make something beautiful.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija

I FOUND OUT ABOUT the original Peace Tower years ago through a friend who was working on a project based on Los Angeles and its communities and neighborhoods. And when I was working in Venice in 2003 with Molly Nesbit and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, I actually approached my friend the artist Lincoln Tobier to think about it in relationship to our project "Utopia Station." Later on, Tom Eccles approached me about the idea of doing something for the Public Art Fund, and I was still in a "Utopia Station" mode and suggested this to him. Then, of course, the situation with the war started and the Republicans were going to have a convention in New York and I thought, Maybe this would be something interesting to propose. I also liked the idea of bringing people together in some sort of event around the tower with speeches, poems, music, whatever--preferably in Central Park around the time of the Republican National Convention. Although that initial plan never came together, word had obviously gotten around. So last year when Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne came to me and told me they were interested in the tower idea, I said, "First we have to talk to Mark di Suvero," because my initial reference was the tower itself, and I knew that Mark had made it. And if he was interested, then I would be willing to do it because then it could be a collaboration with the acknowledgment of the initiatives of the original group of artists, who are still very actively thinking through some of the same issues, and also with contemporaries who are engaged with those issues as well.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Chrissie and Philippe contacted Mark, and it turned out that he was not only interested in the project but actually very excited and supportive of it, and so we got started. Many artists have strong feelings about what went on back then and what still goes on. It's important to think about all that in the context of contemporary protest and peace movements, which in a way haven't really gelled as much as they might have. So maybe the Peace Tower is something to help foster that. Obviously, I like the idea of platforms, of places for people to express their opinions. And I see a coming together of like-minded people as something that's always current. As for the two-foot-square panels that will be attached to the tower, they will be made by a combination of artists who contributed to the original tower and as many people as we can reach out to on the contemporary side. I mean, if we mention it to two hundred people, then hopefully five hundred will hear about it. We've been basically telling people that it will be outside, so the works will have to be able to withstand the weather--and the artists shouldn't necessarily expect to get their work back; if they do, it definitely won't be in the condition it was in when they sent it to us. And so they have to essentially create the work and then give it up, which I think is a really beautiful gesture for everyone to make. Everyone has different ways of thinking about peace. For me, I would like to think that the project is not so much against something, but rather for peace.