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Artists' reenactments: the Vietnam War, the War on Terror, and the performance of American activism

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Artists' reenactments: the Vietnam War, the War on Terror, and the performance of American activism

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ARTISTS’ REENACTMENTS:

THE VIETNAM WAR, THE WAR ON TERROR, AND
THE PERFORMANCE OF AMERICAN ACTIVISM

by

Karen I.M. Huang

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)

May 2016

2

3
TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 4

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 6

ABSTRACT 10

INTRODUCTION 12

CHAPTER 1
Whose Memories? Imagining the Vietnam War in An-My Lê’s Small Wars 53

CHAPTER 2
Reenactment as Memorial: The Peace Tower Multiplied 101

CHAPTER 3
Re-Speaking Reenactment: Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project 167

CONCLUSION 229

ILLUSTRATIONS 234

BIBLIOGRAPHY 267

4
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. I.1 Allison Smith, “Trench Art” from The Muster (2004)
Fig. I.2 Sharon Hayes, In the Near Future (2005–2009)
Fig. I.3 Jeremy Deller, The English Civil War Part II (The Battle of Orgreave), photo by
Martin Jenkinson
Fig. I.4 Malcolm Browne (AP), photograph of the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thich
Quang Duc, June 1963
Fig. I.5 Wally Hedrick Madame Nhu’s Bar-B-Qs, 1963
Fig. I.6 Artists’ Protest Committee, STOP ESCALATION logo
Fig. I.7 Nancy Spero, Kill Commies/Maypole, 1967, from War Series
Fig. I.8 Rudolf Baranik, Napalm Elegy/White Silence, 1970, from the Napalm Elegies series
(1966-1974)
Fig. I.9 Martha Rosler, Red Stripe Kitchen, from Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful,
1967-1972
Fig. I.10 Collage of Indignation, 1967
Fig. I.11 Eddie Adams, photograph of the execution of General Nguyen Van Lem, 1968
Fig. I.12 Art Workers’ Coalition, Q: And Babies? A: And Babies. poster, 1970
Fig. I.13 Wally Hedrick, War Room, 1967/2002
Fig. I.14 Martha Rosler, Hooded Captives, 2004, from Bringing the War Home: House
Beautiful (New Series)
Fig. 1.1 Richard Barnes, Cavalry cede the field to a truck hauling away cannon after a
reenactment of the crucial Union victory at the 1864 Battle of Cedar Creek, Virginia,
from Civil War series
Fig. 1.2 Willie Anne Wright, General Robert E. Lee and Staff, CSA, at the Lee Monument,
from Civil War Redux series
Fig. 1.3 William Earle Williams, Earth Works, Battle Site, Fort Pillow, Tennessee, 1999
Fig. 1.4 An-My Lê, Rescue, 1999-2002, from Small Wars
Fig. 1.5 An-My Lê, Sniper, 1999-2002, from Small Wars
Fig. 1.6 An-My Lê, Ambush II, 1999-2002, from Small Wars
Fig. 1.7 An-My Lê, Untitled, Ho Chi Minh City [billboards], 1998, from Viêt Nam
Fig. 1.8 An-My Lê, Untitled, Ho Chi Minh City [kites], 1998, from Viêt Nam
Fig. 1.9 An-My Lê, Special Operations Forces, 1999–2002, from Small Wars
Fig. 1.10 Winslow Homer, Skirmish in the Wilderness, 1864
Fig. 1.11 An-My Lê, Lesson, 1999-2002, from Small Wars
Fig. 1.12 An-My Lê, Tall Grass I, 1999-2002, from Small Wars
Fig. 1.13 An-My Lê, Tall Grass II, 1999-2002, from Small Wars
Fig. 2.1 Peace Tower, Los Angeles, 1966, Charles Brittin Papers, Getty Research Institute
Fig. 2.2 Peace Tower, Whitney Biennial, New York, 2006, Whitney Museum Archives
Fig. 2.3 Peace Tower, Chicago Cultural Center, 2007, Chicago Cultural Center Archives
Fig. 2.4 Peace Tower, Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival,
Los Angeles, 2012, Files of Cesar Garcia
Fig. 2.5 Artists’ Protest Committee, “Stop Escalation” advertisement, Los Angeles Free Press,
May 14, 1965
Fig. 2.6 White-Out Protest, May 15, 1965, Charles Brittin Papers, Getty Research Institute
5
Fig. 2.7 Hardy Hanson (Artists Protest Committee), “A Call from the artists of Los Angeles,”
1966
Fig. 2.8 Page from Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966
Fig. 2.9 Map issued with Frank Zappa’s “Freak Out!” Album, 1966
Fig. 2.10 Photograph of the Peace Tower (1966) under construction, sign re-erected after
vandalism
Fig. 2.11 Photograph of Peace Tower (1966) with car suspended, Charles Brittin Papers, Getty
Research Institute
Fig. 2.12 Photograph of Peace Tower (1966) with painted barricade
Fig. 2.13 Paolo Canevari, submission for Peace Tower, Whitney Biennial (2006)
Fig. 2.14 Call for Artists, Peace Tower, Los Angeles (2012), Archives of Cesar Garcia
Fig. 2.15 John T. Lange, submission for Peace Tower, Los Angeles (2012)
Fig. 2.16 Stephen Prina, submission for Peace Tower, Los Angeles (2012)
Fig. 3.1 Max Bunzel delivering Paul Potter’s 1965 speech on location at the National Mall,
Washington, D.C. on July 26, 2007, Port Huron Project
Fig. 3.2 Ato Esandoh reenacting Stokely Carmichael, Port Huron Project
Fig. 3.3 Gina Brown reenacting Coretta Scott King, Port Huron Project
Fig. 3.4 Sheilagh Brooks reenacting Angela Davis, Port Huron Project
Fig. 3.5 Ricardo Dominguez reenacting Cesar Chavez, Port Huron Project
Fig. 3.6 Matthew Floyd Miller reenacting Howard Zinn, Port Huron Project
Fig. 3.7 Wall of Flyers advertising Paul Potter Reenactment, Port Huron Project,
Creative Time Archive
Fig. 3.8 Port Huron Project flyer for Angela Davis reenactment
Fig. 3.9 Port Huron Project English and Spanish flyers for César Chavez reenactment
Fig. 3.10 Port Huron Project Oakland Museum program
Fig. 3.11 Paul Potter reenactment, Port Huron Project, Creative Time Archive
Fig. 3.12 Sheilagh Brooks delivering Angela Davis’s 1969 speech on location in DeFremery
Park, Oakland, on August 2, 2008. Creative Time Archive, photographer unknown.
Fig. 3.13 Bob Adelman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Delivering His “I Have A Dream” Speech,
Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963
Fig. 3.14 Bob Adelman, Stokely Carmichael speaking at the “Spring Mobilization to End the
War in Vietnam,” United Nations Plaza, New York City, on April 15, 1967
Fig. 3.15 Port Huron Project screening organized by Creative Time in Times Square, New
York City, September 2008. Photograph by Sam Horine.
Fig. 3.16 Installation View of Port Huron Project at the Park Avenue Armory for Creative
Time, Democracy in America. Photograph by Sam Horine.

6
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I embarked on this project jointly motivated by my contrarian nature and a genuine
enthusiasm for reenactment’s potential. On a positive note, I thought: Reenactment is
everywhere! It holds so much potential for engaging with history! On the other hand, I wanted to
prove wrong the critics who viewed reenactment as a trend in contemporary art, and one that
would fizzle out without consequence, at that. Thankfully, I was surrounded by many who
recognized the value of this project and offered guidance every step of the way. This dissertation
would not have been possible without the intellectual, emotional, and financial support of the
following people and institutions.
Many thanks go to the artists and curators who generously gave their time for interviews
and questions. First and foremost, I am grateful to the artists I focus on in these pages: An-My
Lê, Mark di Suvero, and Mark Tribe. Whether or not they viewed their work as reenactment or
agreed with the trajectory of my arguments, they took time from their busy schedules to speak
with me candidly, and I am appreciative of their participation. Others who kindly made
themselves available for interviews and correspondence include Lois Conner, Cesar Garcia,
Lloyd Hamrol, Chrissie Iles, Lee Kelley, Liz Linden; Ivana Mestrovic, Irving Petlin, and Glenn
Phillips.
This project was profoundly shaped by my graduate coursework. My awareness of the
1966 Peace Tower began with a formative seminar on the art of Los Angeles, taught by Andrew
Perchuk and Lucy Bradnock. Another seminar led by Macarena Gomez-Barris and Jack
Halberstam allowed me to delve more deeply into the Peace Tower and to begin exploring its
2006 reenactment at the Whitney Biennial. My investment in reenactment and political art
became concretized when I studied James Coleman’s project involving Civil War reenactors,
7
Line of Faith (1991), in Richard Meyer’s seminar, “What’s Not American About American
Art?” I am grateful for these early opportunities to test out ideas and gain insights from
professors and graduate students alike.
I would especially like to thank my advisor Kate Flint, who supported this project
enthusiastically from its inception and shepherded it to completion. Her remarkable breadth of
knowledge and openness to diverse perspectives allowed me to develop the project as I saw fit,
and my work benefited enormously from her incisive readings of each chapter. Never have I so
enjoyed reading an individual’s comments on my writing, for her edits, in addition to being
insightful and thorough, conveyed a genuine excitement about the project’s possibilities and
curiosity for further avenues of inquiry, characteristics that are reflected in her own prolific
scholarship.
I am grateful to my other committee members, Suzanne Hudson and Tara McPherson,
who provided invaluable direction while I was deciding the scope of my project. Professor
Hudson’s boundless knowledge of contemporary art and her rigorous questions about my
theoretical framework were immensely helpful. Professor McPherson’s enthusiasm for the topic,
innovative approach to scholarship, and expertise in digital media benefited this project.
The University of Southern California generously funded my studies with a Provost’s
Fellowship and a Beaumont Endowed Fellowship. The Visual Studies Graduate Certificate
program and the Department of Art History also provided significant travel awards and research
grants. This funding allowed me to delve into the resources of: the Chicago Cultural Center,
Creative Time, the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University, the Library of Congress,
the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia University, the Museum of Modern Art
Archives, the New York Public Library Special Collections, and the Tamiment Library and
8
Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. Many thanks to the staff of these
institutions for their professionalism and guidance.
The 2014–2015 Newberry Seminar in American Art and Visual Culture helped to hone
my study of An-My Lê’s Small Wars. The seminar’s participants offered productive and
encouraging dialogue, and special thanks go to its conveners, Sarah Burns, Jennifer Greenhill,
and Diane Dillon; my co-presenter, Erina Duganne; and our respondent, Shawn Michelle Smith.
My project was greatly enriched as the result of many conversations and exchanges. At
critical moments in this process, intellectual exchanges with Amelia Jones, Liz Kotz,
Cuauhtemoc Medina, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Sean Roberts provided inspiration and questions
that pushed my work onward. My text benefited immensely from the careful readings of Claire
Rifelj, Rika Hiro, and Megan Mastroianni, who were my indispensable dissertation writing
group. Thanks go to my cohort at USC—Sam Adams, Megan Mastroianni, Sean Nelson, and
Kay Wells—for being my first interlocutors in this particular journey. I could not have wished
for more enjoyable, engaging colleagues and friends. A special thanks to Kay Wells, who always
knew when the commiseration of a friend was needed, or when an intellectual push was required.
Fellow graduate students at USC and elsewhere who enriched this project and my life include
MacKenzie Stevens, Katie Kerrigan, Britany Salsbury, Virginia Solomon, and Cindy Kang.
Finally, I thank my family for their infinite supply of support and encouragement. My
father, whose Ph.D. in Animal Genetics was at least partial inspiration for my own decision to
continue my studies, provided helpful advice whether I asked for it or not, and I am very grateful
for it. My mother, sister, and brother were always there when I needed a break from my work,
and their belief in me was sustenance through moments of my own doubt. And to my husband,
Gerrick Warrington, who happily moved with me not once, but twice, across the United States so
9
I could pursue my graduate degrees, I cannot thank you enough. It was opportune that you were
diligently studying the law while I was exploring the history of art; pursuing our ambitions side-
by-side has made this all the more meaningful.

10
ABSTRACT
The practice of reviving history in the present is widely found in contemporary art. It is
labeled re-enactment, re-do, re-staging, re-construction—each term nuanced according to the
needs of those who employ it, but signifying the same general principle. These recent
investments in reanimating the past raise questions such as: What work does reenactment as
artistic method do? How does reenacting aid in understanding historical narratives? How does it
contribute to the alteration and production of collective memories? How does reenactment put
pressure on the relationship between art and politics? Delving into one area of reenactment’s
practice, this dissertation explores how contemporary American artists use reenactment as a
strategy to engage with the politics and protest movements of the Vietnam War era. Specifically,
this text examines the intersection of two major avenues of inquiry in contemporary American
art: the practice of reenactment and the revival of the protest culture circumscribing the Vietnam
War.
This project interrogates the politics of reenactment in contemporary artmaking by
looking closely at three recent projects: An-My Lê’s Small Wars (1999–2002), a series of
photographs of hobbyist Vietnam War reenactors; Mark di Suvero’s Peace Tower
(2006/2007/2012), which reenacts a protest originating in Los Angeles in 1966; and Mark
Tribe’s Port Huron Project (2006–2009), in which actors re-speak activist speeches from the
Vietnam War era. Lê produces her work from the position of someone who has lived through the
war and seeks to transcend her role as a victim of American aggression. Di Suvero is a “dove”
from the Vietnam War era, protesting the controversial American War from within the United
States. Tribe, in turn, is offspring of di Suvero’s generation, seeing the war through the lens of
what Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory,” a term that describes how the second generation,
11
those who come after the survivors of traumatic events, “remember” traumatic experiences only
through stories, images, and behaviors that they heard or saw. This dissertation triangulates the
practice of reenactment with these three distinct perspectives, demonstrating how reenactment
provides a variety of approaches for artworks to function as political intervention or activism.
Each case study serves as a productive analysis of reenactment as a method for understanding the
politics of the Vietnam War and how it is remembered in the United States. Interweaving these
projects produces a multilayered version of what constitutes the collective memory of the
Vietnam War within American visual culture.

12
INTRODUCTION

The practice of reviving history in the present is widely found in contemporary art. It is
labeled re-enactment, re-do, re-staging, re-construction—each term nuanced according to the
needs of those who employ it, but signifying the same general principle. These recent
investments in reanimating the past raise questions such as: What work does reenactment as
artistic method do? How does reenacting aid in understanding historical narratives? How does it
contribute to the alteration and production of collective memories? How does reenactment put
pressure on the relationship between art and politics? Delving into one area of reenactment’s
practice, my dissertation explores how contemporary American artists use reenactment as a
strategy to engage with the politics and protest movements of the Vietnam War era.
1

Specifically, I examine the intersection of two major avenues of inquiry in contemporary
American art: the practice of reenactment and the revival of the protest culture circumscribing
the Vietnam War.
I interrogate the politics of reenactment in contemporary artmaking by looking closely at
three recent projects: An-My Lê’s Small Wars (1999–2002), a series of photographs of hobbyist
Vietnam War reenactors; Mark di Suvero’s Peace Tower (2006/2007/2012), which reenacts a
protest originating in Los Angeles in 1966; and Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project (2006–2009),

1
Julia Bryan-Wilson summarizes that the “Vietnam War era” as cited in historical texts includes the late 1960s
through the early 1970s, and that this period is perhaps “the most exhaustively discussed in all of post-1945 U.S.
art.” The designation “Vietnam War era” is able to encompass most socio-political turmoil in the United States of
this period, including protests not explicitly responding to American involvement in the War, such as civil rights,
labor protests, and women’s liberation, but its starting point of the late 1960s suggests that it begins circa 1968,
when the American public overwhelmingly turned against the War. The designation is pithy, yet it is problematic
because it condenses the complex social changes of this period into the one issue of the Vietnam War. This
dissertation recognizes the significance of the Vietnam War, particularly of the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, in
American political history, then and now. As such, “Vietnam War era,” despite its potentially problematic
etymology, serves as an appropriate shorthand descriptor within this project. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers:
Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 9.
13
in which actors re-speak activist speeches from the Vietnam War era. Lê produces her work from
the position of someone who has lived through the war and seeks to transcend her role as a
victim of American aggression. Di Suvero is a “dove” from the Vietnam War era, protesting the
controversial American War from within the United States. Tribe, in turn, is offspring of di
Suvero’s generation, seeing the war through the lens of what Marianne Hirsch calls
“postmemory,” a term that describes how the second generation, those who come after the
survivors of traumatic events, “remember” traumatic experiences only through stories, images,
and behaviors that they heard or saw.
2
This dissertation triangulates the practice of reenactment
with these three distinct perspectives, demonstrating how reenactment provides a variety of
approaches for artworks to function as political intervention or activism. Each case study serves
as a productive analysis of reenactment as a method for understanding the politics of the
Vietnam War and how it is remembered in the United States. My interweaving of these projects
produces a multilayered version of what constitutes the collective memory of the Vietnam War
within American visual culture.

What is Reenactment?
Reenactment’s historical trajectory in the Western world may well be said to begin with
the tableau vivant, the first of these being the reenactment of Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s painting,
L’Accordée de Village (The Village Bride, 1761) during the second act of a 1761 production of
Carlo Bertinazzi’s play Les Noces d’Arlequin. A popular type of entertainment from the late-
eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, the tableau vivant was “based on the notion that a

2
Despite receiving these “memories” secondhand, postmemory suggests that “these experiences were transmitted to
them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.” Marianne Hirsch, The
Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press,
2012), 5.
14
painting was in a certain sense a ‘frozen’ picture in time that only needed to be translated back to
physicality to become entirely animate.”
3
This idea of reanimating an event that had been frozen
in time still holds true for reenactment, both in the artistic realm where past performance art
events are reenacted, as well as in “living history” sites such as Plimoth Plantation, where the
quotidian activities of colonial America, for instance, are revived and performed.
A predecessor for recent explorations of historical reenactment, The Presence of the Past:
Popular Uses of History in American Life by Roy Rosenzweig and David P. Thelen
demonstrated how personal experiences strongly influence historical remembrance. Rosenzweig
and Thelen interviewed “ordinary” people to find out what they knew of the past and how they
related to it. They found that rather than referring to patriotic national narratives, respondents
typically talked about the past in terms of their personal experiences. For example, when asking
people about a public historic event that affected them, the most frequent response was World
War II. Respondents offered their own histories, such as one woman who said she had to learn
self-reliance while her husband was away at war. None of those interviewed told the narrative of
history books and popular culture, of “war as a story of victory over fascism or as a key moment
in a patriotic narrative of the nation-state.”
4
Rosenzweig’s and Thelen’s study suggests that to
make collective historical actions significant for individuals, it would be beneficial to relate them
to their personal pasts.
Vanessa Agnew’s “What Is Reenactment?” which introduced a special issue of the
journal Criticism, serves as a foundational article addressing reenactment as a methodology for
historical study. Agnew states that reenactment is viewed among its proponents as a way to share

3
René Zechlin, “Standstill of Narrated Time,” in Omer Fast: In Memory, ed. Sabine Schaschl, Bilingual edition
(Berlin: The Green Box, 2010), 15.
4
Roy Rosenzweig and David P. Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 160–161.
15
“history from below,” not only serving previously marginalized communities, but also catering
to popular interest in “gore, adventure, and personal transformation.”
5
In addition to representing
history from below, Agnew asserts that people may choose to reenact histories unrelated to their
own so it is “the very ahistoricity of reenactment that is the precondition for its engagement with
historical subject matter.”
6
Rather than criticizing this ahistoricity, Agnew acknowledges its
promise for bringing about Vergangenheitsbewältigung.
7
However, reenactment is most effective
in Agnew’s opinion when it uses the body to represent quotidian experiences of hunger, fear,
suffering, and the like. This corporeal discourse also describes the goal of all hobbyist
reenactors, which is essentially to collapse time, experiencing history as authentically and
viscerally as possible. Agnew concludes, as do most historians who tackle the practice of
reenactment, by arguing that reenactment’s claim to encourage historical understanding is deeply
problematic, yet compelling, and in need of further study.
Although reenactment proliferates in the visual arts, in the study of cultural history, and
in popular entertainment, there are many scholarly critiques of reenacting and its connections to
nostalgia, its gaudy appropriations of the past, and its naïve attempts to create “authentic”
experience to develop a deeper understanding of historic events. Not least, reenactment, an
enlivening of the past that can take many forms, is frequently conflated in the popular
imagination with war or battle reenactment, which (fairly or not) calls to mind oddball (and most
often white male) war enthusiasts who revel in imaginary bloodshed and thinly veiled racism in
the name of historical accuracy.
8
Two of the most frequently cited texts dealing with Civil War

5
Vanessa Agnew, “Introduction: What Is Reenactment?,” Criticism 46, no. 3 (2004): 328.
6
Ibid.
7
Vergangenheitsbewältigung translates as “coming to terms with the past.” Ibid.
8
Attesting to this common association is my own anecdotal experience, wherein every person to whom I told the
topic of my dissertation, responded, "Oh, like war reenactment?" and usually followed that query with an offhand
comment about battle reenactment being a weird hobby.
16
reenactment are sociologist Rory Turner’s “Bloodless Battles: The Civil War Reenacted,” and
journalist Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.
9

Turner wrote his short article for the scholarly journal TDR, but he empathized with the
reenactors to the point that he experienced his own “time warp” while he lay dead during a
reenactment of Pickett’s Charge: “Later I thought, ‘So that’s what it was like.’ There is a kind of
knowledge that can only be gained by living through something.”
10
Surprisingly more critical
than Turner’s article, Horwitz’s best-selling Confederates in the Attic is part diary, part exposé of
his experiences with Civil War reenactors throughout the southern United States. The reenactors
Horwitz encounters are varied, with the cast of characters ranging from the vaguely sinister type
described above, to enthusiastic history buffs, scholars, and war veterans, and his portrayal of
their exploits is generous for the most part. Horwitz’s book is useful for explaining how integral
is historical accuracy—including regalia, weapons, rations, and vocabulary—in the quest to
experience what it truly was like to fight in the Civil War. He is skeptical of the reenactors’
dedication to authenticity, but he offers little in the way of theoretical analyses of their desire to
experience war for themselves via reenactment.
Rebecca Schneider bridges the gap between war reenactment and performance art with
her book, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, in which she
questions time as a linear construct and interrogates “practices of reminiscence in relation to
disappearance, remains, memory, history, artefactual preserve, and live performance.”
11
Taking
as her point of departure a reenactor’s assertion, “The Civil War isn’t over, and that’s why we

9
Rory Turner, “Bloodless Battles: The Civil War Reenacted,” TDR (1988-) 34, no. 4 (December 1, 1990): 123–36;
Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York: Vintage, 1999).
10
Turner, “Bloodless Battles,” 126.
11
Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon, Oxon;
New York: Routledge, 2011), 26.
17
fight,” Schneider considers the possibility that the past is never complete, and thus must be
continually reworked in an indeterminate future. This reworking is potentially a corporeal one,
employing a range of “bodily labor,” such as reviewing documents while hunched over a table in
an archive, or more problematically, “carrying a replica nineteenth-century musket on a historic
battlefield, uttering the ‘phonic materiality’ of a cry to arms.”
12
Integral to this evaluation of
reenactment’s place in the study and transmission of history is the embodied nature of this kind
of remembering, and repetition of events as a natural, and even necessary, practice in the
historical process. Rowena Santos Aquino also puts stock in corporeality, asserting that
“reenactment is a mode of embodied historiography because it is a literal, calculated
performance that gives a body to and makes concrete and perceptible past experiences, with the
goal of creating an audiovisual document of the event, but also of securing that reenactment to
the historical by way of the actor as indexical with the history depicted.”
13
Aquino argues that
reenactment is an alternative model of history expressed through the body.
To explore the possibilities of repetition, Schneider quotes Karl Marx’s appraisal of
Hegel: “Hegel says somewhere that all great historic facts and personages recur twice. He forgot
to add: Once as tragedy, and again as farce.”
14
Also taking up Hegel’s commentary on the
repetition of history, Cuauhtémoc Medina follows Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Marx’s
paraphrasing of Hegel, wherein:
There are three times implicit in this text: that of comical repetition that posits something
like an involution, incapable of creating a new situation; that of tragic repetition that, as
Oedipus well knows, comes into play when the action is irreversible and part of an
operation that is bigger than and incomprehensible to the person or agent involved: a

12
Ibid., 33.
13
Rowena Santos Aquino, “Necessary F(r)ictions: Reenactment, Embodied Historiography, and Testimony” (Ph.D.,
University of California, Los Angeles, 2011), 1,
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy1.usc.edu/pqdtglobal/docview/925623238/abstract/7ECB8A1A06574905PQ/1.
14
Schneider quotes Daniel De Leon’s translation of Marx. Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of
Theatrical Reenactment, 42.
18
historic action; finally, however, there is the time that observes repetition: the present
time that is only the present insofar as it is the product of the tragic and comic histories
that constitute it.
15

Medina goes on to explain how repetition through reenactment “can activate the future” and
“only reenactment can avert nostalgia,” supporting his assertions with Hegel’s example of the
establishment of the Augustan Empire. That is to say, when Cesar took power of the Roman
Republic and established the Empire, this occurrence could be viewed as a chance event. When
Augustus took over in the same way that Cesar had, this repetition of an overthrow of power
established that the Roman Republic could not be reinstated and thereby confirmed the first
event. Medina declares, “Only repetition allows the event to escape its contingent
circumstances.”
16
As for reenactment averting nostalgia, it would be difficult to feel nostalgic for
something that happens repeatedly in one’s own time. Chapter 2 of this dissertation, which
addresses the Peace Tower, will make this apparent.
Turning to the Oxford English Dictionary for assistance, Michele Pierson recounts that
the term reenactment has “two inflections: the first, repetition (‘to enact [a law, etc.] again’), and
the second, performance (‘to act or perform again; to reproduce’).” Pierson maintains that
performance “introduces a reflexive dimension” in contemporary reenactment and is therefore
the more important inflection of the term; artists who employ reenactment in their work do so
recognizing the limits of reenactment even while they opt to use it for conveying affective
historical experience. She explains the practice of reenactment as one in which transformation
occurs after a prior experience is repeated or performed.
17
The potential of reenactment to do

15
Deleuze quoted in Cuauhtémoc Medina, “History Repeats Itself...Otherwise, It Wouldn’t Be History”
(unpublished draft of a lecture given at REDCAT on June 24, 2014, n.d.), accessed March 17, 2014.
16
Ibid.
17
Michele Pierson, “Avant-Garde Re-Enactment: World Mirror Cinema, Decasia, and The Heart of the World,”
Cinema Journal 49, no. 1 (2009): 2.
19
something is also taken up in Experience, Memory, Re-Enactment, a series of seminars, lectures,
and screenings that were subsequently compiled and published in an edited volume. The opening
essay by Steve Rushton asserts that reenactment’s function is the mediation of memory, “how
memory is an entity which is continuously being restructured—not only by filmmakers and re-
enactors but also by us personally, as mediating and mediated subjects.” Rushton later declares
reenactment to be “the agent of memory and experience,” which also characterizes the aims of
this dissertation in exploring reenactment and its impact for reanimating the politics of the
Vietnam War era.
18

Artists, critics, and curators are invested in the politics of reenactment even while many
profess a critical disillusionment with its practice. In recent years, the reenacting of artworks has
generated a plethora of responses, including “Forum: Performance, Live or Dead” in Art
Journal; a seminar organized by Miwon Kwon at UCLA in winter 2013, titled “Re-Do-Over”; a
weighty volume of essays, Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, edited by Amelia Jones
and Adrian Heathfield; and exhibitions such as A Little Bit of History Repeated (Kunst-Werke
Berlin Institute for Contemporary Art, 2001) and 7 Easy Pieces (Guggenheim Museum, New
York, 2005).
19
For A Little Bit of History Repeated, curator Jens Hoffmann invited young artists
to reenact famous performances they had not seen in person. They were to use only
documentation of the performance art or the memories of the artist or viewers of the original

18
Steve Rushton, “Tweedledum and Tweedeledee Resolved to Have a Battle,” in Experience, Memory, Re-
Enactment, ed. Anke Bangma, Steve Rushton, and Florian Wüst (Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute ; Frankfurt am
Main, 2005), 10–11.
19
Amelia Jones, “Introduction,” Art Journal 70, no. 3 (2011): 32–38; Ron Athey, “Getting It Right ... Zooming
Closer,” Art Journal 70, no. 3 (2011): 38–40; Sven Lütticken, “Performing Time,” Art Journal 70, no. 3 (2011): 41–
44; Sharon Hayes, “The Not-Event,” Art Journal 70, no. 3 (2011): 45–46; Sophia Yadong Hao, “Memory Is Not
Transparent,” Art Journal 70, no. 3 (2011): 46–50; Branislav Jakovljević, “On Performance Forensics: The Political
Economy of Reenactments,” Art Journal 70, no. 3 (2011): 50–54; William Pope. L, “Canary in the Coal Mine,” Art
Journal 70, no. 3 (2011): 55–58; Helena Reckitt, “To Make Time Appear,” Art Journal 70, no. 3 (2011): 58–63;
Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (Bristol ; Chicago: Intellect,
2012); Marina Abramovic, 7 Easy Pieces (Milan ; New York City: Charta, 2007).
20
performance to formulate their own interpretation of the performance. As such, A Little Bit of
History Repeated was invested strictly in the relationships between performance art,
documentation, and the archive. Also taking as its subject the reenactment of performance art, 7
Easy Pieces served as Marina Abramović’s platform for establishing the parameters of
performance reenactment. In addition to two of her own performances, Abramović reinterpreted
iconic performances from the 1960s and 1970s by Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Valie Export,
Bruce Nauman, and Gina Pane. Carrie Lambert-Beatty credits 7 Easy Pieces with “making
reenactment the characteristic performance modality of the first decade of the century,” but she
underscores that Abramović also limited reenactment by trying to frame a “normative protocol”
that included “study of extant documentation, enough reinterpretation or change to mark the new
work as distinct, monetary payment to the original artist, and permission from the artist or her
estate.”
20

Abramović’s parameters for reenacting performance art highlight some similarities and
differences between the re-staging of performance art and historical events. Although an art
performance that originated in the 1960s, such as Joseph Beuys’s How to Explain Pictures to a
Dead Hare (1965), is undoubtedly part of history, the ramifications of its reenactment by Marina
Abramović in 7 Easy Pieces (2005) would be unlike those of reenacting a socio-political event,
such as T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm’s reenacting of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy
in The Eternal Frame (1975). A key difference is one of scope: whereas the reenactment of
performance art likely takes place within an arts institution and therefore only reaches art
devotees, reenactment of a historical event is more likely to appeal to a broader public and to be
accessible outside of an institutional setting. Paradoxically, when performance art is reenacted,

20
Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Against Performance Art,” Artforum 48, no. 9 (May 2010): 212.
21
the goal of the live performance is most often directed outward to viewers, so that a new
audience may experience the work as it was originally intended. As such, reception is integral to
the reenacting of performance art. By contrast, when reenacting a historical event, such as a Civil
War battle, the aims are typically experiential for the reenactors, who hope to embody the past
and thereby acquire knowledge of what it felt like to live in that period. In the case of living
history, however, such as reenacting daily life at Plimoth Plantation, the results of reenactment
are again geared toward a viewing audience, which shows that there is not a strict divide between
reenacting of an event that originated in the art world and one that did not.
Amelia Jones describes the reenactment of performance art as a “hugely popular
strategy” that “activates precisely the tension between our desire for the material (for the other’s
body; for ‘presence’; for the ‘true event’) and the impossibility of ever fixing this in space and
time.”
21
Despite Jones’s criticism of reenactment’s investment in the body and in liveness, she
goes on to acknowledge how the reenactment of art and the reenactment of political events all
share “an interest in how time, memory, and history work—and how or whether we can retrieve
past events…by redoing them in some fashion.”
22
Like Jones, I am motivated to study
reenactment (whether primarily aesthetic, social, or political in scope) due to its open-ended
exploration of our relationships with the past. At the heart of this dissertation is an investment in
parsing how reenactment can shape intersections of time, memory, and history, and how those
intersections can be presented through artmaking.
“Life, Once More”: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art (2005), curated by Sven
Lütticken for the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art; Ahistoric Occasion: Artists

21
Amelia Jones, “‘The Artist Is Present’: Artistic Re-Enactments and the Impossibility of Presence,” TDR/The
Drama Review 55, no. 1 (February 16, 2011): 19.
22
Ibid., 25.
22
Making History (2006), curated by Nato Thompson for Mass MOCA; History Will Repeat Itself:
Strategies of Re-enactment in Contemporary Media Art and Performance, curated by Inke Arns
for Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund and the Kunst-Werke Berlin Institute for
Contemporary Art (2007); and Not Quite How I Remember It (2008), curated by Helena Reckitt
at the Powerplant, Toronto, all displayed works that use reenactment to deal with memories or
historic events.
23
These exhibitions were international in scope and demonstrated the far-
reaching appeal of reenactment as artistic method. This proliferation of exhibitions about
reenactment that include American artists indicate that artists working in the United States are,
and would have been well aware of the importance of reenactment domestically and
internationally. Despite widespread interest in the practice, there has not yet been a scholarly
study concentrating on artistic reenactment in the United States. Not only will my dissertation fill
this gap, but it will also demonstrate more specifically that reenactment has been taken up as a
productive method for responding to a history of Vietnam War era activism that deserves more
focused consideration.
24

Life, Once More included a broad assortment of artworks that reinterpret history, such as
Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave (2001), as well as works that reenact art history in
particular, such as Andrea Fraser’s Art Must Hang (2001), which allowed for an expansive
overview of contemporary reenactment practice and the theories surrounding it. Ahistoric

23
For a more comprehensive list of artworks that engage with reenactment and performance documentation, see
Amelia Jones, “Timeline of Ideas: Live Art in (Art) History, A Primarily European-US-Based Trajectory of Debates
and Exhibitions Relating to Performance Documentation and Re-Enactments,” in Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art
in History, ed. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (Bristol ; Chicago: Intellect, 2012), 425–32.
24
Not explicitly dealing with reenactment but coinciding with its concerns about narrative and relating history to the
present and the personal, artists included in the exhibition The Storyteller re-imagine events they have personally
experienced, thereby lending a human and personal element to political and social events. Curators Gilman and
Sundell interpret this trend as a sign that “storytelling is a form for our times.” In another vein of art addressing
conflict and war, War Zones was an exhibition that included works by Jochen Gerz, Alfredo, Jaar, and Martha
Rosler, among others. Claire Gilman and Margaret Sundell, The Storyteller (New York and Zurich: JRP Ringier,
2010); Karen A. Henry and Karen Love, War Zones (North Vancouver, B.C.: Presentation House Gallery, 2000).
23
Occasion presented a more political bent, featuring artworks that addressed Nato Thompson’s
question, “What are the stories from the past that make us who we are?”
25
The exhibition
included Allison Smith’s The Muster (2004-2005; Fig. I.1), which appropriated Civil War
reenactments, but with a twist. She wore Civil War-style clothing and employed historic methods
for recruiting participants, such as mimicking nineteenth-century orators in style and vocabulary,
but in her recruitment speeches she criticized American history and recent politics. Instead of
asking participants to pretend to fight in the Civil War, Smith invited volunteers to take a stand
for their own cause by challenging them with “What are you fighting for?”
26

On the connection between the past and the present, curator of History Will Repeat Itself
Inke Arns underscores how integral is “the now” for reenactment, describing artistic
reenactment’s reference to the past as being “not history for history’s sake; it is about the
relevance of what happened in the past for the here and now. Thus one can say that artistic re-
enactments are not an affirmative confirmation of the past; rather, they are questionings of the
present through reaching back to historical events that have etched themselves indelibly into the
collective memory.”
27
Arns takes great pains to distinguish between contemporary artistic
reenactments and battle reenactments; she interprets the latter as historically-accurate events that
are meant to be viewed passively.

25
Works by Jeremy Deller, Felix Gmelin, Dario Robleto, Yinka Shonibare, Allison Smith, Greta Pratt, Nebosjka
Seric-Choba, Trevor Paglen, Paul Chan, Kerry James Marshall, and Peggy Diggs were included in the exhibition.
Nato Thompson, Joseph Thompson, and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Ahistoric Occasion: Artists
Making History (North Adams, Mass.: MASS MoCA, 2006).
26
Ibid.
27
Inke Arns et al., History will repeat itself : Strategien des Reenactment in der zeitgenössischen (Medien-)Kunst
und Performance = strategies of re-enactment in contemporary (media) art and performance / Hg. v. Inke Arns,
Gabriele Horn für Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund und KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
(Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2007), 43. Emphasis in the original text. The exhibition includes works by Guy Ben-
Ner, Jeremy Deller, Rod Dickinson, Felix Gmelin, Kerry Tribe, and Ant Farm, among others.
24
Not Quite How I Remember It, like Ahistoric Occasion and History Will Repeat Itself,
focuses on works that, Reckitt asserts, appropriate historical narrative rather than recreate it.
Featured in the exhibition was In the Near Future, a performance series by Sharon Hayes that
began in New York in 2005 and continued in London, Warsaw, and Vienna, culminating in
exhibitions of photo-documentation of the performances, or “actions” as she calls them (Fig. I.2).
She invited people to attend and photograph each performance, which consisted of her standing
on the sidewalk for one hour alone, holding a protest sign. For example, in New York, Hayes
went to nine different locations as a lone protester, bearing anachronistic protest signs with
slogans such as, “Ratify the E.R.A. now!” “Who Approved the WAR in Vietnam?” and “I AM A
MAN.” Rather than behaving in an expected manner for a protester—shouting her slogans, for
example, or marching with others—Hayes stood alone and said nothing unless questioned by
passersby. If engaged in conversation, she would tell them her interest in protest and explain the
sign, thus educating her inadvertent audience. Hayes then exhibited the documentation of her
actions using thirteen slide projectors, an anachronistic technology that was meant to remind
viewers that the protest slogans she uses are from an earlier time period. Moreover, the insistent
clicking of the projectors as the slides progress creates a rhythm that the viewers can feel,
prompting them to consider the relationship of bodies to protest, “to keep track of possibility of
public resistance, to keep track of the possibility of speaking with one’s body in a sense.”
28
This
chronological disjunction—Hayes’s intent of drawing attention to and bridging the assumed
disjunction between past and present—is characteristic of many reenactments in contemporary
art.
29

28
Ibid.
29
Claire Bishop asserts that this project exemplifies a contemporary obsession with reenacting protest: “During this
decade, many artists made videos of demonstrations, re-enacted gestures of protest, or emulated the visual imagery
and signifiers of dissent. This type of work arose because the public sphere was perceived to be under threat from an
25
Re-interpreting history, as Hayes does, is integral to the practice of reenactment, which
entails far more than simply repeating the past. Robert Blackson explains how reenactment is
more constructive than reproduction, for it “is distinctive [from reproduction] in that it invites
transformation through memory, theory, and history to generate unique and resonating results.”
30

Blackson emphasizes that reenactment entails personal interpretation of the past rather than strict
verisimilitude. Reenactment thus stands in contrast to reproduction, which is simply “an image
of the original…Imitations and reproductions are stand-ins, empty shirts rarely afforded a
purpose or motivation beyond the limits of the original…the resonance of the project is
embedded more in the dumb object than the act that reproduced it.”
31
Blackson’s definition of
reenactment describes Jeremy Deller’s The English Civil War Part II (The Battle of Orgreave)
(2001; Fig. I.3), a project that is frequently upheld as exemplary of reenactment. It was viewed
by many as transformative and not simply an empty replication of a past event.
The subject of Battle of Orgreave was the violent confrontation between police and
picketers from the National Union of Mineworkers which took place in front of the Orgreave
Coking Plant in South Yorkshire, during the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike. Neil Cummings and
Marysia Lewandowska explain that this battle, which was the culmination of a prolonged
disagreement between labor unions and a Thatcher-era government bent on deregulation, “was a
defining moment for contemporary Britain.”
32
Taking seriously The Battle of Orgreave as an
example of “living history,” Deller hired Howard Giles, director of the reenactment company

all-encroaching privatization, whereby expressions of opposition were minimized and discouraged.” Claire Bishop,
in Sharon Hayes and Chrissie Iles, Sharon Hayes: There’s so Much I Want to Say to You (New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art, 2012), 80.
30
Robert Blackson, “Once More... with Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Art and Culture,” Art Journal 66,
no. 1 (2007): 29.
31
Ibid., 30.
32
Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska, “A Shadow of Marx,” in A Companion to Contemporary Art Since
1945, ed. Amelia Jones (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Pub., 2006), 404.
26
Event-Plan, to orchestrate the event.
33
With the financial support of public art commissioners
Artangel, Deller spent 18 months researching the Miners’ Strike and interviewing former
policemen and miners. His dedication to research is representative of a category of contemporary
reenactments that, as described by critic Adam E. Mendelsohn, “fundamentally rely on
documentation, positioning archival material as the primary source for making this type of art.”
34

Of the approximately 1,000 people who were interviewed and participated in the reenactment,
about 300 were ex-miners, a handful were ex-policemen, and the rest were actors at local
historical reenactment societies. By conversing with miners, policemen, and residents of
Orgreave, and by allowing their words and memories to shape the reenactment, Deller produced
dialogue about a traumatic historical event in a way that allowed for the possibility of catharsis
and reconciliation.
35

The actors rehearsed on June 17, “when participants performed mini-re-enactments,
practiced swear-words and told their stories of the strike to each other,” before performing the
reenactment on June 18, 2001, seventeen years after the original clash.
36
Because Deller
conducted extensive research and collaborated with living participants of the Miners’ Strike, and
because he chose to stage the reenactment outdoors, in Orgreave, the reenactment became active,
affective, and transformative. The live reenactment was both filmed and photographed. Martin
Jenkinson’s photographs were published in Deller’s book, The English Civil War Part II:
Personal Accounts of the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike, which also included newspaper reports on the

33
Deller mentions his interest in living history in projects after The Battle of Orgreave as well. Glen Helfand, “A
Thousand Words: Jeremy Deller,” Artforum International., November 2002.
34
Adam E. Mendelsohn, “Be Here Now,” Art Monthly, no. 300 (October 2006): 14. In his brief essay, Mendelsohn
considers the Peace Tower in tandem with Felix Gmelin’s Color Test II, The Red Flag, 2002, which was a remake of
a student march in Berlin 1968 that included Gmelin’s own father waving a Communist flag.
35
See Alice Correia, “Interpreting Jeremy Deller’s ‘The Battle of Orgreave,’” Visual Culture in Britain 7, no. 2
(November 2006): 93–112; Mark Hutchinson, “Four Stages of Public Art,” Third Text 16, no. 4 (2002): 429–38.
36
Correia, “Interpreting Jeremy Deller’s ‘The Battle of Orgreave,’” 97.
27
original confrontation, essays by participants, and a CD of oral histories. Mike Figgis directed
the documentary film, The Battle of Orgreave, in which Deller’s interviews with participants and
archival television footage were integrated. Whereas the reenactment itself functioned as a
cathartic live event for the picketers, policemen, and witnesses, the book and the film largely
functioned as documentation, both of the 1984 Miners’ Strike and of Deller’s reenactment.
Figgis’s film in no way produces an immersive experience of the violent confrontation; instead,
it is presented as a documentary film, with talking head interviews spliced between excerpts of
the reenacted skirmish. In Deller’s project, the artwork happens in the live reenactment, and it is
that event for which Cummings and Lewandowska credit Deller with “re-animat[ing] the world
as experience through critical reception,” wherein “the encounter with art, the art work, or the
event is no longer a passive encounter through the medium of display, but is articulated as a
place of engagement and production.”
37
Although Deller also has his detractors, Cummings and
Lewandowska’s praise for Battle of Orgreave highlights what reenactments aim to do, which is
to engage subjects with new understandings of a past event in a way that affects collective
memories and actions moving forward.
Taking into account all the aforementioned analyses of reenactment, this dissertation
employs a broad definition of reenactment as any action or object that repeats past events with
the intention of animating them or rendering them corporeal in the present. Key to this
characterization of reenactment is an assumption that the past is relevant and significant for
understanding the present. Reenactment does not simply reproduce the past, though, but
interrogates the past in order to make it matter in the present, de-contextualizing history in order
to recontextualize it for new and perhaps more complex narratives. As such, it engages memory,

37
Cummings and Lewandowska, “A Shadow of Marx,” 406.
28
both individual and collective memories, in order to produce new memory. Although
performance is implicit in the definition of reenactment, this way of engaging with memory can
be considered reenactment even when the finished artwork is a static object, as is the case with
Peace Tower. This definition builds on how art practitioners have variously characterized
reenactment according to its uses of history, memory, and corporeality. Understanding
reenactment in this broader manner complements how artists and curators have implemented it
as method in recent years, for exploring personal histories and political histories. Rather than
compartmentalizing this practice into distinct terms, such as “re-constructing” or “restaging,” I
find this overarching term, “reenacting,” to be the most useful.

Protest Art in the Vietnam War Era
The fraught history of the Vietnam War era sheds light on why artists have continued to
mine the politics of the War as a touchstone for artmaking. This section will explain how the
United States government escalated military involvement in Vietnam, and how key decisions
prompted artists and other groups to protest the War. Although official United States
involvement in Vietnam span the years from 1954 through 1973, and aggressive strikes on
Vietnam only began in 1965 with Operation Rolling Thunder, the origins of the Vietnam War
must be traced back to 1945.
On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam to be free of French colonial rule
and established his fledgling state, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). The previous
year, it had appeared that the DRV would have American support; President Roosevelt had been
hostile toward French colonialism in Indochina and proposed that Indochina be placed under
international trusteeship in preparation for granting its independence in the future. This idea of
29
trusteeship fell by the wayside as the U.S., France, and Great Britain joined efforts and decided
that the DRV was essentially a Communist movement and must be stopped. American
involvement in Vietnam thus began on a small scale in 1950, when the Truman administration
backed French sovereignty in Indochina. What had been a French colonial effort transformed
into the Western protection of “an independent, noncommunist Asian state from communist
aggression.”
38

With the American policymakers’ decision to support the French war in Vietnam, the
U.S. tacitly assumed the following, which shaped all subsequent policy-making toward Vietnam:
The DRV was a communist movement aligned with the interests of the Kremlin; If Vietnam
collapsed, Western interests would be at risk throughout Southeast Asia and perhaps through the
rest of Asia as well; and the U.S. had the capability to make the situation benefit the West.
39

Speaking at a news conference on April 7, 1954, President Eisenhower espoused his “domino
theory” of the danger of Communism’s spread if there was a Communist victory in Vietnam. He
explained, “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will
happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a
beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.”
40
Despite fear of a
domino effect of Communism and the United States’ backing of the French War in Vietnam, in
the spring of 1954, the U.S. declined to intervene in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, and the French
were defeated. Rather than bringing United States’ involvement in Vietnam to a close, this laid

38
Mark Atwood Lawrence, “Explaining the Early Decisions: The United States and the French War, 1945-1954,” in
Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives, ed. Mark Bradley and Marilyn
Blatt Young (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 34.
39
Ibid., 34–35.
40
Quoted in Lloyd C Gardner and Marilyn Blatt Young, “Introduction,” in Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, Or,
How Not to Learn from the Past (New York: New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton & Co., 2007), 6.
30
the foundation for what would become known in the U.S. as the Vietnam War and in Vietnam as
the American War.
After surrendering at Dien Bien Phu, France agreed to take part in a peace conference in
Geneva in July 1954. The Geneva Accords, signed July 21, 1954, divided Vietnam into two
zones split along the 17
th
parallel, with the North led by Ho Chi Minh and his communist party
the Viet Minh, while in the South, Bao Dai continued to lead until the U.S. eventually installed
Ngo Dinh Diem via a rigged referendum to lead the anti-communist regime. The United States
quietly maintained its support of South Vietnam until the mid-1960s, engaging in diplomatic
efforts that did not require a public declaration of war. For instance, the U.S. sent instructors for
Diem’s Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), with the first Green Berets arriving in Nha
Trang in 1957. U.S. policy in support of Diem also led to further animosity between Vietnamese
peasants and landlords, with Diem and the U.S. aligning with landlords and thus driving many
peasants into the National Liberation Front (NLF) forces to defend their land.
41
Vietnamese
people saw that the United States was supporting the corrupt Diem regime which was operating
without popular support. Consequently, many non-communist Vietnamese aligned with the
communist Viet Minh via the nationalistic platform of the NLF, which supported re-unification
of North and South Vietnam.
42
Recognizing that the South Vietnamese were not overwhelmingly
willing to support the U.S., American officials created two programs in an effort to prevent
armed revolutionary movement. One program, which has since been recognized as enormously
ill-advised, was the Strategic Hamlets program, wherein Vietnamese were forced out of their

41
The military arm of the NLF came to be called the “Viet Cong,” and I will use this colloquial term throughout this
dissertation because it is most recognizable to a lay audience. I will note, however, that David Elliott highlights
“Viet Cong” is a “pejorative term that was devised for psychological warfare purposes by the enemies of the
revolution.” David W. P Elliott, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-
1975 (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), xviii.
42
James William. Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), 74–75.
31
villages and re-located to what were essentially internment camps, beginning in 1962. The other
was the training of a tribal group called the Montagnards, turning them into paramilitary forces
alongside the South Vietnamese army.
43
Back in Washington, it was believed that Strategic
Hamlets was working to control the majority of the rural population, when in fact, lower officials
in South Vietnam were falsifying numbers, over-reporting the numbers of hamlets pacified in
order to be rewarded or to avoid dismissal. These inflated numbers contributed to America’s
misguided belief that victory was near.
44

1963 was an important turning point, as the failures of Diem’s puppet regime and of the
United States’ political machinations spun out of control. As members of the Catholic minority
in a country that practiced Buddhism and observed Confucianism, Ngo Dinh Thuc (Diem’s older
brother), who was the Archbishop of Hué, banned the flying of religious flags for Buddha’s
birthday in May 1963. This banning led to protests by Buddhists, and nine people were killed
and fourteen injured; Diem’s regime refused to take responsibility for any of the casualties.
Consequently, on June 11, 1963, the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc committed self-
immolation in protest of Diem’s regime and in the name of religious freedom. Associated Press
photographer Malcolm Browne was there to photograph the horrific scene, and the following
morning, Browne’s photograph of the burning monk (Fig. I.4) was published on the front page of
most international newspapers.
45
San Francisco artist Wally Hedrick made the monk’s self-
immolation the subject of his painting, Madame Nhu’s Bar-B-Q’s (1963; Fig. I.5). Hedrick’s title

43
Ibid., 82.
44
Ibid., 84–85.
45
Matthew Winer Israel, Kill for Peace: American Artists Against the Vietnam War (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2013), 16.
32
makes reference to Madame Nhu’s (Diem’s sister-in-law) offensive comment about the monk’s
suicide; she stated glibly that she was “willing to provide the gasoline for the next barbeque.”
46

In late August, student protests in Vietnam led to upper-class college and high school
students being jailed, and the military began contemplating a coup. Due to the worldwide outrage
caused by Browne’s photograph, the U.S. quickly began negotiating with the South Vietnamese
military to overthrow the Diem government that they had originally helped to install. The new
American ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, conferred with President Kennedy as to
whom should be supported by the United States government to lead South Vietnam and
negotiated with Vietnamese generals as to how the coup would proceed. Diem’s regime was
overthrown on November 1, 1963. Rather than this leading to governmental reform in South
Vietnam, there was instead a succession of coups, which allowed the NLF to infiltrate ranks and
set up provisional revolutionary governments in the South. Realizing that offensive combat
operations would soon be necessary, President Johnson sought Congress’s authorization to act
after North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked a U.S. destroyer, the Maddox, in the Gulf of
Tonkin, on August 2, 1964. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave President Johnson
authority “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the
United States and to prevent any further aggression,” was passed unanimously in the House of
Representatives and with only two dissenting votes in the Senate.
47

Johnson’s administration waited until a few months after his re-election before
authorizing air strikes on Vietnam. Operation Rolling Thunder, a prolonged bombing campaign
that slowly escalated for three and a half years, beginning March 8, 1965 and lasting until

46
Peter Selz and Susan Landauer, Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond (Berkeley, Calif.;
London: University of California Press, 2005), 40.
47
Quoted in Gibson, The Perfect War, 89.
33
November 1968, was aimed at North Vietnam and infiltration routes in Laos. It was intended to
demonstrate American power while also showing benevolence (Johnson placed off-limits the
capital of North Vietnam, Hanoi; its most important harbor, Haiphong; supply routes from
China; and the Red River dikes) with the aims that North Vietnam would decide to negotiate.
48

Although most American narratives of the Vietnam War present this expansion of war as
inevitable, there were many lawmakers who held concerns about engaging in a potentially long
and unwinnable war in Asia and who doubted the significance of Vietnam for U.S. security,
including Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and Armed Services Committee chair Richard
Russell. Operation Rolling Thunder was a failure in that it did not force North Vietnam into
negotiations. Johnson’s decision to escalate war in spring 1965 was also a catalyst for anti-war
protesters in the United States. In September of the previous year, the Free Speech Movement
had begun at the University of California, Berkeley in response to a campus-wide ban on all
forms of political advocacy. The Berkeley uprising inspired subsequent student protesters to
consider tactics more radical than petitions, rallies, and pickets that could be employed on
campuses, such as sit-ins, strikes, and occupying buildings, strategies which were adopted by
anti-war protesters going forward.
49

Conscription was a major issue in the Vietnam War era, for even though the draft was
supposed to be un-biased, the privileged and college-educated were often able to find loopholes
in the system so that they did not have to serve. As a result, the majority of those sent into battle
were the lower-middle and working classes. Addressing this social inequity in a community

48
Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books,
2002), 291.
49
Initially the Free Speech Movement responded to civil rights issues. UC Berkeley banned political activity in part
because civil rights protesters who had worked with the Freedom Riders and the Freedom Summer project were
disseminating information and asking for donations to the cause on campus. Continued support for the Free Speech
Movement from the Left paved the way for anti-war protest groups on college campuses. Jim Miller, Democracy Is
in the Streets": From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 223.
34
organizing guide from 1968, SDS encouraged resistance against many issues, with the draft
being a significant one to protest: “We want to focus on the draft because it is the MOST
IMPORTANT AND MOST TANGIBLE manifestation of the war in most people’s lives. Hardly
anyone exists in a lower class working community who does not have friends or close relatives
who are in the army or threatened by it.”
50
Draft card burning, which was classified as a felony
beginning in August 1965 and was punishable with a $10,000 fine and up to five years in prison,
became a popular method for protesting conscription.
51
October 16–21, 1967 was deemed “Stop
the Draft Week,” beginning with a massive demonstration and march in Oakland, California.
52

Over 22,000 Americans were charged with draft law violations between 1965 and 1975, and of
those, 8,756 were convicted.
53

Pacifists asserted that draft card burning was political speech against the war and should
be protected by the First Amendment, but in 1968, the United States Supreme Court ruled
otherwise. In United States v. O’Brien, David Paul O’Brien argued that the burning of his draft
card was protected “symbolic speech.” In their 7-1 decision, the Supreme Court declared, “the
power of Congress to classify and conscript manpower for military service is ‘beyond question,’”
and “pursuant to this power, Congress may establish a system of registration for individuals
liable for training and service, and may require such individuals within reason to cooperate in the
registration system.” As such, the issuing of draft cards is an “administrative aid in the
functioning of this system,” and it is reasonable that those cards should be properly maintained

50
Students for a Democratic Society, “Don’t Mourn / Organize: SDS Guide to Community Organizing,” May 1968,
3, Box 61, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA.
51
Daniel S. Lucks, Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War (Lexington, Kentucky:
University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 104.
52
See Terry Cannon et al., “Stop the Draft Week,” The Movement, November 27, 1967; “Stop the Draft Week
Flier,” 1967, Box 57, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA.
53
Robert Mann, Wartime Dissent in America: A History and Anthology, 1st ed (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), 129.
35
as tools in this system.
54
The draft has been cited repeatedly as the reason that anti-Vietnam War
protest was so widespread, and why, alternately, protests against the War on Terror have not
been as vehement in its absence.
Shortly after the U.S. began air strikes on Vietnam, the protest group Artists and Writers
Dissent was formed. On April 17, 1965, approximately 15,000 protesters that included members
of Students for a Democratic Society, Women Strike for Peace, Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, and other civil rights organizations gathered on the White House lawn to denounce
the Vietnam War. At this march, Paul Potter gave his now famous speech where he declared
“We must name the system” in order to change it.
55
The following day, petitions against the war
were published as large advertisements in the New York Times, with the Clergymen’s Emergency
Committee for Vietnam urging negotiations, and the group Writers and Artists Protest
proclaiming “End Your Silence” with signatures from 407 writers and artists.
56
In May 1965, the
Artists Protest Committee—creators of the Peace Tower—formed and began demonstrating in
Los Angeles. One of the slogans they adopted for their protests was an image of a simple black
ladder with STOP stenciled below the bottom rung (Fig. I.6); this demand to “stop escalation”
was not heeded, for in July of that year, Johnson authorized 175,000 troops in Vietnam, and at
the end of the year, he promised the escalation of troop levels to 443,000 within the next 12
months.
57

54
United States v. O’Brien, 391 U.S. 367 (1968).
55
Potter’s speech is one of the six that Mark Tribe chooses to reenact in Port Huron Project; it will be addressed in
Chapter 3 of this dissertation.
56
Francis Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester, United
Kingdom; New York: Manchester University Press; Distributed exclusively in the USA by St. Martin’s Press,
1999), 21.
57
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Peace Now!: American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999), 44.
36
Nancy Spero took an explicit approach to protest art when she began her paintings on
paper, War Series, in 1966 (Fig. I.7). Reacting against the representations of the War in the
media, Spero presented the brutality of war, particularly as manifest on the bodies of women,
depicting, “bodies and body fragments—grotesques, severed heads, genitalia—emerging from
mushroom clouds, military aircraft, and crematorium chimneys, and raining onto the ground.”
58

She characterized this work as being “about obscenities—sex and phallic extensions of power.”
59

Similarly, Spero’s husband and frequent collaborator Leon Golub expressed his disgust with the
war through figurative paintings, often showing graphic violence between powerful male bodies,
first with his series Napalm (begun 1969) and then with his Vietnam series (begun 1972). Golub
described his style of protest art as something that moves beyond simple reporting, but rather,
“You have to create these kinds of stylized forms which are so brutal that they jump beyond the
stylization.”
60
In contrast to the brutal representations of war in Spero’s and Golub’s works,
Rudolf Baranik painted images that were abstracted, initially, from a news photograph of a
Vietnamese boy burned by napalm, with his Napalm Elegies series (1966–1974; Fig. I.8).
61
Even
though Baranik’s subject was gruesome, the boy’s burned head is often blurred and repeated
against a black background, and thus he was not immediately legible as a victim of war. Baranik

58
Spero stated in an interview, “My reaction to the Vietnam War was impelled by second-hand information—the
media. I became outraged. I visualized what the Vietnamese people might have thought of the helicopters, of these
technological monsters wreaking destruction on them. I turned them into prehistoric, carnivorous dinosaur-like or
insect-like creatures, the pilots grinning in their cockpits.” Claudia Mesch, Art and Politics : A Small History of Art
for Social Change Since 1945 (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 80–81; Katy Kline and Helaine Posner,
Leon Golub and Nancy Spero: War and Memory = Leon Golub et Nancy Spero: Guerre et Mémoire (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1994), 45.
59
Kline and Posner, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, 29.
60
Leon Golub quoted in Lucy R. Lippard, A Different War: Vietnam in Art (Bellingham, Wash.; Seattle: Whatcom
Museum of History and Art; Real Comet Press, 1990), 47.
61
Baranik used the original photograph on a leaflet he designed for Angry Arts Week. Israel, Kill for Peace, 74–75.
37
described his painting practice as “social formalism,” and as such, “was one of the few artists of
the period who actively sought to unite formalism with politics.”
62

During the period of Operation Rolling Thunder, Americans watched the war play out on
their television screens on the nightly news. Although Vietnam has been famously dubbed the
“living-room war” due to its ample television coverage, the war’s extreme violence and the
United States’ inefficacy were largely masked on screen. Michael Arlen described what the
typical television viewer saw when watching the nightly news from 1965 through 1967:
generally distanced overview of a disjointed conflict which was composed mainly of
scenes of helicopters landing, tall grasses blowing in the helicopter wind, American
soldiers fanning out across a hillside on foot, rifles at the ready, with now and then (on
the soundtrack) a far-off ping or two, and now and then (as the visual grand finale) a
column of dark, billowing smoke a half mile away, invariably described as a burning
Vietcong ammo dump.
63

Responding to how distant the violence and destruction of the war seemed in the United States,
Martha Rosler created a series of photomontages titled Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful
(1967–1972), in which she spliced together photographs of the Vietnam War published in Life
magazine and images of beautifully-designed interiors from House Beautiful magazine. In Red
Stripe Kitchen (Fig. I.9), two American soldiers have been excised from their original context of
a Vietnamese jungle where they were presumably bending over to plant traps, and Rosler has
instead inserted them in a domestic scene, where they appear to be appraising the beige kitchen
tile of a perfectly staged, modern and gleaming red and white kitchen. Rosler photocopied her
collages to share them at antiwar protests, and from there, they were reproduced in underground
newspapers, such as the feminist journal Goodbye to All That!”
64

62
Ibid., 101.
63
Quoted in Chester J. Pach, Jr., “And That’s the Way It Was: The Vietnam War on the Network Nightly News,” in
The Sixties: From Memory to History, ed. David R Farber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994),
106.
64
Israel, Kill for Peace, 82.
38
The same year that Rosler began her photomontage series (1967), the arts community in
New York City orchestrated Angry Arts Week, which was to be a “week-long Anti-War
Happening, using painting, sculpture, film, dance, and poetry.”
65
Taking place between January
26 and February 5, Angry Arts Week featured the Collage of Indignation at Loeb Student Center
at New York University, which was organized by Dore Ashton and Max Kozloff. For the
Collage, artists were asked “to paint, draw, or attach whatever images or objects that will express
or stand for your anger against the war…We are also interested in whatever manner of visual
invective, political caricature, or related savage materials you would like to contribute.”
66

Contributors departed from their usual artistic styles, with some using expletive-filled slogans to
express their outrage (Fig. I.10).
The following year, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive, at
which point actual fighting became prominently featured in American television news reports,
and the public grew even more disillusioned with participation in the Vietnam War. On January
30, 1968, during the Tet holiday, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong surprised U.S. forces by
attacking most major cities in South Vietnam, gaining control in a matter of days. The most
infamous incident resulting from the Tet offensive also produced one of the most iconic
photographs of the war. Photographed by Eddie Adams, the scene took place on the streets of
Saigon after Viet Cong commander Nguyễn Văn Lém was captured by South Vietnamese
marines. South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executed Lém at point blank range, and
Adams happened to photograph the precise moment when the bullet passed through Lém’s skull
(Fig. I.11). An NBC film crew also captured the entire gruesome event; as many as 20 million

65
Therese Schwartz, “The Politicalization of the Avant-Garde,” Art in America 59, no. 6 (December 1971): 99.
66
Quoted in Israel, Kill for Peace, 70.
39
people watched NBC’s footage and even more saw the scene as a photograph published in major
newspapers.
67

The Tet offensive shocked the American people because national propaganda had spread
the message that such an attack by the North Vietnamese would be impossible. The anti-war
movement grew exponentially after it became apparent that the United States government had
been deceiving the public by controlling what was released in the press. Just three months later,
on March 16, 1968, the My Lai massacre occurred, wherein a battalion of American soldiers
under the command of Lieutenant William Calley murdered hundreds of Vietnamese civilians.
Ronald Haeberle photographed the massacre, and his images were reproduced when the story
became widely available on November 13, 1969, when Seymour Hersh’s article was published in
a Cleveland newspaper, The Plain Dealer. The Art Workers Coalition decided they needed to
produce an anti-war protest in response to the My Lai massacre, and they felt the strategy would
need to have “high visual content” to attract the attention of the American public and of
broadcasting companies. After deciding on mass-produced posters, they obtained permission
from Haeberle to use his color photograph of civilian corpses laying in a ditch at My Lai, and
Peter Brandt donated paper for an edition of fifty-thousand posters. The poster was printed as a
color lithograph, with an overlay of a quotation from Mike Wallace’s interview with Paul
Meadlo, one of the soldiers who participated in the killings (Fig. I.12). Wallace, ascertaining the
extent of the killings, asked Meadlo, “And babies?” Meadlo replied, “And babies,” clarifying
that no one was spared in this war atrocity.
68

67
Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for this photograph. Pach, Jr., “And That’s the Way It Was: The Vietnam War on the
Network Nightly News,” 108–109.
68
For a detailed account of the creation of the And babies? poster and the events surrounding it, including MoMA’s
withdrawal of support, see Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 160–208.
40
My Lai was one of the most prominent atrocities of the Vietnam War, but the Winter
Soldier Investigation revealed many more. Held at the Howard Johnsons’ Motor Inn in Detroit,
Michigan from January 31–February 2, 1971, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW)
organized Winter Soldier in an effort to “preclude the further scapegoating of individual soldiers
for what is in fact official United States Military Policy.”
69
More than 125 Vietnam veterans,
including then Navy Lieutenant John Kerry, testified to the war atrocities they had witnessed or
personally committed in Vietnam. The president of VVAW, Jan “Barry” Crumb issued a
statement six days before the start of Winter Soldier that outlined the war crimes committed in
Vietnam and where the blame truly lay: “We intend to tell who it was that gave us those orders,
that created that policy, that set that standard of war, bordering on full and final genocide. We
intend to demonstrate that My Lai was no unusual occurrence…We intend to show that the war
crimes in Vietnam did not start in March 1968, or in the village of Song My, or with one Lt.
William Calley. We intend to indict those really responsible for My Lai, for Vietnam, for
attempted genocide.”
70
Members of Congress endorsed the Winter Soldier Investigation and
called for full congressional investigations of the charges brought forth by veterans. John Kerry
spoke passionately against the war in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on April 23,
1971. At the recommendation of Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, the veterans’ testimonies
were read into the Congressional Record.

69
Vietnam Veterans Against the War, “Invitation to Winter Soldier Investigation, 1971,” 1971, Winter Soldier film
archive.
70
Jan Crumb, “Statement by Jan Crumb, President of Vietnam Veterans Against the War: The Winter Soldier
Investigation,” January 25, 1971, Vietnam War Protest Collection, Folder 1, Tamiment Library, New York
University.
41
Afterlives of the Vietnam War
Over the past four decades, the contentious history of the Vietnam War has served
repeatedly as an exemplar of American diplomatic and military failure. In historical narratives of
the American military and politics, there are three terms that are used to analogize more recent
events to the Vietnam War: the domino thesis, quagmire, and the Vietnam syndrome (also
known as the specter of Vietnam). Any time one of these terms is used, the topic at hand is
understood to relate to the idea of the Vietnam War as failure. Moreover, these three ideas trigger
collective memories of the Vietnam War era and the ramifications of American diplomacy of the
mid-1950s through the mid-1970s. Out of these three terms, the Vietnam syndrome possesses the
greatest impact beyond the bounds of military exploit, for it has been used in popular parlance to
explain the American national psyche after the Vietnam War. Even in the event of national
success such as the Persian Gulf War of 1991, championed in American narratives as a clear and
concise military victory, there was reference to the Vietnam War, and in particular to Vietnam
syndrome.
Washington Post Editor Philip L. Geyelin defined Vietnam syndrome in the early 1980s
as “policymakers’ ambivalence toward the use of military force as an all-or-nothing option,
legislators’ anxious second-guessing of presidential diplomatic and military decisions, and the
media’s cynicism toward all actions of the government.”
71
Sylvia Shin Huey Chong explains the
Vietnam syndrome as an “affective disorder,” which is tacitly understood from President
Nixon’s description of the Vietnam War’s lasting impact on American leaders: “Many of our
leaders have shrunk from any use of power because they feared it would bring another disaster

71
Quoted in Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 2. Chong talks about this and other analogies transforming the Vietnam
War from an active endeavor to a passive suffering.
42
like the one in Vietnam. Thus did our Vietnam defeat tarnish our ideals, weaken our spirit,
cripple our will, and turn us into a military giant and a diplomatic dwarf in a world in which the
steadfast exercise of American power was needed more than ever before.”
72
This coded message
of emasculation—of American policymakers, soldiers, and the nation as a whole—was reversed
with the masculine performance of aggressive American missile strikes ordered during the Gulf
War, as well as by the ensuing victory for the United States.
73
But when the United States
decided to launch its attacks for the Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush and his
administration had to assuage the fears of the American public that the Gulf War would become
“another Vietnam.” Consequently, the Gulf War victory that came just 42 days after the war
began was marshalled as an example of the United States overcoming the Vietnam syndrome.
On March 1, 1991, President Bush, Sr. announced to state legislators in Washington, “We’ve
kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!” and then again the following day, speaking to
U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf via radio, he declared, “The specter of Vietnam has been buried
forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.”
74

The specter of Vietnam was revived a decade later, however, on September 11, 2001,
when terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the American World Trade Center devastated the
American people and provoked President George W. Bush to declare a “War on Terror” in a
session of Congress on September 20, 2001. Five days after President Bush’s address to
Congress, the United States sent its first CIA team, code-named Jawbreaker, into the Panjshir
Valley in north-central Afghanistan to join forces with indigenous groups who were part of the

72
Quoted in Ibid.
73
Robyn Wiegman, “Missiles and Melodrama (Masculinity and the Televisual War),” in Seeing through the Media:
The Persian Gulf War, ed. Susan Jeffords and Lauren Rabinovitz (New Brunwick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1994), 174.
74
Quoted in Chong, The Oriental Obscene, 1–2.
43
Northern Alliance fighting the Taliban. On October 19, a twelve-man Special Forces unit code-
named the Triple Nickel men joined Jawbreaker; simultaneously the Special Operations
detachment, Team 595, landed farther north in the Daria-Souf Valley. These three Special Forces
units employed a combination of air power and ground attacks in order to support the rebel
forces in Afghanistan that had been perilously close to defeat. The Northern Alliance, backed by
U.S. forces, quickly took control of the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, so then attention was turned to
Kabul. Beginning on November 10, 2001, Green Berets bombed Taliban troops in the Somali
Plain north of Kabul in such an effective strike that everyone believed victory over the Taliban
had been secured; when troops reached the outskirts of Kabul on November 13, they found that
residents were already celebrating by playing music and flying kites, both activities which had
been forbidden under Taliban rule. Military historian Max Boot explains that not only were the
people of Afghanistan rejoicing, but so were the people of the United States: “Only a few weeks
before they had been reading dire predictions that Afghanistan was turning into another Vietnam.
Instead of a quagmire, they now learned of a victory delivered with miraculous dispatch and
minimal force—fewer than 500 CIA and Special Operations operatives on the ground turned the
tide against the Taliban.”
75
However, American celebrations were preemptive. Even though
Kandahar, the largest city in southern Afghanistan was overtaken by rebel fighters on December
6, 2001, and the Taliban no longer controlled any substantial territory, the war had not even truly
begun.
In response to the War on Terror, Wally Hedrick revived his project, Black Room, also
called War Room (1967/2002; Fig. I.13), which he originally began in 1967 to protest the
Vietnam War. He bolted together eight of his black paintings, which he had begun painting in the

75
Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace, 336–337.
44
late 1960s as representations of death and mourning, with the painted sides facing inward, to
create a five-foot square space in which viewers could be enclosed.
76
Hedrick called his
paintings “refugees, MIAs, war orphans, and wounded veterans.”
77
War Room served as a
commentary on how the United States had “boxed itself in” with war. Hedrick also stated that
individuals should be able to go into the room to contemplate how they felt about the war.
78

On March 20, 2003, President George W. Bush declared war. In April, American soldiers
and marines captured Baghdad, but battles against the Taliban in Afghanistan and against Al-
Qaeda in Iraq were far from complete. Max Boot points out that the mistake of American
generals and policymakers in underestimating the guerrilla forces in Afghanistan and Iraq
demonstrate that they had forgotten the lessons of Vietnam—enemy resistance does not end with
the fall of enemy capitals.
79
The world would soon understand that the emblematic toppling of
Saddam Hussein’s statue in Firdos Square on April 9, 2003 was an empty propagandistic
spectacle rather than a victorious conclusion to the War on Terror.
The United States continued to underestimate opposing forces, with President Bush’s
infamous oration given aboard the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003
providing an inflated sense of impending American victory. Against the backdrop of a banner
that read, “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED,” Bush proclaimed, “major combat operations in Iraq
have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our
coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country…Because of you, the tyrant has

76
Israel, Kill for Peace, 49; Michael Ned Holte, “Wally Hedrick: The Box,” Artforum 46, no. 10 (Summer 2008):
448; Lippard, A Different War, 17. Lippard’s dates and description differ slightly from other authors in that she says
Hedrick constructed the black room in 1971 and exhibited it in 1973, whereas Israel says it was not completed
during the time of the Vietnam War. Holte states that Hedrick re-painted the panels to revive the War Room both for
the Persian Gulf War and for the War on Terror.
77
Lippard, A Different War, 17.
78
Israel, Kill for Peace, 49.
79
Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace, 338.
45
fallen, and Iraq is free.” Bush went on to vacillate between messages of continued fighting and
certain victory, stating in one breath, “Our mission continues. Al-Qaeda is wounded, not
destroyed,” and then in the next, “Their [terrorists’] cause is lost; free nations will press on to
victory.”
80
Bush’s confidence in the war’s quick completion was woefully misplaced; the United
States did not finish withdrawing troops from Iraq until the end of 2011.
In 2004, struck by similarities between the War on Terror and the Vietnam War, Martha
Rosler continued her photomontage series from the Vietnam War, Bringing the War Home:
House Beautiful. In a slight departure from the original series, which spliced images of domestic
interiors with scenes of war and war casualties, the new series combined photographs of violence
in Iraq with lifestyle and fashion images. Rosler’s selection of runway models and affluent
young people grinning for selfies shows that she updated the series not only in terms of the war
depicted, but also taking into account the values of contemporary culture so that the irony of
their juxtaposition would be salient. Whereas in the mid-twentieth century the focus of American
success and consumerism lay in the perfect suburban home outfitted with modern durable goods
(furniture and appliances), in the early twenty-first century, success had become more
prominently conveyed through social media, individual appearance, and acquisition of soft
goods. In Hooded Captives (Fig. I.14), a blonde model wearing a bright yellow fur coat struts
from the back of a sleek, minimalist room toward the foreground of the montage, where black-
and-white images of two hooded prisoners of war kneel, their heads pressed to a bright orange
floor. Here, Rosler was likely responding to the torture photographs from Abu Ghraib prison that
had become public knowledge in late 2003.

80
“Text of Bush Speech,” CBS News, May 1, 2003, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/text-of-bush-speech-01-05-
2003/.
46
When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified in an open session before the Senate
Armed Forces Committee in August 2006, he made a claim for American troops remaining in
Afghanistan and Iraq, arguing, “If we left Iraq prematurely, as the terrorists demand, the enemy
would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the
Middle East, they’d order us and all those who don’t share their militant ideology to leave what
they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines.”
81
The American media
immediately recognized Rumsfeld’s sentiments, which were reminiscent of President
Eisenhower’s domino thesis justification for the Vietnam War. By this time, three years into the
War on Terror, previously supportive members of the American public were feeling deceived
and disheartened about the potential of a positive outcome from the Iraq War. It was amidst this
atmosphere of disillusionment that the Whitney Museum’s 2006 Biennial opened with the Peace
Tower prominently displayed in its sculpture garden, an installation devoted to war protest that
was the first thing one encountered when approaching the building.
In March of 2008, veterans belonging to Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) testified
at Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, providing testimony of poor military leadership,
contradictory and loosely enforced Rules of Engagement, and a futile, and ultimately
condescending approach to enforcing American ideals on the Iraqi people. IVAW’s project was
modeled after the original Winter Soldier Investigation of 1971; they hoped that Winter Soldier:
Iraq and Afghanistan, might make as significant an impact as did the 1971 investigation, but
none of the major news sources—New York Times, CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS—featured the
event, and IVAW was not issued an invitation from a House or Senate committee.
82

81
Gardner and Young, “Introduction,” 1.
82
Iraq Veterans Against the War and Aaron Glantz, Winter Soldier, Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of
the Occupations (Chicago Ill.: Haymarket Books, 2008).
47
The most prominent connection of the War on Terror to the Vietnam War within the
discipline of art history appeared via a questionnaire published in the journal October in 2008:
“In what ways have artists, academics, and cultural institutions responded to the U.S.-led
invasion and occupation of Iraq?” Benjamin Buchloh and Rachel Churner declare that the
questionnaire, although belatedly coming five years after the start of the war in Iraq, was timely,
for in 2007 there were a high number of casualties in Iraq, and the impending presidential
election made a discussion of the current war especially urgent. Buchloh and Churner employ
their introduction as a platform to defend their questions. They state that out of the 42 responses
received (over 100 individuals and groups were surveyed), they noticed three major critiques:
Respondents asked why they waited until 2008 to publish the questionnaire; why they chose to
focus on Iraq, which is not an isolated conflict; and why they compared it to Vietnam. Citing
Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project as an example of how Vietnam War protest remains
influential, Buchloh and Churner justify their correlation of the Iraq War and Vietnam, asserting
“Not only is it [The Vietnam War] still present in our ideas of how one protests—what protest
looks and sounds like—but also how protest informs intellectual history and how significantly
we have internalized the intellectual paradigms from that generation.”
83
They allege that despite
Vietnam’s place of prominence in our “national consciousness,” public response to the Iraq War
was largely met with apathy, and that any protests that did occur were ignored by the media. The
questionnaire positions anti-Vietnam War protest as “good” politics, in comparison to Iraq War
era protests, which were described as lackluster and ineffectual in comparison. Of the six
questions presented in the questionnaire, three explicitly ask respondents to compare

83
Footnote 6 says, “See, for example, Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project, in which actors restage protest speeches
from the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh et al., “Questionnaire: In What Ways Have Artists,
Academics, and Cultural Institutions Responded to the U.S.-Led Invasion and Occupation of Iraq?,” October 123
(Winter 2008): 7.
48
contemporary anti-war protest with agitation against the Vietnam War, and five assume any
protests made were ineffectual. The three questions pertaining to the Vietnam War also presume
that any protests against the Iraq War were necessarily less visible, less effective, and less urgent
than protests against Vietnam.
84

One critical response of the questionnaire comes from Coco Fusco, who rejects the
editors’ assessment of “effective” political protest. She argues that not only is efficacy difficult
to gauge, but also that “it would be absurd to assume that antiwar efforts are ineffective just
because the war persists.” Her critique grows more scathing, as she accuses the art world of
taking a “fashionably skeptical view of political art,” to the point that “art that addresses political
issues is written off as having failed if it does not generate an immediate calculable result, even
though judging any kind of art in terms of immediate and quantifiable effects is terribly

84
Buchloh et al., “Questionnaire.” Although Buchloh and Churner focus on the “Iraq War,” The six questions posed
in the October questionnaire were:
1. In what ways have artists, academics (faculty, staff, and students), and cultural institutions (including collectors,
dealers, and magazines) responded to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq? Can you offer examples of
significant oppositional practices? How would you assess the forms, visibility, and efficacy (or lack thereof) of
opposition?
2. Are there examples of an active counter-public sphere in which protest against the war in Iraq is conducted with
an intensity comparable to the protests organized during the era of the Vietnam War? What, if anything, demotivates
the current generation of academics and artists from assuming positions of public critique and opposition against
the barbarous acts committed by the government of the United States against a foreign country? Do you consider
the absence of the draft the sole significant factor?
3. Can we speak of the “professionalization” of the artist (as a highly paid and market-dependent provider of
infotainment) as having reduced or eliminated political consciousness from cultural production? Have academics
and those working in cultural institutions been subject to similar processes of professionalization, and if so, what
have been the effects of this professionalization? What have been the political effects of the increasing
marginalization of the humanities in American academic institutions? Do artists and academics still regard cultural
production as a socially and politically communicative, transgressive, or critical activity?
4. Antiwar opposition seems most visible on the Internet, where information is distributed, money is raised, and
demonstrations are organized. How does this electronic-technological public sphere compare to the public protests
of the Vietnam era, during which agitprop cultural activities were organized through word of mouth, flyers, and
planning meetings, and demonstrations were staged in the streets, in museums (for example, by Guerrilla Art Action
Group), in theaters (Bread and Puppet Theater, The Living Theatre), and in a variety of print media (from
pamphlets to weekly magazines)?
5. Does this condition imply a fundamental transformation of the sense of a public political subject? Do advanced
technologies (and more specifically, the ease with which we consume them) serve simultaneously as universally
accessible tools of communication and as spaces of social confinement and depoliticization?
6. What, if anything, do you think can be done to make intellectual and artistic opposition to the war more active
and effective?
49
shortsighted.”
85
Fusco is unimpressed by art shown in mainstream art institutions that addresses
the Vietnam War; she refers to the re-creation of the Peace Tower for the last Whitney Biennial
and other projects as “nostalgic looks at the Vietnam era.” In contrast to these efforts that she
categorizes as nostalgic, Fusco states, “There are, however, some examples of artists, such as
An-My Lê, who have explored how popular memory of the Vietnam War as expressed through
reenactment actually tells us something about cultural attitudes and collective sensibilities.”
86

Although most respondents, like Fusco, roundly criticized October for being politically
disengaged and for investing the Vietnam War era with nostalgia, it is notable that no one was
surprised by the suggested connection between these two moments in American history.
87
This
presumed relationship between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War provides common ground for
many members of the viewing public, which extends beyond the critics and scholars who read
and contribute to October.
****
Reenactment functions as a method of artmaking that can be applied to different
mediums. Each case study in this dissertation reflects the versatility of reenactment for
contributing to explorations of aesthetics, politics, and knowledge production. The chapters

85
Ibid., 54–55.
86
Ibid., 55. Hans Haacke in his response also refers to Peace Tower, but he addresses it in a neutral way, stating,
“To my knowledge, the Whitney Museum has been the only prominent art institution in the U.S. that has offered a
significant forum for such critical productions. I am thinking, in particular, of the Peace Tower, a large communal
work in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Rirkrit Tiravanija, together with Mark di Suvero and their assistants, organized
the participation in this collective endeavor and constructed the tower,” 79.
87
Rosalyn Deutsche, who was one of the respondents to the October questionnaire, criticized the questionnaire in
another essay for perpetuating “left melancholy,” which she characterizes as “an attachment to past political ideals
that forecloses possibilities of political change in the present.” She analyzes Silvia Kolbowski’s video After
Hiroshima Mon Amour (2005–2006), which is “subsequent to, in imitation of, and in honor of” Alain Resnais’
Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Kolbowski’s video relates the bombing of Hiroshima to the invasion and occupation
of Iraq. I bring up Deutsche’s study here to demonstrate how, arguably, American military involvement in Iraq
revived artistic investment in earlier American military atrocities, such as, in the case of my project, the Vietnam
War. Moreover, with Kolbowski’s video, there is a clear allusion to reenactment or re-presentation as method for
political intervention. Rosalyn Deutsche, “Hiroshima After Iraq: A Study in Art and War,” October 131 (Winter
2010): 3–22.
50
address reenactment as photograph, as memorial, and as digital media. Small Wars, Peace
Tower, and Port Huron Project represent a specific cross-section of contemporary art that fit the
following criteria: they are made in the United States; take reenactment as a central point of
inquiry; refer specifically to the Vietnam War era; and relate the Vietnam War to later conflicts
between the United States and foreign entities. Of the case studies in this dissertation, only the
Port Huron Project is explicitly performance-based, but all three case studies seek to reanimate
historical events, not just represent them.
Chapter 1 engages with the intersections of reenactment and collective memory in
photographer An-My Lê’s series, Small Wars. Between 1999 and 2002, Lê photographed
Vietnam War enthusiasts while they reenacted battles on both private and public land in North
Carolina and Virginia. I explore how Lê employs references to landscape art, attentiveness to
military science, and balanced representations of hobbyist war reenactment in order to re-frame
the scope of the Vietnam War within American collective memories. I posit that because Lê
mostly shows American reenactors playacting within the American landscape, with very little
representation of Vietnamese soldiers, her photographs purposely produce an overloaded and
unrealistic Americanness in order to remind the viewer of how the Vietnam War in American
historical narratives has been construed as battles between Americans, as contention between
anti-war protesters and war advocates, the Doves and the Hawks. Rather than photographing
reenactments of iconic violence, such as Eddie Adams’s photo of the execution of Viet Cong
commander Nguyễn Văn Lém, Lê presents aesthetic compositions of forest, foliage, and
sometimes, human figures, to suggest new memories of the Vietnam War, both from the
perspectives of American citizens and from members of the Vietnamese diaspora. This chapter
grapples with mainstream American conceptions of Vietnam and historical narratives of war, and
51
explores how they can potentially be shaped through new imagery such as Lê’s Small Wars
photographs.
Chapter 2 focuses on the Artists’ Tower of Protest, also known as the Peace Tower. The
Artists’ Protest Committee originally created the Tower in Los Angeles in 1966 to protest
American involvement in the Vietnam War. Mark di Suvero and Irving Petlin were the primary
architects of the original Tower, which was subsequently reenacted by di Suvero and Rirkrit
Tiravanija at the 2006 Whitney Biennial to protest the War on Terror, at the Chicago Cultural
Center in 2007 for similar political purpose, and as part of the Pacific Standard Time
Performance and Public Art Festival in 2012. I argue that this repetitive reenacting of the Peace
Tower transformed the Tower from an active political protest into a monument for protest, and
then finally, into a memorial for itself. Although this sounds like a simultaneous failure of protest
art and reenactment as a potential practice for activism, the nuances of each occasion of the
Tower’s reenactment offer productive avenues for exploring the parameters of political art,
public commemoration, and collective memory. Critics of the Tower and its reenactments have
confronted it with the binary of success or failure, usually deciding upon the latter, but the
“failures” of the Peace Tower provide opportunities for dialogue about different kinds of socio-
political engagement and what constitutes “effective” political art, as well as larger questions of
what types of protest are relevant in particular historical circumstances.
Chapter 3 explores Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project, which reenacted six protest
speeches from the Vietnam War era that originated from the civil rights, black liberation, and
anti-war movements. Tribe hired actors to re-speak speeches by Paul Potter, Stokely Carmichael,
Coretta Scott King, Angela Davis, César Chavez, and Howard Zinn on the sites of their original
protests, filmed them, and then disseminated the reenactments as online videos and as dual-
52
projection installations in galleries and museums. Like the Peace Tower reenactments, Port
Huron Project has been similarly criticized for being anachronistic and for failing to generate
political activism, which was the artist’s originally stated intention. The value of this work,
however, lies not in its political efficacy, which is difficult to quantify, but in its ability to make
history resonate for contemporary viewers, interpellating new political subjects through digital
art installations and online video. This chapter demonstrates how Tribe employs a mode of
communicative action that Jay Bolton and Robert Grusin have called “remediation.”
88
The
double logic of remediation is that it multiplies and refashions other media even as it erases all
traces of mediation to produce a sense of immediacy. Port Huron Project refashions protest
speeches given at political rallies, reenacting them as live speeches in the present day and re-
presenting them as online videos and video art installations. By adapting and remixing historic
speeches into different mediums, and especially into sharable files and links on the Web, Tribe
expands the impact of these speeches and incorporates the spectator as a maker of knowledge.

88
J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1999).
53
CHAPTER 1
Whose Memories? Imagining the Vietnam War in An-My Lê’s Small Wars

This chapter explores the legacies of American Civil War photography, landscape
photography, and war reenactment through An-My Lê’s photographic series Small Wars (1999–
2002). By studying these themes in conjunction, I examine how reenactment and photography
can alter and produce American collective memories of the Vietnam War in the present.
Questioning the role of war reenactment in constructing history, Lê participates in and portrays
Vietnam War battle reenactments conducted by hobbyists in Virginia and North Carolina. Lê
photographed the reenactors using technology from the nineteenth-century: a large format (5 x 7)
Deardorff view camera. Her decision to use obsolete technology that gestures both to the Civil
War and early geological surveys of the United States suggests that she is reenacting a variety of
conflicting yet overlapping positions. Lê acts as a nineteenth-century photographer carefully
constructing visual imagery of the United States during a period of intense nation-building and as
an artist in the present-day interpreting the bodily enactment of American memories of the war.
All the while, she also plays the roles of a soldier in the Vietnam War and a journalist narrating
the Vietnam War.
Small Wars engages with issues of collective memory, both of mainstream America and
of the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States, through three major avenues: nineteenth-century
photography, the politics of landscape, and military science. Here, nineteenth-century
photography encompasses Civil War photography and landscape photography, both of which
served as nation-building practices. In Small Wars, references to military science include the
technical term “small wars,” which are all manner of military operations that do not require
congressional approval; use of iconic Vietnam War era equipment (the A-6 Intruder jet); and
54
attention to geography. These seemingly disparate topics coalesce around the idea of the
landscape. Within military science, the landscape as battle terrain, as geography that must be
understood and maneuvered, is a critical factor in strategizing warfare. Within art and humanities
disciplines, the landscape can represent culture, people, and memory.
89
Furthermore, the
landscape as conceived in early American painting was regarded as an experience that all
Americans shared; Angela Miller explains that in the Nationalist spirit of the early nineteenth
century, “A shared landscape would weld the individual to the general, the concrete to the
abstract, the part to the whole,” and by mid-century, landscape art was expected to aid in
civilizing and uplifting the middle-class.
90
Lê brings together these ideas about landscape in her
photographic series Small Wars. Landscape is beautiful yet politicized, and war is political but
sometimes aestheticized as well. Small Wars forces the viewer to consider battle terrain and how
landscape factors into war, into its planning and execution. Lê photographs the reenactors as they
try to reach some sort of understanding about the Vietnam War, while she herself is trying to
comprehend the war and to reconcile the American version with her own lived experience.
Playing with the functions of nineteenth-century landscape art in the United States—aesthetic
pleasure and nation building—and Vietnamese attentiveness to land, Lê employs landscape
photography to address American memories of the Vietnam War, to modify them and to
argument them.

89
See Weston J Naef and James N Wood, Era of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American
West, 1860-1885 (Buffalo; Boston: Albright-Knox Art Gallery ; Distributed by New York Graphic Society, 1975);
Angela L Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered
Society (New York: New Press, 1997); W. J. Thomas Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, 2nd
ed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5–34; Rachael Ziady DeLue, “Elusive Landscapes and Shifting
Grounds,” in Landscape Theory, (The Art Seminar ; v. 6) (New York: Routledge, 2008), 3–14; Lucy R. Lippard,
Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art In the Changing West (New York: The New Press,
2014).
90
Miller, The Empire of the Eye, 10–13.
55
This broad conception of landscape is evident in Lê’s book, also titled Small Wars, which
includes three consecutive series of photographs: Viêt Nam (1994–1998), Small Wars (1999–
2002), and 29 Palms (2003–2004). These three series use the concept of reenactment in order to
provoke new dialogue about a tired American narrative of the Vietnam War, a narrative in which
“Vietnam” has previously been understood only as a historical idea of failed war and a
representation of American disgrace, rather than as a living culture, people, and a sovereign
nation.
91
In the introduction to his comprehensive study of revolutionary movement in the
province of My Tho, historian David Elliott acknowledges how significantly American
memories have limited understanding within the United States of the War and of Vietnam as a
nation:
To the extent that the Vietnamese realities of the period are taken into consideration, they
are typically filtered through the views of Americans with their own agendas and limited
understanding of the environment in which those realities operated. Even postwar
memoirs written by American participants present a picture of the country that is all too
often distorted by remembered personal trauma…While these images are part of the
reality of Vietnam, the full picture is much larger and more complex. It is, however, the
dominance of these personal and therefore limited impressions in American writings that
explain why Vietnam has come to represent a national American trauma rather than a real
place with real people. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said on her June 1997
trip to Vietnam, “The time has come to think of Vietnam as a country, not as a war.”
92

Lê’s Viêt Nam shows Vietnamese homes in the city and in the countryside, landscape views of
fields and jungles, and people engaged in quotidian activities. It presents Vietnam as a full and
dynamic place, and one that is unknown to many Americans. Small Wars depicts white
Americans roleplaying the Vietnam War, reenacting it within the safe confines of Virginian and

91
Walter L. Hixson, “Viet Nam and ‘Vietnam’ in American History and Memory,” in Four Decades On: Vietnam,
the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War, ed. Scott Laderman and Edwin A Martini, 2013,
44–57. “Viet Nam scarcely exists in American history or memory. ‘Vietnam,’ on the other hand, has left an indelible
imprint on American history and memory. Thus, for most Americans, Viet Nam is not so much a country in
Southeast Asia as it is a cultural phenomenon of their creation…”
92
Elliott, The Vietnamese War, 4.
56
North Carolinian soil. This series demonstrates how the Vietnam War is still remembered and
remains controversial decades after its conclusion. 29 Palms studies actual American soldiers
rehearsing for battle, preparing to enter the American “War on Terror” as they train at the marine
base of 29 Palms in the California desert. Its inclusion in the book just after Small Wars makes
the reenactors’ re-animating of the Vietnam War seem prescient of the soldiers rehearsing for
new American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These photographs alluding to the War on Terror
underscore how the Vietnam War still serves as a touchstone of American military missteps and
an example of what not to do in warfare, even while they remind the viewer that the United
States has entered yet another unpopular war under dubious circumstances. The book Small Wars
creates a narrative about the entanglement of America and Vietnam, and thus reinforces the ideas
brought forth by the photographic series itself.
This chapter begins with a brief overview of war reenactment in the United States so as to
provide a foundation for understanding what Lê photographs in Small Wars. Her rendering of
war reenactment as something that is aesthetically pleasing and ostensibly politically inert is a
kind of subversion of the hobby of reenactment, and her inattentiveness to temporality also
contradicts the reasons that are usually put forward about why reenactors choose to reenact. The
next section addresses the logistics of shooting Small Wars—the where, when, and how of Lê’s
photographic practice, which took place in Virginia and North Carolina over the course of four
summers. The third section delves into conceptions of landscape and how they figure into Lê’s
photographs. In addition to exploring the influence of American and Vietnamese landscape
painting and photography on Small Wars, this section also engages with the relationship between
landscape and war. The fourth section provides technical information on military weaponry and
tactics that are relevant to Small Wars. The chapter concludes with a look at the Vietnamese
57
diaspora and its relation to the Vietnam War, and how that relationship is addressed by Small
Wars.

War Reenactment
Lê defines reenactment in very broad terms, characterizing it as “anything that is not
happening in real time.” For the artist, “training is reenactment in a way. Practicing or rehearsing
for a film is reenactment.”
93
Reenactment is nearly an analogue for repetition in Lê’s
characterization of the practice. Since Lê’s definition of reenactment is so flexible, her decision
to photograph Vietnam War reenactors is what lends historical specificity to her project. The
actions of the hobbyist Vietnam War reenactors in Small Wars, as well as Lê’s occasional
directing of them to re-do certain shots, would all qualify as reenactment.
Lê’s characterization of reenactment as a type of repetition produces an interesting
temporal dislocation, where rehearsal—something that happens prior to an event—can also be
reenactment, which happens after an event. Such an unorthodox definition of reenactment is also
at odds with the aims of war reenactment, in which reenactors strive for affective engagement
where they would feel a “physical collapse of time” or “time warp.” Achieving a time warp
would mean for the war reenactor that he truly feels what it would have been like to fight in that
war.
94
Performance and theater historian Rebecca Schneider questions this attempt at authenticity
and asserts that embodying a temporal event renders it uncanny. Moreover, she points out that
the photograph shares with live performance a “time-lag,” for the photograph indicates a time
that has passed, as well as the possibility of repetition and reappearance.
95
Following Schneider’s

93
An-My Lê, interview by Karen Huang, Skype, November 18, 2014.
94
For discussion of “time warp,” see Turner, “Bloodless Battles”; Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic.
95
Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, 143.
58
interpretation of time-lag, Lê’s photographs of live reenactments thus produce a complex,
layered temporality, with the photograph representing in the present moment a time that has
passed—the reenactment—and the reenactment representing another time that has passed—the
Vietnam War—and within the reenactment, the reenactors are attempting to experience their
own affective engagement with a historical event.
In contrast to artists who employ reenactment as an interpretive practice that can either
problematize or lend credibility to the event they choose to reenact, war reenactors intend to pay
homage to the historical event they redo.
96
In popular opinion, war reenactors are often viewed
as eccentric at best, or anachronistically racist, sexist, or politically radical at worst, as journalist
Tony Horwitz described in his best-selling book on Civil War reenactors, Confederates in the
Attic. Even while the practice of war reenactment can be viewed as commemorative of patriotic
events, it is also treated as a questionable sub-culture. That is why it is particularly notable that
Small Wars uniquely positions war reenactment in a liminal space between protest and homage
by showing Vietnam War reenactors in a neutral light. Unlike the well-known and more public
practice of American Civil War battle reenactment, Vietnam War reenactment occurs on a much
smaller scale, with battle reenactments taking place as private occasions as well as being
mounted as public events presented as educational displays of historical regalia and equipment.
In recent years, reenactments of the Vietnam War have received only limited publicity, though a
film documentary by Mike Attie and Meghan O’Hara was completed in 2014.
97
To date,

96
When I refer to reenactment in the art world, I am thinking of practices such as the re-performance of performance
art (which Marina Abramoviç is well-known for doing), as well as reenactment of historical events, such as Jeremy
Orgreave’s The Battle of Orgreave (2001), Allison Smith’s The Muster (2005), which dealt with Civil War
reenactment, and there are many other examples. Refer to the introductory chapter of this dissertation for more on
artistic reenactment.
97
A short article published in The Washington Post in 2005 described the activities of one Vietnam War
reenactment event in Virginia. In 2008, a volume of scholarly essays that examined new trajectories in Vietnam War
scholarship used Lê’s photograph Rescue as its cover, and the volume’s introductory essay begins by addressing
Vietnam War reenactment as a practice that reproduces the War without uncovering any new narratives. Phuong
59
American Studies scholar Jenny Thompson has written the only book to focus on American
reenactment of twentieth-century wars, whereas there are numerous publications addressing
Civil War reenactment and living history practice of the early United States. Moreover,
reenactment of Civil War battles is far more prevalent in mainstream culture and more frequently
used for commemorative purposes than is the reenactment of twentieth-century wars, as is
evidenced by the battle reenactments that have been organized around the Sesquicentennial of
the Civil War.
Thompson’s War Games: Inside the World of Twentieth-Century War Reenactors is
particularly important for its firsthand knowledge of lesser known and less popular war
reenactments, such as those of the Vietnam War. Thompson took a sociological approach to
studying war reenactment by surveying 300 war reenactors, befriending them, and participating
in multiple reenactments. Thompson also provides a brief history of reenactment in the United
States, tracing its roots back to historical pageantry of the late-nineteenth century.
98
The
popularity of war reenactment in the United States, however, is rooted in reenactments of the
American Civil War, which began as a hobby in the 1950s, as the last generation of people who
lived through the Civil War passed on. In 1961, planners for the centennial celebration of the
Civil War decided to incorporate war reenactment as commemoration, and the hobby of
reenactment gained popularity in the following decades.
99
World War I reenactments reportedly
began during the 1970s as hardcore reenactors (those who emphasized authenticity) grew
dissatisfied with how Civil War reenactment was becoming a commercialized spectacle geared

Ly, “Vietnam Buffs Bring Jungle to Va.; Reenactors Evoke a War Many Would Rather Forget: [FINAL Edition],”
The Washington Post, August 8, 2005, sec. A SECTION; Mark Bradley and Marilyn Blatt Young, Making Sense of
the Vietnam Wars Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press,
2008); Mike Attie and Meghan O’Hara, In Country, Documentary (Bond/360, 2014).
98
Jenny Thompson, War Games: Inside the World of 20th-Century War Reenactors (Washington [D.C.]:
Smithsonian Books, 2004).
99
Turner, “Bloodless Battles,” 123–124.
60
toward a broad public. World War I reenactments were more private than those for the Civil
War, with little advertising and no invitations to the public. Reenactments of World War II were
encouraged beginning in the 1950s by veterans of the War and collectors of its artifacts, but did
not become popular as a hobby until the 1970s. Reenactment of later twentieth-century wars—
the Korean and Vietnam Wars—grew in response to the broadening in scope of World War II
reenactments, which shifted from Western Front battles only (Allies against Germans) to also
including Eastern Front events (Russians versus Germans) as Soviet memorabilia became
available in the 1990s. Thompson reveals, “In the 1980s, at a private site in Connecticut,
reenactors began to convene for private Vietnam tactical events, drawing much attention to
themselves among other reenactors for reenacting such a recent and controversial war. But they
also drew many eager participants and eventually spawned several other groups that started
hosting their own events.”
100

Thompson interviewed hundreds of reenactors and participated in reenactments over the
course of seven years. She explains that it was not acceptable to attend strictly as an outside
observer, but rather, “To be allowed to participate in private events, like all reenactors, I was
always required to ‘do’ period impressions, as reenactors say.” Thompson opted to play roles
that women actually would have fulfilled, acting as an American correspondent for Western
Front World War II events and a Russian Soldier for Eastern Front World War II events.
Similarly, Lê needed to participate as a reenactor in order to photograph Vietnam War
reenactors; this resulted in her playing either an ARVN or a Viet Cong (NLF) soldier to
accommodate her racially marked appearance as a Vietnamese woman. For the sake of

100
Thompson, War Games, 46. Although Thompson doesn’t specify how news of Vietnam reenacting was
disseminated, her research notes indicate that print newsletters and word of mouth were commonly used throughout
the 1980s.
61
“authenticity,” which is a primary concern among war reenactors, Lê was required to occupy a
potentially tense position. As a child, she had experienced the violence and destruction of war in
her homeland of Vietnam, but as a teenager, she became a Vietnamese refugee in the United
States (specifically in Huntington Beach, CA), and she now identifies as a Vietnamese
American. Despite these complexities of her personal experience, within the fictive space of
battle reenactment, she is required to play an aggressor against American forces or a conflicted
ally. Lê shares with Thompson her measured, generous characterization of Vietnam War
reenactors.

Photographing Reenactments
The premise of Small Wars arose indirectly from a photography student’s critique. A
photography professor and friend of Lê, Lois Conner, was conducting a critique at the
Massachusetts College of Art and Design when she encountered a student whose work portrayed
reenactors of the Civil War. The student mentioned to Conner that there were also men who
reenacted the Vietnam War, information which Conner then relayed to Lê, thinking the subject
might be of interest to her. Lê states that she originally did not think much of it, but she
conducted some research online and discovered “strange” results of groups overseas and on the
West coast doing Vietnam War reenactments. She then located a group of reenactors on the East
Coast, after which she emailed them, offering to photograph them and give them copies, thinking
that the prospect of having documentation of their reenactments might be incentive enough for
them to allow a stranger to attend and observe. After several attempts to connect with the group,
its two founders Russell Bong and “Tiny” responded enthusiastically to her request. Not
realizing prior to her request that just observation was not allowed—participation was required—
62
she was surprised when their invitations to join them for their next reenactment included detailed
instructions for what apparel and gear she would need and where she could acquire these
supplies. They were excited about the prospect of their reenactment being made more
“authentic” by the presence of an ethnically Vietnamese person, and naturally, she was expected
to play the role of a Viet Cong or ARVN soldier.
101
The significance of ethnic authenticity in this
reenactment is an interesting parallel to the value of indigenous soldiers in a real
counterinsurgency operation mobilized in a foreign country. Not only would Vietnamese scouts
have been invaluable to American military forces during the Vietnam War due to their
knowledge of the terrain, native language, and people, but the use of indigenous soldiers by
American military goes back to the time of the Westward expansion, when the United States
army relied on indigenous soldiers in the Indian Wars.
102

Lê selected her roles for their potential flexibility, also considering which characters
might require the least equipment or less expensive attire. She wore Vietnamese pajamas and
sandals at first, then switched to desert boots at later reenactments. She often played the role of a
Viet Cong soldier, sometimes one that would be captured by the Americans and “turned” into a
scout for the United States.
103
Her participation reenacting a former Viet Cong soldier is also
historically accurate, for Colonel Robert M. Cassidy points out that “the employment of Chieu
Hoi former Viet Cong as irregular scouts to hunt down the insurgent leadership worked
somewhat effectively and offered the additional value of unhinging the enemy morally and
psychologically. Two merits derived from this approach: it balanced the enemy’s special skills in

101
Lê said that there was a young Vietnamese man who worked at a supply store the reenactors frequented in
Washington, D.C., and they frequently invited him to participate in reenactments; he always declined. Lê, interview.
102
Robert M. Cassidy, “The Long Small War: Indigenous Forces for Counterinsurgency,” The U.S. Army War
College Quarterly: Parameters 36, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 50.
103
Lê, interview.
63
irregular warfare, and it significantly increased friendly knowledge of the terrain and of the
enemy.”
104

For her first two reenactments, Lê attended the event with Conner, the friend who had
introduced her to the practice of Vietnamese war reenactment. Lê recalls that they were
inadequately prepared for the realities of battle reenactment, and were forced to sleep on damp
ground because they forgot to bring hammocks.
105
Conner was worried that Lê might find the
experience traumatic, considering her past experience with the war in Vietnam, and she was also
concerned because Lê did not have any prior experience with firearms, explaining: “They trained
her how to handle a gun. We made a lot of photographs with her in action in the landscape, gun
in hand, crouching in the weeds in combat mode. After she set up the photograph with the view
camera, I would focus with her in the landscape and expose the pictures. Being versed with view
cameras, I was a good assistant, but she was a confident director and good actress.”
106
Conner
recounts playing the role of war photographer on their first trip as she shadowed Lê with a 6 x 9
camera, but all subsequent reenactments were photographed with Lê’s signature 5 x 7 Deardorff
camera. Lê explains this transition as the result of trial and error; after looking at her negatives
shot from a medium-format camera, she was disappointed with their quality. She thought about
the look and mood of nineteenth-century photography, and consequently decided to switch to a
large-format camera.
107
This shift allowed her to produce images with more flexibility in tonality
and perspective, and more intense detail. Lê claims that initial blurriness in her Viêt Nam series

104
Cassidy, “The Long Small War: Indigenous Forces for Counterinsurgency,” 59–60.
105
Lê, interview.
106
Conner recalls that during the routine safety check at the beginning of the weekend, it was discovered that the
man in line ahead of them had brought a loaded gun, which was an unsettling beginning to their reenactment.
Despite this, Conner says the reenactors were all very safety conscious and extremely welcoming to Lê and herself.
Lois Conner to Karen Huang, “Small Wars,” October 15, 2014.
107
An-My Lê and Catherine Opie, “An-My Lê in Conversation with Catherine Opie” (Sound and Vision Series,
Paris Photo, Los Angeles, April 27, 2013).
64
was accidental, because at that point she was only accustomed to photographing interiors, and
she did not have access to a light meter, but for Small Wars, she intentionally played with blur
and sharp focus to give a sense of the passage of time.
108
When exhibited, her photographs are
shown as 26 x 37 ½ inch gelatin silver prints in minimal, unobtrusive white frames. Their size is
optimal, for the prints are large enough for viewers to get a sense of expansive landscape and to
examine details, yet small enough to have an intimate viewing experience with each
composition.
It is worth noting that Lê’s large-format camera is cumbersome and requires a tripod and
set-up for each shot. This stands in stark contrast to the quick and portable handheld 35mm
Nikon F camera that became popular among photojournalists during the Vietnam War, and to the
various technologies available to photographers in the present day.
109
Lê photographed during
reenactments, but she also made specific requests of the reenactors and offered direction between
events so that she could get particular shots. It was difficult, however, because the men did not
want their fun to be interrupted, so if action began again when she was still photographing they
would simply run off. Although she directed the reenactors for some photographs, Lê made a
deliberate decision not to hire actors that would give a seamless performance.
110
Thus Lê
relinquished a certain degree of control through her choices of photographic subjects and
nineteenth-century equipment.

108
Ibid.
109
Anne Tucker et al., War/photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, 2012, 21.
110
Lê met the artist Jeff Wall when he gave a talk at Bard, and he advised her to hire professional actors for Small
Wars so that they could rehearse and produce a seamless performance. By photographing actual war reenactors
rather than hired actors, Lê engages with the earnestness of many war reenactors to experience and revive historical
experience. Additionally, she sidesteps any questions about “outsourcing” artistic labor that Claire Bishop has
written about and that Rebecca Schneider brings up when discussing re-performance and the “labor of affect” in
neoliberal society. Lê, interview; Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment,
136–137.
65
In recent years, several American photographers have taken to using period camera
equipment to photograph Civil War reenactments. For his Civil War series (2013–2013), Richard
Barnes used large-format camera and a wet-plate process to recreate the look of Mathew Brady’s
Civil War photographs (Fig. 1.1). However, Barnes positions himself much as Civil War
reenactors do, claiming that he wants to put himself in the shoes of someone like Alexander
Gardner and “attempt to make images that have the look and feel of what it would have been like
to actually be in the field of battle.”
111
Barnes’s words sound similar to those of battle reenactors
who want to achieve a time warp. He then, however, contradicts his attempts at technological
authenticity by purposely incorporating elements of the present-day in his photographic
compositions, such as a modern car. Unlike Lê, Barnes simply fetishizes anachronistic camera
technology for the sake of creating obvious juxtapositions of the past and the present within an
image. Photographer Willie Anne Wright, with Civil War Redux (1987–1999/2003), used a 4 x 5
pinhole camera to photograph reenactors whom she closely followed for 13 years, shooting them
on and around Civil War sites in multiple states (Fig. 1.2). Wright’s photographs also juxtapose
the past and the present, but her work veers more toward portraiture of reenactors than does
Lê’s.
112
Perhaps having the most in common with Lê ideologically is William Earle Williams’s
series, Unsung Heroes: African American Soldiers in the Civil War. Rather than photographing
reenactors, Williams found and photographed specific sites where African American soldiers
trained and fought in the Civil War (Fig. 1.3). Many of these locations appear unremarkable
now, but Williams chooses to explore history through physical sites, recognizing their hidden,
and sometimes forgotten, historical significance. His photographs of cemeteries, fields, forests,

111
Michael Zhang, “Civil War Reenactments Photographed with a Wet Plate Camera,” Peta Pixel, September 22,
2012, http://petapixel.com/2012/09/22/civil-war-reenactments-photographed-with-a-wet-plate-camera/.
112
“Civil War Redux,” Willie Anne Wright: Lensless Photography, accessed November 25, 2015,
http://www.willieannewright.com/Civil-War-Redux.
66
and what are now urban streets, leave room for interpretation, as Lê does in Small Wars, as well
as emphasizing site as a historical character.
113

Over the course of four summers, Lê took between 10 and 12 trips to North Carolina and
Virginia to photograph reenactments. Tiny hosted most of the group’s reenactments on his
private property, near Hurt, Virginia. Typically, participants would arrive on Friday, and the first
battle would commence Friday night. Saturday mornings began early, with whatever campaigns
the founders had arranged. Tiny and Russell would orchestrate the weekend’s battle campaigns
without telling the other participants what they had planned, simply doling out instructions when
necessary so the events would be a surprise. The founders would usually split up, with one
leading the American side, and the other leading the Vietnamese side. Sometimes there might be
a Viet Cong ambush, and for Lê’s first visit, they did not inform others that there would be a
“real” Vietnamese reenactor on the side of the Viet Cong so they would be surprised. This
element of surprise, presumably, was meant to amplify the authentic feeling of fighting in a war
and dealing with unanticipated attacks. The reenactment would last through Saturday, perhaps
with patrols and skirmishes, and then Saturday night would bring another battle. On Sunday the
reenactments would wrap up. Lê explains that the group would do special force operations and
reconnaissance as part of their reenactments, but they did not necessarily keep track of (or agree
on) who had killed whom. For example, there was one instance when Lê shot a GI reenactor in
an ambush but he pretended that he had not been shot, and his crew then came to defend him. Lê
recalls, “Everyone came and it was this big ruckus,” mentioning that these guys were still
supposed to be in character but they were also partly themselves, and they were all very

113
“Unsung Heroes: African American Soldiers in the Civil War,” Center for Documentary Studies, Duke
University, 2009, http://documentarystudies.duke.edu/exhibits/past-exhibits/unsung-heroes-african-american-
soldiers-in-the-civil-war.
67
conservative, the sub-text of Lê’s comment being that they were not inclined either to believe her
or to admit losing to a young, Vietnamese American woman.
114

Although Small Wars was largely photographed on Tiny’s property, Lê took several trips
to other sites for more choreographed photos. She photographed Rescue (Fig. 1.4), a smoky
scene shot with a real Vietnam War A-6 Intruder plane at the Joint Expeditionary Base Little
Creek – Fort Story. One reenactor had family in North Carolina, so Lê photographed around
there, and a trip to the Outer Banks, North Carolina, yielded the photograph Sniper I (Fig. 1.5),
in which Lê hides in tall grass with a grenade launcher pointed at advancing GI troops. These
staged scenes tend to emphasize more dramatic moments of battle, whereas the photographs
taken at Tiny’s focus more on landscape and on the banal moments of waiting that happen during
a war.
115

“Small Wars” and Military Authenticity
The title of Lê’s series refers to a complex military term that was defined in 1940 by the
U.S. Marine Corps Manual of the same name. The broad definition of “small wars” reads as
follows:
The term “Small War” is often a vague name for any one of a great variety of military
operations. As applied to the United States, small wars are operations undertaken under
executive authority, wherein military force is combined with diplomatic pressure in the
internal or external affairs of another state whose government is unstable, inadequate, or
unsatisfactory for the preservation of life and of such interests as are determined by the
foreign policy of our Nation.
116

114
Lê, interview.
115
Logistically, this makes sense because the reenactments at Tiny’s lasted for a full weekend each time and, as Lê
mentioned in her interview, she primarily followed the flow of the reenactments there rather than asking for specific
shots. In contrast, the trips she took to Fort Story, the Outer Banks, etc. were with retired Colonel Ed O’Dowd as
choreographer, so Lê would have had more control over the narrative and deciding whether to re-do scenes while
she photographed.
116
United States, Marine Corps, and Ronald Schaffer, Small Wars Manual: United States Marine Corps, 1940
(Manhattan, Kan.: Sunflower Univ. Press, 1996), 1.
68

Small wars extend beyond warfare as combat and include non-violent ways to further political
objectives, such as providing friendly foreign aid. Counterinsurgencies fall into the category of
small wars, and “low-intensity conflict, guerrilla war, irregular war, and ‘savage wars of peace’”
are other names for small wars.
117
During the Vietnam War, the United States took many
approaches to counterinsurgency:
…the strategic hamlet program…poisoning the rice crop in areas in which the guerrillas
were known to operate…eliminating, through assassination, the ‘infrastructure’—local
village-level cadres; saturation bombing…creating small, skilled special forces units that
could move through the jungle, as silent and deadly as the guerrillas themselves;
designated free-fire zones in which anything living was presumed hostile…winning
hearts and minds through countrywide land reform, rural medical clinics, and rural
education.
118

The responsibilities of the Marine Corps, which include routine active foreign duty, are often
classified under the category small wars. The operations of a small war do not require approval
by Congress because they are not considered declarations of war. And perhaps most significant
for understanding the classification of the Vietnam War as a small war, “Small wars are most
often waged between asymmetrically empowered adversaries—one larger and more capable, one
smaller and less capable when measured in traditional geostrategic or conventional military
terms.”
119

Lê’s naming of these photographs alludes to the Vietnam War as an infamous small war,
but it also points to the international power of the United States in foreign affairs, as a nation that
has participated in over 60 small wars during the twentieth century. It reminds the viewer of the

117
Michael R. Melillo, “Outfitting a Big-War Military with Small-War Capabilities,” Parameters 36, no. 3 (Autumn
2006): 26.
118
Marilyn B. Young, “Counterinsurgency, Now and Forever,” in Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, Or, How Not to
Learn from the Past, by Lloyd C Gardner and Marilyn B. Young (New York: New Press : Distributed by W.W.
Norton & Co., 2007), 217.
119
Noel Williams, “What Is a Small War?,” Small Wars Journal Blog, July 6, 2008,
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/what-is-a-small-war.
69
United States’ low success rate in small wars, considering the failures of U.S. intervention in
Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia.
120
Moreover, considering small wars to be a subset of the types
of warfare in which the United States has engaged, the title is also suggestive of war reenactors
as a sub-group of the American population. But if one is unfamiliar with the term, as many may
be, the title Small Wars presents the only tinge of judgment in the entire work, for it can be read
colloquially as a denigration of battle reenactment, as a minor or petty practice. The author of the
catalog essay for the book Small Wars, Richard B. Woodward, overlooks “small wars” as a
technical term used by the military and only recognizes the title in a metaphorical sense, stating
“…there is of course nothing ‘small’ about the consequences of war, or indeed about Lê’s
talent.”
121
Thus a misunderstanding of the title permits yet another way to interpret the actions
pictured, as trivial actions playing at serious history.
The title of small wars also links the Vietnam War and American wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. The “War on Terror” that began—at least in name—as a result of the events of
September 11, 2001, are actually “small wars” within a projected eighty-year military conflict
against militant Islam, according to David Kilcullen, who was the top counterinsurgency adviser
to General David Petraeus in Iraq.
122
A counterinsurgency doctrine for the United States’ armed
forces was developed out of necessity as Islamic insurgency and sectarian fissures grew in Iraq
in the summer of 2003. Michael R. Melillo explains that heavy-handed American response to
insurgents, such as “cordon and sweep” operations were counterproductive because they hurt the
general populace and thus alienated the civilians whom Americans claimed to protect, and whose
support they needed. Consequently, the U.S. military was forced to return to the failures of the

120
Melillo, “Outfitting a Big-War Military with Small-War Capabilities,” 26.
121
An-My Lê, Richard B Woodward, and Hilton Als, Small Wars (New York N.Y.: Aperture : D.A.P./Distributed
Art Publishers, 2005), 115.
122
Tom Hayden, “The Alternatives to More War in Iraq,” The Nation, August 13, 2014.
70
Vietnam War to learn how to proceed effectively. Melillo refers to the Small Wars Manual of
1940 (reissued in 1990) as the required text for counterinsurgency and stability operations, but it
was one which had fallen out of favor since the embarrassment of America’s last
counterinsurgency war, the Vietnam War, which “was perceived as an anathema to the military,
which preferred to expunge it from its institutional memory rather than to embrace its
lessons.”
123
In addition to the multiple registers that I have proposed for the term “small wars” in
the context of Lê’s series, the realm of collective memory functions as yet another potential
context. In this case, the collective (institutional) memory of the United States military has
attempted to repress the history of the Vietnam War as a disastrous and long “small war.” Lê’s
titling brings to the surface all these issues surrounding this specific military tactic, even while
she suggests interpretations of it in literal and metaphorical senses.
Lê also seems to use “small wars” as a specific military term in that her book and
traveling exhibition of the same title include the series she photographed after Small Wars, 29
Palms, which showed American marines training in the California desert before being deployed
to missions in Iraq.
124
As I mentioned previously, the Iraq War that began in March 2003 is also
considered a small war, and 29 Palms takes as its subject soldiers training at the United States
Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, 29 Palms, in the desert of California. The mission of
any MCAGCC is “to conduct relevant live-fire combined arms training, urban operations, and
Joint/Coalition level integration training that promotes operational forces readiness…”
125
29
Palms is in the Morongo basin and has an arid, upland desert climate. Its terrain is described as

123
Melillo, “Outfitting a Big-War Military with Small-War Capabilities,” 29.
124
Small Wars the book also included the preceding series, Viêt Nam.
125
“Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center: ‘Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command,’ Twentynine
Palms, California,” The Official Website of the United States Marine Corps, accessed March 19, 2015,
http://www.29palms.marines.mil/About/Mission.aspx.
71
consisting of “steeply sloped mountains with flat intervening valleys that are oriented northwest-
southeast. Relief is moderate, with elevations ranging from 1800 to 4500 feet…”
126
As such, the
climate and terrain of 29 Palms is similar to what soldiers would subsequently experience in Iraq
and Afghanistan. This series, which Lê began as she wrapped up her work on Small Wars,
represents “rehearsals” for war whereas Small Wars depicts “reenactments” of war. And again,
these photographs suggest “small” wars in the colloquial sense of limited or insignificant, as
these marines prepare for combat in relatively safe circumstances, completely unlike the entirely
unpredictable and uncontrollable consequences of real warfare in Iraq. Despite the obvious
disparities between training at 29 Palms and being embedded in Iraq (the soldiers will certainly
face worse than the childish graffiti shown in the training camp, with slogans like “Go Home
GI”), 29 Palms, with its portrayal of the soldiers’ vast desert setting, more closely approximates
the awe-inspiring and threatening sense of the sublime that was depicted in landscape painting of
the early- and mid-nineteenth centuries than does Small Wars with its American deciduous
forests.
Small Wars also incorporates military history within the photographs themselves. For
Lê’s photography trips away from Tiny’s property, she enlisted the participation of a “core group
of reenactors” that she met through Tiny’s and Russell’s reenactments. Her friend Edward
O’Dowd, a retired United States Colonel and former military attaché whom she met while
traveling in Vietnam, attended a few of these events to choreograph the reenactments for her,
including those at the Joint Expeditionary Base East-Fort Story, for which he was able to give
instructions that corresponded to actual military response in the event of a plane being shot

126
“Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center: ‘Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command,’ Twentynine
Palms, California,” The Official Website of the United States Marine Corps, accessed March 19, 2015,
http://www.29palms.marines.mil/About/LocalArea.aspx.
72
down. Lê recalls that O’Dowd was “sort of appalled” by the entire premise of Vietnam War
reenactment, but he was also curious and wanted to understand the goals behind these
reenactments.
127

One image from this series, Rescue (Fig. 1.4), was staged at Fort Story, using a Grumman
A-6 Intruder Aircraft from the Vietnam War that is retired in a field there.
128
This type of aircraft
was first used in Vietnam in October 1962.
129
It is unusual for its side-by-side seating, which
facilitated the cockpit workload and encouraged increased communication and interaction
between the members of the crew. Viewed as the workhorse of Naval Aviation, the A-6 Intruder
was flown extensively by the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps during the Vietnam War,
and a total of 693 were produced over the course of three decades until the Navy retired it on
February 28, 1997. The A-6 has been regarded as a remarkable emblem of camaraderie between
these two branches of the military, inspiring the Intruder Association, an active community of
former pilots, bombardier/navigators. Military historian Carol Reardon explains, “Pilots and
B/Ns [bombardier/navigators] had to learn to trust each other's skills. Repeatedly, instructors
reminded them that the A-6 required two minds functioning in synch with each other. Both
members of an A-6 crew got the same award for the same mission. Both suffered the
consequences of an error. The A-6 community could afford no loners.”
130

127
Lê, interview. Lê shared an anecdote that suggested the kind of discrepancies in experience between veteran
Colonel O’Dowd and the reenactors he was helping to direct, many of whom had never been in combat. In one case,
a reenactor claimed to have been a Navy Seal, but after checking an online database, Lê and O’Dowd discovered
that the reenactor had invented the unit in which he said he was embedded. This reenactor, who said he had become
an exterminator after retiring from the Navy, made flamboyant statements to the effect that he used to exterminate
people, and now he exterminates bugs.
128
Ibid. Lê identified the location of this photograph as “Fort Story” (established as Joint Expeditionary Base East-
Fort Story on October 1, 2009), and remembers that the plane was displayed there already. I have identified it as a
Grumman A-6 Intruder by comparing images found on militaryfactory.com.
http://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/detail.asp?aircraft_id=166
129
Andrew Rawson, The Vietnam War Handbook: US Armed Forces in Vietnam (Stroud: History Press, 2008), 198.
130
The A-6 Intruder was developed in response to the United States’ need for an all-weather attack bomber during
the Korean War, and the prototype was built in 1960. It was heralded for its ability to carry a large amount of
ordnance and tonnage, and due to its new bomb release tool, DIANE (Digital Integrated Attack and Navigation
73
The A-6’s reputation as a fighter attack plane that fostered exceptional solidarity not only
amongst members of the same crew but also between branches of the military enhances the
narrative of search and rescue depicted in Rescue. Choreographed by O’Dowd, the five GIs in
the photograph are working together after the bomber has been shot down. This scene is
appropriate for Vietnam War reenactment because Combat Search and Rescue operations grew
exponentially during the Vietnam War.
131
The composition of Rescue is similar to that of
Ambush II (Fig. 1.6), with dark pine tree branches traversing the upper corner of the image,
another pine tree on the right side framing the scene, and smoke engulfing the center of the
image, where the downed plane sits in a clearing. The actions in the photo take place much
closer to the viewer, in the foreground and middle ground of the scene, and that along with the
smoking aircraft creates a sense of urgency that is not felt in many of the photos of Small Wars.
The drama of this search and rescue narrative may be the result of this being one of the most
elaborately staged photographs in the series. The body of one of the plane’s pilots is limply
draped over the plane, as though he attempted to climb out after it was shot down. His co-pilot is
not shown, leaving the viewer to assume that he is unconscious or dead inside the plane’s
cockpit. Two soldiers squat beside the plane, one calling for help while the other stands guard.
Two more soldiers poised in the foreground appear to be prepared for, or currently returning,
enemy fire. There is no sign of these soldiers having arrived via another aircraft, so the narrative
could be that of a land-based rescue mission, thereby emphasizing again the significance of this
particular landscape of pine trees and wispy, tall grasses. Rescue’s specificity—its inclusion of a

Equipment system), the A-6 possessed superior accuracy in air strikes in pitch black darkness. “Legends of
Vietnam: Shoulder to Shoulder,” Air & Space Magazine, accessed January 25, 2015,
http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/legends-of-vietnam-shoulder-to-shoulder-57611944/.
131
Rickey L Rife, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, and School of Advanced Military Studies,
Combat Search and Rescue: A Lesson We Fail to Learn (Fort Leavenworth, Kan.: School of Advanced Military
Studies, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1994).
74
significant Vietnam War era aircraft, and its narrative produced by a distinguished veteran—
aligns Lê’s work as a photographer with the war reenactors she depicts. Her investment in using
appropriate military technology and terminology in Small Wars demonstrates that perhaps she
has more in common with her reenacting subjects than one would expect.

Landscape
The landscapes in Small Wars address the collective memories of American and
Vietnamese people, suggesting how memories are rooted in place, but places that are both
enigmatic and mundane, amorphous yet specific, pictured and imagined. Photographer Robert
Adams has stated eloquently the immense possibilities for landscape in art:
Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities—geography, autobiography, and
metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently
trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people
like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each
other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact—an affection for life.
132

In Small Wars, Lê brings together geography, autobiography, and metaphor to explore the
meaning of war, of memory, and of national and cultural identity. She has asserted in numerous
interviews, including the one I conducted with her, that she sees herself as a landscape
photographer. Her work is treated most comprehensively as landscape photography in her book
Small Wars, in the catalog essay by Richard Woodward and the interview of Lê by Hilton Als,
but there is much more analysis to be done. Reviews of Lê’s work typically mention her affinity
with landscape photography, but in a perfunctory way that acknowledges an aesthetic attention to
land in her photographs of military operations while eliding any attempt to define landscape, the

132
Robert Adams, Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (Millertown, N.Y.; [New York]:
Aperture ; Distributed in the U.S. by Harper & Row Publishers, 1981), 14.
75
history of landscape in art, and why landscape matters. Analyses of her work never specify
where the reenactments photographed in Small Wars took place, and in one publication from
MoMA PS1 the author cared so little about the precise location of these scenes that she even
placed them in the wrong state.
133

I discuss Small Wars primarily in the context of Western landscape photography due to
Lê’s training in Europe and at the Yale University School of Art. Prior to beginning the MFA
program at Yale, Lê worked in Europe as a staff photographer at the guild Compagnons du
Devoir du Tour de France, which encompassed the practices of metalwork, masonry, stone-
cutting, and carpentry/woodwork. Between 1986 and 1990 she photographed these tradesmen in
their workshops and on historic sites doing restoration work; while on-site, she also
photographed the architectural details they were restoring. Lê says of this training that it was
“very practical.” She then traveled to Italy, where she found different craftsmen and stonemasons
and asked to make portraits of them and their workshops. Her process always involved working
indoors, and she explains that she was “looking for situations that were somehow
metaphorical.”
134
She was praised for this work when she entered the MFA program at Yale in
1991, but she said that her professors “basically forbade [her] from working indoors” because
they wanted her to experiment. Initially finding it very difficult, Lê claims that none of her
photographs taken at the beginning of her time at Yale were very good. It was not until her return
to Vietnam that she felt “landscape started working for me.” She explains:
I knew everything was in the landscape. I figured out something about the scale of things.
How in using scale you could suggest relationships between what’s going on, giving it
context, somehow connect it to history, connect it to culture at large. So frankly I don’t
think I really knew what I was doing. The landscape itself was so evocative, so

133
Henthorn wrote the photographs were taken in South Carolina, when in fact they were taken in North Carolina
and Virginia. Cynthia Henthorn, “The Unique Copy (review of Small Wars),” P.S.1 Special Projects Writers Series,
Summer 2002.
134
Lê, interview.
76
expressive, it’s very different than photographing around New Haven. It’s an open
landscape, especially in the North. The drawing of things, the rivers, the trees, growths,
houses, it was the scale that was very evocative for me.
135

One photograph in the Viêt Nam series, Untitled, Ho Chi Minh City (1995) (Fig. 1.7)
shows the expansive landscape to which Lê refers, encompassing a coastline lined with huge
billboards promoting electronics companies that would be familiar to Americans (Compaq,
Sanyo, Hitachi, Nokia, Xerox) and a body of water that is empty with the exception of two small
rowboats in the foreground and two larger ships in the distance. In another photo of the same title
but from 1998 (Fig. 1.8), Lê captures a panoramic shot of a dusty field filled with people flying
kites, which are blurry as they whiz through the sky. The horizon line is pushed extremely low so
that the sky takes up approximately five-sixths of the photograph, and the action is compressed at
the bottom of the frame. Thus in the series Viêt Nam, it becomes apparent that the Vietnamese
landscape served as a catalyst for Lê’s practice. She states that when she was shooting Viêt Nam
after returning to her native country for the first time as an adult, she was more interested in
exploring contemporary Vietnam than in interrogating her own personal narrative: “Instead of
seeking the real, I began making photographs that use the real to ground the imaginary. The
landscape genre or the description of people’s activities in the landscape lent itself well to this
way of thinking.”
136
In the midst of photographing the reenactments for Small Wars, Lê wrote a
short statement that was published in Cabinet, explaining Small Wars as a logical development
from her series Viêt Nam in that both explored “the Vietnam of the mind.” Lê explains: “The re-
enactors and I have each created a Vietnam of the mind and it is these two Vietnams which have
collided in the resulting photographs. Here I experience Vietnam in America as I experienced

135
Ibid.
136
Lê, Woodward, and Als, Small Wars, 119.
77
America in Vietnam: worlds of conflict and beauty.”
137
Lê’s lyrical expression of landscape
highlights the complexity of reconciling physical landscape with imagined space, as well as the
difficulty of melding distinct cultures. Moreover, it addresses obliquely the issue of Vietnam
existing only as the site of the Vietnam War in mainstream American memory, as is the case for
the reenactors. The reenactors’ “Vietnam of the mind” narrates an unreliable story, but Lê also
qualifies her own ideas of Vietnam with this statement, generously placing equal importance on
their different perspectives.
The definition of “landscape” is complicated and varies between individuals and even
between disciplines, an issue that is acknowledged in collected volumes such as W.J.T.
Mitchell’s Landscape and Power, Rachael Ziady DeLue’s and James Elkins’s Landscape
Theory, Joan M. Schwartz’s and James R. Ryan’s Picturing Place: Photography and the
Geographical Imagination, and many more. The group exhibition, Compromised Places:
Topography and Actuality featured eleven photographers, including Lê, who use photography to
address documentation of and imagination of place and to consider how places function as
reservoirs of memories as well as contemporary meaning.
138
DeLue and Elkins posit that
landscape is a “confused” topic made more difficult by the fact that it “is both our subject and the
thing within which we exist.” DeLue explains:
The drama of vision characteristic of certain landscape writing in the first half of the
nineteenth century in the United States, then, might serve as an allegory for the task of
talking about landscape and theoretical conceptualizations of it now, for the reasons
articulated and also because it is well nigh impossible to see anything as not landscape,
given that we cannot detach our looking from the culturally constructed lenses and
frames that make what we see look like what we expect to perceive and, also, given our
wish to provide ever more inclusive definitions of the term “landscape” such that it

137
An-My Lê, “Small Wars,” Cabinet, Spring 2001.
138
Sérgio Mah et al., Lugares comprometidos : topografía y actualidad = Compromised places : topography and
actuality / [comisario, Sérgio Mah ; textos, Javier Chavarría, José Gomez Isla ; traducción, John Elliot, Tamara Gil
Somoza, Tom Skipp]. (Madrid: Fundación ICO, 2008), 15.
78
attends to everything from the land itself to the economies and networks of goods and
people that circulate throughout and across the globe.
139

Although DeLue criticizes the contemporary concept of landscape as overly inclusive, she points
out that the ubiquity of landscape in human activity makes it rich for analysis as well as
extremely complicated to parse. Similarly positing landscape as an all-encompassing part of
existence, W.J.T. Mitchell begins his “Theses on Landscape” by proclaiming “Landscape is not a
genre of art but a medium,” while his second thesis explains that “landscape is a medium of
exchange between the human and the natural, the self and the other.”
140
In this way, landscape
only exists as a human construct and in dialogue with persons, understood in accordance with
constructed ideologies about place and culture.
141

Small Wars problematizes the Western notion of landscape that Mitchell goes on to
define, a notion which emphasizes representation of the scenic and the picturesque within natural
terrain. Rather than highlighting physical experience within a setting, Western art history has
often translated landscape into an image. Instead of solidifying a specific place, or recognizing
Michel de Certeau’s elaboration of “space as a practiced place, a site activated by movements,
actions, narratives, and signs,” representation of landscape, Mitchell asserts, “turns site into
sight.”
142
For de Certeau, and by extension for Mitchell, place is a stable, physical site comprised
of organized elements in relation to one another. Space comes into being when time, action, and
story enliven a place.
143
Mitchell views the failing of Western landscape representation as its
inability to engage with this existential kind of space.

139
DeLue, “Elusive Landscapes and Shifting Grounds,” 10.
140
Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 5.
141
W. J. Thomas Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), x.
142
W. J. Thomas Mitchell, “Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness,” in Landscape and Power, 2nd ed.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 265. Mitchell here is influenced by Michel de Certeau’s The Practice
of Everyday Life.
143
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 117.
79
Despite being inspired by nineteenth-century traditions of American landscape painting
and photography, Lê turns on its head that conception of the landscape as static image. First, the
landscapes of Lê’s photographs are functional sites, largely determined by the reenactors whom
she contacted. Primary locations, for instance Tiny’s private property, were not personally
selected by Lê for their topography, vegetation, or other aesthetic qualities, but for sheer
proximity and convenience. Other sites such as Fort Story were chosen due to the props they
would provide—in that case, a relic of the Vietnam War. All this is to say that although Small
Wars can be read as landscape photography, the series rejects many of the tenets of landscape
photography in that it does not necessarily focus on the beauty of landscape or the scientific
details of nature, nor does it address the sublime. Lê transforms these practical places, however,
into meaningful spaces. Although she aestheticizes terrain, foliage, and natural detail in her
photographs, Lê almost always includes physical human activity within that beautiful space, and
she does so, I argue, for the purposes of generating new collective memories about war. She
represents “space” as it is characterized by de Certeau, with the “place” of “Tiny’s property in
Virginia” enlivened and shaped by the actions of Vietnam War reenactors.
Lê stated in an interview for Art 21, “I was originally thinking about the Hudson River
School or the European painters—or landscape painting in general and nineteenth-century
photography…It has to do with scale, the distance from which you’re describing something.”
144

The way in which she articulates Western landscape painting and photography as intertwined
inspirations for her own work makes sense considering that nineteenth-century American
landscape painting influenced landscape photography through its aesthetic tradition as well as its
philosophical and scientific ideologies. At its onset, American landscape photography was

144
Susan Sollins and Marybeth Sollins, Art 21: Art in the Twenty-First Century 4 (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
2007), 49.
80
expected to prove or disprove evolutionary theories with its allegedly objective documentation of
geographical fact. Recent writings on landscape photography, however, explain that even early
geological survey photographs by photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan were hardly
objective. Taking to task Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay of 1982, “Photography’s Discursive
Spaces: Landscape/View,” which positions O’Sullivan’s photographs as factual “views” that
were necessarily non-aesthetic, art historians Joel Snyder and Robin Kelsey analyze the aesthetic
decisions that were made in these survey photographs and the ways in which they obfuscated
specific topographical information.
145
Simultaneous with government-sponsored geological
surveys, in the mid-to-late 1850s, a market for landscape photographs developed, largely due to
joint ventures between local photographic businesses and publishing houses as they produced
and sold travel, architectural, and landscape prints and stereographic views to tourists. Appearing
in the western United States by the early 1860s, these photographic publishing houses first sold
prints depicting local sites, but by the 1870s, they were selling works to print and sell at
stationery shops and thus disseminating geographic views farther afield.
146

The origins of American landscape photography can also be traced to documentation of
the Civil War. In relation to this, the most highly regarded photographic type was the “incidents
of war, battlefield landscapes with fine detail, a sense of objectivity, and a vast yet neutral sense
of scale,” characterized, for instance, by the photographs of George N. Bernard in Photographic
Views of Sherman’s Campaign.
147
Alexander Gardner’s well-known Photographic Sketch Book

145
Robin Kelsey, Archive Style Photographs & Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007). Kelsey asserts that the modernist qualities of O’Sullivan’s survey photographs were too
persistent to be attributed to mere accident by the photographer or misunderstanding of the photographs by art
historians. Rather, survey photographs such as these were experiments that developed a new pictorial style.
146
Joel Snyder, “Territorial Photography,” in Landscape and Power, by W. J. Thomas Mitchell, 2nd ed (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002), 179.
147
High Museum of Art., Louise E. Shaw, and Western Association of Art Museums., A Century of American
Landscape Photography: Selections from the High Museum of Art (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1981), 4.
81
of the Civil War also offered a large number of panoramas, including views along the North
Anna, James, Potomac, Appomattox, and Rappahannock Rivers.
148
Then in the decades
following the Civil War, grand photographs of the American frontier were produced parallel to
works by painters of the sublime such as Albert Bierstadt. Carleton Watkins, Timothy
O’Sullivan, Eadweard Muybridge, and William Henry Jackson explored the monumental
American landscape while they worked for U.S. geological surveys and railroad companies.
Muybridge dramatized space and light through his landscape photographs. Watkins favored
carefully constructed compositions that portrayed natural order, producing landscapes that
reflected a beautiful physical reality rather than the picturesque or the sublime. These nineteenth-
century straight photographers of the American West all emphasized the awe-inspiring qualities
of the American landscape, whether through romanticized or scientific views.
149

The human figure in picturesque landscape art often functions as an intermediary
between the viewer and the represented scene.
150
In photographs by O’Sullivan, human figures
“function most often as indices of a precarious and frightful relationship between explorer and
the object of exploration,” as Joel Snyder explains.
151
The presence of the human figure in Small
Wars complements the landscape. In a public conversation with Michael Almereyda following a
screening of the Art 21: Protest episode, Lê declared, “I’m not necessarily just interested in
people fighting and holding guns; I’m interested in people fighting and holding guns in the

148
Anthony W. Lee, “The Image of War,” in On Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War,
by Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 37.
149
High Museum of Art., Shaw, and Western Association of Art Museums., A Century of American Landscape
Photography, 5.
150
Asher B. Durand’s painting Kindred Spirits (1849) depicts William Cullen Bryant and Thomas Cole happening
upon a beautiful vale; their deep appreciation of nature is imparted to the viewer of the painting. Interestingly, this
painting also illustrates what W.J.T. Mitchell criticizes in Western art history—its conversion of site into sight—in
that the vale Durand represents is made into an image by him and its presence as art is then reinforced by Bryant and
Cole within the composition. Naef and Wood, Era of Exploration, 16.
151
Snyder, “Territorial Photography,” 194–195.
82
landscape. So I felt that the large-format camera was necessary.”
152
Her medium was determined
by her desired subject matter and composition, and she admits to being inspired by Timothy
O’Sullivan, Roger Fenton, and many other nineteenth-century photographers who used the large
format camera to describe space and details. Lê described how the 5 x 7 view camera “provides a
great large negative full of details. It allows for a certain clarity and descriptive sharpness. Above
all, in an image from 5 x 7 negatives or larger, one can sense the volumes of air moving between
things and inside spaces.” She went on to expound on her preference for black-and-white
photography, which she said shows how things are “drawn,” (presumably meaning line and form
are more apparent than in color photography), and that black and white also “seems fitting as a
way to conjure up memory or to blur fact and fiction. Most of my memories of the Vietnam War,
aside from what I witnessed firsthand, derive from black-and-white television news footage and
black-and-white newspaper images.”
153

Lê’s figures seem comfortably integrated in their surroundings, but their appearance of
belonging in this particular landscape may belie the inauthenticity of their setting. Furthermore,
the foliage signals discord in the reenacted narrative, for the pine, oak, maple, and other
temperate deciduous trees pictured are North American rather than Vietnamese. Some critics
have superficially highlighted this disjunction as simply an example of tension between fact and
fiction. Reviewing a traveling exhibition of Small Wars and 29 Palms, E.J. Pettinger claims,
“Anyone familiar with contemporary art will recognize the struggle in her work between fiction
and fact. Her subject matter is war on a scale we can more easily manipulate and understand.”
154

Another critic points out more astutely that the disparity between the landscape of the

152
An-My Lê, An-My Lê, interview by Michael Almereyda, May 2008.
153
Lê, Woodward, and Als, Small Wars, 123.
154
E. J. Pettinger, “The Vietnam of the Mind,” Boise Weekly, January 7, 2009, sec. ARTS: VISUAL ARTS.
83
reenactment and the landscape of the original war “foregrounds the social and psychological
motives of the reenactors, as well as reminding us of the implications of the Oriental setting of
the actual war. They look absurd, like campers run amok.”
155
That is to say, the reenactors look
so comfortable (and ridiculous) because rather than being in the unfamiliar terrain of Vietnam,
they are quite literally playacting in their own backyards. This conflation of American and
Vietnamese sites (virtual and physical) is key. Curator Karen Irvine articulates, “It is the
landscape that provides the most telltale signs of falsehood: the flora is typical North American
pine and oak forest, nothing like the dense, tropical jungle that covers much of Vietnam.”
156

Thus dissonance between a viewer’s expectations of seeing a Vietnamese landscape in
reenactments of the Vietnam War but actually seeing the Atlantic coastal plain reinforces the
America-centric narrative of the Vietnam War. And as a result of displaying America where it
should not be seen—in the landscape where the Vietnam War was fought—Small Wars
demonstrates that Vietnamese narratives of the war have been obfuscated in favor of American
ones.
For Lê, landscape is not simply a backdrop, and it is never inanimate. She views
landscape as a “character” that changes and can be reenacted.
157
In conditions of war, she
understands the landscape as a vital actor that can help an army win or cause their downfall. Lê
explains, “My attachment to the idea of landscape is a direct extension of a life in exile. The
sense of home has to do with the importance of food and location, and it is all connected to the
land. Vietnam has always been (and still is somewhat) an agricultural society. Its culture and

155
Janina A. Ciezadlo, “Climate of War,” Afterimage 34, no. 5 (April 2007): 26–28.
156
Karen Irvine, “Under the Clouds of War,” Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, August
2006, http://www.mocp.org/exhibitions/2000/6/an-my-le-small-wars.php.
157
Lê, interview.
84
history are deeply rooted in its land.”
158
Lê has admitted to being influenced by North
Vietnamese combat photographers, who made landscape very important in their work.
159

Although she has not specified which individuals or images inspired her in particular, the work
of Vietnamese artists on the Vietnam War/American War has become more prominent outside of
Vietnam.
Several exhibitions and their catalogues were mounted and published around the time that
Small Wars began to be exhibited. At the British Museum, London, the exhibition Vietnam
Behind the Lines: Images from the War, 1967–1975 and its catalogue of the same name focused
on combat art, mostly from behind battle lines, made by North Vietnamese artists during the
war.
160
124 works in the exhibition were made by 13 well known Vietnamese artists, many of
whom have works in museum collections in the country; it is likely that Lê would be familiar
with some of their work from her travels in Vietnam after graduate school. Although the
exhibition was necessarily selective, it included a variety of genres—propaganda, combat art,
and life sketches—none of which are graphically violent. This lack of brutality is shared with
Lê’s Small Wars series. The exhibition Nam Bang! presented at Casula Powerhouse in New
South Wales, Australia included works by returned servicemen, Vietnam veterans, Vietnamese
refugees, and their family members who had been affected by their experiences with war.
161
It
aimed to explore collective memories of the Vietnam War, encompassing the memories of those

158
Lê, Woodward, and Als, Small Wars, 119.
159
Ibid., 123.
160
Jessica Harrison-Hall and British Museum, Vietnam behind the Lines: Images from the War, 1965-1975
(Chicago, IL: Art Media Resources, 2002).
161
The exhibition catalogue emphasizes how the show’s participating curators and artists are invested in a continual
process of reworking the history of the Vietnam War, with Eric Foner stating, “History always has been and always
will be regularly rewritten, in response to new questions, new information, new methodologies, and new political,
social and cultural imperatives.” Boitran Huynh-Beattie and Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Nam Bang!: A 2009
Casula Powerhouse Project (Casula, NSW: Casula Powerhouse, 2009).
85
who experienced the war firsthand as well as the subsequent generation’s secondhand memories,
or what Marianne Hirsch would call “postmemory.”
162

The Drawing Center’s exhibition, Persistent Vestiges: Drawing from the American-
Vietnam War, looked at art made by American and Vietnamese artists, art that is “bound by a
particular sense of activism and of the exploration of the complex role of imagery in influencing
perceptions about the people, the land, and the events involved in the conflict.”
163
Curator
Catherine de Zegher focused on some Vietnamese combat artists that had been featured
previously in the British Museum’s exhibition Vietnam Behind the Lines: Nguyen Cong Do,
Nguyen Van Da, Nguyen Thu, Quang Tho, Truong Hieu, and Vu Giang Huong. Most of these
artists were officially trained during the mid-1950s at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hanoi, where
French Impressionism was a dominant style; its impact is evident in their subject matter of
intimate scenes of daily life. De Zegher notes the significance of their chosen subject matter from
when they were illustrating on the battle front: “An extraordinary sense of calm and quiet, of
idealism, pervades the works, which include depictions of soldiers working, gathering, or
relaxing in the landscape. Not that the absence of violence means that the drawings should not be
considered as ‘activist’ or are without ‘heroic’ undertones: The soldiers may not be fighting, but
they are listening to the radio or preparing ammunition…The artists drew what they estimated
most important.”
164

De Zegher also underscores how the landscape was an important subject for Vietnamese
artists, who assisted with farming and the rebuilding of roads and bridges when they visited army

162
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012).
163
Catherine De Zegher, Persistent Vestiges: Drawing from the American-Vietnam War (New York: Drawing
Center, 2005), 5–6.
164
Ibid., 13.
86
camps. She quotes artist Nguyen Thu, who stated “something is more important than making art
and it is living. And to live, you need to cultivate the rice together.” It must be understood that
within Vietnam, the value of land was astronomical during the War; land was a key factor for
mobilizing support of the Communist Revolution in Vietnam. David Elliott explains that the
distribution of land to peasants was used to attract revolutionaries, mobilize popular support in
rural areas where the revolution was already viewed favorably, and aid in large-scale military
action.
165
On the intertwining of land with the Vietnamese people, De Zegher goes on to explain:
In addition to human cooperation, the harmony of people with nature was a favorite
subject of the North Vietnamese artists, and the landscape itself—the national homeland
defended in the military struggle—served as a motivating image. The draftsmen depicted
soldiers and civilians together erecting viewing platforms, building ships, learning to
shoot, running printing presses, weaving, and making grenades—all against the haunting
backdrop of rice fields and jungle. Again, violence is rarely depicted, and when it is, the
image is not of human suffering but of wounds inflicted on the land. Trees and rivers, in
some instances ravaged by napalm or herbicide, stand in as the metaphorical collective
body of the Vietnamese people.
166

The role of the Vietnamese landscape in the Vietnam War, as an adversary to fight against, is
evident in the United States’ historic use of chemical defoliants, especially Agent Orange, in
order to clear dense mangrove swamps and other tropical foliage so that Vietnamese guerilla
fighters could not hide and so that American soldiers would be able to more easily navigate the
terrain.
167
Although I do not believe that Lê’s photographs show a one to one correlation of body
to land, I maintain that her photographs from Small Wars that are framed with leafy branches
may allude to defoliation of Vietnamese landscape during the war. She shows the ecological

165
Elliott, The Vietnamese War, 454.
166
De Zegher, Persistent Vestiges, 14.
167
The herbicides were sprayed over about 24 percent of southern Vietnam, destroying 5 million acres of upland and
mangrove forests and about 500,000 acres of crops (a total area the size of Massachusetts). Of these areas, 34
percent were sprayed more than once; some of the upland forests were sprayed more than four times. “History:
Agent Orange/Dioxin in Vietnam,” The Aspen Institute, August 2011, http://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-
work/agent-orange/history.
87
abundance of these North American landscapes as a contrast to the destroyed Vietnamese
landscape of the war, which still has not fully recovered. One of the many ways in which Lê
conjures up simultaneously the United States and Vietnam is through her representation of flora
and land. These North American landscapes are explicitly not Vietnamese landscapes. They are
so clearly not Vietnam, yet the subject matter of Vietnam War reenactment forces the viewer to
think of Vietnam. It is this juxtaposition of unlike elements—what one sees versus what one
expects to see—that startles the viewer and produces questions in one’s mind about what is
known of the War and of Vietnam.
Along those lines, Lê has explained in interviews that nature is an integral yet often
overlooked aspect of battle. Small Wars focuses on that interplay between soldiers and nature,
between the familiar and the foreign. For instance, the terrain and climate of Vietnam were
unfamiliar to American forces and made battle more difficult for the GIs, whereas for the Viet
Cong, their knowledge of the Vietnam jungle facilitated their attacks. Art historian David Kunzle
asserts that the Vietnamese people are emotionally attached to their jungle landscape, and that
this attachment was apparent both in their fervent defense against foreign occupation and in their
artistic representations of the Vietnamese landscape.
168
In addition, the terrain is significant for
small wars such as the Vietnam War, which are usually waged against many enemies located in
different countries, climates, and terrains. For instance, “In great campaigns, the opponent’s
system is understood…it is only when some great reformer of the art of war springs up that it is
otherwise. But each small war presents new features…Small wars break out unexpectedly and in

168
David Kunzle, “Two Different Wars,” in As Seen by Both Sides: American and Vietnamese Artists Look at the
War, ed. C. David Thomas (Boston, Mass.: Indochina Arts Project, William Joiner Foundation ; Amersht).
88
unexpected places…The nature of the enemy…can be only very imperfectly gauged.”
169
This
component of small war relates to Lê’s interest in landscape and war and her comment that the
landscape is yet another foreign, unknown element for American soldiers going into battle in
Vietnam. How the terrain of the war benefited the Viet Cong and hindered American soldiers has
been addressed by scholars such as sociologist James Gibson, who argues that the Vietnamese
fought a guerilla war, and their covert movements through jungle, mountains, countryside, and
tunnels proved more effective than the United States’ stronger firepower.
170
Although Lê does
not try to estrange the viewer from the mundane, temperate deciduous forest that comprises most
of her landscape views, she makes evident the fact that the terrain is a vital character of battle,
whether by having branches or grasses interject the foreground of a photograph or by
emphasizing how deep and uncertain is the terrain in a dark background.
One photograph from Small Wars that incorporates human figures, attention to terrain,
the action of battle, and the feel of a grand landscape view, is Ambush II (Fig. 1.6). The setting is
a deciduous forest which is occupied by two GIs standing in tense, bent-legged positions, guns at
the ready, with a third crouching down by the bank as they wait behind a wall of smoke in a
creek. Because the soldiers themselves are not engulfed in the smoke, the viewer could surmise
that they have just thrown a smoke bomb at the enemy and are preparing to ambush them. Lê has
taken the photograph from a slightly elevated viewpoint, perhaps on a small incline, and her
composition emphasizes lush layers of leafy branches, with the nearest layer in shadow jutting
into the frame in the upper foreground, and subsequent layers in the middle ground and
background brightly contrasted but in soft focus as the result of distance and smoky haze. There

169
Charles Calwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, 3
rd
ed., 1906; rpt. (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman
Littlefield, 1976), 33, 43. Quoted in Stephen Peter Rosen, “Vietnam and the American Theory of Limited War,”
International Security 7, no. 2 (October 1, 1982): 104.
170
See Gibson, The Perfect War.
89
is a heightened level of detail throughout the photograph, evident in the individual leaves of the
trees, the rough texture of fallen branches on the lefthand side of the composition, and the jagged
rocks and particles of dirt and debris in the center of the creek, leading the viewer’s eye directly
to the dense, white cloud of smoke. More than a depiction of battle, this photograph functions as
a study of light and shade, turning a mundane section of private land into a mysterious landscape
ripe for exploration. The energy and anticipation of the reenactors is conveyed by their bodies,
but the mood of the scene is unexpectedly serene for the violent subject matter.
Another photograph, Special Operations Forces (Fig. 1.9), shows four reenactors poised
within a leafy forest of oak trees, preparing to fend off intruders. A cluster of three soldiers
occupies the center of the landscape, and a fourth man lies on the ground just ahead of them,
peering through the scope of his rifle. Within the grouping, one man is talking on a transmitter,
and another is on bended knee with his rifle ready. The long branch of a split oak tree has fallen
in the foreground, its spindly offshoots extending over the men. The rest of the tall, thin trees in
the landscape all seem to tilt inward toward the men, but the overall effect is gentle rather than
threatening. Lê’s photographs of figures in battle, shrouded by the landscape, bears similarity to
a painting of the Civil War: Winslow Homer’s Skirmishes in the Wilderness, 1864, (Fig. 1.10).
Both Lê’s photograph and Homer’s painting feature a cluster of soldiers in the middle of an oak
tree filled landscape. However, Homer’s scene is as chaotic as Lê’s is peaceful. Likely based on
Homer’s own on-site sketches for the Battle of the Wilderness that took place May 5–6, 1864, he
depicts Union troops shooting at unseen enemies in the midst of a dark, overgrown forest in the
forests of Spotsylvania, Virginia, an area that was known as the Wilderness because “it was a
nearly impenetrable stretch of woodland punctuated by sluggish streams and dense
90
underbrush.”
171
There is a sense of foreboding and desperation in this scene, owing to the
extremely dark palette of the painting, the shadowy, hastily formed quality of the figures, and the
exaggerated poses of the two men at center, one of whom appears to be shooting his rifle at an
enemy, as he steps over the leg of a fallen comrade who is slumped against the massive oak tree
at the center of the painting. A small cloud of smoke is visible behind the heads of the two
figures at the right. Their actions amplify the dark mood of the scene, but the sinister, overgrown
terrain and how it envelops these tiny Union soldiers are what truly produce the narrative.
172

Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey has observed that “Skirmish in the Wilderness functions
more as a landscape than as a battle scene. It takes effort to discern the figures who themselves
are struggling against the dense undergrowth and dark canopy.” Harvey goes on to address the
specificity of Homer’s rendering, from the “distinctive red badges of [Francis Channing]
Barlow’s regiment,” to the evocative way he presents “the chaotic nature of the actual battle
scene.” Unlike the typical serenity of Lê’s photographs of battle reenactments, however, in
Homer’s painting, Harvey concludes, “There is no room for reflection in this scene. Survival
against an unseen enemy and an unfeeling landscape send an unambiguous message about the
brutality of war.”
173
Despite the fact that the settings of Special Operations Forces and Skirmish
in the Wilderness are nearly identical, and the grouping of figures and their basic poses bear a
striking resemblance, there is no denying that Lê’s photograph appears to show men comfortably
playacting battle whereas Homer’s painting reveals an emotional desperation of a real war.

171
Eleanor Jones Harvey, The Civil War and American Art (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), 156.
172
Kathryn Shively Meier explores the significance of the landscape in this particular Civil War battle. She looks at
soldiers’ writings in which they emphasized nature and their concern about the environment affecting their military
performance, wherein “nature largely became an additional enemy.” See Kathryn Shively Meier, “Fighting in
‘Dante’s Inferno’: Changing Perceptions of Civil War Combat in Spotsylvania Wilderness from 1863 to 1864,” in
Militarized Landscapes: From Gettysburg to Salisbury Plain, ed. Chris Pearson, Peter A Coates, and Tim Cole
(London: Continuum, 2010), 39–56.
173
Harvey, The Civil War and American Art, 156–157.
91
Homer’s painting still serves as an example, however, of the kind of visual imagery of war that
Lê’s reenactors would want to emulate. His attention to the landscape and its role as a vital
character in the Battle of the Wilderness demonstrates how representations of landscapes of the
Civil War made an impact on Lê’s photographs of war reenactment.

Vietnamese Diaspora
Lê’s biography exemplifies a major trajectory of the Vietnamese diaspora. She was born
in Saigon in 1960, and as a small child she endured brutal aspects of warfare, including nightly
shelling of her city and the Communist takeover of the American embassy and the radio station
behind her family’s home. She experienced five years of respite in Paris as her mother earned her
Ph.D. at the Sorbonne (her father stayed behind in Vietnam as a guarantor for the family’s
return), but then returned to Saigon in 1973. In April 1975, Lê and her family were evacuated by
the Americans to Orange County, California, which remains to this day the largest and most
politically-organized population of ethnic Vietnamese outside of Vietnam.
174
The official date
for the Fall of Saigon, April 30, 1975, is commemorated annually in Orange County with “Black
April,” where members of the community gather for speeches and candlelight vigils to honor the
fallen.
175

It was in Orange County, specifically in the city of Westminster, that the only memorial
for South Vietnamese soldiers was erected, in 2003. The Westminster Vietnam War Memorial

174
Karin Aguilar-San Juan, Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2009).
175
Anh Do, “Vietnamese Immigrants Mark Black April Anniversary,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2015,
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-vietnam-reunion-20150425-story.html; Senator Janet Nguyen (SD-
34), “Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 29 - Black April Memorial Month,” California Legislative Information,
April 21, 2015, http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160SCR29. On April 21,
2015, the resolution proposed by State Senator Janet Nguyen, from Garden Grove, California, was passed. SCR-29
proclaimed April 2015 as Black April Memorial Month, commemorating the 40
th
anniversary of the Fall of Saigon.
92
features two standing soldiers cast in bronze—one white American and one South Vietnamese.
This controversial memorial, which took seven years to be produced due to many discussions,
fundraising efforts, and political setbacks, aimed to commemorate South Vietnamese who had
been erased from the War’s history, both within the country of Vietnam and in the United States.
With Vietnam’s reunification under North Vietnam, South Vietnamese civilians, officials, and
soldiers either fled the country or were forced into reeducation camps after the War.
176
Most pre-
1975 South Vietnamese military cemeteries and memorials were razed to make room for new
building developments. And in the United States, the South Vietnamese who fought alongside
American soldiers have been largely omitted from official narratives, likely due to the
complicated politics of cooperation between South Vietnamese and American forces, and
American shame over their collective failure to defeat North Vietnam.
177
Despite the fact that
250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers perished alongside 58,000 American soldiers during the war,
the instrumental role of the South Vietnamese is largely absent from American histories of the
war. Khuyen Vu Nguyen asserts that the Westminster Vietnam War Memorial is significant for
how it functions as “an active effort to ensure the existence of the South Vietnamese experience
in the Vietnamese American collective memory.”
178

Initially, in 1994, the first Vietnamese American councilman of Westminster, Tony Lam,
proposed a memorial to South Vietnamese soldiers. Contention over the potential site for the
memorial led to the project being shelved until 1996, when mayoral candidate Frank Fry

176
Internal struggles between North and South Vietnam, and how the War affected civilians, were introduced to an
international audience in 1970, with the publication of Between Two Fires. The Saigon-based newspaper, Tieng Noi
Dan Toc (The People’s Voice), sponsored a writing contest, “Writing for the Fatherland and People.” Out of 75
entries, nine personal stories of how the war affected the Vietnamese people were selected for publication. Ly Qui
Chung, ed., Between Two Fires: The Unheard Voices of Vietnam (New York: Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1970).
177
Khuyen Vu Nguyen, “Memorializing Vietnam: Transfiguring the Living Pasts,” in What’s Going On? California
and the Vietnam Era, ed. Marcia A. Eymann and Charles Wollenberg, First Edition (Oakland : Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2004), 153–155.
178
Ibid., 156.
93
reintroduced the memorial as part of his campaign. Fry claimed that after speaking to
Vietnamese friends, he realized there were many losses on their side, not just the American side,
and so he sought to “honor the bond between Vietnamese and American soldiers” in the new
memorial.
179
After a national search for a design, neoclassicist sculptor and former Vietnamese
refugee Tuan Nguyen was selected to design the memorial. Nguyen’s own publishers
spearheaded a fundraising campaign to support the memorial. Subsequent debates over the
amount needed to be fundraised and the proposed location for the memorial (originally to be
placed near the Westminster City Hall) prolonged the path to the Memorial’s production. These
issues were not simply logistical, but instead laid bare discomfort with how memory of the War
would be represented. Mayor Fry admitted that “his council colleagues and other civic leaders
always had a problem with the notion that [the] statue would show the Vietnamese and American
together.”
180
Many Vietnamese Americans were also dissatisfied with the final product, either
because they thought energy and resources should be used to forge into the future rather than to
reflect on painful memories, or because the portrayal of the South Vietnamese soldier in the
memorial was viewed as not heroic enough. Obviously, collective memories of the Vietnamese
diaspora (the diaspora represented by its overwhelming concentration in Orange County) are not
monolithic, but it was disappointing to the memorial’s supports that this exemplary attempt to
construct one representation of collective memory was fraught with tension rather than
functioning, as was originally hoped, as a site for collective healing.
181
This type of “failure”
through a traditional style of commemoration demonstrates why Lê’s Small Wars series and its

179
Ibid., 157.
180
Ibid., 159.
181
Ibid., 162.
94
refusal of didacticism offers more avenues for producing collective memories for the Vietnamese
diaspora.
Lê’s participation as a Viet Cong soldier in the battle reenactments for Small Wars is
particularly salient when considering her personal experience living through the Vietnam War
during her childhood and adolescence. Lois Conner, Lê’s friend who accompanied her on
multiple reenactments and assisted with photography, explains that she was concerned the sound
of gunfire and explosions might trigger unpleasant memories of the war for Lê, indicating that
the personal is an inevitable facet of Small Wars.
182
Moreover, Lê’s ethnicity is integral to the
reenactment, for it allowed her—or perhaps more accurately forced her—to play the role of the
enemy aggressor. Interestingly, this role assignment that depended upon racial markers occurred
decades earlier with Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles during the filming of the anti-war
movie Go Tell the Spartans.
Beginning in 1975 with “Operation Baby Drop,” there was an influx of Vietnamese
refugees to Orange County (Lê and her family were part of this group), and this refugee
population was utilized for playing the roles of South Vietnamese and Viet Cong in Spartans. 60
refugees were hired to be in the movie, and those who were actually ARVN veterans provided
suggestions for making the battle scenes more realistic. Moreover, some of the veterans claimed
that acting in the movie allowed them, in a way, to re-inhabit Vietnam. Nghia Vo Trong, a
former helicopter pilot who evacuated his family from Vietnam in April 1975 and who
participated in the Spartans filming explained: “I think a lot of them like the filming because this
area reminds them of Viet Nam. They didn’t like the war; a lot of them lost their friends or

182
Conner to Huang, “Small Wars.”
95
husbands. But I think they like to look again, once again, at the war.”
183
Analyzing this
quotation, Sylvia Shin Huey Chong argues that despite the trauma of the Vietnam War,
reenacting parts of it for film was enjoyable on some level:
The process of re-creating the war for the film industry becomes an ambivalent source of
pleasure for these refugees, as they are allowed to inhabit, albeit phantasmatically and
temporarily, a country and a history to which they cannot return. ‘To look once again at
the war’ takes on a different meaning for these refugees than for the American public, for
whom their bodies are simply indexical traces of acts of violence America seeks to
forget.
184

Chong thus highlights the potential for recuperative memory through the process of reenacting.
By phantasmatically inhabiting the country and history of Vietnam through the filming of
Spartans, some Vietnamese refugees were able to revive their own memories of the War and its
relationship to their lives and homeland, taking steps to re-present themselves as real bodies and
individuals in an effort to counteract their erasure within American collective memories. Perhaps
Lê’s participation in reenactments for Small Wars similarly provided her a safe space to revisit
the environment of her childhood, yet to experience the War from the active perspective of a
combatant. As such, the activity of reenacting would have been recuperative for her, while her
photographic representations of the reenactments are constructive for a potentially diverse
audience of the Vietnamese diaspora and other Americans.
Turning the body of the Vietnamese refugee into an emblem of American aggression
effectively erases the Vietnamese body, experience, and identity. This erasure mirrors the
eradication of Vietnam as a dynamic, living culture from the American collective memory,
which equates Vietnam with a lost war. During the Vietnam War and in American popular

183
Robert Lindsey, “Viet Nam Refugees Find Work Restaging the War,” Chicago Tribune, November 1, 1977,
ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
184
Chong, The Oriental Obscene, 163–164.
96
culture afterwards, the War has been depicted as Americans battling against themselves in an
internal moral struggle. National rifts were notably caused by anti-war protest and unrest within
American military forces. The “doves” and the “hawks” were two conflicting factions within the
American public; both were critical of President Lyndon Johnson’s military decisions, but the
doves favored peace whereas the hawks encouraged escalating American bombing in North
Vietnam and giving more authority to American military generals. The problem of “friendly
fire,” or killing one’s own in a military campaign, was intentional and prevalent on the American
side during the Vietnam War to such a degree that movies like Platoon foreground the fighting
between Americans to the detriment of a more complex historical narrative that accounts for the
agency of the Vietnamese.
185
Viêt Thanh Nguyen characterizes these depictions of American
soldiers as “compulsory empathy,” wherein empathy is demanded from viewers on the part of
“these soldiers and their suffering—both as victims and victimizers—[who] stand in for the
emotional, cultural, and psychic devastation wreaked on the United States by the war.”
186

Clearly, although the War’s ramifications were devastating in Vietnam and provoked outrage
against American imperialism elsewhere, the Vietnam War has been perpetuated through popular
culture as a foundational struggle between Americans, as something that must be reckoned with
in order to define American identity.
Marita Sturken has written about how the dominant memory of the Vietnam War in
America favors veterans while omitting Vietnamese people: “The narrative of the Vietnam War

185
Katherine Kinney argues, “The idea that we fought ourselves, literalized in the repetitious image of Americans
killing Americans, is, I would argue, virtually the only story that has been told by Americans about the Vietnam
War. In novels, memoirs, oral histories, plays, and films the image of friendly fire, the death of one American at the
hands of another, structures the plotting of both realist gestures toward ‘what really happened’ in Vietnam and
symbolic expressions of what Vietnam meant.” Katherine Kinney, Friendly Fire: American Images of the Vietnam
War (Oxford, [England]; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4.
186
Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Remembering War, Dreaming Peace: On Cosmopolitanism, Compassion, and Literature,”
in Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War, ed. Scott
Laderman and Edwin A Martini (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 147.
97
as told in the United States foregrounds the painful experience of the American Vietnam veteran
in such a way that the Vietnamese people, both civilians and veterans, are forgotten.”
187
Lê
subtly responds to this gap in American collective memory by publishing her photographs Viêt
Nam alongside Small Wars (in the book of the same name). By juxtaposing various scenes from
contemporary Vietnamese life with reenacted battles of the Vietnam War, Lê presents a
counterpoint to mainstream collective memory of the Vietnam War, which is typically focused
on the experience of white Americans.
One photograph in the series Small Wars, titled Lesson (Fig. 1.11), speaks to this attempt
to insert Vietnamese people back into the narrative of the Vietnam War in America. Lê sits on a
log beside an American soldier wearing a Special Forces beret. Dressed in black Vietnamese
pajamas, Lê is presumably acting as an ARVN soldier who is operating in solidarity with
American forces. The American soldier’s rifle lays across the log beside his feet, and a bag of
supplies and a spare pair of boots sit several feet away from Lê; the casual placement of their
supplies suggests that they are not currently in danger, and that this is, as the title states, a
peaceful learning moment. Lê’s lips are slightly parted as she is caught while explaining
whatever she is writing or drawing on her notebook, and the American soldier looks and listens
intently. This quiet moment, so unlike what is usually represented in Vietnam War
photojournalism, shows Vietnamese and American armies in solidarity. It gives a face to the
(South) Vietnamese soldier and reminds the viewer that the Vietnam War was not simply an
internal struggle in the United States.
Over the past few decades, the complexity of the Vietnam War has been distilled into a
few key images of photojournalism and popular film. The reenactors who Lê photographed

187
Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering
(Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2002), 8.
98
included in their repertoire reenactments of famous scenes from the Vietnam War that had been
documented in photography, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph that Eddie Adams
took in 1968 of General Nguyen Ngoc Loc executing a NLF prisoner at close range (Fig. I.11).
Although she photographed these reenactments of infamous events, Lê decided not to publish
any of them in Small Wars, explaining that she did not feel that reproducing these scenes would
elucidate anything new about the war or aid in understanding of the war. This particular event,
for instance, had already been reenacted symbolically in the critically acclaimed movie The Deer
Hunter, as a game of Russian roulette imposed on prisoners by the Asian Communists.
188
Lê
stated that everyone already knows that horrific things happened, and that she did not see the
point of repeating these horrors. She continued, “I didn’t think it would help me. I think we all
make work in a selfish way. I made it because I want to understand something. I think I was very
interested in those guys, they were trying to understand something too. They were trying to
understand the myth.”
189
As such, Lê’s avoidance of iconic imagery sidesteps the violent
spectacle of war as well as its traumatic effects. By omitting her photographs of iconic moments
reenacted, Lê refuses to reduce the Vietnam War to a coherent group of historical images. Lê’s
photos recast the Vietnam War in more uncertain terms and unknown settings; perhaps here,
ambiguity mitigates the typically loaded image of the war in Vietnam.
Lê’s practice is distinct from that of other Vietnamese artists in that she presents the
Vietnam War in an opaque way, without explicit criticism or judgment, despite her personal
experiences. Her work is never moralistic; Small Wars eschews easy interpretation. Another
well-known Vietnamese artist who is highly regarded for his treatment of the War is Dinh Q. Lê

188
H. Bruce Franklin, in Seeing through the Media: The Persian Gulf War, ed. Susan Jeffords and Lauren
Rabinovitz (New Brunwick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 33–36.
189
Lê, interview.
99
(no relation), who incorporates war documentation and popular imagery to criticize the
entertainment value of trauma and violence. Combining photography and weaving in Persistence
of Memory, Dinh plaits together a black-and-white news photograph and a color still from a
Hollywood film so that the weaving “invokes a more reflective kind of consumption, while the
pixelated quality of the historical photographs draws them into the contemporary climate of
digitized media.”
190
Dinh unquestionably takes trauma, memory, and, issues of the Vietnamese
diaspora as the central themes of his artwork, whereas Lê maintains neutrality as much as
possible in her treatment of the Vietnam War and respective Vietnamese and American
experiences from the war. Lê’s photographs most often position the viewer as a cool observer,
due to the slightly elevated viewing angle and scale of the human figures. The only exceptions in
Small Wars are Bamboo, Brambles, Creek, Tall Grass I and Tall Grass II, which clearly situate
the viewer as a potential actor within the scene. Notably, these are photographs that either do not
contain any figures (Bamboo, Brambles, and Creek) or contain figures that are largely
obscured.
191
This suggests that Lê conceives of the landscape and the human figure as symbiotic
characters that should coexist. Additionally, with Tall Grass I (Fig. 1.12) and Tall Grass II (Fig.
13), Lê shows a narrative where the viewer becomes a Viet Cong soldier hiding in the grass. In
Tall Grass I, the GI has his back to the viewer, but his head is turned to the left, in profile, as if
looking or listening for danger. In Tall Grass II, he is facing the viewer with his gun raised, and
the blurriness of his face and body indicate that he has quickly whipped around, sensing a VC

190
Art Gallery of the Graduate Center. et al., Image War: Contesting Images of Political Conflict (New York City:
Art Gallery of the Graduate Center, the City University of New York : Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006),
12.
191
Two other photographs—Fallen Tree and Path—do not include human figures or suggestion of military presence
(i.e. no smoke bombs, explosions, or equipment) and are composed panoramically, suggesting that they are meant to
provide information about the physical geography of the site. Path also serves as a lead-in for Landing Zone, which
is published on a facing page in the book Small Wars; Path shows a treed field that is relatively open and holds cows
grazing; Landing Zone shows smoke billowing along the right side of another open, grassier field with trees,
implying the purpose of this open area was for landing aircraft.
100
ambush. This perspective situates the viewer in the role of the enemy Viet Cong, which is also
the role of Lê as photographer and often as reenactor.
By supplanting Vietnamese jungle with North Carolinian and Virginian forest, Lê
augments the common American simplification of Vietnam. In the same way that Americans
conceive of “Vietnam” as the “Vietnam War” only (rather than individuals, history, culture, and
a living, continually changing society), “Vietnam” as a place is summed up in the American
visual imaginary as confusing jungle and site of bloody battle. Emphasizing the American
landscape in these photographs of war reenactments, Lê forces the viewer to reconsider the
narrative of the Vietnam War and the idea of Vietnam as a multivalent culture.

101
CHAPTER 2
Reenactment as Memorial: The Peace Tower Multiplied

The Artists’ Tower of Protest, also known as the Peace Tower, was originally constructed
on Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip in 1966, at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and La Cienega
Boulevard. At the top of a large hill, its elevation made it highly visible, as did its placement just
up the street from many of the art galleries that were part of a popular gallery walk that took
place along La Cienega. In addition to art devotees, many passing motorists would have been
able to see the Tower. As intended by its organizers—The Artists’ Protest Committee, led in this
project by Irving Petlin and Mark di Suvero—its presence was undeniably public in the most
obvious sense of the word. Anyone could come to view the Tower, and many people who had no
plans to see it on purpose could also happen upon it. On a scaffold behind the Tower hung over
four hundred panels contributed by artists to protest the Vietnam War. Despite the Tower’s
accessibility, the area it occupied was circumscribed by a low, makeshift wall. The Tower
needed to be defended from vandals and those who were offended by its anti-war positioning
(Fig. 2.1).
In 2006, in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s sculpture garden (a small, walled
courtyard at the corner of Madison Avenue and 75
th
Street in New York City), a smaller version
of the Peace Tower was produced by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Mark di Suvero, and the Whitney
Biennial’s curators (Fig. 2.2). In many ways, it was a reenactment of the original Tower. It was
protesting an unjust war—in this case, the American war in Iraq. The Tower’s structure and
components were similar, as the metal frame was still designed and engineered by Mark di
Suvero, and its square panels were painted by various artists who contributed them freely to the
installation. Moreover, two of the same key players were involved, namely di Suvero and Petlin.
102
This reenactment was public in that it was largely visible from the sidewalks and streets of
Manhattan. Its image was reproduced in newspapers and magazines across the country,
disseminating it further, perhaps, than the original Tower’s reach. Unlike the original Tower, this
version did not provoke outrage with its political message; if anything, it was met with
acceptance in general news media as an emblem of political art. On the other hand, it met with
criticism in the art press as a failure in protest.
Once more, in 2007, an abbreviated version of the Peace Tower—using just the bottom
portion of the Tower from 2006—was installed in the Chicago Cultural Center. Designed solely
by di Suvero, this smaller-scale, indoor rendition of the Tower included panels from Chicago-
based artists, activists, and veterans (Fig. 2.3). This one was still protesting the American wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan. It seemed to be designed for failure, however. Organized concurrently
with the unveiling of di Suvero’s sculptures in Chicago’s recently-designed Millennium Park,
next door to the Art Institute of Chicago, di Suvero had always intended for the Tower to be
recreated outside, in public space. Issues with the city and getting permits prevented this type of
installation, so the Tower was miniaturized and relegated indoors. This was no small feat,
requiring the use of forklifts in tight quarters to transport 21 foot-long stainless steel poles into
the gallery space, and only one upstairs gallery could house the Tower due to its height and
weight. This diminutive construction was the most distinct from the original Tower, but its spirit
of protest was still sincere.
In 2012, as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time initiative which aimed
to present a history of art made between 1945 and 1980 in Southern California, the Peace Tower
was erected again in Los Angeles (Fig. 2.4). Di Suvero and Petlin were still its main architects,
and the structure of the 2006 Tower was adjusted and re-used. This time placed further west on
103
the Sunset Strip, in a vacant parking lot between Hilldale Avenue and Hammond Street, this
Tower was poorly publicized and was presented with little political context sustaining it. It
functioned as a relic of its 1966 original; the context of PST made that very clear. It stood thus as
a monument to Los Angeles’s artistic past, its current potential political resonances ignored.
Here, summarily, are the four renditions of the Artists’ Tower of Protest or The Peace
Tower. They are not all equal in ambition, scale, or even material, but the last three all embody
crucial aspects of the first. The re-created Towers have been easily criticized for failing to live up
to the anti-war aims of the original. Even its primary creators, di Suvero and Petlin, lament the
failures of its reincarnations to provoke viewers to protest. Di Suvero has been the common
driving force through all versions, and he continues to try to use the Tower in new, socially
benevolent ways: he and Tiravanija tried to install the Tower in New Orleans to be used as a
temporary outdoor soup kitchen, but the city rejected the idea.
192
This series of reenactments has
intertwined the Tower with concerns of protest, political art, public commemoration, and
collective memory. In 1966, the Peace Tower specifically protested the Vietnam War. In 2006
and 2007, the Tower protested the War on Terror yet gestured back in time to the Vietnam War.
And in 2012, the Tower pointed to current issues—continued American warfare abroad, the
corrupt financial industry—while referring to its original manifestation as a beacon of 1960s
social activism. Even without measurable gains in activism, the cyclical temporality of these
reenactments was productive, for with each iteration, it became more evident that protest against
war continues to be vital, and that collective memories of historic, national events provide a
common language for protest.

192
Mark Di Suvero and Ivana Mestrovic, interview by Karen Huang, Long Island City, February 19, 2014.
104
I pause here to draw attention to my decision to label these renditions of the Towers as
“reenactments.” As discussed in my Introduction, I consider all attempts to enliven a historical
event or object in a way that animates and renders corporeal the event or object to be
reenactment. Reenactment is not simply reproduction, but reproduction reinterpreted. In addition
to interpretation, reenactment encompasses performative actions, but is not limited to
performance. Reenacting thereby serves as an umbrella term, under which I would place “re-
staging” and “reconstructing,” two other kinds of “re-dos” that employ aspects of performance,
theater, and object. Following Irving Petlin’s conception of the 1966 Peace Tower, I consider the
original Tower to be an event:
In retrospect, Petlin regards the production and display of the Tower as an ‘event,’ a
version of ‘situationist’ street politics…A public event, with the element of duration and
created outdoors, cannot be avoided by the press and has reverberations within a wider
constituency. Importantly, too, for the Artists’ Protest Committee the planned event had
elements that resisted being reduced to an ‘art work,’ to be looked at in reproduction in a
journal with the viewer turning the page, blanking out the issues and passing on to
another glossy image. To break through both the blanket of press avoidance and the art
journals’ processes of aestheticization were large but crucial struggles.
193

Petlin’s acknowledgment of the Tower as an “event” with “duration,” lends itself to a reappraisal
of the Tower and its making as performance, and as such, something that could be readily
reenacted in the strictest sense of the term. I will go on to evaluate subsequent iterations of the
Tower as reenactments although they missed the mark for incorporating the actions surrounding
the original Tower. The Towers in New York, Chicago, and then again in Los Angeles, became
static in certain ways, but the aims of each and their participatory aspects still place them
squarely within the realm of reenactment.

193
Irving Petlin in conversation with Frascina, October 27, 1992 and April 14, 1997. Frascina, Art, Politics, and
Dissent, 57–58.
105
In the case of the Whitney Biennial, the Tower’s placement within the institution of the
Museum raised questions about what public the sculpture was able to engage with and made it a
target for criticism. Collective disappointment in the 2006 Tower was generated by confusion
over its form: Tiravanija wanted it to exemplify the actions of relational art; di Suvero and Petlin
intended it to perform political protest; and the Whitney’s curators similarly wanted the Tower to
function as protest, but they limited it to a static sculpture within the confines of their sculpture
garden. Despite these contradictions and failures, interest in the Tower persisted beyond its
reenactment at the Whitney, most notably in the form of more reenactments. Even if this
reenacted Tower “failed” to instigate subsequent protests, what potentially has this reenactment
achieved? Pablo Helguera insightfully asks if it “is possible to distinguish and define successful
and unsuccessful socially engaged artworks?” Helguera points out, “to argue, for instance, that
good socially engaged art creates constructive personal relationships is wrong: an artist’s
successful project could consist of deliberate miscommunication, in upsetting social relations, or
in simply being hostile to the public.”
194
By thinking about the reenactments of the Peace Tower
through this flexible understanding of success, I hope to explore more productively how the
Tower addressed questions about history, politics, and memory.
Beginning with these foundational questions about the application of reenactment to
protest art, this chapter explores intersections between memorials, monuments, political protest,
and art, as demonstrated through the three reenactments of the Tower in 2006, 2007, and 2012.
Interrogating the parameters of political art, activist art, and monument, and assessing how
reenactments of the Tower corresponded with or contradicted those categories, this chapter aims
to clarify some debates about what constitutes political art, and by extension, political efficacy. I

194
Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook (New York: Jorge
Pinto Books, 2011).
106
argue that what was originally conceived as protest in 1966 was inadvertently converted into a
monument for political protest, and a memorial for itself, with its subsequent reenactments. A
parallel transformation also took place, as the Tower as political art transitioned into a more
benign example of public art. Moreover, its subsequent re-stagings suggest that the form of the
Peace Tower has become something akin to a formula or a theatrical script that can be
performed—replicated—in various locations and situations. With the Tower, its repetitions of
performance have led to a deadening effect of the project rather than reviving and reinterpreting
the script, as would be ideal in theatre, or, for that matter, for the enlivening ability of
reenactment. It could be said that by following a formula for each reenactment, the Peace Tower
morphed from an active political protest into a eulogy for anti-Vietnam War activism, which
begs the questions: What keeps political protest alive? How can reenactment serve to enliven or
mute protest?

Origin of the Tower
In the beginning of May 1965, Los Angeles became the site of multiple anti-war protests
called “teach-ins” and “teach-outs.” A teach-in, such as that moderated by Professor of History
Stanley J. Wolpert at UCLA, was attended by close to 500 people, and the purpose was to
encourage education, debate, and dialogue about the Johnson policy on Vietnam. Other teach-ins
took place on Friday, May 14, at San Fernando Valley State College and California State College
at Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Community Teach-Out was organized for May 15, where
participants would be able to listen to a Washington meeting of government policy-makers, to
107
watch a film by the National Liberation Front, and to hear presentations from various activist
groups before engaging in discussion about the information that had been presented.
195

During this time period, Los Angeles artists were also coordinating their own political
protests. The Artists’ Tower of Protest was the culminating project in a series of meetings and
anti-war protests organized by the Artists’ Protest Committee (APC) in 1965. On May 2, 1965,
75 artists met at the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles to discuss the war in Vietnam, and a second
meeting the following week attracted hundreds of artists. During that gathering, the APC decided
to disrupt the gallery scene on La Cienega Boulevard with a weekend of protests, including what
they called, in the vein of the recent teach-ins and teach-outs, a “white-out.” On the day before
the scheduled white-out, May 14, the APC published a two-page “Stop: We Dissent”
advertisement in the Los Angeles Free Press; 174 signatures in the ad declared their allegiance to
“a foreign policy which will remove our troops from Vietnam and Dominican Republic now!”
196

A six-rung ladder with “STOP” boldly printed at its base functioned as the “stop escalation”
symbol of protest, and this image would reappear in the form of placards and fliers during their
weekend protest (Fig. 2.5). The phrase “ladder of escalation,” coined by Herman Kahn in 1962
to illustrate a “process of conflict between two powers” was used widely in this period by
military strategists.
197
The APC’s “stop escalation” symbol thus aimed to repudiate this form of
warfare by which a developed nation, the United States, would impose military pressure on a

195
Art Kunkin, “Teach-Ins, Teach-Outs, White-Outs,” Los Angeles Free Press, May 14, 1965.
196
The ad stated six “realities: “that the constant use of force cannot be used to stop the process of transition and
turmoil throughout the world nations; that we support the right of all people to express popular demand by
revolution, as in the origins of the United States republic; that the actions of the United States were destroying the
United Nations and Organizations of American States, created to settle disputes and keep the peace; that the
responsibilities for world peace must be discharged through the United Nations; that the struggle for freedom ‘at
home’ is weakened and made hypocritical by irresponsible tactics abroad; that military intervention is ‘evil, immoral
and illegal…a betrayal of our own ideals.” Frascina goes on to say, “Significantly, too, item number 5 states that
‘Selma and Santo Domingo are Inseparable,’ thereby drawing a parallel between United States foreign intervention
and domestic repression on ‘bloody Sunday’ (7 March 1965)…” Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 29–30.
197
Ibid., 33.
108
developing country, Vietnam, until the weaker country submitted. Along with publishing the
APC’s “Stop: We Dissent” advertisement, the Los Angeles Free Press reported on their planned
events with much enthusiasm, stating, “But perhaps one of the most exciting and new
developments is the activity planned by the Los Angeles art community this weekend starting
with a White-Out protest on Johnson’s Vietnam policy at most of the La Cienega Blvd. art
galleries on Saturday, May 15 from 10 am to 5:30 pm.”
198

The APC’s weekend protest began with their “white-out” protest, during which the artists
used placards printed with the “stop escalation” symbol to cover parking meters, lamp posts,
telegraph poles, and gallery windows on La Cienega Boulevard between Melrose and Santa
Monica.
199
A photograph of an unidentified gallery on La Cienega also shows that individual
paintings on display were covered with sheets of paper, on top of which a “stop escalation”
symbol was affixed (Fig. 2.6). On Sunday at 1:00 PM, in front of the new Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, approximately one hundred artists dressed in black carried “stop escalation”
posters while distributing copies of the APC’s “Stop: We Dissent” advertisement, inspiring
museum visitors and other artists to join in spontaneously.
200
The protest weekend ended on
Monday night, during the weekly gallery walk on La Cienega. This time, the protesters
numbered around one thousand, and they carried various posters that called for the United
Nations to intervene in Vietnam to stop bombings. The demonstration began at 7:00 PM and
concluded at 9:45 PM with the marchers signing a roll of paper that was then submitted to the
government. Instructions for the “Artists’ Peace Walk” were given to leaders, specifying that all
laws should be followed, the march should be completely silent, and that if any protesters did not

198
Kunkin, “Teach-Ins, Teach-Outs, White-Outs,” 4.
199
Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 31.
200
Philip Leider, then editor of Artforum, recalls that the number of protesters hovered around 500, and that they had
the support of many museum personnel. Ibid., 32.
109
follow the rules, to walk around and away from them.
201
The police demonstrated their hostility
toward the protest by refusing to assist Irving Petlin in apprehending the owner of a sports car
who drove into the demonstration and injured several protesters, as well as by arresting a
seventeen-year-old girl bearing a poster that said “peace,” supposedly because she was
obstructing traffic.
202

Although there was widespread radio and television coverage of the protest, mainstream
Los Angeles newspapers reported minimally on the weekend’s events. The Los Angeles Herald-
Examiner published a short article on Tuesday, May 18, about the previous weekend’s
demonstration. The Herald-Examiner indicated its disapproval of the protesters through the title
of the article, which put “Peace Protest” in scare quotes. The article states that the march took
place between the 600 and 800 blocks of North La Cienega Boulevard, and that a seventeen-
year-old artist, Rochelle Markovitz, was arrested after she refused to obey police officers’ orders
and threw her whiteboard sign at a squad car.
203
The alternative newspaper the Los Angeles Free
Press reported on APC’s weekend of protests with the headline, “White-Out Blacked-Out:
Protest by Art Community Gets Silent Treatment.” The Free Press published three photographs
by Charles Brittin in this article, showing over one hundred artists gathered in a silent vigil in
front of LACMA on Sunday morning and a demonstration of over 1000 protesters on Gallery
Row the following evening, where they obstructed traffic by circulating between crosswalks
nonstop. The actual White-Out event, which took place on Saturday, was apparently a
disappointment, as the Free Press pointed out that there was barely anyone visiting Gallery Row

201
Artists’ Protest Committee, “Angry Arts-Artists’ Peace Walk / Instructions to Monitors (Handout),” 1965,
Charles Brittin Papers, Box 83, Folder 3, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute.
202
“White-Out Blacked-Out,” Los Angeles Free Press, May 21, 1965, 44 edition, 2.
203
“‘Peace Protest’ Snarls Traffic,” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, May 18, 1965.
110
on Saturday to notice the stop escalation signs covering the galleries’ windows.
204
In this same
issue of the Free Press, journalist and playwright Norman Hartweg wrote an impassioned
statement for artists, asserting that it was impossible to continue working as an artist without
engaging in politics: “You are forcing us to speak in your language because you can no longer be
allowed to speak for us. We must add to our art our individual protest, our individual personal
statement. We can not paint in peace, act in peace, write in peace, while you bomb North
Vietnam, while you invade Santo Domingo.”
205

Next, the APC began organizing to protest the RAND Corporation’s military research
and its secret “think tank” proposals for Vietnam, which included hamlet relocation and diverting
rivers to dry up deltas. In the pages of the Los Angeles Free Press on June 26, 1965, the day
before the planned event, the APC announced their demonstration against the RAND
Corporation, explaining that “the Rand Corporation supports administrative unilateral recourse in
foreign lands and thereby violates our commitment to the United Nations as the proper peace-
keeping agency for the world.”
206
The APC met on the Santa Monica Pier, marched to the
RAND Corporation, and held a rally in front of the building. Hoping to stop the protest,
representatives of RAND invited a delegation from the picket to have a closed debate in the
future. Petlin negotiated for both a closed meeting and a public dialogue; the closed debate took
place on July 7 and lasted for five and a half hours. The public “Dialogue on Vietnam” took
place on August 3, at the Warner Playhouse on North La Cienega Boulevard. Speaking for the
APC were Harold Dreyfus, Leon Golub, Max Kozloff, and Petlin. The Los Angeles Free Press
reported on the event, stating that it basically reinforced the status quo, with each side rehearsing

204
“White-Out Blacked-Out.”
205
Norman Hartweg, “Moment,” Los Angeles Free Press, May 21, 1965.
206
Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 36.
111
their own opinions without finding alternatives to the actions in Vietnam.
207
In a recent
interview, Petlin asserted that the Artists’ Protest Committee’s public debate with the Rand
Corporation on August 3, 1965, solidified the APC as a presence in the media, and it was after
this that they decided something needed to be created in public space that would be seen by
many people and incite controversy.
208
Despite the delegates of the APC feeling as though they
had won the debate, the APC recognized that there had up until that point been a meager
response to their demonstrations, debates, and newspaper ads. Consequently, they decided that
they needed to stage a collective event that could not be ignored.
Monetary and ideological support for the original Tower was garnered by several letters,
petitions, and advertisements paid for and published in newspapers by the APC. Arnold
Mesches, Chairman of the APC’s fundraising committee, mailed letters to potential supporters,
requesting funds “to buy concrete and steel and wire, funds for publicity and invitations, funds
for hiring guards, funds for buying ads and for shipping. Funds that cry, STOP! Funds to build a
tower of protest that will reach to the sky ‘and talk to God all day’ crying PEACE! We, the
artists of his world, need Peace in which to work! STOP! STOP! STOP!”
209
On November 26,
1965, Petlin wrote a letter to the readers of the Los Angeles Free Press, proclaiming: “The need
to discover some unique, distinctive manner in which we as artists could express our protest
against the drift of American foreign policy in Vietnam has been a primary source of discussion
since the formation of the Artists’ Protest Committee…”
210
He then asked readers to help by
donating or locating a plot of land on which the tower could be built. A few weeks later, Hardy

207
Ibid., 38.
208
Irving Petlin, interview by Karen Huang, Telephone, March 25, 2015.
209
Arnold Mesches and Artists’ Protest Committee, “Fundraising Letter for the Artists’ Tower of Protest,” 1965,
Charles Brittin Papers, Box 5, Folder 3, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute.
210
Irving Petlin, quoted in Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 20. The APC eventually found a vacant rental lot on
their own accord.
112
Hanson produced for the Artists’ Protest Committee a black and white poster, “A Call from the
Artists of Los Angeles,” which called for 1000 artists to assist in the construction of the Tower.
Reproducing a photograph of a Vietnamese family at the top of the poster, it also featured a
partial list of prominent artists, writers, critics, curators, and gallery owners who had already
agreed to participate (Fig. 2.7). Inviting contributors to “speak in the manner native to us as
artists,” the poster’s language reads with a sense of urgency, emphasizing that the Tower is a
product of turbulent times and that artists must act because “it is no longer possible to work in
peace.” Information about the project was printed in English, Italian, German, Spanish and
French, indicating the APC’s desire for the Tower to reach an international audience. These
public requests for assistance demarcated steps in the Tower’s production as anti-war protest,
further reinforcing the importance of process in this project.
211
When it came time to send out a
call for artists’ panels, the APC asked for “any work of art, done on a panel, 2 feet square,
weatherproof (for example, masonite, exterior plywood, etc.), maximum ¾ inch.”
212
The uniform
size of the panels was intended to make the project as egalitarian as possible, with no one artist
taking precedent over another. The panels would emphasize the anti-war protest’s collective
voice in a non-hierarchical display. All artists were required to sign a consent form that
forewarned them that their panels may be destroyed during or after the Tower’s existence.
213
It is
a generally accepted fact that 418 artists sent in panels, but due to the collective and ephemeral
nature of the project, it is impossible to ascertain all 418 participants.
The structure of the original Tower was designed by Mark di Suvero and architect
Kenneth H. Dillon. Other participating artists include Elaine de Kooning, Sam Francis, Judy

211
Ibid., 21.
212
“A CALL FROM THE ARTISTS OF LOS ANGELES,” poster by Hardy Hanson, reproduced in Ibid.
213
Ibid., 63–64.
113
Gerowitz (Chicago), Lloyd Hamrol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Lee Mullican, Ad
Reinhardt, Jim Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Hélion, and Leon
Golub, among many others.
214
In order to bring the Tower to fruition, the artists had to secure the
location, obtain building and safety approval, and invite artists to contribute painted panels. They
selected a vacant rental lot at the intersection of Sunset and La Cienega, which would place the
Tower at a high geographical vantage point; without providing details of their project to the lot’s
owner, they signed a three-month lease. Discretion had to be exercised so that the lot’s owner
would not discover the nature of the project and try to stop it.
This placement of the Peace Tower in an outdoor, public space was integral to the
ideological sentiments it represented. Julia Bryan-Wilson astutely points out, “rather than use the
existing spaces for art, the Peace Tower became an alternative, public exhibition site outside the
art institution.”
215
Moreover, this location near the center of the Sunset Strip was optimal, for the
Strip was, and still is, a storied locale; in the mid-twentieth century, crime and celebrity
characterized the Strip in equal measure. Sunset Boulevard traverses Los Angeles from East to
West, and the Strip occupies approximately one and a half miles in the middle of its twenty-two
mile length. Thomas Crow describes the significance of this area beginning in the 1920s with the
construction of silent film actress Alla Nazimovah’s mansion at Sunset and Crescent Heights
Boulevard, where she hosted celebrities ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Sergei Rachmaninoff
to Errol Flynn. Part of unincorporated land until 1984, the Strip also served as a haven for
organized crime. During the 1940s, popular Hollywood nightclubs such as Ciro’s and the
Trocadero opened. In 1959, Nazimovah’s Garden of Allah was demolished and replaced with
Lytton Savings and Loan and a gigantic parking lot, as the first step in what was planned to be a

214
Ibid., 17.
215
Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 6.
114
transformation of the Strip from a center for seedy nightlife to a respectable cluster of offices,
hotels, and apartments. By the time of the Peace Tower’s construction, old Hollywood clubs
were experiencing a revival as rock clubs, and smaller clubs opened on the Strip as well, making
it a pedestrian-friendly destination, as well as a popular thoroughfare for car enthusiasts to cruise.
But amidst this nightlife revitalization, a curfew was instituted for minors, and policemen
harassed club-goers. Significant for the Tower’s placement as a beacon, Crow describes the
prevalence of hand-painted billboards here, towering above the hubbub; these billboards were
allowed because county ordinances for outdoor advertising were less restrictive than the city’s.
216

Characterizing these billboards as means of communication between entertainment executives,
Crow claims, “If one goes looking for royalty in Los Angeles—of crime, film, or rock—the Strip
carries that aura in what is possibly the city’s most layered, lurid, and properly tawdry
condensation of cultural memory.”
217

The rhythm of cruising the Sunset Strip, with expanses of low buildings punctuated by
skinny palm trees, telephone poles, and large billboards, is captured in Ed Ruscha’s artist book
Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). Published the same year as the construction of the
original Peace Tower, Ruscha takes a photographic inventory of the Sunset Strip’s architecture,
moving East to West from Crescent Heights Boulevard to Cory Avenue. Looking through
Ruscha’s snapshots of Sunset Boulevard, the parking lot where the Peace Tower would stand can
be identified easily by the craggy hillside in the background and the oversized billboards
flanking the site (Fig. 2.8). The large Bank of America building, one of the tallest on the Strip,
was located diagonally across the street. According to Lloyd Hamrol, while the original Tower

216
Thomas E. Crow, The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design, 1930-1995 (New Haven; London: Yale
University Press, 2014), 255–256.
217
Ibid., 257.
115
was under construction, FBI agents had rented out a couple floors of the Bank of America
building so that they could monitor the participating artists as potential subversives.
218
Ruscha’s
book usefully illustrates just how much the Peace Tower would have stood out in this mundane
and overwhelmingly horizontal cityscape. Its placement at a busy intersection, where cars would
have waited at a stoplight, as well as its elevation above the portion of La Cienega that housed
gallery row, is emphasized in Ruscha’s photographic foldouts.
Demonstrating the pop culture significance of the Sunset Strip during the 1960s, Frank
Zappa’s band, The Mothers of Invention, also issued a map of the Strip, available by mail-order
and advertised on the sleeve of early pressings of their first album, Freak Out! The inside of the
album’s cover read, “PLANNING ON VISITING L.A. THIS SUMMER? Send for your copy of
the special map we have prepared for you: ‘FREAK-OUT HOT-SPOTS’ shows how to get to
Canters, Ben Frank’s, Fred C. Dobbs, The Trip, The Whisky A-Go-Go, The Brave New World,
It’s Boss, Bido Lito’s, and many more interesting places. Also shows where the heat has been
busting frequently with tips on safety in police-terror situations” (Fig. 2.9).
219
Zappa’s reference
to “police-terror situations” underscores local political tensions of the Strip in this period, which
also came into play with the original Tower’s installation.
Amidst these changes on the Sunset Strip, the Artists’ Tower of Protest was planned and
built. The political message of the Tower was made public when the artists began assembling the
Tower on-site on January 27, 1966, and the next day, Los Angeles County “requested a stop
order because of an ordinance forbidding construction of anything over five feet in height
without a building permit. The artists protested that their tower was actually a piece of sculpture,

218
Lloyd Hamrol, interview by Karen Huang, Telephone, July 29, 2015.
219
Crow, The Long March of Pop, 267.
116
designed to be moveable.”
220
While waiting on the building permit from the County, on
Saturday, January 29, the artists erected on a tall wood scaffold a large billboard that said “STOP
WAR IN VIETNAM.” Appended to the right side of that were two small octagonal signs
proclaiming “Artist’s Protest Tower / To Be Erected Here.”
221
Overnight, the sign was knocked
down, so the artists put it back up the following morning. Then in the evening of Sunday,
January 30, the sign was vandalized again with the culprits attempting to burn it this time, but the
artists reconstructed the sign yet again and stood it on the ground (Fig. 2.10). On February 2, the
County accepted the APC’s argument that the Tower constituted a moveable sculpture and they
eventually issued a safety permit so that construction could continue.
222
To prove to the city of
Los Angeles that the Tower was structurally sound, di Suvero decided to suspend a wrecked car
from it to prove its strength (Fig. 2.11).
Limited media coverage of the Peace Tower began with brief descriptions of the planning
process and initial construction efforts. The Los Angeles Times’s editor, Art Berman, reported on
the Tower the day after construction began, taking the time to interview di Suvero on-site. Di
Suvero described the Tower as “the only way we [artists] can express ourselves…This is a
symbol of the cultural conscience of artists all over the world. The artists’ committee is against
war and for peace. We are for love.”
223
The New York Times included mention of the Tower in
Grace Glueck’s “Art Notes” column. Under the heading “Escalation,” Glueck provided an
overview of the project, stating that it was sponsored by the Artists Protest Committee that had
been formed the previous May and that had staged numerous demonstrations before going to

220
“Protest Tower Going Up,” Los Angeles Free Press, February 4, 1966.
221
Charles Brittin, “Film Negatives of Artists Tower in 1966,” n.d., Charles Brittin Papers, Box 29, Special
Collections, Getty Research Institute.
222
“Protest Tower Going Up.”
223
Art Berman, “Art Tower Started as Vietnam Protest: Tower of Art Started for War Protest,” Los Angeles Times
(1923-Current File), January 28, 1966, sec. PART ONE.
117
Mark di Suvero to design the Tower. She quotes Petlin and the APC’s call for works, using
Petlin’s statement about expecting animosity and the possibility that artworks will be
destroyed.
224
Berman’s and Glueck’s succinct articles were both noncommittal about the APC’s
goals, and their adherence to quoting di Suvero and Petlin shrewdly let the reporters off the hook
when it came to addressing the potentially controversial politics of the Tower.
The completed Tower was painted purple and yellow and stood fifty-eight feet and four
inches tall. Its steel construction included an octahedron for the lower base, a tetrahedron for the
upper base, and stretched double tetrahedrons for the top. Viewing the Tower from the front, the
three downward lines of the top tetrahedron are reminiscent of an abstracted peace symbol.
Notably, the peace symbol, which was designed by Gerald Holtom in 1958 as a symbol for
nuclear disarmament, became popularly used by protestors in Europe by 1961, and was
subsequently embraced in the United States, first as a symbol for anti-nuclear protests, and then
for anti-Vietnam War activism.
225
At the tower’s base, a large sign proclaiming “ARTISTS
PROTEST VIETNAM WAR” began a roughly u-shaped, 100 foot-long wall of 418 two-foot-
square painted panels. A low wall that served as a makeshift barricade separating the space of the
Tower from the street was painted with slogans for peace, American flags, and images of
American aggression: silhouettes of American soldiers using bayonets to stab large burlap bags
labeled RICE RICE RICE (Fig. 2.12).
The APC published a full-page ad in the New York Times on the day of the dedication
ceremony, announcing the Tower’s opening, its location, and listing all the New York artists
who had contributed panels. The run of the Tower, they audaciously claimed, was “From Feb. 26

224
Grace Glueck, “Art Notes,” New York Times, January 30, 1966.
225
Ken Kolsbun and Michael S Sweeney, Peace: The Biography of a Symbol (Washington, D.C.: National
Geographic, 2008).
118
until End of War in Vietnam.”
226
Petlin, ex-Green Beret Master Sergeant Donald Duncan, and
writer Susan Sontag gave speeches at the dedication ceremony for the Artists’ Tower of Protest
on February 26, 1966. As a symbol of peace, children released six white doves.
227
The Los
Angeles Herald-Examiner took the opportunity to joke about hawks (supporters of the war)
fighting the doves (anti-war protesters) at the dedication ceremony in their article “Boos, Coos at
‘Tower of Protest’.” The paper reported:
Six white doves—symbolizing peace in Vietnam—were released yesterday to dedicate
the controversial ‘Artists’ Tower of Protest Against the War in Vietnam.’ But the doves
were preceded by the hawks at the site of the structure at the corner of Sunset and La
Cienega Boulevards. Sgt. R. Fleming of the West Hollywood sheriff’s office said a fight
at the tower before the ceremony was broken up by deputies…During the formal
dedication, there were mixed boos and cheers as former Army sergeant Donald Duncan
spoke of his opposition to the war.
228

Although the label of “war hawk” can be traced back to Thomas Jefferson, who referred to
Federalists who wanted to go to war against France as such, it was not until the 1960s that
“doves” became a popular journalistic label for their polar opposite. Because the rhetoric of the
Vietnam War was as much about infighting between Americans as it was about the effects of
warfare in Vietnam, the hawks versus doves metaphor was frequently conjured in reports on the
war.
The day after the dedication ceremony, the New York Times published a short article,
“Hollywood Gets a Protest Tower.” In the article, reporter Peter Bart writes positively about the
Tower, calling the panels surrounding it “a brilliantly colored protest mosaic,” as well as
describing the Tower as “graceful.” He quotes Petlin, Sergeant Donald Duncan, and Susan
Sontag. Bart reports that Sontag asserted the “tower was more than ‘visual rhetoric,’ that it

226
“PEACE TOWER Opening Today,” New York Times, February 26, 1966.
227
Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 16–17.
228
“Boos, Coos at ‘Tower of Protest,’” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, February 1966, Charles Brittin Papers, Box
5, Folder 3, Special Collections, Getty Research Institute.
119
represented a means whereby the American people can ‘bear witness to their sorrow and
revulsion regarding the American war in Vietnam.”
229
Sontag’s assertions about the Tower as a
vehicle to bear witness are notable, for “bearing witness,” as Barbie Zelizer has theorized, is a
method of collective remembering in which the bearer assumes responsibility for the events.
230

In 1966, proponents of the Peace Tower believed that it would take an active role in political
protest, serving as a moral compass for Americans with regard to the Vietnam War. An
encounter with the Tower would then, ideally, force individuals to take responsibility for the
violent actions of the United States in Vietnam and consequently decide how to respond
appropriately. In this way, the original Peace Tower was intended to spur critical thought and
action. Although in 1966 the Vietnam War was a contemporary concern and not yet a historic
event to be collectively remembered, Sontag’s statement in the original Tower’s dedication
ceremony indicates why the Tower would come to be reenacted four decades later. If it had the
potential to bear witness in 1966, it should be able to do so again in another time of questionable
American imperialism.
Despite the Tower’s emphasis on peace and harmony, the rhetoric around the Tower
focused on hostility, controversy, and tension, perhaps due to the inherently contentious nature of
protest. Its creators were prepared for a battle in that “the committee, anticipating opposition,
plans to surround its tower with a fence and keep a guard posted around the clock.”
231
A letter to
the editor published in the Los Angeles Times revealed public aggression toward the Tower.
William T. Adams of La Jolla, California, compared two recently published news stories—one
the report of a Sergeant killed by sniper fire, the other an introduction to the Peace Tower—

229
Peter Bart, “Hollywood Gets a Protest Tower,” New York Times, February 27, 1966.
230
Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), 11.
231
Berman, “Art Tower Started as Vietnam Protest.”
120
angrily citing this juxtaposition of stories as an example of “the chasm between courage and non-
courage.” Adams goes on to describe the Peace Tower: “On the opposite page was the story of
one Mark di Suvero, 32, of New York who, with some other misguided companions, is erecting a
tower of old pipe, auto parts and assorted junk on Sunset Blvd. as an ‘artistic’ protest against our
fight in South Vietnam. I say whoever owns that lot should kick him off it. If he wants to build a
tower of protest, let him go back to New York and build it.”
232
The Tower had barely begun
construction at that point but it was already prompting outraged responses such as this one from
Adams.
The Tower’s impact resided in large part in its apparent aggression toward social niceties
and regulations. Therese Schwartz asserted in 1971 that although full-page ads in the New York
Times served the function of informing artists that hundreds of fellow artists were engaged in
political issues and spending money to declare it, they did not change anything. Instead,
Schwartz argued, artists found that they had to challenge laws in order for protest to be effective.
As artists, the way they could test the law would be with their artwork. “The combination of the
Tower, the mosaic and the all-night lighting constituted the artists’ Protest, which, since the lot
was on an elevation, was visible for miles around. The avant-garde artist’s traditional ivory tower
had been replaced with a radical beacon.” Despite her positive treatment of the Tower, Schwartz
went on to question its aesthetic appeal and how it emphasized artists’ work: “But did the
unique, artistic nature of the Tower in fact deflect attention from the dirty truths of the war?
From, say, the bombings and genocide in Southeast Asia, the draft resistance, arrests and jailings
at home? And did it not, perhaps, picture the artist in a very glorious light—staging an elaborate
pageant, putting a large art object out in the open and then spending twenty-four hours a day and

232
William T. Adams, “Two Reactions,” Los Angeles Times (1923-Current File), February 3, 1966.
121
infinite energy protecting it?”
233
These questions regarding the Peace Tower’s efficacy, and the
larger question of what artwork could do in the service of political activism, would be revived
with the first reenactment of the Peace Tower four decades later.

“Like a Goat in a Petting Zoo”: The Tower reenacted, times 3
The 2006 reenactment of the Peace Tower was mounted within the parameters of the
Whitney Biennial, “Day for Night,” which was conceived of as an exhibition with political aims.
Curator Chrissie Iles spoke about how the political nature of the biennial arose “in an organic
way.” Explaining that the 2002 Biennial was held just after the bombing of the World Trade
Center on September 11, 2001, it was too recent for artists to articulate responses to the tragedy
in that exhibition. Iles described the subsequent 2004 Biennial as one filled with sadness and
melancholia. By contrast, by 2005, when Iles and Philippe Vergne were researching for the
following year’s Biennial, they found that the mood throughout the country was characterized by
“anger, frustration, and a great sense of wanting to make some sort of statement about the
situation that America found itself in and that the objects were working in.” Even though the
Whitney Museum, as a nonprofit organization, could not be directly political, the Biennial could
show artists’ works that made political statements.
234
The 2006 Biennial was also notable for its
controversial inclusion of European artists living and working abroad, in addition to artists of
American citizenship or foreign artists working in the United States.
235

Iles and Vergne invited Rirkrit Tiravanija to exhibit in the Biennial. Tiravanija proposed
reenacting the Peace Tower, a project he became familiar with in 1999, when he exhibited with

233
Schwartz, “The Politicalization of the Avant-Garde,” 99.
234
Chrissie Iles, interview by Karen Huang, Telephone, January 22, 2014.
235
Carol Vogel, “This Whitney Biennial Will Take In The World,” New York Times, November 30, 2005.
122
Lincoln Tobier at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tobier’s project, (It All Comes
Together in) Ruckus L.A., included a model reconstruction of the Peace Tower. Tiravanija
suggested a collaboration with Tobier, which never happened, for the 2003 Venice Biennale. The
following year, Tiravanija began planning with the Public Art Fund in New York to restage the
Tower in Washington Square Park and to organize speeches, poems, and music during the
Republican National Convention, but the project was put on hold by Tiravanija himself.
236
When
the Whitney Biennial’s curators approached Tiravanija, he seized the opportunity to reenact the
Peace Tower, this time contacting Mark di Suvero, who was enthusiastic about the opportunity to
restage the Tower as a protest against the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Tower was coordinated between the Whitney Museum and di Suvero’s and
Tiravanija’s studios. Tiravanija’s studio assistant, Liz Linden, worked with him, di Suvero, and
di Suvero’s studio manager, Ivana Mestrovic. Di Suvero’s studio handled the Tower’s
engineering and design, and Tiravanija’s facilitated the call for panels and other aspects of the
project’s organization. Linden disseminated the call to artists, which began by quoting the
original call to action which proclaimed, “The horror that is the undeclared war in Vietnam is
becoming more intense every day. Simultaneously, significant groups of people throughout the
country are voicing their indignation, and demanding an end to this senseless war.” Despite this
explicit reference to political action and war, the second half of the new call did not prompt
artists to refer to the current wars. It appealed, “Today we will create a new Peace Tower for the
Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night. We invite you to participate by submitting a panel of
your own. We also plan to invite as many of the 1966 artists as possible along with new

236
John Tain, “Peace Tower as Commonplace: Relational Aesthetics’ Lieux de Mémoire,” Public Art Dialogue 3,
no. 2 (September 1, 2013): 172–173.
123
contributors to build our monument to peace…”
237
In addition to this call for panels, there was a
“Visual Petition for Peace” that urged artists to engage with social issues and to submit images
online: “Now Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija will make a new Peace Tower in the
Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the 2006 Biennial. Artists from all over the world
can join this visual petition for peace by sending an image to the website which ensures the
diversity of the Peace Tower and allows it to continue to develop over time. For the last half a
century, artists have united to act collectively on major social and political issues that have
confronted the United States. END YOUR SILENCE.”
238

The Whitney Tower was designed and fabricated at di Suvero’s studio in Long Island
City, then assembled in the Whitney courtyard. Di Suvero had to re-design the Tower to
accommodate the cantilevered portion of the Whitney Museum’s Brutalist building. Rather than
the purple and yellow of the original Tower, the new Tower was constructed using unpainted,
stainless steel poles, a decision that made the sleek, metallic structure stand in stark contrast to
the rough, handmade, and colorful quality of many of the painted panels.
239

After contacting a sampling of artists about their panels, I received a cluster of
surprisingly similar responses; these self-selecting artists enthusiastically stated that they thought
the reenacted Tower was a worthwhile political project, but most of them did not see the Tower
in person, never saw photographs of the Tower, and did not contact the Whitney to request any
photographs or feedback. For instance, Sam Durant wrote that he wanted to participate in the

237
Mark Di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija, “Draft of Call for Panels for 2006 Peace Tower,” December 1, 2005,
Studio of Mark di Suvero.
238
“Artists’ Call: Visual Petition for Peace,” 2006, Studio of Mark di Suvero. The “website” refers to the Peace
Tower website that was originally hosted by the Whitney Museum. The link is no longer active.
http://whitney.org/biennial2006/projects/tower/
239
The monetary value of the stainless steel used for the 2006 Tower (and reused for the 2012 Tower) actually led to
the pieces being stolen from the yard of Di Suvero’s studio in Petaluma, California. Di Suvero and Mestrovic,
interview.
124
Tower because it was a “momentous achievement” as “the first time a major U.S. museum had
allowed such a high profile, overt political display going against the war policies of the U.S.
government.” His contribution reproduced a civil rights protest sign that read “Like Man, I’m
Tired of Waiting.” Durant explained that the Tower was such a clear anti-war statement, it
provided the context for him to refer to “another aspect of people’s struggle against injustice,
namely the civil rights movement.” He was unable to see the Tower in person, but he imagined it
to be impressive, and hoped that it “might lead other institutions to be braver.”
240
Peter
Downsbrough explained that he opted to participate after being contacted by Chrissie Iles
because he wanted to show support for the idea of peace. He acknowledged that his panel was
not explicitly “political,” as he found it difficult to address the Iraq War specifically on a two
foot by two foot panel. Downsbrough never saw the Tower nor any photographs of it.
241

Similarly, Jacqueline Bishop was personally invited to participate (by Arnold Mesches), chose to
contribute a panel that referred metaphorically to war as pollution, but then did not see the
completed Tower.
242
These well-intentioned yet somewhat passive approaches to this call for
protest art call to mind “flash activism,” which includes actions such as email campaigns, signing
online petitions, and the like. With flash activism, its low time commitment makes it is easy to
attract sympathetic individuals to a cause.
243

One of the most analytical responses I received was from artist Paolo Canevari, who
submitted a cube rather than a flat panel (Fig. 2.13). His contribution used black rubber from

240
Sam Durant to Karen Huang, “Peace Tower,” July 10, 2015.
241
Peter Downsbrough to Karen Huang, “Peace Tower,” July 13, 2015.
242
In contrast to these sincere responses, however, I also received a glib response from Yuri Avvakumov of
AgitArch Studio, who answered “why not?” to my asking him why he chose to participate, and that he thought the
completed Tower “looked a bit like a Christmas Tree.” Jacqueline Bishop to Karen Huang, “Peace Tower,” March
31, 2015; Yuri Avvakumov (AgitArchStudio) to Karen Huang, “Peace Tower,” February 21, 2015.
243
Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport, Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age, 1st edition
(Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2011), 73.
125
tires as a reference to other work he was making at the time, entitled Black Stones, and was his
own political statement about the Iraq War. Black Stones refers to the sacred stone of Mecca, and
Canevari uses rubber from tires as a symbol of the Western world’s ties to the oil industry.
Canevari considered the reenacted Peace Tower to be a good idea and observed that “its
continuation (from the original 1960’s project) can somehow help in a political awareness and a
stronger consciousness about the economical interests related to conflicts and wars.” Despite his
positive opinion of the Tower, he also voices his belief that reenacting historical protest leads to
an emphasis on the personality of the artist and of the original work to the detriment of the
“current reality and political consciousness.” He pithily describes the 2006 action as a “vintage”
form of protest that is socially acceptable and therefore less challenging to the public’s
understanding.
244

Many critics appraised the reenacted Tower similarly, pointing out its anachronism and
non-confrontational message. In his review of the Biennial as a whole, Michael Kimmelman
describes the affair as “partly about preaching to the converted.” Of the Peace Tower
specifically, he writes that it “resembles a giant Tinkertoy construction rising from the Whitney’s
courtyard beside the museum entrance,” and then goes on to characterize it as “old-school civic
protest, almost quaint—a genuine, albeit predictable response to what’s going on in the world
that makes no claims to being anything other than what it is.” Despite the “quaint” nature of the
reenactment, Kimmelman nonetheless asks, if rather tepidly, “and why shouldn’t artists get
together to say something about war and peace, in the midst of war, if there is an opportunity like

244
Paolo Canevari to Karen Huang, “Peace Tower,” April 6, 2015.
126
the biennial?”
245
The critic for the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Knight, pinpoints how the
change in historical circumstances and venue make the Tower ineffective as political protest:
The biggest groaner is Rirkrit Tiravanija’s restaging of Mark di Suvero’s 1966 Artists’
Tower for Peace. The original Constructivist-style tower, a grass-roots Vietnam War
protest, was erected in Los Angeles on a vacant lot at Sunset and La Cienega boulevards,
where hundreds of contributors added 2-foot-square panels registering their political
opinions—sparking a citywide commotion. (A man even got shot). Rebuilt in the
sculpture garden at the Whitney, where it pokes its head up to greet shoppers along
Madison Avenue, the once-anarchic public sculpture is tamed like a goat in a petting zoo.
The peace tower is emblematic of the show—earnest and stale.
246

As Kimmelman likens the Whitney’s Tower to a Tinkertoy construction, Knight also derides the
Tower as child’s play. Knight’s humorous simile comparing the reenacted Tower to a tame
petting zoo goat indicates how the reenactment comes across as the polar opposite of its original
form. Knight’s critique emphasizes a major problem with the Tower as protest in the Biennial,
which is the fact that the Tower has permission to occupy this space, its placement in this venue
is logical, and its construction is legal. In this case, permission renders the protest mute. By
making a comparison between an anarchic sculpture and a petting zoo animal, Knight
underscores his unspoken assumption that protest art should be something unexpected that
should generate controversy. His interjection, “a man even got shot,” suggests that he views
violence as a positive response to a functional political artwork.
One issue with the 2006 Peace Tower was its context of the museum institution, as well
as the context of biennial culture. The original Tower was understood within the realm of public
community art and protest art, in line with projects such as the Wall of Respect, a blighted
building located in inner-city Chicago that artists from the Organization of Black American

245
Michael Kimmelman, “BIENNIAL 2006: Short on Pretty, Long on Collaboration,” New York Times, March 3,
2006, sec. Weekend Arts.
246
Christopher Knight, “Biennial? Who Needs It?,” Los Angeles Times (1923-Current File), March 22, 2006.
127
Culture painted over with celebratory representations of African American heroes.
247
Removing
the Tower from that kind of public historical and theoretical context and inserting it into the
Whitney’s sculpture garden highlighted the fact that reenactment of an event cannot entirely
incorporate the original context. In order for the reenactment to be productive, the new context
needs to be just as meaningful as the original, but in a different way. The more elite and more
commercial environment of the Whitney Museum did not lend itself to public dialogue as much
as the vacant parking lot in Los Angeles did in 1966. Circumscribed by its production within the
art world, the American media addressed it as an exhibition installation, having art critics review
the Tower as part of the Biennial, rather than news reporters treating it first and foremost as
political protest.
The version of the Peace Tower exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center from June 8
through October 1, 2007, bears the least resemblance to the other renditions of the Tower. This
reconstruction, organized in conjunction with an installation of Mark di Suvero’s sculptures in
Chicago’s Millennium Park, places the most emphasis of all the Towers on it being an artistic
creation by di Suvero. This version of the Tower was, however, the only one to make explicit its
place in the lineage of Peace Towers, providing information within the confines of the exhibition
space about the history of the 1966 Peace Tower and the 2006 reenactment at the Whitney
Biennial.
248

247
The mural was created in collaboration with the community of 43
rd
and Langley, with OBAC holding
neighborhood meetings to select which heroes would be represented. The Block Museum has created an interactive
website documenting the Wall of Respect and its connections with the Black Freedom and Black Arts movements.
Mary Schmidt Campbell and Studio Museum in Harlem, Tradition and Conflict : Images of a Turbulent Decade,
1963-1973 (New York, NY: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1985), 57; Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art,
Northwestern University, “The Wall of Respect,” Wall of Respect, accessed January 17, 2016,
http://www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/wallofrespect/main.htm.
248
Elizabeth (Lee) Kelley, “Letter to George and Mary Lou Friedley,” August 31, 2007, Chicago Cultural Center.
128
When di Suvero was invited by the city of Chicago to exhibit his outdoor sculptures at
Millennium Park, he proposed inclusion of the Peace Tower. There were concerns from city
officials, however, that the Tower would be vandalized. Also, being outdoors, the content of the
contributed panels would have to be vetted and approved for all audiences, which was not
feasible, and this censorship would have gone against the spirit of protest in which the Tower
was intended. Despite these complications, di Suvero insisted that the Peace Tower needed to be
reenacted in Chicago, which was an important site of historic American protest. Chicago also
had personal significance for di Suvero, who was arrested there while protesting at an anti-war
rally on Easter 1968.
249

As a compromise, Lee Kelley, then-director of the Chicago Cultural Center and a long-
time friend of di Suvero’s, proposed that the “Chicago Rooms” on the second floor of the
Cultural Center could be utilized for a Peace Tower exhibition beginning in June 2007. With
ceilings twenty-two-feet high, the galleries would only allow for the bottom section of the Tower
to be displayed indoors, with the dimensions of the overall structure measuring 50’ x 20’ x 20’.
Similarly to the coordination of the original Tower and the 2006 reenactment, this time a call for
panels was put out to local Chicago artists and activists. Wanting to make full use of this
exhibition opportunity, di Suvero proposed contextualizing this version of the Peace Tower with
photographs of contemporary United States wars, particularly in Iraq. There ended up being two
corresponding photography exhibitions under the umbrella of “Mark di Suvero: Works and
Protest.” One exhibition displayed George Bellamy’s photographs of di Suvero’s sculpture
oeuvre, and the other included documentary photographs of the Iraq War, taken by
photojournalists as well as by Iraq War veterans. The gallery that displayed the Tower and the

249
Elizabeth (Lee) Kelley, interview by Karen Huang, February 10, 2014.
129
Iraq War photographs has a large window that overlooks Millennium Park, which connected this
installation to di Suvero’s outdoor installations and to his original preferred site for the Tower.
Chicago’s Tower was explicitly aligned with contemporary anti-war protest as was
evidenced in its concurrent photography exhibition, as well as in the outreach that the curatorial
staff of the Culture Center conducted. Corresponding with various groups protesting the Iraq
War, such as Iraq Veterans Against the War, Code Pink—Women for Peace, Southsiders for
Peace, Chicago Coalition Against War and Peace, and Chicago Labor Against the War, this
reenactment of the Peace Tower took seriously the political goals of di Suvero and the Peace
Tower.
250
While organizing the exhibition, Lee wrote to a collaborator at Aperture magazine,
Melissa Harris, emphasizing that di Suvero “is most interested in raw, difficult imagery which
tells the real story of soldiers and the Iraqi people.”
251
After requesting photographs from Iraq
Veterans Against the War and from photojournalists suggested by Harris, di Suvero and Kelley
selected photographs by the following: Thomas Dworzak, ABBAS, and Alex Majoli (Magnum);
Alexandra Boulat and Gary Knight (VI); and Nina Berman. All photographs were printed at 16 x
20 inches on non-archival paper. The accompanying exhibition of Bellamy’s photographs of di
Suvero’s sculptures included larger images of 40 x 60 inches, printed on aluminum sheets.
Local publications briefly reviewed this version of the Peace Tower. In Time Out
Chicago, Philip Berger appraises it as having a “reassuringly retro quality,” and says this version
“recycles an idea di Suvero devised in 1966 and resuscitated for the 2006 Whitney Biennial.” Its
democratic nature—apparently to ensure that every panel submitted would actually be included
in the exhibition, panels were displayed on a rotating basis—would make it appealing to
proponents of public art, Berger asserts, although the small size of the gallery made it difficult

250
Elizabeth (Lee) Kelley, “List of Contacts,” March 2007, Chicago Cultural Center.
251
Elizabeth (Lee) Kelley to Melissa Harris, “Peace Tower - Chicago,” April 26, 2007.
130
for visitors to step back and see the panels hung on the middle row.
252
Independent critic Jason
Foumberg classifies the Peace Tower as yet another example of outdated idealism, and describes
the installation as “a collection of two-foot square panels, essentially protest signs, assembled
along a fancy scaffolding.” He derides the Tower further asserting “Snubbing art-world tradition
of delicately spaced art in a white box gallery, The Peace Tower stylistically emulates a
community-center-type art show, a public forum or the community bulletin board.” Foumberg
also criticizes the Tower in that “It’s a new war but the model for protest remains the same,” and
that museum reenactments of the Tower end up with “protest like a memory wrapped in a soft
piece of linen.” He concludes with even more scathing criticism: “The Peace Tower, like the
children-holding-hands logo, is coming to symbolize the most basic act of community-based
organization. Sticking together is something we learned how to do in kindergarten, and to
remember it is to stir sweet memories packed with polite armor.”
253
Although Foumberg’s
acerbic assessment lacks nuance, he draws attention to the repetitiveness of the Peace Tower;
now having been reenacted twice, its form—steel “scaffold,” an open call for participation, and
two-foot by two-foot panels—is beginning to seem formulaic.
In January 2012, the fourth, and to date the most recent, Peace Tower was erected as part
of the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival. Standing for the duration of
the eleven-day festival, January 19–29, 2012, the Tower was reenacted within the context of
other works of performance art from the 1960s and 1970s. Some works, such as James Turrell’s
Burning Bridges at Pomona College, were precise reenactments of the original performances.
Suzanne Lacey reenacted her series on rape, Three Weeks in May (1977), but adapted it for a
contemporary context, as indicated by its new title, Three Weeks in January: End Rape in Los

252
Philip Berger, “Art and Design,” Time Out Chicago, July 19, 2007.
253
Jason Foumberg, “Making Peace,” New City, July 7, 2007.
131
Angeles (2012). Other performances were inspired by works from the 1960s, such as Tirs:
Reloaded, which reimagined Nikki de Saint Phalle’s “shooting paintings” from 1960s.
Glenn Phillips of the Getty Research Institute and Lauri Firstenberg of LAXART co-
directed the Festival and selected projects from a large body of proposals. Phillips explained that
the overall concept of the Festival was to present an inventory of all the ways that it might be
possible to restage a work, ranging from precise replication of all details of a past performance,
to loosely reimagining works, with the original event being inspirational rather than an exact
model.
254
Although the Festival focused on performance art, after receiving promising proposals
for public art projects, the organizers decided to go beyond the parameters of performance.
Among the public art installations were Judy Chicago’s Sublime Environment, an interpretation
of her 1968 dry-ice environment that was originally made with Lloyd Hamrol and Eric Orr, and
Willie Herrón’s mural, East of No-West, which represented Asco’s 1972 performance, Walking
Mural. The PST Peace Tower should have occupied a liminal space between public art and
performance, with interactive events organized in relation to the Tower, but its performance-
based programming fell to the wayside as the project continued.
The Tower’s reenactment was first proposed by the Getty, which held documentation of
the original in its archive and knew that a survey of Los Angeles in the 1960s could not omit a
project as significant as the Peace Tower. The new Tower was primarily curated by Cesar
Garcia, then Senior Curator of LAXART. Similarly to all previous versions of the Tower, there
was a new call to artists to contribute panels, disseminated through targeted emails (Fig. 2.14).
Emblazoned with the headline, “A CALL TO THE ARTISTS OF LOS ANGELES from Mark di
Suvero on the occasion of the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival,” the

254
Glenn Phillips, interview by Karen Huang, September 21, 2015.
132
call includes a black-and-white reproduction of the photograph of the Tower’s sign, “STOP
WAR in VIETNAM” with the smaller torn “Artists’ Protest Tower” sign leaning against it on the
ground. This image calls to mind the original Tower’s political goals as well as the controversy
its anti-war message generated, with the torn sign functioning as an index of those altercations
when the Tower’s construction began. This particular call, emailed directly to individual artists
in 2011, reuses the language of the original call for works poster, changing its emphasis by
capitalizing different words and phrases, as it boldly hails artists to seize this reenactment of the
Tower as an opportunity to protest “against ongoing and continuing war.” Like the original call,
it begins by declaring, “We artists, today, each day, attempt to summon creative energy in an
atmosphere POLLUTED with the crime and the moral decay that is the reality of war. / IT IS NO
LONGER POSSIBLE TO WORK IN PEACE. We call on 400 artists to help with the
construction of the Artists’ Tower of Protest.” It goes on to make a claim for visual art as a
natural method for protest, for “This action will make our VOICE BE HEARD as no debate, no
demonstration, no newspaper advertisement could. Here, we speak in the manner native to us as
artists.” What it chooses to use from the original call are statements that make reference to the
original Tower’s desire to draw attention to and to protest the Vietnam War but that are still open
to interpretation when it comes to which war or wars artists would want to protest today. It
acknowledges the formation of the Artists Protest Committee in May 1965, and concludes with a
paragraph that was not in the original call:
Today, we find ourselves in a historical moment that asks us to reflect on how much has
truly changed since 1965. As the war on terror lingers with NO END IN SIGHT, and
military interventions occur around the world daily, the construction of the Artists’
Tower of Protest is so much more a duty. This Tower asks us to reflect on what it means
133
to be an ARTIST-ACTIVIST; serving as an enduring reminder of the long-held tradition
of artists who speak out against injustice in the world.
255

Responses to this emphatic call for “artist-activists” were lackluster, as is evident in the number
of artists who failed to reply at all, as well as those who replied in the negative.
256
Additionally,
photographs of the installation show a sparse distribution of panels both on the Tower and on a
surrounding fence.
Although the completed Tower for PST stood as a static exhibition during the Festival, it
was conceived of as a more active part of the Festival, intended to generate dialogue about arts
activism and the history of Los Angeles art. In an early proposal for the project, there were four
programming initiatives included: to expand the Tower’s reach through academic partnerships;
integrate performances with the Tower installation; hold conversations or roundtables; and
promote West Hollywood community involvement.
257
Due to budgetary constraints and
logistical issues, performances and partnerships with West Hollywood were never realized, and
proposals for academic collaboration and public conversations were only partially accomplished.
In spring, 2011, while a teaching assistant for Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s UCLA course “Art as
Social Action,” Cesar Garcia incorporated the Peace Tower and performance art into his course
section. Conversations and roundtables were only conducted, Garcia explains, “to help generate
some new archival material [for the Getty Research Institute] about the project and this
iteration.” These dialogues were not open to the public, however, and documentation does not
yet appear to be available for researchers.
258

255
LAXART, “Call to Artists for The Artists’ Tower of Protest, Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art
Festival,” 2011, Files of Cesar Garcia.
256
LAXART, “Master List of Artists,” n.d., Files of Cesar Garcia.
257
LAXART, “Mark Di Suvero, Peace Tower: Proposals for Public Project in Conjunction with the Getty
Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival,” 2011, Files of Cesar Garcia.
258
Garcia wrote that there was significant documentation, including recorded interviews with Mark di Suvero and
other artists involved with the original Tower (Garcia’s/LAXART’s files have photographs of Irving Petlin and
Lloyd Hamrol in conversation, sitting before a wall that displays panels from the PST Tower). The conversations
134
In all materials—proposal, call to artists, PST website, and the Festival program
brochure—LAXART and the Getty referred to the PST Tower as a “re-staging” of Mark di
Suvero’s 1966 Peace Tower. Asked about this choice of terminology, Phillips explained that he
prefers the terms “re-staging” or “re-imagining” when redoing a work of art. For Phillips,
“reenactment” carries more negative connotations in popular usage due to its associations with
battle reenactment. He views reenactment as something that happens in a particular moment in
time and therefore needs to be witnessed in that moment. He describes James Turrell’s Burning
Bridges as perhaps the most relevant instance of “reenactment,” as an ephemeral performance
that attempted to re-create in precise detail the original sequence of events. For example, when
Burning Bridges was performed in 1966, fire engines showed up on the scene because citizens
thought the building was actually on fire and called 9-1-1; because this happened in the original
event, even though it was unplanned, Turrell insisted on getting the West Hollywood fire
department to participate in the reenactment for the 2012 Festival. Acknowledging that Turrell’s
reenactment was “precise past the point of productivity,” Phillips describes this type of
reenactment as nearly turning a work of performance art back into theatre, which is defined by
repetition.
259
In contrast, for Phillips, “re-staging” or “re-imagining” are meant to serve as more
flexible catchall categories which encompass the re-do of a performance or an event where
details do not necessarily need to remain the same. In his estimation, if something is re-staged it
can refer to a static object that is constructed and then remains in place for a period of time, such

were conducted and recorded specifically for archiving, without an audience. Garcia believes the GRI holds the
documentation. With regard to the lack of related performances, the Tower’s installation required extensive
engineering and structural support that wasn’t previously accounted for, and costs associated with making the site
available for people to enter (security, safety issues, etc.) made a program onsite difficult to realize. Cesar Garcia to
Karen Huang, “Email Correspondence with Cesar Garcia,” December 21, 2015.
259
Rebecca Schneider explains that Richard Schechner has repeatedly positioned performance against theatricality,
with theatricality producing imitation whereas performance presented the “actual.” Schneider, Performing Remains:
Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, 125.
135
as the Peace Tower, or it can be a performance that is re-done. As such, Phillips’s
characterization of re-staging is similar to my definition of reenacting. On the spectrum of “re-
stagings” in the Festival, Phillips states that the Tower probably fell somewhere in the middle
with regard to how true to the original it was.
260

When asked how he would define reenactment and whether he viewed the PST Tower as
a reenactment, the curator of the Tower installation, Cesar Garcia, equivocated, saying that his
definition of reenactment has evolved and that it changes based on context. He describes the
understanding of reenactment within the PST Festival as one focused on bringing to life works
from the 1960s and 1970s that mostly were only known through still images or word of mouth.
Garcia alleges the project was driven by an “archival fever” on the part of the Getty Research
Institute. For the PST Tower, Garcia was interested not so much in creating a faithful
reenactment or re-creation, but more in thinking about “what that particular moment meant, how
that project evolved from it, art that was informed and inspired by it, and if that were to happen
now, what could staging this piece again tell us, not only about what current political concerns
might be, but also how it could throw light on artists’ relationships to activism today.” Garcia
hoped the call would draw out responses that would map out what artists today found urgent to
address, such as the banking industry, student loan debt, and so on. Garcia says the opening for
the Tower was not as well attended as he would have hoped, and the Tower felt very symbolic
rather than having the activist function of its original iteration. He states astutely that “the Tower
has become an interesting litmus test” for how engaged artists seem to be with current events.
261

260
Phillips, interview.
261
Cesar Garcia, interview by Karen Huang, August 11, 2015.
136
“Painters are lousy politicians”: The Parameters of Political Art
The popular narrative of the original Artists’ Tower of Protest, recounted at the time of
the 2006 Biennial, typically described it as an “effective” protest because it was public; it
provoked controversy and public outrage; and it showed hundreds of artists cooperating to
protest the Vietnam War despite the belief that Los Angeles was an apolitical place and that
artists there were not interested in political art. But in fact the 1966 Tower had already provoked
skeptical reactions in its own time. In the Los Angeles Times, on February 22, 1966, Art
Seidenbaum not only asks if the Peace Tower is good or bad art, but he also queries, “Will this
Tower persuade people or not? And which way?” Seidenbaum goes on to assert, “As a political
strategy, the tower is a lousy idea, a real vote-loser in all probability.” His criticism damns the
efforts of artists in making political statements, pointing out that, as is often the case with
political protest, the Tower would only appeal to those who were already anti-war and would
more likely stir up anger because “the sight of bearded men and weird collage still functions as a
red cap waved before an enraged public…This is precisely why painters are lousy politicians,
why their normal inclinations are to hole up and do their howling in private, why they refuse to
accept the everybody[sic] standards instead of fomenting personal, often futile revolutions.”
262

Forty years later, in his dissertation on the application of Brechtian politics in the art of
Martha Rosler, Hans Haacke, and Yvonne Rainer, Philip Glahn addresses the issue of how
politics and art relate, arguing that the original Tower was ineffective as political art, for it
returned to “outmoded forms of artistic expression, sloganeering and simplified agit-prop.”
263
In
contrast to the Brechtian model of dialectic, resistance, and estrangement, Glahn claims that the

262
With “collage” Seidenbaum is referring to the makeshift walls of panels around the Peace Tower. Art
Seidenbaum, “Peace Tower: Monument to Protest, Anti-Protest,” Los Angeles Times (1923-Current File), February
22, 1966, sec. PART IV.
263
Philip Glahn, “Estrangement and Politicization: Bertolt Brecht and American Art, 1967-79” 2007, 69.
137
Tower failed in 1966 because it was simplistic in its message, and because it failed to integrate
form and content. That is to say, Glahn takes issue with the participating artists’ aestheticizing of
politics. Employing Therese Schwartz’s 1971 Art in America article on the Tower, Glahn points
out how on the one hand not all of the panels included were examples of protest, and on the
other, some artists presented panels that were unlike their usual artworks so as to fit into some
idea of what was appropriate protest art. Consequently, some artists made panels that presented
blatant political messages in ways that had nothing in common with their typical representational
styles. Glahn chides this as a separation between “the artist and his political opinion” that leads
to the production of political art that is “intellectually and artistically simplistic.”
264

Lucy Lippard, who was involved in this style of activist art both as a curator and a critic,
offers in retrospect, in a more nuanced way than Glahn, a comment on how the roles of artists in
political protest tend to be reactionary or supportive rather than avant-garde:
While artists are never the vanguard of political movements, once they are swept into
action they can be valuable allies…Even on the Left, where most activist art comes from,
there is a tendency to dismiss its effectiveness, to consider the arts as window dressing,
useful only for fund-raising. In a sense this is true; art often reflects rather than leads
social agendas. Most images may not be ‘worth 1000 words’ but sometimes they can
operate parallel to rhetorical texts and dense information barrages, providing jolts to
embedded opinions. Art is the wildcard in many a fixed game.
265

Lippard allows for the possibility that activist art can awaken viewers by “providing jolts.” She
suggests that activist art aims to promote real change, but there are many ways that art can
function, and there are even more ways to categorize art with an explicit political motivation.

264
This quote is specifically about the Collage but Glahn lumps the Collage and the Tower together as agitprop in
this discussion. Ibid., 67.
265
Lucy Lippard, “Time Capsule,” in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, ed. Will Bradley and Charles Esche
(London; New York: Tate Pub. : In Association with Afterall ; Distributed in the United States and Canada by Harry
N. Abrams, 2007), 410.
138
Some clarification of the terms of “public art,” “political art,” “activist art,” and
“community-based art” are in order if this chapter is to interrogate why the reenacted Tower was
seen as problematic. As I have already begun to suggest, how artists define “political art”
changed during the four decades between the original Peace Tower and its 2006 reenactment.
Will Bradley describes the art of the 1960s as primarily responding to revolutionary ideologies in
a few distinct ways. Stating that “Active revolutionary movements had little or no interest in the
bourgeois art world,” Bradley explains how one expectation of art was that it should serve as
propaganda for revolutionary ideals, with Emory Douglas’s posters produced for the Black
Panther Party being an example of this practice.
266
Another tactic of artists was “the enactment of
new social relationships under the utopian sign of art,” as was the case with performance groups
such as the San Francisco Diggers.
267

Francis Frascina, who has written the most comprehensive account of the 1966 Peace
Tower, delineates the ambivalence about the Tower in its own time, and how even contributing
artists had questions about its significance as a political protest. Immediate response to the
Tower, in the form of visitors and local television and radio reports, were far more plentiful than
reports in national newspapers and journals.
268
Although Philip Leider, then editor of Artforum,
was publicly supportive of the Artists’ Protest Committee and Artists and Writers Protest, and
Charles Brittin sent color transparencies of the Tower to Artforum, an article never
materialized.
269
With regard to participating artists in the Tower, Ad Reinhardt submitted a
panel, painted blue, with the words NO WAR written on it, but in a radio interview broadcast on

266
Will Bradley, “Introduction,” in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, ed. Will Bradley and Charles Esche
(London; New York: Tate Publishing in association with Afterall; Distributed in the United States and Canada by
Harry N. Abrams, 2007), 17.
267
Ibid., 18.
268
Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 68.
269
Frascina says that Life magazine also photographed the Tower, but then did not publish an article on it. Ibid., 85.
139
June 13, 1967, Reinhardt stated that political art is ineffective, and that if an artist wants to
protest, he should do so “as a human being. There’s no way they can participate as an artist
without being almost fraudulent or self-mocking about what they’re doing.”
270
Similarly, Hans
Haacke, who contributed a panel to the original Tower as well as to the 2006 Tower, wrote a
letter to Jack Burnham in April 1968, following the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.:
The event pressed something into focus that I have known for long but never realized so
bitterly and helplessly, namely, that what we are doing, the production and the talk about
sculpture, has no relation to the urgent problems of our society. Whoever believes that art
can make life more humane is utterly naïve…Not a single napalm bomb will not be
dropped by all the shows of ‘Angry Arts’. Art is utterly unsuited as a political tool.
271

Haacke and Reinhardt, in retrospect, distinguish art from the general concerns of humanity. In
contrast to these demoralized accounts of political art’s inefficacy, Frascina claims that the Peace
Tower, along with The Collage of Indignation (1967) served as a model for members of the Art
Workers’ Coalition and Artists and Writers Protest when they were searching for ways to address
their outrage over the My Lai massacre, which had occurred on March 16, 1968 and became
public knowledge in November 1969.
272
The Tower exemplified the importance of forming a
community of artists within the anti-war movement. It also demonstrated what Frascina calls
“transgressive” politics, for its form of anti-war protest provoked outrage and physical attacks,
and as such, was perhaps beyond the scope of mainstream press more interested in mere
sensationalism.
273

270
Quoted in Ibid., 81.
271
Afterall and Hans Haacke, “Extract from Letter to Jack Burnham,” in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader,
ed. Will Bradley and Charles Esche (London; New York: Tate Pub. : In Association with Afterall ; Distributed in the
United States and Canada by Harry N. Abrams, 2007), 174.
272
The Collage of Indignation was part of the event Angry Arts Week, which was essentially a week-long Anti-War
Happening. The Collage was a giant wall of painting, drawing, and text dominated by slogans such as “Hump War”
(Nancy Graves) and “Johnson’s Filthy War.” These blunt expressions of anger stood in place of the contributing
artists’ usual styles. Francis Frascina, “Meyer Schapiro’s Choice: My Lai, Guernica, MOMA and the Art Left, 1969-
70,” Journal of Contemporary History 30, no. 3 (July 1, 1995): 493.
273
Frascina, Art, Politics, and Dissent, 96.
140
In September 1970, Artforum published a symposium on “The Artist and Politics,”
wherein the magazine printed artists’ responses to the following prompt:
A growing number of artists have begun to feel the need to respond to the deepening
political crisis in America. Among these artists, however, there are serious differences
concerning their relations to direct political actions. Many feel that the political
implications of their work constitute the most profound political action they can take.
Others, not denying this, continue to feel the need for an immediate, direct political
commitment. Still others feel that their work is devoid of political meaning and that their
political lives are unrelated to their art. What is your position regarding the kinds of
political action that should be taken by artists?
274

At that moment, many of the short statements from artists still supported political art as a logical,
if somewhat limited, response to war. Donald Judd, who had contributed a panel to the Tower in
1966, wrote a long, thoughtful response to this prompt wherein he addresses his reservations
about political art and the ways in which he has acceded to politics. He states that his “attitude of
opposition and isolation” changed over the last five years “in reaction to the events of the fifties:
the continued state of war, the destruction of the UN by the Americans and the Russians, the
rigid useless political parties, the general exploitation and both the Army and McCarthy.”
275
Judd
argues that everyone needs to be involved in politics, otherwise “someone else will decide
everything.” To protest the Vietnam War, he acquiesced to marching “in the first Fifth Avenue
parade and I hate group activities (Ad Reinhardt was the only artist I recognized).”
276
Even
though Judd believes that “art may change things a little, but not much,” it is important to act.
Irving Petlin, in his response, asserted that he would give the same advice to artists and other
individuals alike:
By continuing waves of strikes, calls, interruptions, demands, non-cooperation, sabotage,
resistance, by no business as usual anywhere, by groups, grouplets, individuals closing
things down, opening them up, by making the normal full of surprise, the ordinary

274
“The Artist and Politics: A Symposium,” Artforum 9, no. 1 (September 1970): 35.
275
Ibid., 36.
276
Ibid., 37.
141
unexpected, the typical unknown, until nothing can be counted upon to be what it is. To
spread out and educate and inform all those who would listen, that we as a nation carry a
terribly violent seed in the 20
th
century that must be resisted here at home in its home and
place.
277

Four years after the making of the Peace Tower, Petlin still advocated for active protest in the
streets.
In 1971, in her Art in America article “The Politicalization of the Avant-Garde,” Therese
Schwartz characterized “effective” protest as that which “made its point clearly, was imaginative
and forceful, and demanded and received official involvement, from the granting of permission
to the final clean-up.”
278
Schwartz stated that artists in the mid-1960s were still employing
protest methods from the 1930s: “protest shows, benefit exhibitions, posters, signed statements,
etc.” which describe precisely the tactics of the APC. She says that this might have been due to
the influence of Abstract Expressionism, which had its social roots in the 1930s. But by the end
of the 1960s, “The style of protest changed, and it became hip, cool, often anti-art, as many of
the younger avant-gardists became involved. Art, traditional object-art, would no longer be used
to carry the message. Artists would put themselves where their art had been. This coincided with
conceptualist polemics against the survival of the art-object.”
279
The Tower followed the old
method that produced a concrete object as its apex.
In 1984, Lucy Lippard addressed how, in that present moment, politics “seems to imply
‘radical’ politics.” Lippard criticizes artists who study Marxist theory but then are incapable of
applying Marxism to the capitalist society in which they work. She acknowledges that “political
art also means community organizing and development, working with people to whom art would

277
Ibid., 38.
278
Schwartz, “The Politicalization of the Avant-Garde,” 100. The example of effective protest Schwartz describes is
Tosun Bayrak’s “environment” exhibit.
279
Ibid.
142
normally mean nothing, working with them in their own rather than in an art context.” She also
gives credit to one who may not make explicitly political artwork “but who supports the left,
gives to benefits, works for feminism or artists’ civil rights—an artist whose consciousness is
raised.”
280
Lippard asserts, “Political art doesn’t have to have political subject matter to have
political effect, so long as political awareness is a motivation.”
281
Her emphases on community
formation and political ideals rather than art objects encompassing political subject matter are a
notable evolution in this historiography of political art. Writing in 1985 on the relationship
between artists and politics, Dore Ashton emphasizes that artists are also citizens, and “In times
of social upheaval, public events affect the lives of everyone, and artists are no exception.”
282

Ashton eloquently explains, “If we think in terms of public events, instead of politics, and acts of
imagination, instead of art, we can understand better the persistence of what is called political
art, or protest art, or art of social conscience.” She highlights that American artists produced
protest art such as the Peace Tower during the 1960s because they were horrified by current
events, and rather than being confined as matters of politics, these issues implicated all of
humanity.
283
Ashton’s and Lippard’s declarations stand in opposition to earlier statements from
Haacke and Reinhardt that corralled artists away from regular citizens and assumed artists
occupied an ivory tower in society.
Suzanne Lacy coined the phrase “new genre public art” in the 1990s to describe public
art that consisted of more than simply sculpture or an installation placed in public space. Integral
to “new genre public art” was a need for engagement and an exploration of relationships between

280
Lucy R Lippard, “What, Then, Is the Relationship of Art to Politics?,” in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for
Social Change (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984), 30.
281
Ibid., 33.
282
Dore Ashton, “Artists and Politics, Politics and Art,” Social Text, no. 12 (October 1, 1985): 76.
283
Ibid., 76–77.
143
the artist and an audience: “All art posits a space between the artist and the perceiver of the
work, traditionally filled with the art object. In new genre public art, that space is filled with the
relationship between artist and audience, prioritized in the artist’s working strategies.”
284
Lacy
goes on to explain that “the connection between an activist view of culture and new genre public
art had been forged during the Vietnam War protests of the late sixties by U.S. artists who were
in turn influenced by political activists.”
285

During the rise of new genre public art, Nina Felshin was distinguishing between political
art and activist art, characterizing political art as more passive and more object-oriented than
activist art. She writes:
Activist art, in both its forms and methods, is process- rather than object- or product-
oriented, and it usually takes place in public sites rather than within the context of art-
world venues. As a practice, it often takes the form of temporal interventions, such as
performance or performance-based activities, media events, exhibitions, and installations.
Much of it employs such mainstream media techniques as the use of billboards, wheat-
pasted posters, subway and bus advertising, and newspaper inserts to deliver messages
that subvert the usual intentions of these commercial forms.
286

Thus activist art is a public, process-based practice that often interrupts aspects of everyday life.
Political art, in contrast, may be circumscribed by boundaries of the art world (such as a
museum’s physical walls or even simply museum sponsorship) and tends to be more focused on
a finished product. Felshin goes on to emphasize how integral public comprehension and
participation are to activist art and makes the point that simply placing political art in a public
space does not transform it into activist art.
287
Applying Felshin’s definitions, the original Peace
Tower functioned as activist art by disturbing the political climate at the intersection on the

284
Suzanne Lacy, “Introduction: Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys,” in Mapping the Terrain: New
Genre Public Art (Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press, 1995), 35.
285
Lacey cites Lucy Lippard’s A Different War to support her argument that public art and political activism began
to be intertwined in response to the Vietnam War. Ibid., 26.
286
Nina Felshin, But Is It Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 10.
287
Ibid., 16.
144
Sunset Strip and introducing another source of aggression and violence between hawks and
doves. The reenactments of the Tower at the Whitney Biennial and at the Chicago Cultural
Center would then fall squarely into the category of political art, because their sponsorship by
and locations within the arts institution limited their impact in public space.
In 2001 Grey Room published the conversation, “Every Form of Art Has a Political
Dimension,” in which Rosalyn Deutsche, Branden W. Joseph, and Thomas Keenan interviewed
political theorist Chantal Mouffe and discussed notions of “the political” and “politics.”
Deutsche and Mouffe agree that all forms of artistic practice have a political dimension, and that
by labeling any art “political art” it problematically asserts that other art not labeled as such is
free from politics. Mouffe follow conservative political theorist Carl Schmitt in arguing:
“The political” is the dimension of antagonism—the friend/enemy distinction. And, as
Schmitt says, this can emerge out of any kind of relation. What I call ‘politics,’ on the
other hand, is the ensemble of discourses and practices, institutional or even artistic
practices, that contribute to and reproduce a certain order. These are always in conditions
that are potentially conflictual because they are always informed by, or traversed by, the
dimension of “the political.”
288

Mouffe is inspired by Schmitt’s theorization of the political as an antagonistic relationship, but
she moves beyond Schmittian antagonism to develop a model she calls “agonistic pluralism,”
wherein adversaries are able to find a common symbolic space, which in the United States “is the
allegiance to the ethico-political principle of liberal democracy—liberty and equality for all—
even though we are going to have different interpretations of these principles…” By contrast, “in
an antagonistic relation there is no symbolic space in common.”
289
There is also confrontation in
a vibrant, political public sphere, but in agonistic pluralism, those confrontations are what drive
dialogue and enliven democratic ideals. Mouffe’s “agonistic pluralism” occurs within a pluralist

288
Chantal Mouffe et al., “Every Form of Art Has a Political Dimension,” Grey Room, no. 2 (January 1, 2001): 99.
289
Ibid., 124.
145
public sphere and assumes that people are motivated by their “passions,” an understanding that
breaks from Jurgen Habermas’s conception of the public sphere as a place for rational consensus.
Habermas’s vision of the public sphere has been analyzed by scholars over the course of the past
few decades, many of whom highlight it as an ideal or “idealized construction” rather than
reality.
290
Miwon Kwon suggests, however:
in the face of balkanized identity politics…and the homogenizing effects…wrought by
the intensities of late capitalism’s mass mediated spectacle culture…it might be useful
not to throw out Habermas’s vision of the bourgeois public sphere so readily. The fantasy
of a public sphere, where one might bracket, temporarily, one’s private, personal interests
to imagine a collective identification, a different sort of intimacy—not for affirmation,
consensus, or unification (not a self-same identification)—seems more important than
ever. Such an effort to imagine a democratic public sphere anew is necessarily an
exercise in abstraction, and the (art) work to be done seems to be located in the space of a
coming together of this different sort of intimacy and publicity.
291

Kwon assesses Habermas’s public sphere as idealized but useful, unlike Mouffe’s insistent break
from Habermas’s rational consensus. In spite of this difference of position, Kwon’s hope for
“collective identification” that is distinct from “affirmation, consensus, or unification” paces
alongside Mouffe’s goal for agonistic pluralism, which results in collectivity if not agreement.
Mouffe asserts that people act politically according to their “passions,” and that collective
identification arises with these shared political actions.
Aligning with Mouffe’s understanding of agonistic pluralism and the political as a
collective identification, the Peace Tower can be understood as a form that is meant to engage
with this collective understanding of the political, one in which agonism foments dialogue as part

290
Rosalyn Deutsche describes Habermas’s conception of the public sphere as “homogenizing,” for it did not allow
the participation of nonbourgeois groups, and for its presumption that there could be a “singular, unified public
sphere that transcends concrete particularities and reaches a rational—noncoercive—consensus.” Rosalyn Deutsche,
Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Chicago, Ill.; Cambridge, Mass.: Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in
the Fine Arts; MIT Press, 1996), 58, 287–288.
291
Miwon Kwon, “Public Art as Publicity,” in In the Place of the Public Sphere?, ed. Simon Sheikh (Berlin:
b_books, 2005), 30–31.
146
of confrontation, and through which collective identification comes to shape collective
memories. Mouffe’s investment in art as agonistic practice is significant, particularly for
analyzing a project such as the Tower, which was meant to function agonistically in its original
conception. The political conflicts its creators engendered were what made the Tower notable.
Writing about the construction of the Peace Tower at the end of January 1966, Art Berman
acknowledged how the Tower’s creators anticipated animosity and potential violence against
themselves and vandalism against the Tower. Berman wrote, “The committee, anticipating
opposition, plans to surround its tower with a fence and keep a guard posted around the clock.”
Furthermore, even in the call for panels, the committee had written, “Each artist must accept the
possibility of (his painting’s) destruction by hostile groups. The reality of such a possibility
makes the construction of the tower so much more a duty…It is no longer possible to work in
peace.”
292
Although the Peace Tower was conceived of as a call for peace, its makers were fully
aware that its production would incite aggression toward protesters. By encouraging public
debate, the 1966 Tower hoped to generate more dialogue about the problems of the Vietnam War
and force individuals to identify collectively with this issue, no matter if they were hawks or
doves. Petlin asserted that the original Peace Tower instigated passionate reactions from veterans
who found it anti-patriotic and consequently fomented violence between those detractors of the
Tower and its defenders. He then lamented that the reenacted Tower was far less provocative,
and the mere fact of the museum’s permission, by funding, coordinating, and giving space to
erect the reenactment, rendered the Tower ineffective.
293
The founders of the Tower emphasized
that its presence could prove antagonistic to war hawks; I view their emphasis on antagonism as
representing latent, perhaps not fully-developed ideals of what Mouffe calls agonistic politics.

292
Berman, “Art Tower Started as Vietnam Protest.”
293
Petlin, interview.
147
Mouffe eschews the category of political art by instead arguing that artists can participate
in agonistic pluralism by making “critical art,” of which there are four kinds:
There is the kind of work that more or less directly engages critically with political
reality, such as that of Barbara Kruger, Hans Haacke or Santiago Sierra. Then there are
artworks exploring subject positions or identities defined by otherness, marginality,
oppression or victimization….Thirdly, there is the type of critical art which investigates
its own political condition of production and circulation such as that of Andrea Fraser,
Christian Phillipp Mueller or Mark Dion. We can also distinguish art as utopian
experimentation, attempts to imagine alternative ways of living: societies or communities
built around values in opposition to the ethos of late capitalism. Here we find for instance
the names of Thomas Hirschhorn (Bataille Monument), Jeremy Deller (Battle of
Orgreaves) or Antony Gormley (Asian Field). What makes all of these very diverse
artistic practices critical ones is that, albeit in different ways, they can be seen as
agonistic interventions in the public space.
294

The examples Mouffe provides for “critical art” also fall into the expansive category of “social
practice” or “socially engaged art.” Encompassing artmaking within experimental visual art,
performance art, and social movements, social practice makes the combination of aesthetics and
politics its primary goal and gained increased prominence in art historical scholarship in the early
2000s, with texts by Claire Bishop, Grant Kester, and Shannon Jackson.
295
Artist Pablo Helguera
proposes that “what characterizes socially engaged art is its dependence on social intercourse as
a factor of its existence.”
296
He goes on to highlight the distinction between social practice and
relational aesthetics, explaining that art or aesthetics are no longer presented as integral in the
new formation of the term. None of the conceptions of the Peace Tower fit the model of social
practice. Social interaction, although anticipated, was not inherent to the Tower. Also, the Tower

294
Chantal Mouffe, “Art and Democracy: Art as an Agonistic Intervention in Public Space,” in Art As a Public
Issue: How Art and Its Institutions Reinvent the Public Dimension (Rotterdam; Amsterdam; New York: NAi
Publishers, 2008), 12–13.
295
Shannon Jackson, “Social Practice,” Performance Research: Lexicon Special Issue, September 2006, 113–18.
296
Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art, 2.
148
was largely aesthetic, with emphasis placed on the finished Tower and painted panels as a
sculptural installation rather than on continued actions or political engagement.
The one aspect of the reenacted Towers that generated political conflict took place with
the Whitney Museum’s “Peace Tower By Night” event, which attempted to incorporate
Tiravanija’s relational art practice with protest art. On Saturday, April 29, 2006, the Whitney
hosted “Peace Tower By Night,” billed as “an evening of music, readings, and performance” that
was free and open to the public.
297
The invitation for the event listed Irving Petlin, Arnold
Mesches, John Weber, Elise Gardella for Paul Chan, DeeDee Halleck, Matthew Day Jackson,
Michael Ratner, Martha Rosler, Lynne Stewart, Apeshit, Japanther, John Giorno, Momus, New
Humans, and Nora York. It took place at the base of the Tower, in the museum’s café that looked
out onto the sculpture court, and it was conceived of as a way to activate the Tower’s political
goals. Organized in the spirit of the opening ceremony of the original Tower, which had included
speeches by Irving Petlin, Susan Sontag, and former Green Beret Master Sergeant Donald
Duncan, as well as a ceremonial releasing of six white doves, the Whitney’s event sought to
render the Tower more interactive and to promote public dialogue around it.
Unfortunately, by all accounts, Peace Tower by Night turned out be a powder keg that ignited
when a dissenting opinion was voiced. The event revealed the fissures within anti-war protest
(separated by generation and ideology), wherein individuals and groups disagreed as to how to
effectively convey ideas to protest war.
Participants’ memories of the event seem to be fuzzy, but the un-contested events of that
evening are as follows. The program, which was free and open to the public, opened with a
performance by a “blond lady” (Nora York, presumably), who sang Bob Dylan’s “Masters of

297
Whitney Museum of American Art., “Peace Tower by Night Email Invitation,” April 28, 2006.
149
War,” recorded in 1963 to express Dylan’s anger about the Vietnam War. This was followed by
speeches from some of the original Peace Tower activists, including Irving Petlin, Arnold
Mesches, and John Weber. Post-punk musician Momus (Nicholas Currie) then performed a set
of five songs, and his set was followed by more individual speeches. Then the controversy
apparently began with the set played by punk/metal band Apeshit, whose noisy, dissonant style
upset many attendees and prompted some to leave. But the program continued with a spoken
word poem by poet, activist, and performance artist John Giorno, titled “There Was a Bad Tree,”
which was followed by a performance from electro-blues band New Humans. As Japanther set
up for their performance, the well-known media activist DeeDee Halleck took the microphone
and announced, near tears, that the Iraqi filmmaker Faiza Al-Farij who was going to speak had
left early because she felt that the music “was the kind of music that American soldiers listen to
in their tanks.” Lead singer of Japanther, Ian Vanek, was outraged and shouted at Halleck,
“That’s fucked! What do you mean, the music they listen to in their tanks? We’re trying to set up
a fucking rock show here, and you tell us this is the music they listen to in tanks? That is so
fucked up! We support our troops in Iraq!”
298
After Vanek’s outburst, Halleck left the stage.
Some of the other speakers told Vanek that he should respect Halleck’s right to speak,
and the mood became very contentious. Liz Linden, Tiravanija’s studio assistant who had
coordinated the call for artist panels and the nighttime event, recalled that Tiravanija was present
during this commotion but he looked at her as if to say, this is your thing, handle it. Linden states
that she remembered she was forced to “shout down” the crowd to calm everyone and to get
them to listen to Martha Rosler.
299
Ivana Mestrovic, Di Suvero’s studio manager, recalls that the
event nearly ended in a fist fight, the debate became so heated.

298
Nicholas Currie, “Rocking and Awful,” IMOMUS, April 30, 2006, http://imomus.livejournal.com/191956.html.
299
Liz Linden, interview by Karen Huang, February 17, 2014.
150
Curator Chrissie Iles explained that the idea for the event came from Tiravanija and di
Suvero. She stated that they wanted the Tower to do something, they did not want it to be static;
rather, they hoped for it to be a catalyst. She described the planning of the event as being very
last-minute where they invited people on the spur of the moment; for example, they invited Yoko
Ono and Noam Chomsky who could not attend and participate on short notice. It was done in a
quick way in a “flurry of emails and responding. It was in the moment.” Iles said there was a real
sense of urgency: “Let’s do this and let’s do it now.” Iles attributed this to Tiravanija not being a
“historicizing person” but rather “an in the moment kind of person. He is interested in history
only as it stays in the present as something very active in the present.” She recalls that di Suvero
“took the mike and spoke very passionately” at the event.
300
By contrast, di Suvero and his
assistant Ivana seem to think that he did not speak at the event but merely attended it. Irving
Petlin remembers, however, that di Suvero did in fact speak, as did Hans Haacke. However,
Petlin’s memory differs from Chrissie’s narrative in that Petlin claims no representative of the
Whitney attended the event. Petlin recounted, “The night it was opened, not a single curator
showed up. I can’t prove this, but I think the Board told them they couldn’t show up.” He
continued, “There was no support from the Whitney curatorial staff themselves. It was not a
happy event for me.”
301

The tensions between generations, particularly between different protest styles which
could be attributed to generational distinctions and whether or not someone had participated in
anti-Vietnam War protest, arose in everyone’s narratives. From the perspectives of di Suvero and

300
Iles seems to be presenting Tiravanija’s viewpoint in the same way that Nicholas Bourriaud has defined relational
aesthetics, as practice that is not at all derived from the past but rather “It arises from an observation of the present
and from a line of thinking about the fact of artistic activity.” Chrissie Iles, interview; Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational
Aesthetics, (Collection Documents Sur L’art) (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002), 44.
301
Petlin, interview.
151
Petlin, those who were too young to have known the Vietnam War through personal experience
had a tendency to treat the subject of war in glib or ironic ways. In an interview with di Suvero
and Mestrovic, they addressed the divide between younger artists and the older artists who had
lived through the War. Referring to the bands that performed at the event, di Suvero said “the
young guys were making it into a hip-hop[sic] event, right?” Ivana stated, “there was a big gap
between [us when it came to] understanding what their sense of protest was.” Di Suvero
perceived some contributions to the Whitney’s Tower to be publicity stunts more than they were
an avenue for political protest. Furthermore, some of the younger contributors to the Tower used
humor or irony whereas for the older artists who had physically defended the original Tower
from vandalism, and who had known people who died in the War and seen others being thrown
into jail for protesting the War and participating in Civil Rights protests, protest was very serious
and sincere. Ivana said that one panel contributed by a young artist stuck in her memory because
it simply said “free beer,” and although there is nothing wrong with that, this type of humor
stood in stark contrast to how the original artists conceived of the Tower’s role.
302

Writing on his blog the day after the event, Momus (Nicholas Currie) described the
negative reaction to Apeshit’s performance as one that weeded out the weak: “They played a set
of screeching, jerky noise. I screwed in my earplugs, and noticed children in the room covering
their ears in dismay. The older people, the 60s veterans, also looked pained, and many of them
left. Basically all the frail people, the people who need the benign protection of other people, left
the room. The strong remained.” His narration takes a more diplomatic turn, however, after
recounting Vanek’s outburst toward Halleck. Currie claims:
[I] ran over to the fraught Halleck and told her that I thought she’d made a good and
important point. What does it mean to advocate peace using the textures, rhetorics and

302
Di Suvero and Mestrovic, interview.
152
semantics of war? How can you be into peace when you’re talking about fucking x and
smashing y? And what does it mean that a representative—the only representative—of
the people supposedly being helped by this evening’s events, the Iraqis, sensed a deeply
alienating menace and aggression in the music being played, and associated it with the
spirit of the occupation?
303

He does not share Halleck’s response, but a review of the evening published in Village Voice
states that the filmmaker Brandon Jourdan had Vanek make peace with Halleck at the end of the
evening.
304
Momus concludes his blog post by acknowledging what may have been an oversight
on the part of the Whitney: “The Whitney’s problem, in trying to assemble a 1960s-style
program combining peace speeches and music, is that rock music today comes from a subculture
that doesn’t celebrate peace. It comes from a dark, nihilistic place more in love with death than
life. Forty years ago that wouldn’t have been the case. The rock music of 1966 would have been
charged with Eros, not Thanatos.”
305
In essence, the Peace Tower by Night event ended up
demonstrating a clash between the agonists and those in favor of a more peaceful liberal
democracy.
The failures of the Peace Tower reenactments have been rectified, according to some
scholars and critics, by the more recent Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS). In a roundtable
on the topic “The Social Artwork,” Silvia Kolbowski, Matthew Friday, and David Joselit
discussed the division of “critical art” and political activism, and how art and nonart activism
were employed in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Joselit proposed that OWS got it right by
essentially propagating the message, “Don’t just critique, occupy,” an idea which Joselit says can
be applied to the art world: rather than just critiquing the institution, take it over and repurpose

303
Currie, “Rocking and Awful.”
304
Cortney Harding, “Give Noise a Chance,” Village Voice, May 9, 2006, http://www.villagevoice.com/music/give-
noise-a-chance-6418526.
305
Currie, “Rocking and Awful.”
153
it.
306
Along those same lines, Joselit credits the power of the Occupy Movement and historic sit-
ins (presumably referring to those of the 1950s and 1960s) with how they employ “duration and
the physical commitment of [their] participants.”
307

OWS gained traction, attracting protesters and getting empathetic press through a
combination of physical commitment and tension with local government. Beginning with a few
thousand activists occupying Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011, OWS garnered public
attention and encouraged protesters to march across the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1. Despite
the fact that demonstrators broke no laws, the New York Police Department arrested more than
700 individuals; law enforcement’s aggressive response to peaceful protesters forced OWS into
the public eye and made people more sympathetic toward the movement. On October 14, Mayor
Bloomberg was forced to call off his planned eviction of Occupy protesters from the Park due to
anticipated backlash that would attract more demonstrations. Public battles between civil protest
and police enforcement proved productive for proliferating the message of OWS.
308

On a smaller scale, the original Tower had utilized much of the same practices. The
physical commitment of the original Peace Tower has been acknowledged, from the active labor
of many participants in its construction, and particularly in its defense. For the original Tower,
the local press reported several times on the process of the Tower being erected, mostly to
address public controversy about its anti-war sentiments, but also to explain problems with
obtaining permits from the city. In these articles, the physical participation of its contributors
were described and occasionally photographed. All subsequent reenactments of the Tower lack
that element in the sense that there was not a public call for like-minded activists to assist in

306
“Roundtable: The Social Artwork,” OCTOBER 142 (Fall 2012): 78.
307
Ibid., 82.
308
Randy Shaw, The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, Second edition (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2013), 14–21.
154
building the Tower; there was only a request for artists to mail or bring panels to contribute.
Reenactment of the Peace Tower at the Whitney did not challenge the purposes of its site (the
museum safely remains an arbiter of aesthetic taste). The 2012 Tower at PST displayed panels
that protested alongside OWS, the most explicit of which made reference to Bank of America,
such as John T. Lange’s bleeding Bank of America logo (Fig. 2.15). However, the discourse
around the reenacted Towers had little in common with that of the more impactful OWS.
Kolbowski, arguing against Matthew Friday, asserts that Occupy’s contribution is its rendering
of “discourse as potentially activist.”
309
The success story of OWS was not one of getting official
response to formalized demands; in fact, OWS made no formal demands to Congress or banking
regulators. If they had, there would have been a danger of Occupy becoming simply a lobbying
group.
310
Instead, OWS created a national discourse around the issues of class and income
inequality. The production of discourse, more than the production of tangible results (such as
more anti-war protests, or the United States withdrawing troops from Afghanistan), is a crucial
component of any type of activism.

Memorial(s) for Anti-War Protest
What Kerwin Lee Klein calls the “memory industry,” a scholarly focus on intersections
between memory and history, began in the 1980s, inaugurated by the publication of Yosef
Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982) and Pierre Nora’s “Between
Memory and History” (1984).
311
Along with this investment in memory studies arose a new

309
“Roundtable: The Social Artwork,” 82.
310
Shaw, The Activist’s Handbook, 21.
311
Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations, no. 69 (January 1,
2000): 127.
155
wave of building public sites of memory: the museum, the memorial, and the monument.
312
This
boom in Western museums and memorials happened despite the fact that post-World War II,
monuments were looked upon unfavorably as aesthetically uninspired and ideologically suspect.
Andreas Huyssen suggests that monuments flourished in the 1980s and 1990s in response to the
acceleration of cultural, scientific, and technological innovation that altered physiological
perception, creating a flattening effect of geographical space and historical time. In place of
historical continuity or discontinuity, times and spaces were perceived as always readily
available in the present moment. Monuments may have been seen as a way to counteract that
immateriality with physical permanence.
313

Moving into the twenty-first century, memorials have become ubiquitous in American
life, and art historian Erika Doss posits that their proliferation arises from an urgent, collective
desire to archive public affect, or “physically expressed emotion.”
314
Doss’s attention to
corporeality with “affect” aligns with Huyssen’s earlier proposal that monuments battle the
immateriality of modern life. Interest in collective memories has been made manifest in recent
years through a diverse array of mediums, including figurative sculptures, temporary shrines,
public buildings, plaques, and Web sites. In the United States, all these types of commemoration
are described interchangeably as “memorials” or “monuments,” although Doss explains that
“memorial” is perceived more favorably, for “monument” is understood to be monolithic.
Essentially, both monuments and memorials recognize and preserve memories, typically

312
Andreas Huyssen, “Monuments and Holocaust Memory in a Media Age,” in Twilight Memories: Marking Time
in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 249–60; Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C.,
the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2009), 1–2. Savage explains that early in the history of the United States, monuments were viewed with suspicion,
but during the mid- to late-19
th
century, the first American boom in public monuments was taking place, and
monuments in this time were frequently viewed as populist.
313
Huyssen, “Monuments and Holocaust Memory in a Media Age.”
314
Erika Lee Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 15.
156
honoring people and/or historical events, but by the mid-twentieth century, the term “monument”
encompassed negative connotations. In a pluralist society, the traditional attributes of
monuments—“durability, solidity, dignity, large size, and fundamental emotional impact” came
to be perceived as retrograde.
315
Historian Kirk Savage articulates the problem of public
monuments as lying in their fixity—their inscriptions and imagery do not change over time—
which presents an artificial historical closure: “Traditionally, this means that monuments strip
the hero or event of historical complexities and condense the subject’s significance to a few
patriotic lessons frozen for all time.”
316

James Young acknowledges the perception of monuments as monolithic and static
entities by responding with his notion of the “countermonument.” A countermonument melds
public art and political memory, but it possesses contradictory qualities that monuments do not.
Whereas a monument aims to comfort, avoid controversy, endure over time without changing,
and remember history so that citizens are not individually burdened by memory, a
countermonument is provocative, can change or be ephemeral, invites interaction, and prompts
people to contemplate and remember the history it presents.
317

Presenting an alternative configuration for modern monuments, Mechtild Widrich posits
the “performative monument,” offspring of performance art and public art, with audience
participation being inherent in its form. In contrast to Young’s ephemeral countermonument,
Widrich’s performative monument is marked by temporality in that the work is produced
through its successive interactions with visitors. She gives as an example Maya Lin’s Vietnam

315
Mary McLeod, “The Battle for the Monument: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” in The Experimental
Tradition: Essays on Competitions in Architecture, ed. Hélène Lipstadt, Barry Bergdoll, and Architectural League of
New York (New York, N.Y.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1989), 115.
316
Savage, Monument Wars, 10.
317
James Edward Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 7–8.
157
Veterans Memorial (1982), which is always shown in photographs with a visitor tracing a name
on the granite wall, or being reflected in the stone as they contemplate the memorial. Due to
these pervasive representations of visitor engagement with the Veterans Memorial, Widrich
asserts, “In this sense the monument is also always a performance.” In addition to the
performative monument’s ability to engage subjects, Widrich argues for “their performative
force, the fact that through conventional gestures they effect changes in social reality.”
318
This
performative force derives from the performative speech-acts defined by J.L. Austin in How to
Do Things With Words, and Widrich finds that that “the contemporary monument does not ‘tell’
political facts, but engages audiences in forming new ones.”
319

These definitions of monuments, memorials, countermonuments, and performative
monuments all share concerns about authority, audience, and social relationships. Each version
of the Peace Tower engages with at least one of these categories, and by analyzing these
intersections, the political ramifications of protest art and reenactment can be rethought. Art
Seidenbaum referred to the original Peace Tower as a monument in 1966, with his article, “Peace
Tower: Monument to Protest, Anti-Protest,” in which he derides the Tower as a failure of
political strategy.
320
Yet it is evident that the original Tower partially followed the formula of
monumentality described above. For example, the Tower was staunchly vertical and large in
scale at 58-feet high; the walls of painted panels flanking it also added to its massive presence.
Even though the Tower’s skeletal frame appeared gangly, as we have seen, its creators famously
demonstrated the Tower’s physical durability by suspending an old automobile from it when the
city of Los Angeles questioned its structural integrity. The Tower was meant to make a strong

318
Mechtild Widrich, Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art, (Rethinking Art’s Histories);
Rethinking Art’s Histories (Manchester, United Kingdom ; New York: Manchester University Press, 2014), 9.
319
Ibid.
320
Seidenbaum, “Peace Tower.”
158
emotional impact on viewers, as indicated by its heartfelt dedication ceremony, the pointed
political messages illustrated on its painted panels, and the signed newspaper advertisements and
petitions that accompanied its presentation. Finally, the Tower was intended to become a
permanent fixture, albeit not in the vacant parking lot it occupied in the winter of 1966. Petlin
had hoped to relocate the Tower to the garden of the Pasadena Art Museum, where Walter
Hopps was acting director, but the Museum’s trustees would not agree to it. The Tower was then
offered to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Santa Barbara, which had a
grassy site appropriate for the Tower. Finally, the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington said
they would accept the Tower, but it was later decided that shipping it would be too much
trouble.
321
Rather than situating the Tower permanently, Petlin and di Suvero eventually had no
choice but to auction off the painted panels and to compress the metal structure into flat
“wafers.”
322

But despite similarities to traditional examples of the genre, its makers never intended for
the Tower to function as a monument. For one, the original Tower rejected the static quality that
was characteristic of traditional monuments. What was significant about the Tower of 1966 was
its presence as process. In 1966 Petlin conceived of the Tower as a live event that would need to
be contended with in its particular moment. Although it was only featured in local news media
and thus did not have an international presence, its construction, the obtaining of permits, and its
subsequent defense from vandals were documented by the Los Angeles Times, so that the Tower
seemed active, evolving, and engaged with various groups in Los Angeles. Unlike the “logic of
closure” ascribed to traditional public monuments that espoused patriotism after a finished event,
such as the Allied victory in World War II, the Peace Tower was meant to spark debates and

321
Schwartz, “The Politicalization of the Avant-Garde,” 99.
322
Grace Glueck, “Art Notes,” New York Times, April 10, 1966.
159
controversy about the current Vietnam War for the duration of its installation at the intersection
of Sunset and La Cienega.
323
In 1966, the Artists’ Tower of Protest was both a declaration of
anti-war sentiment and a call to arms for continued anti-war protests in an effort to end the
American war in Vietnam.
Although the 2006 reenactment was intended to be interactive, the aims of its primary
creators, Tiravanija and di Suvero, were never realized. John Tain examines the 2006 Tower as a
work by Tiravanija and thus aligned with the artist’s typical practice of relational aesthetics. Tain
argues that the 2006 Tower was meant to be a relational artwork, which would mean that it must
emphasize its presentness and whatever social relationships it can generate in its own moment.
This presentness is complicated by the fact that Tiravanija elected to reenact a historical project
that was linked to the Vietnam War. Asserting that Tiravanija’s presentation of the Tower is akin
in spirit to French historian Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory), Tain
describes the Whitney’s Tower as “a collective remembering, a re-activation, of the past
according to present needs,” rather than a static definition of history. Pierre Nora’s concept of
Lieux de mémoire includes physical sites, such as archives, monuments, or museums, as well as
intangible sites of memory such as national holidays and political polemics, explains Tain. For
Nora, memory is active and evolving, whereas history is a static reconstruction, and Tain asserts
that Tiravanija’s Tower (at least as the artist hoped it would be) is more accurately a process of
remembering.
324
Although Tain credits Tiravanija with re-activating the past, which is the belief
I also harbored early on in my research, I would now argue, instead, that Tain elucidates not
what the Tower actually achieved, but rather what Tiravanija (and di Suvero, although Tain
addresses his role very little) hoped that it would. For the most part, the 2006 Tower failed to

323
Savage, Monument Wars, 10.
324
Tain, “Peace Tower as Commonplace,” 177.
160
function as a lieu de mémoire in the spirit of Nora’s active, collective remembering but rather
approached a leaden monument, the kind feared by post-World War II iconoclasts. Or, as Travis
Diehl puts it, “Rather than a lightning rod, Peace Tower became a historical anchor; plucked
from its original moment, di Suvero’s sculpture was oddly gutted, lending the biennial a vague,
even decorative idealism.”
325

Another key factor—participation—aligns all versions of the Tower with the goals of a
countermonument, as described by Young, as well as with Widrich’s notion of the performative
monument. The original Tower aimed to incite viewers, either to encourage people to join in
anti-war protest, or to provoke inflammatory responses from supporters of the Vietnam War; its
invitation to participation was not simply one of cooperation. In its re-presentations, it also
engaged with collective memories of the Vietnam War—its original context—and the War on
Terror, which formed its new contemporary context, and it is this attempt at collectivity with
some part of a public that makes the reenactments notable.
The Tower, in every incarnation, was a participatory project. Although spearheaded by
Petlin and di Suvero, many local Los Angeles artists were instrumental in constructing the Tower
on-site, and hundreds of artists contributed panels in protest of the Vietnam War. Unlike a
traditional model of monument-making wherein the funding, design, and execution of a singular
monument was managed by a small interest group or a federal agency, the original Peace Tower
included many pieces and voices and lacked any centralized institutional support. The call for
works that took place each time the Tower was enacted was perhaps the most participatory
aspect of the project. The artists’ call was targeted each time toward specific artists, but also was

325
Travis Diehl, “Universal Steel: Mark Di Suvero, Occupy Wall Street, and the Artists’ Tower of Protest,” East of
Borneo, March 12, 2014, http://www.eastofborneo.org/articles/universal-steel-mark-di-suvero-occupy-wall-street-
and-the-artists-tower-of-protest.
161
open to contributions from artists who were not already connected to the organizers, as well as,
in the case of the Chicago reenactment, to war veterans, amateur artists, and the general public.
The call for works arguably aligned the Tower reenactments with community-based art.
Moreover, the engagement of viewers with the Tower would have been more participatory in
nature than was typical of monuments. Unlike the Washington Monument, for instance, which
was meant to make an impression from afar rather than to invite close examination, as pointed
out by Mary McLeod, the original Peace Tower would have attracted notice from passersby as a
roadside spectacle, but it would also have invited close looking at its individual protest panels.
326

The arrangement of the panels so that they formed tall walls zigzagging along the backside of the
Tower prompted viewers to walk past the Tower, to tilt their heads back, to scan their eyes up
and from left to right, and to walk along the length of the wall in order to see the abundance of
individual messages and images that had been contributed. By structuring the 1966 Tower and its
panels in this way, so that it encouraged intimate physical interaction and close looking, it
became anti-monumental.
Widrich’s theoretical model of the performative monument provides another way to
understand the original Tower’s encouragement of visitor engagement and participation.
Previously in this chapter, I analyzed the antagonistic aims of the Tower as a failed attempt at
agonism, as best defined by Chantal Mouffe. Now, I want to consider the Tower’s antagonistic
efforts in light of performative monuments, “which work by provoking public acts of
commemoration.”
327
I am referring here to the oft-repeated narrative of the Tower being
vandalized by individuals who were offended by its anti-war politics, and thus needing to be
defended by participating artists and supporters from the nearby community of Watts. The

326
McLeod, “The Battle for the Monument: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.”
327
Widrich, Performative Monuments, 34.
162
Tower’s historical and political significance was “constructed” by this clash just as much, if not
more so, than by its physical construction of metal and painted panels. Just as Lin’s Vietnam
Veterans Memorial is produced by its temporal interactions with visitors, the 1966 Peace Tower
was enacted and made significant by its temporal interactions with opponents and proponents
during the three and a half month-period when it was built and then stood to be viewed, attacked,
and defended. The performative components of the original Tower, for the most part, could not
be replicated with its reenactments. Nothing about the reenactments were changed over the
duration of their respective exhibitions, and no measurable changes in public political discourse
occurred as a result of the reenactments. The Tower as reenacted for the Whitney Biennial,
confined within the museum’s sculpture garden, lacked the capacity for public political
engagement. In this context, it became immobilized as an aesthetic object, and instead of
angering proponents of the Iraq War, it simply irritated art critics. And despite its ideological
connections to anti-war protest, it failed to generate new political actions or to encourage
commemoration of anti-Vietnam War protests. The indoor reenactment of the Tower in the
Chicago Cultural Center faced similar challenges. Although the Cultural Center was open to the
public, the enclosing of the Tower—which, in its shortened form, looked even more like a
scaffold—limited its public impact. Lastly, the PST reenactment, like the Whitney reenactment,
returned the Tower to an art world context, with the Tower being ensconced as just one aesthetic
event within an extensive program of Los Angeles performance art of the 1960s.
As is evident, reenactments of the Peace Tower operated contradictorily, in some ways
like a traditional monument and in other ways as a countermonument. In addition to the
countermonumental attribute of viewer engagement, the Peace Tower arguably became a
countermonument as it was reenacted repeatedly. Its repetition, each time restaged for a finite
163
amount of time, emphasizes the Tower’s ephemerality rather than the permanence for which the
original Tower strove and for which traditional monuments are known. The reenacted Tower
also functions as a countermonument by asking participants—panel contributors as well as
viewers—to remember the Vietnam War and the protests against it in light of recent American
wars.
To understand how a countermonument asks for engagement through its impermanence,
consider the Harburg Monument Against Fascism and for Peace (1985), designed by Jochen
Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz. A forty-foot-high, three-foot-square aluminum pillar coated with
soft lead, it stood in the commercial center of the blue-collar suburb of Harburg, Germany.
Viewers were invited to use the attached stylus to sign the column, and as the column became
covered with graffiti, it would be lowered into the ground in five-foot increments, until the
Tower eventually disappeared. The monument completed its planned vanishing act on November
10, 1993, and the site is now covered with a burial stone inscribed “Harburg’s Monument
Against Fascism.” Young explains this countermonument as functioning by “return[ing] the
burden of memory to visitors: now all that stands here are the memory-tourists, forced to rise and
to remember for themselves.”
328
Widrich disagrees with Young’s categorization of the Harburg
Monument, asserting instead that Gerz’s project was a performative monument, because without
the participation of citizens writing on the column, the project would not have functioned. The
public was conceived of as an integral part of the monument. Highlighting the public nature of
commemoration, Widrich asserts that this is what makes it politically relevant. The gesture of
commemoration, performed in public, can always be witnessed by others.
329

328
Young, At Memory’s Edge, 131.
329
Widrich, Performative Monuments, 167.
164
Another understanding of the Peace Tower reenactments and their processes of making is
the argument that by responding to the call for panels, the contributors were offering public acts
of commemoration for anti-war protest as it used to be, in the 1930s and then again in the 1960s,
with “protest shows, benefit exhibitions, posters, [and] signed statements” as the prominent
practices of social activism.
330
With the PST reenactment, the call for panels actually reproduced
imagery of the original Tower and reused the language of the original call for works, making
specific reference to the atrocities of the Vietnam War. It reads as a protest against contemporary
American politics, of course, but it also resounds as a lamentation for historic anti-war protest.
By asking contributors “to reflect on what it means to be an ARTIST-ACTIVIST,” the call
suggests a need to memorialize this elusive role. For example, Stephen Prina’s panel
commemorates the famous poster made by the Art Workers’ Coalition in 1970 which protested
the horrific My Lai Massacre, an event that was instrumental in turning American public opinion
against the Vietnam War.
On March 16, 1968, the United States 1
st
Battalion 20
th
Infantry Regiment arrived at the
village of My Lai, expecting to find Vietcong troops or sympathizers. Instead, the American
soldiers found a village full of unarmed Vietnamese civilians. Nevertheless, Lieutenant William
L. Calley ordered the troops to “take care of this group,” then clarified that he “wanted them
dead.” Lieutenant Calley and Private First Class Paul Meadlo then proceeded to lead the
massacre of several hundred civilians.
331
The American public only became aware of the My Lai
Massacre after Seymour Hersh’s first report was published by the Dispatch News Service on
November 13, 1969, and some of army photographer Sergeant Ron Haeberle’s photographs of
the massacre were published by The Plain Dealer, a small newspaper based in Cleveland, Ohio,

330
Schwartz, “The Politicalization of the Avant-Garde,” 100.
331
Seymour M. Hersh, “The Scene of the Crime,” The New Yorker, March 30, 2015, 53.
165
on November 20; Life magazine then picked up the story in its issue of December 5, 1969. The
AWC’s And babies? poster used Haeberle’s disturbing photograph of corpses of Vietnamese
civilians laying in a trench, and the “And babies?” caption originated from Mike Wallace’s
televised interview with Meadlo in November 1969 (Fig. I.12).
The AWC originally partnered with staff of the Museum of Modern Art to produce the
poster. After initially agreeing to support the project by securing paper donations and free
printing for 50,000 copies, MoMA backed out of their co-sponsorship due to the protestations of
the museum’s Board of Trustees. Bill Paley, the President of the Board of Trustees, and Nelson
Rockefeller insisted on maintaining a “boundary, however fictitious, between [politics] and
‘art’.” Francis Frascina explains that “Though they might operate at MoMA as they did in their
other areas of interest, the trustees wished to maintain the image that ‘art,’ museums and
galleries were a salvation from everyday life.”
332
Despite differences of ideology between the
AWC and MoMA’s board, the groups oddly agreed on there being a separation between politics
and art. Insisting that their poster was not art, the AWC wrote in a Letter to the Editor in the New
York Times, “It is a political poster, a documentary photograph treating an issue that no one, not
even the most ivory tower esthetic institution, can ignore.”
333
Beyond exposure of their political
project in the New York Times, distribution of the And babies? poster in the streets was
facilitated by sympathetic students and antiwar groups.
334

In contrast to the realism and gore of Haeberle’s photograph on the AWC poster, Prina
opted to eschew figurative imagery and instead to employ eye-catching colorblocking in hot

332
Francis Frascina, “Meyer Schapiro’s Choice: My Lai, Guernica, MoMA and the Art Left, 1969-70 - Part 2,”
Journal of Contemporary History 30, no. 4 (October 1, 1995): 708.
333
Frazer Dougherty, Hans Haacke, and Lucy Lippard, “Art Mailbag: Why MoMA Is Their Target,” New York
Times, February 8, 1970, sec. 2.
334
Bradford D. Martin, The Theater Is in the Street: Politics and Public Performance in Sixties America (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 149–150.
166
pink, purple, and fuchsia for his panel. Prina refers to the poster by employing its simple text
“And babies? And babies” (Fig. 2.16) An overlay of translucent red lettering states the dates
“69–70” and “03–?” again conjuring the connection between contemporary American wars and
the Vietnam War. Discordance between the panel’s vivid colors and its somber message attract
the viewer’s eye. Most significantly, together, the text and dating are reminiscent of an epitaph;
Prina’s panel functions as a tombstone for a once infamous political protest. Prina’s panel
referencing the My Lai Massacre and the AWC’s historic protest poster are emblematic of the
Peace Tower’s reenactments turned memorial. Despite all attempts to the contrary, repeated
reenactments of a once-powerful protest concluded not as a catalyst for activism, but as a
commemoration of protest itself.

167
CHAPTER 3

Re-Speaking Reenactment: Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project

On a sunny summer day in 2007, against an imposing backdrop of the Washington
Monument encircled by waving American flags, a young man proclaimed powerfully, “Most of
us grew up thinking that the United States was a strong but humble nation, that involved itself in
world affairs only reluctantly, that respected the integrity of other nations, and other systems, and
that engaged in wars only as a last resort…the incredible war in Vietnam has provided the razor,
the terrible, sharp, cutting edge that has finally severed the last vestige of the illusion that
morality and decency are the guiding principles of our foreign policy.” This young man’s name
was Max Bunzel, but these aggressive words were not his. Bunzel’s accusation of the
government’s wrongdoing was originally written and uttered April 17, 1965 by Paul Potter,
President of the Students for a Democratic Society, as part of the March on Washington to End
War in Vietnam. Artist Mark Tribe had hired Bunzel, a professional actor, to reenact Potter’s
speech at the original site of the March on Washington (Fig. 3.1). Potter’s critique of the United
States government resonated uncannily in 2007, for it conjured up issues surrounding the
nation’s contemporary War on Terror. The strangeness of this event in 2007—its confluence of
two distinct periods of political turmoil in the United States—resides at the heart of this chapter,
which explores how Tribe’s Port Huron Project activates history through re-speaking: in live
performances, as online video, and as art installations.
This chapter will demonstrate how re-speaking in Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project is a
form of interpellation that functions most efficiently under the auspices of “New Media,”
disseminated through Internet technology and communities. Ideological interpellation, as
explained by French philosopher Louis Althusser, refers to the recognition by an individual that
168
he is being summoned as a subject.
335
I assert that Tribe’s project interpellates the viewing
subject through a mode of communicative action that Jay Bolton and Robert Grusin have called
remediation.
336
Remediation is “where users borrow, adapt, or remix existing materials,
expressions, and interactions to create a continually expanding universe of innovative new works
and ideas.”
337
Hypermediacy and transparent immediacy are the two opposing yet
complementary strategies of remediation, with hypermediacy creating a surplus of visual
representation that draws the viewer’s attention to the medium, and transparent immediacy
attempting to render invisible the medium to immerse the viewer in the visual representation.
Hypermediacy and immediacy share an “appeal to authenticity of experience,” in using media’s
visibility or invisibility, respectively, in order to produce an experience where the viewer feels
connected to the objects represented.
338

Tribe employs remediation by borrowing historic protest speeches, adapting them as live
speeches in a new epoch, and remixing them as edited online videos and as dual-projection art
gallery installations in order to expand his audience’s understanding of New Left anti-war
sentiment and the United States’ recent interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The live speeches
and the edited reenactment videos posted online are examples of hypermedia, whereas his
immersive gallery installations utilize the logic of transparent media. Re-speaking in Port Huron
Project is only possible through its remixing of historic speeches into different mediums, thereby
making possible the hailing of new Subjects for future political engagement. Tribe’s application

335
Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (London and
New York: Verso, 2014), 190.
336
Bolter and Grusin, Remediation.
337
Leah A Lievrouw, Alternative and Activist New Media (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2011), 4.
338
Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 70–71.
169
of remediation combats how, in Martha Rosler’s words, color television coverage of the Vietnam
War made viewers “audience spectators rather than citizen participants.”
339

In addition to studying how these speeches are transformed through media, this chapter
will also look at their trajectories over time, from their archived primary sources to Tribe’s
reenactments, in order to address the ways in which these speeches have engaged audiences and
how their impact has evolved depending on time, location, and audience. Tribe’s orchestration of
re-speakings also addresses the significance of speech for advocating foreign policy, especially
when it came to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War and subsequent backlash against it.
As communications scholar Gregory Allen Olson asserts: “Foreign policy is essentially a
rhetorical process, one in which words compete with other words for supremacy. Once accepted
as facts or definitions or controlling theses, these words guide actions and constrain options. As
rhetoric changes, so too does policy.”
340
Rhetoric’s impact on foreign policy, and on leading the
American people into and then out of South Vietnam, is harnessed by Tribe with his reenactment
of six New Left speeches.
Tribe was in good company with his inclination to link Vietnam War era protest with
protest against the War on Terror. In the summer of 2007, the journal October sent a
questionnaire to artists, critics, and art historians, essentially asking them to compare political
protests of the 1960s with protests today. The issue editors, Benjamin Buchloh and Rachel
Churner posit, “Why compare the forms of protest, or lack thereof, to the Vietnam era?” They go
on to explain:
Comparing the protest strategies of the Vietnam era to those of today is not to insist upon
a comparability between the wars, nor is it to propose that we can apply the lessons of the

339
Rosler quoted in Frascina, “Meyer Schapiro’s Choice,” July 1, 1995, 495.
340
Gregory Allen Olson, Mansfield and Vietnam: A Study in Rhetorical Adaptation, (Michigan State University
Press Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series); Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State
University Press, 1995), 3–4.
170
prior indiscriminately to the later one. It is, however, to insist that we acknowledge the
continuing importance of the Vietnam War in our national consciousness. Not only is it
still present in our ideas of how one protests—what protest looks and sounds like—but
also how protest informs intellectual history and how significantly we have internalized
the intellectual paradigms from that generation.
341

Their footnote for this statement directs the reader to Tribe as an exemplar of the Vietnam War’s
continuing importance: “See, for example, Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project, in which actors
restage protest speeches from the late 1960s and early ‘70s.”
342
Tribe intentionally focused his
project on anti-Vietnam War protest, even explaining in an unpublished conversation with
Sharon Hayes that he had considered, but eventually decided against, reenacting a speech by
feminist activist Karla Jay—“because it’s different in significant ways from other speeches I’m
using, which all deal in one way or another with Vietnam. The parallels between Vietnam and
Iraq throw into relief the differences between then and now in how we imagine and practice
protest.”
343

Artist/activist Paige Sarlin takes to task Tribe, Buchloh, and Churner, and their conflation
of the War on Terror with the Vietnam War, arguing that Tribe’s project similarly “works to
elaborate itself not in relation to the specificity of the past or the present, but somewhere in
between, in relation to this structure of analogy. In this way, the project shares with October’s
questionnaire a lack of clarity about the specific ideological and political character of the social
movements of the 1960s (and the American left more broadly).”
344
Sarlin goes on to argue that
Tribe misuses the radical history of 1960s class and race-based protests by mining from its
general “radical character” without attention to the particularities of those protests or that

341
Buchloh et al., “Questionnaire,” 7.
342
Ibid.
343
“Sharon Hayes + Mark Tribe in Conversation” n.d., Creative Time Archives.
344
Paige Sarlin, “New Left-Wing Melancholy: Mark Tribe’s ‘The Port Huron Project’ and the Politics of
Reenactment,” Framework 50 n. 1-2 (Spring/Fall 2009): 140.
171
historical moment. Although I would agree with Sarlin that Tribe glosses over complexities of
the radical movements of the 1960s, histories of which I will summarize later in this chapter, I
find that Tribe’s holistic approach to the Movement under the umbrella of the New Left thrives
symbiotically with his practice of reenactment. I argue that The Port Huron Project mines
historic speeches purposefully and opts to leave out most of the historical context so that
ambiguity can function as a productive force. In this way, words from anti-Vietnam War protest
can resonate in a new period of turmoil in the United States.

Port Huron Project
Port Huron Project is a multi-media series, its reenactments beginning in 2006 and
continuing until 2008.
345
Tribe selected six protest speeches originating between 1965 and 1971
that can be characterized as part of the New Left movement, and hired actors (amateurs and
professionals) to reenact these speeches on their original public sites. He filmed these
reenactments and used edited versions of the videos to share the speeches online and to exhibit
them as art installations in galleries and museums. Tribe says he was unaware of Jeremy Deller’s
Battle of Orgreave and he was not familiar with Sharon Hayes’s work when he conceived of his
project, but rather his reference point for reenactment was Revolutionary War reenactment,
which took place regularly in New England where he grew up.
346
His initial aim was for his
reenactments to function as political intervention, stating, “The goal was to use the speeches not
just as historical ready-mades or conceptual-art explorations of context, but also maybe as a
genuine form of protest, to point out with the help of art how much has changed, yet how much

345
Post-production of the project lasted until 2009.
346
Mark Tribe, interview by Karen Huang, September 10, 2013.
172
remains the same.”
347
By incorporating art and politics in live reenactment and digital media,
Port Huron Project hails subjects to consider these physical and virtual locations as alternative
political spaces.
348
These politicized reenactments function in multiple mediums: performance,
digital video, video installation, and photography. Furthermore, they act in different arenas: the
public, outdoor site; the gallery; and the Internet. Their complexity does not arise simply from
their conflation of time periods, but also from their formal characteristics, which will be
addressed later in this chapter.
Tribe culled his speeches for The Port Huron Project after two summers of research in
publicly accessible archives, selecting them based on the flexibility of their messages and thus
their ability to resonate with socio-political issues in the present. He eventually decided on six
anti-Vietnam War speeches, crediting the Pacifica Radio Archives, the Schomburg Archives, and
Wayne State University as especially rich sources for the transcripts or recordings of his
preferred discourses.
349
Taking approximately one month each time to meet with potential actors
and conduct auditions, he advertised online and in print magazines such as Back Stage to find
principle and alternate actors for each reenactment. He also reached out to specific individuals,
as was the case with Ricardo Dominguez (re-speaking Cesar Chavez) and asked them to do cold
readings of the speeches. Tribe specified that he did not want the actors to try to emulate their
respective historical figures, either through speaking style or dress. Having the actors perform in
their own clothing ensured that any passersby or online viewers would not mistake the speech for

347
Creative Time, “Artist Produces Reenactments of Radical New Left Speeches,” Approved Press Release.
Creative Time Archives. Tribe has since retracted this claim, saying that the project eventually became “art about
politics” rather than “political art.”
348
For more on the political potential of the arts and popular culture, see Nancy Sue Love and Mark Mattern,
“Introduction: Art, Culture, Democracy,” in Doing Democracy: Activist Art and Cultural Politics, (SUNY Series,
Praxis: Theory in Action); SUNY Series, Praxis, Theory in Action (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2013).
349
Port Huron Project Roundtable at LACE, 2010, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.
173
a period piece, but would rather consider it as an event happening for the first time, aimed
toward current problems with the War on Terror and social and economic inequities.
On April 17, 1965, addressing the crowd at the “March on Washington to End the War in
Vietnam” at the National Mall, Washington, D.C., Paul Potter rejected President Johnson’s claim
that the war protected American freedom, instead labelling the United States’ plans and
justifications for the Vietnam War “cultural genocide.” On July 26, 2007, actor Max Bunzel
reenacted Potter’s speech in front of the Washington Monument (Fig. 3.1). For the “Spring
Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam,” held at the United Nations Plaza on April 15, 1967,
Stokely Carmichael rallied listeners to consider how American aggression against Vietnam ran
parallel to American oppression of black people.
350
On September 7, 2008, Actor Ato Essandoh
reenacted Carmichael’s speech at the United Nations Plaza (Fig. 3.2). On April 27, 1968, Coretta
Scott King spoke on behalf of her recently assassinated husband, Martin Luther King, Jr., at a
peace rally in Central Park, New York City, reciting his notes for “Ten Commandments on
Vietnam.” On April 27, 1968, actress Gina Brown reenacted King’s speech in Central Park (Fig.
3.3). Angela Davis spoke at a Black Panther rally in DeFremery Park, Oakland, California, on
November 12, 1969, asserting that the efficacy of the anti-war movement depended on its ability
to relate to the fight for liberation of blacks, Latinos, and working-class whites. On August 2,
2008, Professor Sheilagh Brooks and dancer Aleta Hayes both reenacted Davis’s protest in
DeFremery Park (Fig. 3.4). At a memorial service for Vietnam War veterans in Exposition Park,
Los Angeles, on May 2, 1971, Cesar Chavez urged people to think about how all citizens are
responsible for the American obsession with violence and how many of the poor and

350
Stokely Carmichael adhered to a revolutionary approach against the Vietnam War, maintaining that “the white
capitalist class in America was oppressing people of color both at home and in the Third World.” Rhodri Jeffreys-
Jones, Peace Now! American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1999), 95.
174
underprivileged are forced to join the military as their only chance toward improving their lives.
On July 19, 2008, artist and Professor Ricardo Dominguez and actor Brian Valparaiso reenacted
Chavez’s speech in Exposition Park (Fig. 3.5). And on May 5, 1971, Howard Zinn delivered a
speech at a peace rally in Boston Common, encouraging civil disobedience to protest the
Vietnam War. On July 14, 2007, actor Matthew Floyd Miller reenacted Zinn’s speech on Boston
Common (Fig. 3.6).
After selecting actors, Tribe publicized the reenactment, using email and paper flyers
(Fig. 3.7). For the reenactments organized with Creative Time, press releases were sent to their
national contacts, and local institutions LACE and the Oakland Museum also disseminated press
releases to their own contacts. Tribe’s advertising methods combine those of 1960s grassroots
activism and more recent digital activism and mainstream public relations campaigns. The flyers
co-produced with Creative Time for the Democracy in America speeches include the name of the
sponsor (Creative Time); the new title of the speech; explanation that the speech is a reenactment
from (date) originally orated by (activist’s name); a photograph of the original speaker; that the
reenactment is part of the Port Huron Project which is by the artist Mark Tribe; that the
reenactment is also part of the public art initiative Democracy in America; then the date, time,
and location of the speech; a map of the location; and website addresses for Tribe and for
Creative Time (Fig. 3.8).
The last three reenactments of the Port Huron Project (Chavez, Davis, and Carmichael)
were commissioned by Creative Time’s Democracy in America: The National Campaign, a
week-long exhibition held in New York City’s historic Park Avenue Armory (September 21–27,
2008). Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) co-presented the Chavez reenactment in
Exposition Park, and the Davis reenactment in Oakland was co-presented by the Oakland
175
Museum of California. These reenactments, like the first three organized independently by Tribe,
consisted of free, public performances on the respective original sites of the historic speeches.
Tribe again documented each reenactment to create videos that could stand alone for exhibition
and for online distribution. Additionally, for the reenactments commissioned by Creative Time,
it was stipulated that Tribe would also be expected to participate in a conversation or give a talk
in each location—Los Angeles, Oakland, and New York. In June 2008, Tribe held community
meetings in Los Angeles as part of his project research; included in those meetings were
individuals such as Rita Gonzalez, curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and
Armando Duran, attorney and President of Self Help Graphics & Art.
351
At the Armory in New
York, Tribe gave an overview of Port Huron Project and how it looks back to a period when
people believed they could truly make a difference; he then introduced actor Clinton Lowe, who
re-spoke Stokely Carmichael’s speech. Oakland had the most community programming
surrounding the reenactment, with a screening of the documentary Chicago 10 followed by a
conversation between former Black Panther Minister of Culture Emory Douglas, Creative Time
Curator Nato Thompson, Oakland Museum Curator Rene de Guzmán, and Tribe.
For Democracy in America, Creative Time researched and organized with artists and
activists for one year preceding the exhibition in preparation for the Convergence Center, “an
activated space to both reflect on and perform democracy, and a living forum with speeches with
political thinkers, artists, and community activists.”
352
Over 40 artists participated in the
exhibition and forum, and Mark Tribe’s project was one of four national commissions from

351
Diane Haithman, “The ’60s, Now; Artists Re-Create Seminal Events from the Turbulent Decade for Port Huron
Project,” Los Angeles Times, July 19, 2008, sec. Calendar; Part E; Calendar Desk.
352
“Convergence Handout, Democracy in America,” 2008, Democracy in America Files, Creative Time Archives.
176
Creative Time.
353
Artists, cultural critics, and community activists delivered speeches and
performed in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall each day, addressing daily topics such as We Will
Not Accept a War on ‘Terror’; Ethics in the Art World; Cultural Production Must Escape the
Trap of Neoliberal Capital. The exhibition also presented a mobile component that took place
prior to the exhibition at the Armory. For example, the Center for Tactical Magic’s Tactical Ice
Cream Unit handed out pamphlets from local progressive groups along with ice cream cones,
and Angel Nevarez + Valerie Tevere’s Another Protest Song welcomed contributions of
politically engaged music on their website, then visited parks in Brooklyn and Queens to invite
the public to sing these new songs.
Creative Time’s contributions to Port Huron Project consisted largely of providing
organizational support, getting permits, and publicizing events on local and national levels. They
created press releases and printed invitations for the Democracy in America exhibition as well as
collaborating with Tribe to produce flyers for each individual performance for local distribution.
Creative Time also featured Tribe’s website on their own site. Finally, Creative Time funded and
published the related book, The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches,
which included essays by Tribe, Creative Time curator Nato Thompson, and theater and
performance arts scholar Rebecca Schneider, along with transcripts of all six New Left
speeches.
354

The earliest speech reenacted in Port Huron Project was Paul Potter’s. Potter delivered
his speech as the final oration of the day for SDS’s March on Washington to End the War in
Vietnam on April 17, 1965. At the time, the March on Washington was the largest protest against

353
Other commissions were done by Sharon Hayes, Olga Koumoundouros and Rodney McMillian, and Steve
Powers.
354
The requirements of the project were specified in the contract between Mark Tribe and Creative Time. Creative
Time Archives.
177
the Vietnam War, with somewhere between 15,000 and 25,000 attendees. Other speakers
included Senator Ernest Greuning, activist I.F. Stone, academic Staughton Lynd, and musicians
Joan Baez and Judy Collins. After Potter’s speech, participants marched from the Washington
Monument to the Capitol Building.
355
Potter’s speech was documented and disseminated in
several ways at the time of its first oration and in more recent years. Potter did not deliver his
speech with a title, but it has been labeled “The Incredible War” and, more frequently, “We Must
Name the System,” quoting the most famous line of his speech, wherein “the system” refers to
capitalism and its accompanying consequences of social inequality. One audio recording of
Potter’s live speech survives in the collection of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin,
although researchers lament that it is very difficult to hear. More useful primary documents,
then, are the printed versions of the speech that SDS published and distributed on their own
accord, in May 1965.
356
Potter’s successor as President of SDS, Carl Oglesby, took up the
“system” again in the first issue of New Left Notes (January 21, 1966), wherein he labels the
corrupt system “corporate liberalism,” which “performs for the corporate state a function quite
like what the Church one performed for the feudal state. It seeks to justify its burdens and protect
it from change.”
357
Oglesby argues that the counterpoint to corporatism is humanism, and so that
is how the system must be changed. In 1971, Potter commented briefly on his speech in his
memoir, A Name for Ourselves. Nearly forty years later, Professor of Rhetoric Jeffrey P. Drury
argues that Potter’s speech made an impact within SDS and that his speech, along with the larger
March on Washington organized by SDS, served to aid SDS recruitment even though it did not

355
Jeffrey P. Drury, “Paul Potter, ‘The Incredible War’ (17 April 1965),” Voices of Democracy | VOD Journal 4
(2009): 26.
356
Gregory Allen Olson, Landmark Speeches on the Vietnam War, 1st ed, (Landmark Speeches); Landmark
Speeches (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010), 63–64.
357
Students for a Democratic Society and Carl Oglesby, “Liberalism and the Corporate State,” New Left Notes,
January 21, 1966, 1 edition, New Left Collection, Box 61, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA.
178
carry much lasting weight among the broader public on a national level. Drury also suggests that
Potter’s address was almost forgotten in subsequent decades due to its “lack of success” in
stopping the Vietnam War, but then regained favor in recent years when its ambiguity made it
salient again for the Iraq War. He cites the omission of Potter’s speech from American Rhetoric,
a large online database of more than 5,000 speeches, as further evidence that this speech is rarely
remembered outside of the study of rhetoric of social movements.
358
However, Potter’s speech
was included in another publication from 2010, Landmark Speeches on the Vietnam War, which
situates it as one of the more well-known anti-war speeches out of the six that Tribe selected for
The Port Huron Project.
The Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam took place in New York on April 15,
1967, and included a procession from Central Park to the United Nations, as well as the burning
of draft cards by college students, and performances by folk singers, poets, and rock and roll
bands. Stokely Carmichael shared billing with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Harry Belafonte,
James Bevel, and Dr. Benjamin Spock. At this point in time, the Spring Mobilization was the
largest peace demonstration in American history, with anywhere from 100,000 to 400,000
demonstrators in attendance and 3,000 local police officers to keep the peace. On a platform in
United Nations Plaza, Carmichael spoke out against American imperialism and declared his
support for Dr. King.
359
The Spring Mobilization is mentioned in books that deal with Vietnam
War protest, such as Charles DeBenedetti’s An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the
Vietnam War and Peace Now! American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War by Rhodri
Jeffreys-Jones, although Carmichael’s involvement is not included. Even in the most recent

358
See www.americanrhetoric.com; Jeffrey P. Drury, “Paul Potter, ‘The Incredible War’ (17 April 1965),” 38.
359
Joseph E. Peniel, Stokely: A Life (New York: Basic Civitas Books, a member of the Perseus Book Group), 186–
187.
179
biography of Carmichael, Stokely: A Life, his speech is not addressed in detail, perhaps because
Carmichael’s politics became more radicalized in later years.
360
Tribe encountered the speech as
a transcript held in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public
Library. Unlike Potter’s speech, which only persists through fuzzy audio recording, there is
photographic documentation of Carmichael orating, in which he is pictured raising his left fist in
a Black Power salute.
361

On April 27, 1968, Coretta Scott King spoke at a peace rally in Sheep Meadow in Central
Park, New York, in place of her husband, Dr. King, who was assassinated on April 4. In addition
to speaking about her husband’s work in Civil Rights and peace protest, she read Dr. King’s
“Ten Commandments on Vietnam,” which had been scribbled on a sheet of paper found in his
pocket upon his death. Although little has been published about this 1968 peace rally as whole,
there are extant photographs of Coretta Scott King speaking as well as well-preserved audio of
her speech. The audio recording is partially available online from Pacifica Radio’s archives, and
it was re-published on the website of National Public Radio on January 31, 2006, the day after
her death.
362

At Bobby Hutton Park (now DeFremery Park) in Oakland, California, Angela Davis
spoke at a Black Panthers Rally to free Bobby Seale, a Black Panther Party co-founder who had
been arrested as one of the “Chicago Eight” on charges of inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic

360
Charles DeBenedetti and Charles Chatfield, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era, 1st
ed, (Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution) (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990); Rhodri
Jeffreys-Jones, Peace Now! American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1999); Peniel, Stokely.
361
Mark Tribe, Rebecca Schneider, and Nato Thompson, The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left
Protest Speeches (Milano: Charta, 2010), 26.
362
Coretta Scott King, 1968 Revolution Rewind Moment - Coretta Scott King, n.d., Pacifica Radio Archives,
https://archive.org/details/1968RevolutionRewindMoment-CorettaScottKing; Coretta Scott King, “Coretta Scott
King: Delivering Her Husband’s Message,” NPR News, January 31, 2006,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5181061.
180
National Convention in Chicago, and was then convicted and sentenced for contempt of court on
November 5, 1969. Davis spoke along with Masai Hewitt, Minister of Education of the Black
Panther Party, Terence Hallinan, anti-war activist and attorney, and Charles Garry, the Panthers’
lawyer. An audio recording of the rally, including Davis’s speech, has been preserved and is now
readily available on the Internet, both on Pacifica Radio Archive’s site and through the
University of California at Berkeley’s Social Activism Sound Recording Project.
363
Although
this rally has not been addressed in recent compilations on the Black Panthers, such as The Black
Panthers Speak or Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party, the clear audio
recording and its accessibility online makes Davis’s speech easy to find.
364
Moreover, the audio
includes the other orators from the rally as well, which preserves Davis’s speech within its
historical context of the Panthers speaking on their relationship to the peace movement.
César Chavez’s speech of 1971 at Los Angeles’s Exposition Park is one of the few anti-
war protests he made. Celebrated for his dedication to the farmworkers union, Chavez did not
begin speaking out against the Vietnam War until 1969 at a mass in Washington D.C.
commemorating the death of Robert Kennedy.
365
On May 2, 1971 Chavez protested the Vietnam
War at a peace rally organized by the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice, speaking to a
crowd of around 2,600 protesters and 300 police officers in Exposition Park. A transcript has
been published in books of Chavez’s collected speeches. The Words of César Chavez includes a
transcript of the 1971 address, labeling it simply “Speech at Exposition Park.” Similarly in An
Organizer’s Tale: Speeches, the speech is published according to its location, “At Exposition

363
“UC Berkeley Library Social Activism Sound Recording Project: The Black Panther Party,” The Media
Resources Center, UC Berkeley Library, n.d., http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/pacificapanthers.html#1969.
364
Philip Sheldon Foner, The Black Panthers Speak (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2014); Kathleen Cleaver
and George N. Katsiaficas, Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and
Their Legacy, (New Political Science Readers); New Political Science Reader Series (New York: Routledge, 2001).
365
Miriam Pawel, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography, First U.S. edition (New York, NY: Bloomsbury
Press, 2014), 192–193.
181
Park.” In César Chavez and the Common Sense of Nonviolence, José-Antonio Orosco makes
reference to the 1971 oration to illustrate how Chavez viewed poverty, violence, and power as
intertwined problems that could be alleviated by adhering to his general philosophy of
nonviolence.
366
Online, the text is available only in a detached way, through the Cesar Chavez
Service Clubs under the heading “Speech Against the Vietnam War and for Non-Violence,”
which is also far less catchy than Tribe’s labeling of it as “We Are Also Responsible.”
On May 5, 1971, Howard Zinn delivered a speech during a peace rally at Boston
Common on the topic of civil disobedience. Zinn’s speech has been published in several volumes
of Zinn’s prolific collected writings. An audio excerpt can be heard in a recent documentary on
Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. In Howard Zinn Speaks: Collected Speeches,
1963–2009, Anthony Arnove labels this text, “Speech Against the Vietnam War on Boston
Common”; this is a more accurate title than “The Problem is Civil Obedience” as Tribe names it,
for that is the title already frequently used for Zinn’s speech at Johns Hopkins in 1970, which
uses some of the same statements on civil disobedience that Zinn proclaims in 1971 in Boston
Common.

The New Left
Tribe’s engagement with left politics began when he was just a toddler, with his parents
taking him to political rallies in the late 1960s.
367
As a professor at Brown University in the early
2000s, Mark Tribe was surprised by his students’ apathy towards the war in Iraq and their

366
José Antonio Orosco, Cesar Chavez and the Common Sense of Nonviolence (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 2008).
367
Tribe described his parents as mainstream liberals rather than radicals. It should be noted that Tribe’s father is
Laurence H. Tribe, renowned scholar of constitutional law and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor
of Constitutional Law at Harvard University. Tribe, interview.
182
disenchantment with political involvement more broadly. His initial goal with the Port Huron
Project was to inspire political idealism and action in the present day. As the project developed,
he became more invested in producing symbolic moments of resonance between anti-Vietnam
War protest and contemporary sentiments against the United States’ War on Terror. Tribe
explains his decision to employ what he calls “historical reenactment” to explore these issues: “I
sought to engage the legacy of the New Left by reanimating largely forgotten protest speeches. I
wanted to pluck speeches out of the archives and bring them into the present without smoothing
over the intervening historical transformations.”
368
Describing the Port Huron Project as an
“incomplete survey of the New Left,” he named it after the Port Huron Statement, the 1962
manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a group that has been heralded in
many studies of the New Left as central to this complex political movement.
369

The New Left legacy that Tribe reenacts is an inclusive amalgamation of several radical
movements—anti-war, Black Power, student protest, and labor union organization—that
flourished in the United States between 1955 and 1975.
370
Although Tribe conscientiously
includes anti-war speeches that speak to demographics not wholly dominated by white student
radicalism, he titles his project referencing the manifesto of SDS. By the late 1960s, SDS was
promoting itself as the “central force of the New Left in the United States,” supportive of the
black liberation movement, the labor movement, and fighting against the draft.
371
The

368
Mark Tribe, “Introduction,” in Rebecca Schneider and Nato Thompson, Mark Tribe: The Port Huron Project,
Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2010), 9.
369
Port Huron Project Roundtable at LACE.
370
Van Gosse, “A Movement of Movements: The Definition and Periodization of the New Left,” in A Companion to
Post-1945 America, ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2006), 277–302,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470996201.ch15/summary. Van Gosse addresses the ambiguities of
the term “New Left” and concludes that it is most useful when it is made inclusive rather than simply using the term
to focus on the young white protesters of the Students for a Democratic Society.
371
Students for a Democratic Society, “SDS: An Introduction,” n.d., New Left Collection, Box 61, Hoover
Institution Archives, Stanford, CA.
183
problematic status of SDS in defining the complex New Left movement has been taken up by
many scholars in recent years. Van Gosse emphasizes that limiting one’s understanding of the
New Left to the activities of SDS places undue emphasis on white youth in the narrative of
radical politics of the 1950s through the 1970s. Furthermore, Gosse argues, SDS did not make
lasting social reform through their interventions, which were more idealistic than practical;
instead, their central role in the historical narrative of the New Left arose from the prolific
writings of their former leaders and members Tom Hayden, Todd Gitlin, and Jim Miller.
372

Along those lines, sociologist Penny Lewis describes how Gitlin’s The Sixties conflated the
demise of SDS and the New Left with the end of the anti-war movement, and in so doing,
perpetuated the narrative of the antiwar movement as one overwhelmingly dominated by young,
middle-class students.
373
John McMillian refers to the dominant narrative of the 1960s as the
“New Left consensus,” a legend that began in 1962 with the Port Huron manifesto and continued
in the form of marches, meetings, and dedication to ideas of social justice.
374
This exceptionalist
consensus view of the New Left assumes that it was completely separate from the liberal
political ideals and organizations that preceded it chronologically.
375

To understand the reasons for Tribe’s citing of the New Left, and the repercussions of the
Port Huron Project reenactments, one must consider the actual history of the New Left, the

372
Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 86;
Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Rev. trade ed (New
York: Bantam Books, 1993); Tom Hayden and Students for a Democratic Society (U.S.), The Port Huron
Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution (New York; [Berkeley, Calif.]: Thunder’s Mouth Press ;
Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2005).
373
Penny W. Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory (Ithaca:
ILR Press, 2013), 44–45. Lewis’s study of the antiwar movement explores the class dynamics of the antiwar
movement, debunking the pervasive myth that the movement was largely comprised of the middle-class and elite.
Lewis presents a revisionist account of class dynamics by studying working-class opposition to the war.
374
John McMillian, “‘You Didn’t Have to Be There’: Revisiting the New Left Consensus,” in The New Left
Revisited, ed. John McMillian and Paul Buhle (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003), 3.
375
Andrew Hunt, “How New Was the New Left?,” in The New Left Revisited, ed. John McMillian and Paul Buhle
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003), 142.
184
beginnings of which was certainly intertwined with other liberal and radical movements. One
view is that the origins of the New Left can be found in the Civil Rights movement, which
arguably began as early as the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. When the Civil Rights movement came into full swing in the
1950s and 1960s, “direct action” techniques distinguished their tactics from activists of earlier
generations.
376
Other, more radical groups that also fought white oppression during the first half
of the twentieth century included Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association,
the Nation of Islam, and the Communist Party USA, who threatened the extant social order by
asserting black political empowerment. In these decades, battling for social equality was
revolutionary and radical, and as a result served as a foundation for what would become the New
Left.
377
Considering the significance of the Civil Rights and Black Freedom movements, Terry
H. Anderson describes how 1960s activism originated “in the South, from Greensboro to Selma,
and spread up the east and west coasts to elite universities where students often formed or joined
new left organizations.”
378

Another assessment of the New Left’s beginnings is that white radicals were reacting
against the “ultradomesticity” of the 1950s, with its emphasis on the nuclear family and rigid
constructions of masculinity and femininity. White and black radicals of the black freedom
movement, the New Left, and the women’s liberation movement also rejected liberalism by the
late 1960s, with SDS arguing that rather than organizing around general ideas of equality, protest
should address one’s own oppression and not attempt to speak for another group’s issues.
379

376
Steven F. Lawson, “Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement,” The
American Historical Review 96, no. 2 (1991): 464.
377
Gosse, Rethinking the New Left, 20–22.
378
Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), v.
379
Alice Echols, “Women’s Liberation and Sixties Radicalism,” in The Sixties: From Memory to History, ed. David
Farber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 152.
185
Early members of SDS adopted C. Wright Mills’s ideas about the integration of political
problems with personal life, a sentiment later popularized by the women’s liberation movement
with the slogan “the personal is political.” These early new leftists enlarged the scope of personal
problems they experienced as college students and re-formulated them as politics.
380
Alice
Echols points out that the political was also personal, in that “Politics [of sixties radicalism] was
not about the subordination of self to some larger political cause; instead, it was the path to self-
fulfillment.”
381
In this process of self-fulfillment through political action, sixties radicals
empowered themselves to challenge the elite powers who ran mainstream politics.
382

The New Left also had roots in the Communist Party of the Old Left, which recruited
tens of thousands of members during the 1930s and 1940s and had millions of sympathizers and
readers of its publications. During this time, the Communist Party was responsible for building
industrial unions and for confronting segregationist policies and white supremacy, and the Party
was highly influential until the advent of the Cold War. Despite the decline of Communism in
the United States during the mid-1950s, the surviving progressive activists in the Party’s ranks
were instrumental in campaigns pertaining to Civil Rights, anti-war, and pro-labor movements.
Angela Davis, who was associated with the Black Panther Party in the 1960s, was also a leader
in the Communist Party at that time. The Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party contributed to the
student movement with its Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which
became the main student organization within the national antiwar movement, supplanting

380
Ibid., 163.
381
Ibid., 163–64.
382
Ibid., 167.
186
SDS.
383
Maurice Isserman attributes the collapse of the American Communist party between
1956 and 1958 to the demise of the Old Left and the rise of the New Left.
384

Yet another ideological group that made an impact on the New Left were the pacifists,
who formed church groups, local peace societies, and some smaller religious denominations and
secular organizations. Their ethical stance of nonviolence was perceived as radical in times of
government-sponsored wars, and their stable resources and alliances during the Cold War meant
that they continued to influence and to strengthen the New Left as it developed. Thus the Old
Left can be understood as comprised of two overlapping categories. The Marxist political parties
that dominated in the first half of the twentieth century were primarily invested in issues of class
and were proponents of the labor movement, while less mainstream political groups such as
African Americans and pacifists developed activist ideologies from their outsider status.
385
The
shift from the Old Left to the New Left was characterized by a broadening of the battlefield from
simply fighting for the working classes to battling larger issues of racial oppression, militarism,
and patriarchy.
386
Comprehensively defining the New Left as struggles for radical social change
from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, this expansive movement includes Civil Rights, Black
Power, anti-war, women’s liberation, Chicano activism, gay liberation, and labor unions.
An important factor to consider in Tribe’s selection of an iconic group of speeches is that
the “anti-war movement” is actually an amorphous mass of activism for which it would be
extremely difficult to present a historiographical account. Terry H. Anderson asserts that
“movement is a slippery term, one used throughout the sixties to describe activists who marched

383
Hunt, “How New Was the New Left?,” 143–144.
384
Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left, Illini Books ed
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
385
Gosse, Rethinking the New Left, 20–29.
386
Echols, “Women’s Liberation and Sixties Radicalism,” 155.
187
and protested for a myriad of causes, the most prominent being civil rights, student power, peace
in Vietnam, and women’s liberation…There is no one definition of movement.”
387
What these
activists had in common was their determination to question what they felt to be the unjust status
quo.
388
One way in which Anderson expands the “movement” beyond the purview of the New
Left is to address how groups railed against capitalism during the 1960s, emphasizing that this
branch of activism, although it included New Left radicals, was not strictly a clash between
capitalism and the New Left as has been often construed. The sixties “movement” against big
business corresponded with anti-Vietnam War protest in that activists challenged businesses that
they felt were profiting from the evils of war, prime examples being Dow Chemical and
Honeywell, which produced napalm and weapons, respectively.
389

By embracing a comprehensive definition of the New Left, anti-war protests generated by
a variety of local and national groups can fall into this category, which Gosse describes as “a
‘polycentric’ left encompassing a series of overlapping, contingent social movements, each with
its own centers of power, that related to each other through a series of strategic arrangements.”
Moreover, these overlapping movements, although distinct, share an investment in protest as a
moral endeavor and were deeply influenced by Old Left Communism, Socialism, Trotskyites,
pacifists, and religious radicals.
390
Tribe’s compiling of these speeches for reenactment also
provides a mini summary of antiwar speeches, which generally have not been amalgamated
whether for study or commemoration.
391

387
Terry H. Anderson, “The Movement and Business,” in The Sixties: From Memory to History, ed. David Farber
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 176.
388
Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, iv.
389
Anderson, “The Movement and Business,” 177–183.
390
Gosse, “A Movement of Movements,” 292.
391
Olson, Mansfield and Vietnam, 11.
188
The complexity of the New Left’s roots and the disparity of movements that are lumped
into this category suggest why it was efficient and effective for Tribe to title his project
according to the Students for a Democratic Society’s iconic manifesto. Even if the emphasis on
SDS’s activism is unwarranted, it is what has pervaded historical literature on the 1960s.
Moreover, Tribe’s investment in anti-war activism required a structured framework that the anti-
war movement did not possess during the Vietnam War. There was no central, national
organization that spearheaded antiwar protests but rather many small, local groups formed
continually in response to special interests, such as separate groups for mothers, draftees,
ministers, and more. As a mass movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement could not be
directed by just one organization.
392

The Port Huron Statement (1962)
When SDS wrote the Port Huron Statement, there already existed in the United States
several leftist movements: “the cultural and artistic rebellion of the Beats; the foreign policy
protests that centered on nuclear weapons and Cuba; and the civil rights movement’s revolt
against segregation and apartheid.”
393
As demonstrated in the previous section of this chapter,
SDS did not start the New Left and were not even the most influential group within it. However,
its integral role in historiographies of the New Left and Tribe’s decision to refer to it with his
project merits reflection, particularly with respect to the content of the manifesto.
In December 1961, Tom Hayden, the field secretary for Students for a Democratic
Society, began writing a manifesto for SDS that was intended to be used for recruiting purposes.

392
Gosse, Rethinking the New Left, 86.
393
Allen Smith, “Present at the Creation . . . and Other Myths: The Port HuronStatement and the Origins of the New
Left,” Peace & Change 25, no. 3 (July 1, 2000): 339.
189
Hayden’s and Paul Potter’s participation in the SNCC voter registration project in McComb
County, Mississippi in the fall of 1961 influenced the Port Huron Statement, which attempted to
encompass SNCC’s investment in “direct action and democratic ethos.”
394
This document
ballooned into a fifty-page draft that was then discussed and revised during a five-day SDS
meeting held in Port Huron, Michigan the following May. The completed Statement was
mimeographed as 20,000 booklets in August 1962 and sold for thirty-five cents apiece.
395
A
second printing took place in December 1964, and a third printing in October 1966, of 20,000
copies each, suggesting that the statement remained integral to SDS’s mission and to recruitment
and was widely disseminated.
396

In examining the ideals proclaimed in the Port Huron Statement, Tribe’s decision to use
the manifesto as his touchstone is fitting. The Statement’s central idea was that of “participatory
democracy,” which SDS proclaimed to be based on the following principles:
That decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groupings; that
politics be seen positively, as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of
social relations; that politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into
community…that the political order should serve to clarify problems in a way
instrumental to their solution; it should provide outlets for the expression of personal
grievance and aspiration; opposing views should be organized so as to illuminate choices
and facilitate the attainment of goals; channels should be commonly available, to relate
men to knowledge and to power so that private problems—from bad recreation facilities
to personal alienation—are formulated as general issues.
397

394
Richard Flacks and Nelson Lichtenstein, eds., “Introduction,” in The Port Huron Statement: Sources and
Legacies of the New Left’s Founding Manifesto (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 5.
395
Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution (New York: Thunder’s
Mouth Press, 2005), 3-4.
396
Students for a Democratic Society, “The Port Huron Statement,” October 1966, New Left Collection, Box 62,
Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA.
397
Tom Hayden and Students for a Democratic Society (U.S.), The Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the
1960s Revolution (New York; [Berkeley, Calif.]: Thunder’s Mouth Press; Distributed by Publishers Group West,
2005), 53–54.
190
In its upholding of participatory democracy, the Statement was also criticizing passive
citizenship, wherein individuals did nothing more than listen and vote.
398
Tribe’s association
with the legacy of the Statement likewise questioned passive citizenship and appropriated its
tenet of participatory democracy. The Port Huron Project endeavored to re-present the notion of
participatory democracy to new subjects, highlighting many benefits of the political process—
collectivity, grievance-airing, problem-solving, and decision-making—that participatory
democracy could bring.
As much as the Statement proposes the necessity of action, it also acknowledges a tide of
“contemporary malaise” in American life. The authors assert that feelings of powerlessness and
apathy that pervade American campus life, and American life more broadly, exemplify the
current problem with democracy, which is a “rise of a democracy without publics.”
399
Also, the
Statement begins by addressing the status of its writers, whose class and position mirror that of
Tribe’s Brown University students: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest
comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”
400

Originating from the Students for a Democratic Society, it is logical that the Statement begins
and concludes by emphasizing that students and the university will be responsible for catalyzing
real social change. In the final section of the Statement, “The University and Social Change,” the
authors assert, “We believe that the universities are an overlooked seat of influence.” The
university is critical for social change because it educates young people and thus helps to form
social attitudes and to produce and transmit knowledge; it reveals controversial social issues as a

398
Robert J. S. Ross, “The Democratic Process at Port Huron and After,” in The Port Huron Statement: Sources and
Legacies of the New Left’s Founding Manifesto, ed. Richard Flacks and Nelson Lichtenstein (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 132.
399
Hayden and Students for a Democratic Society (U.S.), The Port Huron Statement, 63–65.
400
Ibid., 45.
191
result of its own involvement, such as how university engineers supply research for defense
contracts; and it is a mainstream institution that is open to participation from all different
perspectives. Its unique position makes it an ideal place to begin building a community of allies
with other liberal interest groups.
401
Presenting the university as the key to a New Left movement
in America, the Port Huron Statement spoke to college students in 1962, urging them to action.
In 2006, its ideology is revived by the Port Huron Project to encourage a new generation of
students toward political activism. Many portions of the Port Huron Statement resonate with the
moment in which Tribe began his project. For example, the statement addresses American
consumerism, economic disparity, and disproportionate government spending on military
defense, and the dominant military-industrial complex in 1962, all of which were major concerns
in the 2000s, and remain so.
Communications scholar J. Justin Gustainis, who defines rhetoric expansively as “the
deliberate use of symbols to persuade,” including speeches, marches, songs, military campaigns,
gestures, destruction of property, comic strips, and films, argues that the Port Huron Statement
functions through paradoxical rhetoric. Gustainis points out that the Statement repudiated anti-
Communist sentiments even while it criticized the Soviet Union as oppressive, and it espoused a
sort of secular religion in its references to human brotherhood and asceticism. Most significantly,
the Statement is critical of elites even while it calls on elite individuals—select college students,
who were already a privileged group—to become agents for change, and it does this while
simultaneously addressing the university as creator of and solver of problems in American life.
402

These paradoxes within the Port Huron Statement mirror the paradoxical nature of Tribe’s Port
Huron Project, which elevates live protest and video documentation of protest; strives for

401
Ibid., 165–166.
402
J. Justin Gustainis, American Rhetoric and the Vietnam War (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1993), 79–86.
192
inclusivity while selecting specific viewpoints out of the archives; and functions as art,
education, and protest all in one.
By re-speaking six speeches under the rubrics of the New Left and the Port Huron
Statement, Tribe both reenacts the problematic historiographical emphasis on SDS and offers to
alleviate that partisan narrative by including other important figures and speeches that were part
of the New Left but were not always recognized as such. Through his naming of the project,
Tribe perpetuates the iconic status of SDS and their Port Huron Statement, but he does so for
idealistic means, to address the problems of the United States’ War on Terror and the similarities
between the current national lack of support for war with the anti-Vietnam War protests of the
1960s and 1970s. He applies the legacy of SDS to signal antiwar protest to a lay audience, a
conflation that Penny Lewis asserts still carries weight today: “The Vietnam antiwar movement
is correctly understood as the dominant movement of expression for the white and middle-class
New Left, usually seen as synonymous with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In a faulty
inversion, however, the implosion of the New Left appears to stand in for the end of the antiwar
movement.”
403
Lewis explains that the memoirs, histories, and films that have since been
produced by former activists of SDS and the New Left perpetuate a perspective that renders their
organizations central, and thus make it seem as though the antiwar movement ended with them:
“For these authors and collections, it is not that nothing happened after the New Left was broken,
it is just that its particular story was over. Nevertheless, to the extent that the antiwar movement
is linked to the New Left youth movement, its own historical arc gets cut short.”
404
Although
Tribe’s engagement with these historical narratives takes artistic license rather than scholarly
specificity, his selection of speeches under the shadow of the Port Huron Statement attempts to

403
Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks, 44.
404
Ibid., 45.
193
continue the historical arc of the antiwar movement, both by aggregating speeches from distinct
political groups, and by connecting these protests with more recent activism concerning the War
on Terror. Admittedly, he generates these connections while highlighting the already iconic and
problematic status of SDS.
Referring to the Port Huron Statement written in 1962, during a new period of turmoil in
the United States post-9/11, Tribe takes part in a popular practice of contemporary art, which
Carrie Lambert-Beatty explains as excavating and reconsidering links to the past, and Terry
Smith asserts is an “awareness of the coexistence of different ways of being in time.”
405
Delving
into history and in particular into the long-1960s to address issues in the present-day is evident in
art and society more broadly. For example, the tendencies of contemporary artists and critics to
“return to the sixties” has been addressed by James Meyer, who characterizes this shift as “a
revival of such traditional art historical formats as chronological narrative and the monograph,
the gathering of testimonial…and intensive archival research.”
406
Following the high hopes of
sixties radicalism, in the 1980s, there was what Julie Stephens has coined “the death of the
sixties narrative,” wherein the demise of sixties’ belief in social transformation was pondered
and lamented.
407

An entire academic journal called The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture
was begun in 2008, with its editors Jeremy Varon, Michael S. Foley, and John McMillian
admitting in their inaugural issue that this focus partially derives from nostalgia for an epoch

405
Terry E. Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 3; Carrie Lambert-
Beatty, “The Academic Condition of Contemporary Art,” in Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present, ed. Alexander
Blair Dumbadze and Suzanne Perling Hudson (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 459.
406
James Meyer, “The Return of the Sixties in Contemporary Art and Criticism,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture:
Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Terry (Terry E. ) Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 326.
407
Julie Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism (Cambridge, U.K.; New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17–21.
194
characterized by crisis, protest, and idealism, and to which “serves as a primary reference point
for perpetually raging culture wars, as well as basic decisions of political identity.”
408
The Sixties
primarily explores “three broad areas of inquiry: the Sixties themselves, their impact, and their
construction in memory.”
409
Drawing connections between the 1960s and present-day issues is a
recurring theme in the journal, as is evaluating recent conferences and publications that take the
1960s as their subject. In the second issue of the journal, a review by historian Victoria Langland
dealt with the plethora of conferences that commemorated the 40
th
anniversary of 1968. Focusing
on two conferences held at Leeds University and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro,
Langland reveals that “often the empty signifier in the room was not, in fact, 1968 itself, but
rather ‘democracy.’ Both at the time and now 40 years later, observers have repeatedly
characterized 1968 in terms of its relationship to an unspecified ideal of democracy.”
410
In 2009,
the journal included a special forum on “The Sixties and the 2008 Presidential Election,” in
which contributors credited the 1960s with President Obama’s successful campaign and election.
For instance, former Civil Rights activist Heather Tobis Booth asserts “The greatest positive
lesson from the Sixties for today embodied by the campaign of Barack Obama is the importance
of organizing—of gathering people around the concerns of their lives to find common solutions,
acting together in pursuit of a shared vision.” She lists a few cases that she believes demonstrates
the power of organizing during the 1960s, among them the Potter speech that Tribe opted to
reenact: “When Paul Potter asked us to name the system so we could change it at the first march

408
Although historians commonly consider nostalgia to be a negative term, Svetlana Boym argues that nostalgia can
serve as a bridge between collective memory and individual memory. Jeremy Varon, Michael S. Foley, and John
McMillian, “Time Is an Ocean: The Past and Future of the Sixties,” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and
Culture 1, no. 1 (June 1, 2008): 2; Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
409
Varon, Foley, and McMillian, “Time Is an Ocean,” 2.
410
Victoria Langland, “Academic Anniversaries and Commemorative Conferences: History and Memory at the 40th
Anniversary of 1968,” The Sixties 1, no. 2 (December 1, 2008): 244.
195
on Washington against the war in Vietnam, we helped to end that war and said people can help
shape our foreign policy.”
411

Books such as Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, Or, How NOT to Learn from the Past
specifically link the mistakes of the Vietnam War with the War in Iraq, and Anthony Arnove’s
Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, takes its title and inspiration from Howard Zinn’s 1967 book
Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal.
412
The project “Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan,”
appropriates the terms of the Winter Soldier Investigation from 1971 during which veterans of
the Vietnam War gave their testimonials about the atrocities of the war that they committed or
witnessed; similarly, Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan gathered veterans of these conflicts to
give public testimony.
413
Thus the Port Huron Project, through its use of The Port Huron
Statement, efficiently cites this oft-acknowledged connection between the Vietnam War era and
the War on Terror.

Live Presence and Digital Afterlives
The six speeches of the Port Huron Project have been criticized for being too iconic, but
in actuality, they vary with regard to how recognizable and available they are.
414
Tribe conducted

411
“The Sixties and the 2008 Presidential Election,” The Sixties 2, no. 1 (June 1, 2009): 50,
doi:10.1080/17541320902909540.
412
Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn Blatt Young, eds., Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, Or, How Not to Learn from
the Past (New York: New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton & Co., 2007); Anthony Arnove, ed., Iraq: The Logic
of Withdrawal (New York: The New Press, 2006).
413
“Winter Soldier” is a play on Thomas Paine’s “summer soldier” that he describes in The American Crisis (1776);
the summer soldier refers to deserters of Valley Forge, soldiers who left when crisis hit. Organized by Vietnam
Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the Winter Soldier Investigations took place in Detroit on January 31–February
2, 1971 and were subsequently made into a documentary film. Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan consisted of
multiple hearings with the largest event being held at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland and
including more than 200 veterans; a book was published from these accounts: Iraq Veterans Against the War and
Aaron Glantz, Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations (Chicago: Haymarket
Books, 2008).
414
Paige Sarlin, “New Left-Wing Melancholy: Mark Tribe’s ‘The Port Huron Project’ and the Politics of
Reenactment,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 50, no. 1/2 (April 1, 2009): 139–57.
196
research for two summers to find appropriate speeches, limiting himself using the following
parameters: he needed either a transcript or a complete recording of the speech; the original
needed to have been given in a public, outdoor location that was still accessible; and the ideas in
the speech needed to be applicable to current issues in American politics.
415
Because each site
was public and outdoors, in a park or plaza, it was likely that all individuals would feel welcome
to attend, which would not have been the case if speeches had been re-spoken indoors in a
museum or university setting. Tribe’s desire to reenact speeches in outdoor spaces that were
readily accessible to the public came from his wish to have the opportunity for an inadvertent
audience, where people would happen upon the reenactment. He looked for protest speeches that
were given by activists rather than government officials, and he strove to find activist speeches
with ideas that were focused on presenting big issues rather than being more detail-oriented,
organizational speeches that simply brought up the day-to-day logistics of ongoing protest
events.
416
Reenacting protest speeches in their original locations, Tribe may have been hoping to
conjure the power of their initial moments in the 1960s, in which contestation of the status quo
and consensus of liberal ideals produced a public space.
417

Thus driving Tribe’s selection of speeches was not their iconicity but rather their ability
to be sited. In addition to the potential resonance of the words that were spoken, being able to
occupy the physical space of a historic event guided Tribe’s research as he looked for suitable
anti-war speeches to reenact. Tribe’s own understanding of reenactment focuses on the
importance of place: “The same words, more or less, being delivered at the same location, more

415
Port Huron Project Roundtable at LACE.
416
For example, Tribe initially considered speeches by Robert F. Kennedy before deciding against speakers with
official government affiliations. Tribe, interview.
417
Rosalyn Deutsche has written extensively on how conflict produces social space, and how this conception of
public space is what allows for a truly democratic spatial politics. Deutsche, Evictions.
197
or less, to a group of people, made it a reenactment…Part of what I think we mean by
reenactment, and this has to do with battle reenactment, is you go back to the place, so there is
this site-specificity that is really important…It [place] is a huge element to stand on the same
ground in a different time.”
418
Although Tribe refers to battle reenactment, he does not return to
the original sites of the historic speeches to attempt to experience a time warp, as war reenactors
do. Tribe’s investment in each location is for its symbolic significance, and a belief that the
history of a space is still relevant for understanding its current uses. It is the place, in this
situation, that makes each re-speech a reenactment, an event happening again, and not simply a
reading of a historic speech.
419

He ascribes to place individual memories of the past, recognizing both their metaphorical
and historical potential, in the vein of Michel de Certeau’s construction of urban space: “Places
are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read,
accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an
enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body.”
420
Furthermore,
Tribe’s correlation of speech and place in his production of reenactment maps onto de Certeau’s
proposal of “pedestrian speech acts,” wherein “the act of walking is to the urban system what the
speech is to language or to the statements uttered.”
421

For de Certeau, walking is a “space of enunciation” that produces spatial organization,
creating and following paths; the most relevant intersection of speech and space for the Port

418
Tribe, interview.
419
In contrast, Howard Zinn’s book, Voices of a People’s History of the United States, generated performances of
speeches that were never promoted as reenactment nor perceived as such. Each performance of Voices was simply
treated as a reading, and the audio CD that was issued in 2006 is titled Readings from Voices of a People’s History
of the United States. Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, eds., Voices of a People’s History of the United States, 3rd
edition (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014).
420
Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 108.
421
Ibid., 97.
198
Huron Project is de Certeau’s explanation of synecdoche and asyndeton. With synecdoche, a
part stands in for a whole, and as such, “synecdoche makes more dense: it amplifies the detail
and miniaturizes the whole.” By contrast, asyndeton, which omits conjunctions and adverbs,
“cuts out: it undoes continuity and undercuts its plausibility.” Taken together, “A space treated in
this way and shaped by practices is transformed into enlarged singularities and separate
islands.”
422
With its live, on-site reenactments, Port Huron Project engages with perlocutionary
speech acts, wherein the speaker aims to “achieve by saying something, such as convincing,
persuading, deterring,” as well as de Certeau’s pedestrian speech acts, with particular urban sites
being constituted by the standing speaker, the congregation of an audience, the milling about and
stopping of passersby, and so forth. Connecting speech and space in a concrete way, Tribe draws
on de Certeau’s symbolic weaving of the two.
For the reasons previously addressed, the re-speaking of Angela Davis’s speech in
DeFremery Park was especially poignant. DeFremery Park is informally called Bobby Hutton
Memorial Park, after the first recruit of the Black Panthers.
423
DeFremery Park is located in West
Oakland, which has been primarily an African American neighborhood since World War II. In
1966, the Black Panther Party emerged here. The park itself was the site of many Black Panther
events, not just the rally in which this speech was originally delivered. Events like the Black
Panthers’ Black Community Survival Conference in March 1972 offered community
engagement and support to replace diminishing social welfare services, such as screening for
sickle cell anemia, distributing food and provisions, and disseminating information on free
medical services. Elaine Brown recalled, “DeFremery was a tattered park. Its thinning grass

422
Ibid., 101.
423
Only 16 years old when he joined the Panthers, Hutton was killed by Oakland police on April 7, 1968. Over 2000
people attended Hutton’s funeral.
199
reflected the poverty of West Oakland where Bobby…lived and died. But it was our park now,
the people’s park. It had come to be called ‘Bobby Hutton Memorial Park.”
424
By the time Tribe
reenacted Davis’s speech, in 2008, the demographics of West Oakland had already begun
shifting, with many young, non-black transplants moving into the area in search of affordable
housing, but the history of the black freedom movement there was still powerful. The symbolic
importance of West Oakland and DeFremery Park contributed to the reenactment’s political
impact. In the case of the Angela Davis reenactment, DeFremery Park is a synecdoche for the
city of Oakland and its complex history of racial politics. The legacies of Davis’s speech, the
Black Panther rally from which it originated, and the site of DeFremery Park are intertwined and
revived with the Port Huron Project.
The specific locations of the respective speeches mattered primarily for publicizing the
Port Huron Project as reenactments of protest, and for the experience of the live reenactment
events. Concerted efforts were made to ensure that the event was advertised through paper flyers
and email and would reach local communities. The flyers were emailed as jpegs so they would
be easy to forward and to print in black ink on standard letter-size paper, and the email message
was framed as a “call to action,” asking individuals to put up the flyer in their own communities.
Tailoring the flyers for each reenactment or location, the Chavez reenactment flyer, for instance,
was distributed both in Spanish and English (Fig. 3.9).
425
The flyer for the events at the Oakland
Museum, which included more programming for the community such as a roundtable discussion
with former Black Panther Prime Minister of Culture Emory Douglas and a screening of Chicago

424
Quoted in Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical
Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 115.
425
“Mark Tribe L.A. Meeting Minutes 5-22-08,” May 22, 2008, Creative Time Archives.
200
10, incorporated a screenprint of a young Angela Davis designed by local artist and activist Jesus
Barraza (Fig. 3.10).
At each reenactment, Tribe handed out transcripts of the speeches, which lent to the event
a didactic feel. The transcripts also included a heading that indicated the sponsor, artist name,
project title, and where one could find the original speech in archives.
426
In addition, Tribe
explained to the audience that he was filming these speeches and directed people to stand in view
of his cameras, emphasizing that by participating in the filming as extras, they would be seen
when the video was posted online. Tribe’s reenactments persist online as edited digital videos
(on YouTube, MySpace, Vimeo, the Internet Archive, and his own artist’s website) that are
usually accompanied with a project description, basic information about each speech, and a
transcript of each speech. Video of the reenactments also went on to be displayed in art galleries,
projected as dual-screen installations so that the reenactor was visible on one screen and the
audience on the other, allowing the gallery-goer to be a spectator of both parties.
The live performances of the Port Huron Project all drew far smaller crowds than did the
original speeches, which were predominantly given within the contexts of broader political
rallies, unlike Tribe’s standalone reenactments. The disparities in audience size could be partially
attributed to the distinct natures of political protest and art-as-protest. Whereas Paul Potter’s
original speech, given within the context of the March on Washington to End the War in
Vietnam, galvanized thousands of anti-war protesters who knew their presence and voices would
be vital, Bunzel’s re-speaking provided no such motivation. Even though the speech itself would
relate the conditions of the Vietnam War to the present War on Terror and thereby potentially
ignite some political fervor amongst the audience, the publicity for the event clearly stated that it

426
“Transcript of Speech Delivered by César Chávez at Exposition Park, Los Angeles,” Creative Time Archives.
201
was a reenactment of a historical speech rather than a protest action. Variable audiences ranging
from approximately 25 to 300 people attended the reenactments of the Port Huron Project, with
the smallest audience for the Paul Potter reenactment in Washington, D.C. and the most well-
attended being the Angela Davis reenactment in Oakland, even though each only drew, at most,
ten percent of the number at the original speeches. Despite lackluster turnout and some criticism
of Tribe’s directing of the audience, the reenactment of Chavez’s speech in Los Angeles and of
Davis’s speech in Oakland prompted spontaneous, passionate responses from individuals in the
crowds. In the case of Ricardo Dominguez’s reenactment of Cesar Chavez in Exposition Park,
the United Farmworkers Association chant commonly associated with Chavez, “Sí, se puede!”
was begun by one of Chavez’s daughters, energizing the event and calling Dominguez back on
stage.
427
In Oakland, Sheilagh Brooks’s rendition of Angela Davis’s 1969 speech evoked
impromptu bouts of applause and cheers. In these cases, despite having small audiences,
Dominguez and Brooks were able to generate shared enthusiasm for the political ideals they
were re-speaking. As such, they were able to produce a sense of common purpose among
participants, which is integral to the success of political rallies.
With regard to transformation between live performance and video of the performance
that was then transmitted online and in art installations, participants in the LACE-sponsored
reenactment acknowledged that there was more inventiveness in the production of the audience
than there was of the reenactor’s performance, the primary reason being that when these videos
would be shown in other contexts, it was necessary to create a sense of a large audience even
though that was not the reality.
428
The audience’s role was a site of tension, as they were well
aware that they were being filmed and that their presence would be used in the video of the

427
Ricardo Dominguez, interview by Karen Huang, Skype, June 24, 2014.
428
Port Huron Project Roundtable at LACE.
202
reenactment that would then be disseminated. Moreover, the reenactment of the speeches by two
different performers in some cases, as well as doing multiple takes of each reenactment, resulted
in more options for Tribe when editing his videos and consequently a seamless speech for
viewers watching the online versions of the video, but lent itself to an over-produced feeling for
attendees at the live event. In a roundtable discussion after LACE presented a video installation
of the Port Huron Project, one participant made a tongue-in-cheek comparison to an “applause”
sign being held up for a studio audience watching a talk show filming.
429

Tribe admitted that his goal was to reach a critical mass for the filmed audience, but that
it was also very important to him to have both the intentional audience—art world and activists
who heard about the event through publicizing and community outreach—and the incidental
audience—passersby in the public space who stopped to listen and observe. Furthermore, the
artist explains the invasiveness of his camerawork as a purposeful production of spectacle: “I
assembled a conspicuous crew of photographers, video camera operators, sound recordists and
production assistants to document the events, turning the reenactments into small-scale media
spectacles.”
430
Tribe even emphasized these “media spectacles” by publishing photographs of the
filming in the publication for Port Huron Project. For instance, his introduction to the book
features only one photograph, and that photograph is shot from a surprising angle, slightly
behind and off to the side of Max Bunzel (reenacting Paul Potter), thus showing a profile view of
Bunzel. The small audience is seen in three-quarter view and Tribe, laying on his back with a
video camera held up to his left eye, strains to film Bunzel from below in a way that would
undoubtedly make him look quite imposing and highlight the Washington Monument’s looming

429
Ibid.
430
Mark Tribe, “Introduction,” in The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches (Milano:
Charta, 2010), 10.
203
presence behind him (Fig. 3.11). There is no attempt to hide mediation, and in fact, this
photograph toys with the logic of hypermediation (one of the two strategies of remediation),
which is characterized by fragmentation and a surplus of visuals and information. For example,
having multiple windows of text, graphics, and video open on one’s computer screen, “create[s]
a heterogeneous space, as they compete for the viewer’s attention.”
431
This visual style of
hypermediacy “emphasizes process or performance rather than the finished art object.”
432
As
such, multiplicity exemplifies hypermediacy in that various kinds of representation are rendered
visible.
433
Thus the photograph of Tribe filming Bunzel re-speaking Potter makes the viewer
hyperconscious of the simultaneous mediums of photography, film, and live performance. This
layering is integral to hypermediacy, which “multiplies the signs of mediation and in this way
tries to reproduce the rich sensorium of human experience.”
434

Responses to the live performances of these speeches were divided. Frieze magazine
roundly criticized every aspect of the reenactments of Angela Davis’s 1969 speech held in
DeFremery Park. Frieze’s critic took issue with the reenactment’s “somewhat haphazard
community engagement” and “ambiguous political posturing.” He found unconvincing the
delivery style of the two actors who performed the speech, one after the other.
435
Perhaps most
importantly, though, was the critic’s evaluation of Tribe’s directing and apparently invasive
camera work:
Tribe’s cameras dominated the scene, and his proxies spent time between ‘takes’
coaching and frantically stagemanaging their audience. Our function as audience was
merely to show up and become placeholders for two other audiences: first, the absent
audience of Davis’s address; second, the projected audience Tribe imagines for the film

431
Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 32.
432
W.J.T. Mitchell, quoted in Ibid., 31.
433
Ibid., 33–34.
434
Ibid., 34.
435
Sheilagh Brooks was the primary reenactor who was featured in the Port Huron Project catalogue and whose
reenactment was used for the video projected in Times Square. Aleta Hayes was the alternate actor.
204
document of the re-enactment. I never quite felt that we were being, to use Louis
Althusser’s language, ‘hailed’ by what was being read, except indirectly, and by way of
some other imagined audience. The result was a brittle spectacle, a game show with a
political theme.
436

Independent curator Joseph del Pesco, who attended the reenactment of Angela Davis’s speech
in Oakland, similarly observed, “Any suspension of disbelief, any imagining of the historic
moment and Davis’s message, was disrupted in the swarm of stagecraft. One is forced to assume
that Tribe was privileging the media representation, the ‘commercial for the revolution,’ over the
live performance experience.”
437
Del Pesco’s criticism presumes, not unreasonably, that the live
performance is the main event of the Port Huron Project whereas the film would be secondary
documentation, but is there any reason the live act should take precedence over digital media,
particularly for a politicized artwork that intends to make an enduring impact long after the live
event is complete?
438

Philip Auslander has argued vociferously against the commonly assumed binary “that the
live event is ‘real’ and that mediatized events are secondary and somehow artificial
reproductions of the real.”
439
He takes as his subject “mediatized performance,” which he defines
as “performance that is circulated on television, as audio or video recordings, and in other forms
based in technologies of reproduction.”
440
Auslander points out that live and mediatized

436
Julian Myers, “Port Huron Project 5: The Liberation of Our People,” Frieze 65 (October 2008). I quote Myers at
length here because I believe the firsthand experience of the live event to be highly significant for considering this
work’s reception and impact. Since I was not present, I rely on the published words of others who were to gauge
reception.
437
Joseph del Pesco, “Mark Tribe, The Liberation of Our People: Angela Davis 1969/2008,” X-Tra Contemporary
Art Quarterly, Summer 2009, http://x-traonline.org/article/mark-tribe-the-liberation-of-our-people-angela-davis-
19692008/.
438
The primacy of the live performance versus the role of performance documentation is a well-trod argument in
performance studies. For more information, see Jones and Heathfield, Perform, Repeat, Record; Philip Auslander,
“The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28, no. 3 (September
1, 2006): 1–10.
439
Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1999), 3.
440
Ibid., 5.
205
performances intersect in that live performances are frequently recorded so recordings can then
be sold, or, conversely, when a musician gives a live concert, it is often with the intention of
promoting record sales. Following Jacques Attali’s analysis of the cultural economy of
performance, Auslander emphasizes that this cross-pollination of the live and the mediatized is a
kind of “repetition, the mass-production of cultural objects…By being recorded and becoming
mediatized, performance becomes an accumulable value.”
441
Tribe’s orchestration of Port Huron
Project aligns with this economy of repetition. Although the live reenactments were important to
his project for how they could recall the trappings of protest rallies and engage the public, the
work was always intended to exist beyond the typical boundaries of the live and continue into
mediatized performance of art installations and digital videos perpetually accessible on the
Internet. Port Huron Project, as much as it conjures up the nostalgia of Vietnam War era protest,
does not fetishize liveness, and critics who found fault in the “distraction” of cameramen were
assuming, wrongly, that there are immutable differences between the live and the mediatized.
The debate over what is primary in performance, the live act or the documentation of the
performance, is a well-trod topic in performance studies and art history. Del Pesco and other
critics of The Port Huron Project’s live reenactments seem to buy into Peggy Phelan’s assertion
from Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, which stated that performance is inherently
ephemeral and cannot be documented without that documentation becoming something other
than the original work.
442
This binary view of performance and documentation is foundational in
performance theory but it has since been revised, as scholars such as Diana Taylor, Philip
Auslander, and Amelia Jones acknowledge that both are mediated entities. In “The

441
Ibid., 26. Auslander also argues that the live would not exist without mediatization, for without the counterpoint
of recorded performance there is no category of the live.
442
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London ; New York: Routledge, 1993), 146.
206
Performativity of Performance Documentation,” Auslander categorizes documentation of
performance into the documentary and the theatrical. Documentary documentation is the
traditional understanding of the document as a record or evidence of the event that comes after it
happens. Auslander defines theatrical documentation as documentation of a performance that
was “staged solely to be photographed or filmed and had no meaningful prior existence as
autonomous events presented to audiences.”
443
The Port Huron Project’s videos meld these two
categories of documentation, by functioning both as strict documentation (in the case of the long,
unedited shots used in gallery installations) and as theatrical documentation in the sense that
Tribe placed slightly more importance on the filmed product than on the live reenactment. Side-
stepping altogether the binary of performance and documentation, Mechtild Widrich asserts “re-
performance concerns both presence and history,” thereby emphasizing that live performance
and documentation each involve corporeal experience and mediation.
444
Much like Chris
Burden’s precisely orchestrated performance, Shoot (1971) for which the resulting photographs
were as significant as the actual act of being shot, the videos of Port Huron Project are as much
the artwork as are the live reenactments.
445
Del Pesco’s indignation that Tribe’s cameras were as
evident as the performer not only revives the outmoded belief that performance matters more

443
Auslander quotes artist Gina Pane, who describes how photography of her body art interrupts the viewing of the
performance, with the photographer obstructing the audience’s view in some cases. Auslander explains: “It is clear,
then, that such archetypal works of performance and body art as Burden’s and Pane’s were not autonomous
performances whose documentation supplements and provides access to an originary event. Rathre, the events were
staged to be documented at least as much as to be seen by an audience; as Pane observes, sometimes the process of
documentation actually interfered with the initial audience’s ability to perceive the performance. In this respect, no
documented piece is performed solely as an end in itself: the performance is always at one level raw material for
documentation, the final product through which it will be circulated and with which it will inevitably become
identified, justifying Slater’s claim that the photograph ultimately replaces the reality it documents…” Auslander,
“The Performativity of Performance Documentation.”
444
Widrich, Performative Monuments, 16.
445
Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” 51.
207
than documentation, but also elucidates expectations of public protest being unmediated, raw,
affective experience.
The live and the mediatized are simultaneously present in the Port Huron Project
performances. Tribe exploits visual signifiers of protest speech—a podium, microphones, an
impassioned individual with mouth open caught mid-sentence, and a crowd of people—
orchestrating these elements to attract an audience and to make clear the stakes of the event to
viewers/listeners, emphasizing a symbiotic relationship between art and protest. Encountering a
re-speech from the Port Huron Project, one would see a person standing at a podium, speaking
forcefully into a microphone, as a small crowd of people stand before him or her and listen
intently, and as cameramen circle about filming the speech. Perhaps something the speaker said
would resonate: “This whole economy in this country is a war economy. It’s based on the fact
that more and more and more weapons are being produced…” but then the following lines might
confuse: “What happens if the war in Vietnam ceases? How is the economy going to stand unless
another Vietnam is created, and who is to determine where that Vietnam is gonna be?” (Fig.
3.12).
446
In addition to this estrangement of temporality, the orator would leave after finishing
her speech, the cameramen would direct the crowd to stay and perhaps to shift closer to the
stage, and then another woman would come to the podium and deliver the same speech in a
similarly fervent manner. This careful management of the performance, of its filming, and of the
crowd participating in it are crucial elements of the Port Huron Project, which operates through
the recognizability of protest imagery. Tribe’s photographs draw on iconic photographs of
protest speech, such as Bob Adelman’s photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering his “I
Have a Dream” speech in Washington D.C., on August 28, 1963. Seen in profile, King’s mouth

446
From Angela Davis’s 1969 speech.
208
is wide open as he projects his words, and his right hand is open and outstretched in a gesture
both of power and solidarity with the crowd, which is hinted at by the few heads that are visible
at the bottom edge of the frame (Fig. 3.13).
I suspect that the “live performance experience” del Pesco expected would conform with
what is represented in photographs of protest speeches, such as a close-up of Stokely Carmichael
raising his left hand in the Black Power salute while standing at a podium completely surrounded
by microphones, which is then protected by metal stanchions (Fig. 3.14). Captured in this one
image of protest are the elements that critics like del Pesco found lacking in The Port Huron
Project; the abundance of microphones suggests the need for great amplification to a large crowd
as well as for recording for broadcast; the stanchions again point to the possibility of a crowd, of
chaos, and a need to protect Carmichael in his act of radical dissent; and Carmichael’s iconic
gesture makes evident the tenor of his speech. This limited view of the Spring Mobilization that
this photograph of Carmichael provides is a typical document of 1960s anti-war speeches, and
this type of imagery does not account for the messiness of such an event or any other kinds of
mediation or interruption that may have taken place. Being one spectator in a crowd of thousands
at the original Spring Mobilization, it is likely that it would have been difficult to hear
Carmichael, and that there would have been many distractions. Instead, these photographs
suggest that a sympathetic protester attending the event would have been able to focus intensely
on the speaker and to be mesmerized by his message.
Although del Pesco is too prudent to use the loaded term “authenticity” in his critique,
that is his major issue with the Angela Davis reenactment he witnessed. There was no way to
suspend his disbelief and believe that he was actually watching Angela Davis speak, never mind
the fact that this is a reenactment and by definition a performance after the original event. Del
209
Pesco’s critique misses the point entirely, which is that the purpose of these reenactments is
never to transport the viewer wholly to November 12, 1969, but rather to constantly toggle
between the past and the present; one way in which that traversal of time occurs is through the
mediation of cameras and directing.
447
These visual interruptions happen concurrently with
jarring auditory incongruities, such as hearing a statement about the “murderous president”
(which some could assume meant President George W. Bush) only to hear mention of the
Vietnam War seconds later. Port Huron Project uniquely layers live reenactment and digital
media, situating historic events in localized places and the Internet alike, consequently
transcending debates over performance and documentation hierarchy. Whereas live performance
and even the gallery installations of Port Huron Project engage with questions of corporeality
and phenomenology, the reenactments’ online afterlives indicate that the Port Huron Project
must be studied with respect to Internet activism and Web art.
As much as the Port Huron Project is about convening people in physical, live space, it is
perhaps even more significant existing in virtual space. In interviews and statements, Tribe
vacillates between placing emphasis on the live performance or on the digital afterlives of the
performances. Reviews of the Port Huron Project are similarly contradictory, with some critics,
such as Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight, claiming to be greatly inspired by the
reenactments while others like del Pesco say they did not feel as though they were “hailed” as
subjects. Tribe argues that contrary to popular expectations, live protest does not necessarily
have a greater impact than online activity: “Strategies most successful in the ‘60s—getting a
bunch of people out in the street to march—have been co-opted in a sense. I think two million

447
In her essay for Creative Time’s publication on The Port Huron Project, Schneider describes how the Zinn
reenactment dealt in fugitive time, with the past flashing up in the now, folding time in on itself during the live
reenactment. Rebecca Schneider, “Protest Now and Again,” in The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left
Protest Speeches (Milano: Charta, 2010).
210
people worldwide marched to protest the Iraq War, and it had no impact. If anything, the Blair
and Bush Administrations were able to point to the protests as examples of what we were
fighting for [American ideals of democracy and freedom of speech]. I’m interested more in
disrupting the media apparatus.”
448

One site where Tribe disrupted the “media apparatus” was on the Internet. In an
unpublished email exchange with musician Susanne Oberbeck, Tribe and Oberbeck briefly
discuss The Port Huron Project with regard to its surprisingly didactic impact as online videos:
Oberbeck: When I watched the Port Huron speeches on youtube [sic], I found them
mainly informational, almost as if I was watching the original speeches.
Tribe: The strangeness of the reenactments doesn’t really come across on YouTube, but I
put them up there anyway because I want the project to have a second life online. I’m
experimenting with remaking the reenactments in the studio, with the idea of making
video that works better on the net. Also working on video installations based on the
reenactments.
449

Oberbeck goes on to inquire about how these reenactments intersect with politics, asking if Tribe
hoped to challenge the definition of history and to encourage people to exercise their democratic
rights, to which Tribe responds that “new strategies and new ideas” are needed, and “the so-
called counter-globalization movements and tactical media are a start.” In this dialogue, the
potentially stilted effect of watching the reenactments as YouTube videos is spun into an attempt
at “tactical media,” which refers to employing the Web to facilitate protest and organize social
movements.
450
Although the videos of The Port Huron Project could not be described as
successful with regard to measurable mobilization of political protest, their formats as digital
video (viewed online as well as in person, an experience that will be discussed later in this
chapter) interpellate subjects, engendering possibility for social awareness and future

448
Alex Gartenfeld, “For the Love of Art: Mark Tribe on Post-Digital,” Paper, October 10, 2008.
449
Mark Tribe and Suzanne Oberbeck in Conversation, n.d., Creative Time Archives.
450
Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport, Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age, Reprint
edition (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2013), 9.
211
engagement with politics by those individual subjects. In watching the online videos and hearing
the resonance of the speaker’s rhetoric, the subject may become self-conscious of what she is
witnessing and feel an arising awareness of contemporary political issues, and a sense that action
needs to be taken. The online video of the reenactment has the potential to transform the subject
from a passive surfer of the Web or casual art viewer, into a political subject.
Raising individual awareness, however, does not necessarily coincide with mass
activism. The audiences for the videos online, looking at the YouTube “views” counter for
instance, indicates more interest than that generated by the live reenactments but also reveals that
none of these videos ever went viral. For instance, there are two versions of Angela Davis’s 1969
speech posted on YouTube. One version, shared by username “porthuronproject,” is the 5 minute
edited video that also appears on Mark Tribe’s artist page and has had 3,735 views on YouTube.
The second version, shared by username “marktribe,” is the 5 minute video that was projected in
Times Square, complete with scrolling news ticker at the bottom of the screen and closed
captioning so that viewers passing by on the street would know what Davis (Sheilagh Brooks)
was saying; this version has had 1,895 views on YouTube (Fig. 3.15).
451
The news ticker is
reminiscent of the 24 hour news cycle that currently characterizes American television
programming, and Tribe’s appropriation of it reflects the mediated way in which all news is
presented now. He states, “I was interested in using reenactment as a way of holding up a mirror
at the present. To look at the present by reenacting the past. So I didn’t see my reenactments as
being about the New Left. I saw them as being about 2008, 2006, and creating this sense of
history dissonance or conjunction...of Brechtian alienation…”
452
He emphasizes the value of
making the viewer feel the peculiarity of the present, the strangeness of the impossibility of

451
The view counts as of September 1, 2014 are 3,793 and 1,921, respectively.
452
Tribe, interview.
212
revolution, and so on. The incongruity of seeing the present through the past is epitomized by the
re-speaking of Davis’s speech on a Times Square Jumbotron as a news ticker inundates viewers
with even more information and forms of media. Flooding the viewer with so much information
is Tribe’s way of utilizing hypermediation to interpellate the viewer. Hypermediation emphasizes
the medium so that the viewer must take notice of it. It does so not to be distracting, but rather,
paradoxically, to provide a heightened sensorial experience. The news ticker in the Angela Davis
reenactment digital video would be unexpected for the viewer, creating a temporal feedback loop
from 1969 to 2008 and back again.
There is no view counter for Tribe’s own website, nor for the videos on Vimeo, but it is
evident that the impact of the videos on these four websites has been exponentially greater than
the impact from the live performances. Who are the viewers of the online videos, and what
prompted them to click the link for “The Liberation of Our People: Angela Davis 1969/2008”?
Were they searching for speeches by Angela Davis or for information on the Black Panthers? Or
were they looking for art projects by Mark Tribe? Did they watch the video to its completion?
Did Sheilagh Brooks’ re-speaking of Davis’s words resonate with the viewer in the present day?
Although these specific questions cannot be answered, what can be theorized are the
consequences of digital media, specifically the Internet, for the circulation of artworks and
political ideas. Tribe’s association with Internet activism contributes to the reenactment’s
reclamatory potential, for the Web has often been theorized as an open space for diverse
participation.
453
He explains that for some digital artists the Internet is “an accessible public
space similar to an urban sidewalk or square where people converse, do business, or just wander

453
Tara McPherson, “Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web,” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory
Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 199–208. McPherson has
theorized a more nuanced experience of the Web, arguing for three parts of its phenomenology: volitional mobility,
the scan-and-search, and transformation.
213
around. Part of the appeal of this space is that it is outside the museum-gallery complex and thus
gives artists access to a broad, non-art audience.”
454
Tribe seems to subscribe optimistically to
the “frontier” or edge vision of the internet and other new media systems described by
communications scholars such as Geert Lovink and Leah A. Lievrouw, in which media are
spaces for participation, speech, interaction, and creativity.
455
This idealistic vision of the Web as
productive and participatory space is apparent in one of Tribe’s earlier projects, Rhizome, which
was conceived during the dot com boom of the mid-1990s as an egalitarian community for artists
to present and discuss their work online.
456
It has since grown into is a not-for-profit arts
organization affiliated with the New Museum that hosts events, commissions artworks, publishes
relevant articles online, and manages an online database for digital art, submitted by the artists
themselves.
When nearly completed with the project, Tribe posed the question, “Are there online
equivalents to bodies in the street?”
457
As addressed previously, although Port Huron Project
came into being as live events—powerful speeches that were meticulously organized, publicized,
and attended by live audiences—the reenactments were orchestrated to persist through online
afterlives, in digital videos and photographs. The live performances, albeit integral to the project,
served as raw material for Tribe’s edited videos, which made up the bulk of the project. Due to
the planned digital presence and afterlives of the Port Huron Project, I interrogate it through its
relationship with the Internet under the auspices of “New Media,” as defined expansively by
Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonya Livingstone. “New Media” is a contentious term that began being

454
Gartenfeld, “For the Love of Art: Mark Tribe on Post-Digital.”
455
Lievrouw, Alternative and Activist New Media, 2–3.
456
Laurel Ptak, Interview with Mark Tribe, Founder, Rhizome, Web, April 29, 2010, http://www.as-
ap.org/oralhistories/interviews/interview-mark-tribe-founder-rhizome.
457
Carla Blumenkranz, “Radical Speak Performance Artist Mark Tribe Breathes New Life Into Old Politics.” New
York Magazine (September 22, 2008).
214
used in the 1960s and became common parlance during the mid-1990s as a replacement for
“multi-media.” Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explains that New Media problematically relegated
“other media as old or dead,” and it assumed a singular status rather than permitting plurality of
technologies. New Media is also distinct from mass media, in that its primary characteristics
were deemed to be fluidity and interactivity. Critical debates in media studies have argued about
what constitutes New Media, and what is new about New Media. Chun points out that the term
“new” should be thought of as a historical category and one that encompasses repetition in its
very definition:
The new is ‘fresh, further, additional,’ ‘restored after demolition, decay, disappearance,
etc.’ (OED). Along these lines, the Internet seemed to make old theories, dreams, and
structures new again, revitalizing Athenian democracy, the bourgeois public sphere,
deconstruction and capitalism. The Internet seemed to renew the new, and technology,
with its endless upgrades, is relentlessly new…
458

Lievrouw and Livingstone build on Chun’s explanation and further distinguish New Media,
particularly in relation with activism, from other communication systems. They emphasize New
Media’s ability for recombination, networked architecture, ubiquity, and interactivity.
459
New
Media “combine and remix features and capabilities from all types of media and information
technologies and content, they also blur the usual divisions between media producers and
consumers, and between those who design systems and those who use them.”
460
I introduce
definitions of New Media because Tribe’s project seems to be rooted in theories of media and
communication studies. New Media’s beginning in the 1960s, which is also the origin for the
protest speeches and the New Left movement that Tribe mines, is not coincidental. Form and
content are intertwined here, both for the original moment of the 1960s and for the recent

458
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (New
York: Routledge, 2006), 3.
459
Lievrouw, Alternative and Activist New Media, 16.
460
Ibid., 7.
215
reenactments of the Port Huron Project in the twenty-first century, with the promises of leftist
politics and the potential of technological developments being reenacted in concert.
By selecting speeches from the late 1960s and early 1970s to circulate in these different
mediums that would still resonate amongst Americans during the 2000s, Tribe employs this
method of re-speaking to engage contemporary viewers in the vein of French philosopher Louis
Althusser’s notion of “ideological interpellation.”
461
Interpellation is the condition by which a
free subject is summoned and socially constructed by a public voice.
462
This interpellation of the
subject functions most effectively with Tribe’s edited videos, which although mediated, are
handled less obtrusively than the live re-speeches apparently were. It is only through the re-
speaking of these historical protest speeches in digital media that the twenty-first-century subject
recognizes himself as the subject being hailed. Interpellation of the subject is most effective
when the speeches are projected in video installations, but it also occurs with the videos on the
Internet. The ideology of the Port Huron Project that interpellates the contemporary subject is
broadly that of the New Left movement, one that advocates radical change in social structure,
and more specifically would hail the subject to be an active, socially conscious citizen, aware of
the confluences between historical issues and current social problems. In the case of the gallery
goer, the subject is constituted not only by the ideals spoken in the digital projections, but also
constituted physically by the projection’s installation, by the precise placement of screens and
speakers.
The video installations at Creative Time’s Democracy in America and at LACE
attempted to re-create a comprehensive audio-visual experience akin to watching the speeches

461
Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism.
462
Jacques Bidet and Louis Althusser, “Introduction: An Invitation to Reread Althusser,” in On the Reproduction of
Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (London and New York: Verso, 2014), xix – xxviii.
216
live. The installation incorporated surround sound and synchronized video projections, with two
9 x 16 foot rear projection screens, each displaying a stationary camera view.
463
The projection
angles matched camera angles from the live performance, and stereo speaker placements
matched microphone placements from the live performance, in an effort for the environment of
the gallery installation to mimic the space of the performance site.
464
There is nothing else in the
gallery, aside from some stools for seating. Unlike the online videos, to maintain the experience
of the live event, each video projection in the gallery installation played a single, unedited
shot.
465
The camera was positioned at the back of the crowd so the gallery goer would feel as
though she were standing in the last row of the audience at the reenactment (Fig. 3.16). With
regard to the corporeality of the video installations, Tribe states, “I guess I’m always curious to
see how people are going to read it. I’m interested for example when I do the video installation
whether audience members can decode the symbolic form and understand that I’m interested in
raising the question of embodiment and presence in mediation through the way of structuring the
screens.”
466
Tribe’s gallery installations aim to produce an immersive experience through
transparent immediacy (one of the two strategies of remediation) in that he wants to make
invisible the media by multiplying them.
467
By using projections that are roughly human-scale,
Tribe employs the gallery installation in part to make the viewer forget they are watching a
digital medium. The other side of remediation, hypermediacy, means that when watching the
unedited videos in the gallery installation, the viewer is also acutely aware of her presence in an
exhibition space. She is fully cognizant of the directing and production that went into the making

463
“Democracy in America AV Install Schedule,” 2008, Creative Time Archives.
464
See Creative Time, “Port Huron Project Installation Diagram at the Armory,” 2008,
http://www.marktribe.net/exhibitions/park-avenue-armory/.
465
Tribe, “Introduction,” 10–11.
466
Tribe, interview.
467
Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 5.
217
of the video, as she watches photographers, other cameramen, and the artist intervene between
performances. She is able to see also the audience and how engaged or distracted they are
throughout the performance. And, of course, she sees and hears the reenactor speaking against an
unjust and illogical war. This visibility of spectacle, as Tribe calls it, really plays on
hypermediacy and its ability to engage the viewer.
468
With hypermediacy, visual representation
constantly draws the viewer’s attention to the medium. The visibility of mediation, however,
intends to heighten the experience “so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience,
which can be taken as reality.”
469
By oversaturating the viewer’s perceptive field with layers of
media, she is simultaneously hyper aware of mediation yet able to be immersed in the overall
experience.
Watching the videos online, albeit a less embodied experience, still interpellates via
remediation. Because these actors are seen to be speaking in the present—or at least the very
recent past—they appear to be addressing a new generation with problems of America’s violent
foreign interventions and demanding it is the job of a new generation to, as Paul Potter
proclaimed, “name that system. We must name it describe it, analyze it, understand it and change
it…” Potter’s use of “we” and Bunzel’s re-speaking of it hail a new subject to take heed.
Moreover, Tribe’s dissemination of his reenactments through open source video on the Internet
reiterates the “now-ness” of these reenactments and, paradoxically, the immediacy of this
mediated experience. The Internet serves as a significant point of demarcation in how one
understands forms of communication, speed of that communication, and interpersonal

468
Ibid., 6. Bolter and Grusin point out that hypermediation is not a new or purely digital phenomenon; they give
medieval illuminated manuscripts as an early example of hypermediacy, in which case “large initial capital letters
may be elaborately decorated, but they still constitute part of the text itself, and we are challenged to appreciate the
integration of text and image.”
469
Ibid., 54.
218
relationships; there are those who remember what life was like before high-speed Internet
(roughly those born in the mid-1980s) and the younger generation who does not.
470
Tribe taps
into this distinction knowingly, and uses online videos to hail viewers, especially younger
viewers, who would recognize themselves as subjects being spoken to when the medium is
digital video posted on social forums online, but may not when confronted with a transcript or a
fuzzy audio recording. The digital aims to speak in a way that the live may not.

Decontextualizing and Recontextualizing
Paige Sarlin has eloquently criticized the Port Huron Project as “New Left-wing
melancholy.” Building on Walter Benjamin’s characterization of left-wing melancholy as “the
transposition of revolutionary reflexes…into objects of distraction, of amusement, which can be
supplied for consumption,” Sarlin derides Port Huron Project for being a cultural product rather
than a political project capable of transforming culture or society. She argues that Port Huron
Project isolates and monumentalizes protest speeches instead of paying attention to their original
political activities and movements, and in so doing, New Left-wing melancholy “fetishizes the
history of the New Left as a way of avoiding addressing the present.”
471
Asserting that Tribe
simply buys into liberal political ideology due to nostalgia for the “good” political protests of the
1960s, Sarlin neatly undercuts Tribe’s declared intentions of fomenting protest against the
United States’ recent involvement in more unjust wars. She emphasizes the sense of dislocation
in Benjamin’s left-wing melancholy, wherein radical ideals no longer generate political actions
but instead exhibit a “metamorphosis of political struggle from a compulsory decision into an

470
Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection (New
York: Current, 2014).
471
Sarlin, “New Left-Wing Melancholy,” 141.
219
object of pleasure, from a means of production into an article of consumption.”
472
Extrapolating
the inherent disconnect and complacency of left-wing melancholy, Sarlin suggests that Tribe is
guilty of “New Left-wing melancholy,” or clinging nostalgically to New Left politics of the
1960s in a way that prevents political change in the present. In her view, Port Huron Project
forestalls change by excising history in a superficial manner. Taking issue with what she views
as Tribe’s incomplete usage of reenactment, Sarlin asserts, “In essence, reenactment involves
two procedures, the decontextualization and subsequent recontextualization of the past in relation
to the present…Reenactment constructs a temporal dislocation and thereby has the potential to
operate as a form of historical intervention. But Tribe’s project, as made evident on his website,
does nothing more than collect various resources…”
473
Tribe, Sarlin explains, simply reiterates
well known historical objects—these six speeches—while ignoring how those protest events
were supported and organized and what their ideological foundations were. Sarlin also criticizes
Sharon Hayes’s series In the Near Future (2006–2008) for employing documentation of familiar
historical moments, claiming that both for Hayes and Tribe:
These works trade on the power of decontextualization but do not seek to question the
process of depoliticization that these documents from the past have already undergone,
nor the operation of circulation and reproduction that continues and entrenches this
particular form of depoliticization. Tribe’s project, like the work of Hayes, exhibits a
particular form of New Left-wing melancholy that makes visible the reproduction of
hollowed-out forms. In doing so, they support a kind of political inertia in which history
is represented as an ineffectual loop of repetition and circulation.
474

472
When Benjamin coined the term “Left-Wing Melancholy” in 1931, he was writing about the poetry and prose of
Erich Kästner, which was extremely popular with bourgeois readers. Benjamin suggests that Kästner is
representative of what is wrong with the left-wing intelligentsia, many of whom had given up revolution in favor of
amusement. Walter Benjamin, “Left-Wing Melancholy,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Paul
Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 1st Harvard University Press pbk. ed, vol. 2, Part 2 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 425.
473
Sarlin, “New Left-Wing Melancholy,” 144.
474
Ibid.
220
Sarlin’s critique, essentially, is that by restaging these speeches without interrogating them, Tribe
renders impossible the opportunity for radical change or for different interpretations. She
suggests that more attention to the organizing of protest would present an alternate side of
history and thus potentially challenge the status quo.
Undermining the Port Huron Project as “New Left-wing melancholy” is shrewd, for it is
difficult to refute Sarlin’s argument that Tribe excised speeches from their historical contexts to
generate a cultural product. I would argue, however, that it is an easy critique. Yes, when history
is brought into the present, something is lost, but something is also gained. Why does Mark
Tribe, and for that matter, many other artists, too, choose to reenact historical moments? The
process of reenacting, of embodying history, both figuratively and literally, opens up the
potential for new kinds of knowledge. And for all Sarlin’s assertions about Tribe’s obfuscating
of history, she ignores the fact that for many students today, they might not learn about these six
speeches, or the specific historical circumstances of each, at all without the Port Huron Project. I
am not arguing in favor of simple exposure, however. I am suggesting that these cultural
memories are not lesser once cited, decontextualized, and recontextualized—but rather are
changed and become different. Their difference comes through the layering of the new event
over the historic event. This distinct experience is created through what Tribe calls reenactment
and what Sharon Hayes describes as a “re-insertion of historical material into a present
moment.”
475
For example, as I delve into the texts themselves and their historical contexts, the
respective political rallies from which these speeches originated are illuminated again. If Tribe
had simply presented all the information necessary, including a short didactic text explaining
precisely the speech’s origin, its historical moment, and whether there were any measurable

475
“Sharon Hayes + Mark Tribe in Conversation.”
221
ramifications on public policy as a result of these protests, there would be little left to experience,
to interpret, or to discover on one’s own.
As a college professor, Tribe would understand how to facilitate intellectual exploration
in place of presenting rote facts. Some decontextualizing leaves room for what John Falk and
Lynn Dierking call “free-choice learning,” which is completely voluntary, self-directed learning
guided by individual interests. According to Falk and Dierking, free-choice learning can take
place through television, books, radio, museum exhibitions, the Internet, or even through
conversation. They assert that contemporary American society is a “Learning Society” in which
learning is a lifelong practice by choice and includes shifts in attitudes, values, and beliefs;
aesthetic understanding; and sociocultural dimensions.
476
Port Huron Project facilitates this kind
of free-choice learning through the selective information and contextualization it provides on its
webpage.
On his artist website, Tribe has maintained a page dedicated to the Port Huron Project
that includes downloadable versions of each speech, either as abbreviated five-minute videos or
the full-length videos. There is a clickable link to individual webpages for each reenactment, on
which there are excerpts from the speeches, a description of the speech, film stills, and
quotations from reviews of the Port Huron Project as a whole, or of the individual reenactment,
where applicable. Relevant downloadable files are also available on each speech. For example,
on the Angela Davis “The Liberation of Our People” page, one may download the speech
transcript, the reenactment flyer, and the audio recording of Davis’s original speech from 1969.

476
They provide the example of participating in Civil War reenactment: “This broader definition of learning means
that as we immersed ourselves in the time period, listening to Civil War-era music, preparing the food, and dressing
up like nineteenth-century soldiers and women, we learned much more than the mere facts of war. We learned as
much as we could about what it felt like to live at the time and experienced, in small ways, the triumphs and
tragedies of that period…” John H. Falk, Lessons Without Limit : How Free-Choice Learning Is Transforming
Education (Walnut Creek, CA ; Oxford: AltaMira Press, 2002), 9.
222
On the page for César Chavez’s “We Are Also Responsible” speech, the visitor may download a
transcript of Chavez’s speech and the publicity flyer for the reenactment in either English or
Spanish. This dedicated webpage allows subjects to encounter the speeches as a cohesive group,
not least in the video compilation available on the main page that includes a few minutes of each
reenactment. It also provides a multimedia experience for visitors, who may decide on a variety
of pathways through the information and subsequently continue their search on other websites or
offline sources.
477

César Chavez’s 1971 speech offers a prime example for how Port Huron Project
potentially recontextualizes and expands an established historical narrative. Beginning his
activism as a community organizer for the Latino civil rights group Community Service
Organization (CSO), Chavez is best known as a labor leader who, in 1962, co-founded the
National Farm Workers Association of America, which merged in 1966 with the Agricultural
Workers Organizing Committee to become the United Farm Workers Association (UFWA). His
mobilization of migrant workers and his nonviolent protest tactics of fasts, boycotts, strikes, and
pilgrimages to improve the labor conditions for farmworkers are integral to his legacy. He
became famous for his role in the Delano Grape Strike and Boycott, which lasted from 1965 to
1970 and eventually led to collective bargaining between table-grape growers and laborers.
Complicating his legacy, Ilan Stavans asserts that Chavez’s image has become a mere
commodity: “Streets, schools, libraries, and parks are named after him today. The United States
Postal Service issued a stamp with his likeness. There’s even a motion to declare his birthday a
national holiday commemorating immigration.” Despite this high degree of visibility, however,
Stavans explains, “Yet Chavez’s legacy was one of a prophet manqué. A poll conducted in 2005

477
“The Port Huron Project,” Mark Tribe, accessed January 18, 2016, http://www.marktribe.net/port-huron-project/.
223
suggested that the vast majority of young people in the country don’t know who he was, what he
stood for, what his legacy is.”
478
Stavans suggests that Chavez is commemorated for his
nonviolent support for labor rights, as well as acknowledged more simply as an empty icon.
What Chavez is not remembered for is his opposition to the Vietnam War. By featuring his 1971
speech at Exposition Park, Tribe brings this aspect of Chavez’s activism into his public
biography. Chavez himself, at the beginning of his address to the Vietnam Veterans Against the
War, apologizes, “It is hard for me because we in the farm workers movement have been so
absorbed into our own struggle that we have not participated actively in the battle against the
war.”
479
He goes on to relate the struggles of farmworkers with those of other poor Americans,
who were drafted or enlist in the war only because they have no viable alternatives, thereby
linking his work for the UFWA with the anti-war movement. This correlation between the labor
movement and anti-Vietnam War protest not only enhances Chavez’s biography as a champion
for civil rights, but it also underscores how anti-war protest had crossovers with other social
concerns of the 1960s and 1970s.
A specific way through which Tribe decontextualizes and recontextualizes and thus
produces new cultural memories surrounding these speeches is through their naming. Tribe titled
each speech according to a catchy line from its transcript. Tribe’s titles all take direct quotations
from the speeches themselves, but they also decontextualize each speech by naming them
without reference to a specific war, event, or protest. His mode of decontextualization presents
an opportunity for these speeches to be rediscovered. For instance, Potter’s “We Must Name the
System” speech of 1965 is commonly identified by this title, although it has also been called
“The Incredible War” or is simply identified by the protest from which it originated, the March

478
Cesar Chavez and Ilan Stavans, An Organizer’s Tale: Speeches (New York: Penguin Group, 2008), xxix.
479
Ibid., 119.
224
on Washington. In contrast, Stokely Carmichael’s “Let Another World Be Born” is not
recognized as such in scholarly references. A typed transcript of Carmichael’s speech held in the
archives of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture only possesses the heading
“SPRING MOBILIZATION TO END THE WAR IN VIETNAM / APRIL 15, 1967 / Speech by
Stokely Carmichael, / Chairman, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,” which shows
that the speech in its original moment was recognized as important due to the larger protest for
which it was written.
480
Tribe’s decision to title the speech per a famous line has resulted in
Carmichael’s speech being renamed and decontextualized.
Carmichael’s famous line, “Let another world be born” was a quotation from the poem,
“For My People,” written in 1937 by the renowned black poet Margaret Walker. Walker’s poem
reads as ode to African American culture as well as protest to social injustice and a call for
liberation and equality. “Let another world be born” is excerpted from the poem’s final verse:
“Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a
second generation full of courage issue forth, let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a
beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood.
Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take
control!”
481
Walker’s words, via Carmichael, re-spoken by Esandoh, are thus revived in
subsequent times of war and racial strife. The reenactment does not simply reproduce
Carmichael’s speech in front of the United Nations; it reiterates it with a different frame. This
new frame emphasizes the metaphorical notion “Let Another World Be Born”—a sentiment both
aggressive and hopeful—so that it can be employed in an entirely new context.

480
Carmichael, Stokely, “Transcript for Speech, Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam” n.d., Democracy
in America Files, Creative Time Archives.
481
Margaret Walker, “For My People,” Poetry Magazine, November 1937.
225
In addition to suggesting metaphorical import, Tribe’s titling is both logical and
problematic. It is logical because the speeches needed to be concisely identifiable and easy to
publicize. Their titling also makes sense because artists often title their artworks, and each
reenactment in the Port Huron Project is very much a work by Mark Tribe. But Tribe’s naming
of these speeches is controversial because it suggests that he is making a claim on these
speeches. His claiming of these speeches renders it impossible for subjects to conceive of the
original event without also thinking about each speech’s contemporary reenactment, thus
changing cultural memory in a very basic way—by adding this new layer of interpretation.
Furthermore, Tribe’s decision to title these speeches also makes searching for them online, using
a search engine such as Google, very efficient. Not only is the subject guaranteed to find the
speech, but the subject is guaranteed to find Tribe’s orchestrated reenactment of that speech. His
titling is thus tailored to how research is now conducted, and also to how Americans in general,
the majority of whom have access to the Internet, typically make a first attempt to collect
information on a topic. This self-motivated, individuated experience of Web searching is
representative of “volitional mobility,” a term coined by media arts scholar Tara McPherson. The
sensation of volitional mobility is characterized by “a mobilized liveness which we come to feel
we invoke and impact, in the instant, in the click, reload.”
482
Thus the presence of the Port
Huron Project videos online allows for a seemingly free exploration of sources on the Internet
all while the individual websurfer is being hailed via directed movement.
Returning to Angela Davis’s 1969 speech at the rally for Bobby Seale, one reason Tribe’s
reenactment of her speech is more visible online is due to how he named it. When using the
ubiquitous Google search engine to research on the Web for “angela davis liberation of our

482
McPherson, “Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web,” 202.
226
people,” the first results that appear all pertain to Mark Tribe’s reenactment of her speech. The
results vary from short news notices publicizing the event, to Tribe’s own artist website that
archives the project. However, even when searching with “Angela Davis November 12 1969”
Tribe’s project is the first search result that appears, suggesting just how ubiquitous this
reenactment is as opposed to the original protest speech. It is only with more digging that
evidence of the original event at DeFremery Park pops up. In the case of this speech from Tribe’s
project, there is an audio recording of the original event, and this audio recording is easily
accessible through an online archive of the University of California at Berkeley, in the “Social
Activism Sound Recording Project: The Black Panther Party.”
483
Despite this availability of
Tribe’s source materials, their 2006–2008 reenactments in the Port Huron Project are what come
to the foreground for anyone using Google to research these historical events. Google’s
PageRank algorithm ranks gives search returns according, roughly, to popularity; the popularity
of a page is determined by how frequently that page is referenced (linked) by other pages, as well
as how often that search term appears on the page.
484
The high rank of links to the Port Huron
Project suggests a broader sphere of influence than would be surmised from YouTube view
counts or, returning to the live reenactment, by physical turnout of attendees at the re-speeches.
On the Internet (as measured through Google’s dominant presence), Tribe’s re-speeches supplant
the original events in public memory. Sarlin critically assesses Tribe’s project for this
substitution effect, but she argues that how he reproduces history substitutes generalities in place
of specific histories.
485
I agree that Tribe’s re-speeches substitute the original speeches, but I do

483
UC Berkeley and Pacifica Radio, “Social Activism Sound Recording Project: The Black Panther Party,” Media
Resources Center, UC Berkeley Library, accessed January 8, 2016,
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/pacificapanthers.html#1969.
484
Seth Finkelstein, “Google, Links, and Popularity versus Authority,” in The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning
Connections in the Digital Age, ed. Lokman Tsui and Joseph Turow (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2008), 104–20.
485
Sarlin, “New Left-Wing Melancholy,” 141.
227
not find his action to be one of erasure, but rather of layering. Tribe builds on the historical
framework of Davis’s 1969 speech and brings it into the present, reviving it for a new generation
and offering another lens through which to understand Davis’s words. By virtue of the
reenactment videos being so easy to find and to access, the Port Huron Project becomes part of a
dialogue on anti-Vietnam War protest, which flows into larger discussions about the history of
protest in the United States.
Port Huron Project recontextualizes historic events and offers new material for others to
recontextualize as well through its creative commons license, Attribution-NonCommercial-
ShareAlike 3.0, which means that individuals may freely share his videos in any format and
adapt them [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/].
486
By giving the freedom for
others to adapt—defined as “remix, transform, and build upon the material” and to distribute the
videos of the reenacted speeches, Tribe clearly makes room for discourse about this history and
for further layering of narratives. Significantly, his online videos infiltrate straightforward,
educational historical sites. For instance, his videos are linked from websites on Cesar Chavez,
Angela Davis, and Students for a Democratic Society. His artistic reenactments, shared in a
contemporary medium through which the viewer can encounter Davis’s historic speech, become
part of the historical narrative for learning about the Black Panthers. When one watches these
reenacted protests against the Vietnam War in a time of the United States’ new controversial
foreign interventions, the Port Huron Project produces additional layers of meaning through its
melding of the Vietnam War era and the War on Terror. Building new interpretive structures
through the selection of speeches, their naming, casting for reenactment, filming, editing, and

486
Gartenfeld, “For the Love of Art: Mark Tribe on Post-Digital.” Tribe states here that he put the media online
under creative commons licenses. The digital videos can be found online in various locations, but their archiving on
the site archive.org lists the specific type of Creative Commons License that Tribe filed.
https://archive.org/details/PHP3_5min_mpeg
228
disseminating open source video and gallery installations, Tribe makes it impossible for viewers
to think of the original historical moment in absence of their reenacted states. One cannot exist
without the other.

229
CONCLUSION

The primary question of this dissertation has been, how does reenactment mobilize art in
ways that change our perception of historical narratives, and of contemporary politics? In writing
this dissertation, I found, unsurprisingly, it doesn’t always. Reenactment art, as with any other
kind of art, sometimes falls short of its objectives, largely because artmaking encompasses
exploration, interrogation, and contemplation that is typically not meant to end in a definitive
conclusion.
The most idealistic of the case studies in this dissertation is the Peace Tower, which,
contrary to its aims of reviving anti-Vietnam War protest to activate dissent against the War on
Terror, ended up memorializing anti-war demonstrations. Despite this “failure,” the Peace Tower
was able to generate discussion about political art and protest tactics, which is an integral product
of politically engaged art. As Coco Fusco asserts, “There is more at stake in the making of art
that addresses social and political issues than immediate gratification. There is a general social
good that comes from the persistence of cultural practices that, in their very articulation,
maintain the possibility of oppositional thought and discourse, that offer engagement with art
outside a market context.”
487
Illustrative of Fusco’s argument, Peace Tower and Mark Tribe’s
Port Huron Project may not have provided “immediate gratification” in the forms of large-scale
anti-war campaigns, but they contributed to discourse about the United States’ role in foreign
military exploits, and offered their audiences ways to question warfare. These projects also
functioned both within and outside of the art market, for although they were sponsored by arts
institutions, they were accessible in public spaces, both physical and virtual.

487
Buchloh et al., “Questionnaire,” 55.
230
Despite their ideological contributions, however, there are obvious ways in which Peace
Tower and Port Huron Project could have employed reenactment’s interpretative possibilities to
greater effect. In the case of the latter, Tribe could have conducted more rigorous community
outreach, for instance, in the Exposition Park neighborhood where Cesar Chavez’s speech was
given. The demographics of the Exposition Park neighborhood today is approximately fifty
percent Latino and forty percent African American, and residents are largely lower and working-
class. In engaging the local communities, Port Huron Project may have been able to bring an
aspect of Chavez’s historical speech into the present, such as his acknowledgment of the limited
opportunities for minorities and the poor and the need for more social equality. Similarly, the
Peace Tower could have incorporated more of the interactive programming that had been
proposed for it, in each iteration, so that the reenactments would have been more active, protest-
oriented events, as was the original.
By contrast, An-My Lê’s Small Wars sidestepped the fraught relationship between art
and politics by challenging established narratives in an oblique way. With Small Wars, Lê
photographed Vietnam War reenactors and the landscapes they inhabited. Her generous
portrayals of this type of reenactment which is frequently derided, opened the door for
contemplation on the uses of landscape in American art, the American narrative of the Vietnam
War, and the possibility of reshaping that narrative with collective memories from the
Vietnamese diaspora. Her open-ended criticality, though not as politically explicit as Peace
Tower and Port Huron Project, was in fact the most “effective” in terms of suggesting ways to
re-think the Vietnam War for different communities.
I return here to questions about political efficacy and failure because conversations about
the relationship between art and politics inevitably include accusations of the same. This
231
project’s ancillary investment has been the assertion that art and politics are gainfully
intertwined. Debates about whether art should be autonomous, or whether art can explicitly take
on politics, frequently include straw man arguments. These include the dangers of political art
becoming propaganda, or assertions that art should never be instrumentalized, as though those
invested in politically-engaged art are proposing to limit artmaking in these ways. The art world
periodically addresses the relationship between art and politics, often in the form of
questionnaires or special issues of scholarly journals. During the presidential campaign that
would determine if George W. Bush would win a second term, concerns about the War on Terror
instigated scholarly investment in this debate about political art. In the November/December
2004 issue of Frieze, 22 artists were asked four questions about art and politics, two of which
inquired about art being “effective”: “What constitutes political art? Has there been a resurgence
of it? What is an example of art that is politically effective? Do you think it is effective to make
political work that functions within the art world, or is this simply preaching to the
converted?”
488
Although there was substantial dissension among the responses for all questions,
Frieze’s questions about the political effectiveness of art prompted the most virulent answers. In
response to question three, A.A. Bronson stated, “The idea that political art should be effective is
highly questionable, although this is implied in your wording,” and question four seemed to
offend Paul Chan, who simply declared, “This is a chump question; I’m not answering this.”
489
I
believe the persistence of inquiry into political art’s efficacy, and the tensions surrounding this
supposition, demonstrate this to be a worthwhile consideration in art historical discourse, much
the same way that reenactment as a practice generates similarly intense positive and negative

488
“What the World Needs Now...,” Frieze, no. 87 (December 2004), http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/what-the-
world-needs-now-/.
489
Ibid.
232
critical responses. I am inclined to agree with Martha Rosler’s optimistic assertion in the special
“Art of Politics” section in the September 2004 Artforum: “art provides a different frame for
interpreting experience…and offers the possibility of intelligible political engagement.”
490
As
such, this dissertation has endeavored to show how reenactment is a different frame for engaging
with the political in a flexible way.
A common critique of reenactment is that it has presentist tendencies, however, when
used thoughtfully, reenactment does not have to fall prey to the same issues as presentism.
Reenacting is not simply about the present day, and it certainly is not about seeing the past just
through the lens of contemporary thought. At its best, reenactment should interrogate and
reinterpret history, much in the same way as revisionist history does. It is not a “study of
sameness,” as Lynn Hunt contends is the issue with presentism.
491
If anything, allegations of
reenacting the 1960s as a nostalgic practice contradict any accusations of reenactment being
based in presentism. Presentism assumes a moral superiority of the present over the past,
whereas this re-visiting of the Vietnam War era critiques the politics of American military
involvement in the past and the present. In these cases, reenactment is a reminder not to repeat
the mistakes of the past. The artists studied in this dissertation reenact the Vietnam War era to
comprehend the events of the present day.
I began researching this project in earnest four years ago, when reenactment had been
gaining momentum within art discourse and popular culture for several years, and perhaps was at
its peak period of popularity. In the present moment, it appears that reenactment is not quite as
prolific in the art world as it once was, but I believe it will remain a useful practice in the artistic

490
Martha Rosler, “OUT of the VOX,” Artforum 43, no. 1 (September 2004): 218–19.
491
Lynn Hunt, “Against Presentism,” Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical
Association, May 2002, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-
2002/against-presentism#.
233
toolbox.
492
Undoubtedly, reenactments of performance art will continue as viewers demand live
engagements with past works. The lifespan for reenactment of historical episodes is cyclical,
much the same way that political art proliferates during times of socio-political upheaval. There
have already been productive ramifications of reenactment’s exploration of history as a practice,
which I hope this dissertation has shown. In its most expansive applications, reenactment can
continue to be applied to projects of historical knowledge production and political resistance,
simultaneously looking backward and forward.

492
A few examples of significant scholarly attention to reenactment in years past: Marina Abramović’s exhibition,
The Artist Is Present, held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in the spring of 2010; the publication of Amelia
Jones’s and Adrian Heathfield’s Perform, Repeat, Record, in 2012; the New Museum presenting “Expanded Forms
of Reenactment in Queer Performance: Holly Hughes and Cynthia Carr in Conversation,” on May 10, 2013; the Pew
Center for Arts & Heritage hosting the roundtable, “Again, in another time and place: A conversation on
reconstruction, restaging, and reenactment,” on October 5, 2013; and the Film Society of Lincoln Center screening
series, “Repeat as Necessary: The Art of Reenactment.”

234
ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. I.1 Allison Smith, “Trench Art” from The Muster (2004)

Fig. I.2 Sharon Hayes, In the Near Future (2005–2009)
235

Fig. I.3 Jeremy Deller, The English Civil War Part II (The Battle of Orgreave)
(photo by Martin Jenkinson)

Fig. I.4 Malcolm Browne (AP), photograph of the self-immolation of
Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, June 1963
236

Fig. I.5 Wally Hedrick Madame Nhu’s Bar-B-Qs (1963)

Fig. I.6 Artists’ Protest Committee, STOP ESCALATION logo
237

Fig. I.7 Nancy Spero, Kill Commies/Maypole (1967) from War Series

Fig. I.8 Rudolf Baranik, Napalm Elegy/White Silence, 1970,
from the Napalm Elegies series (1966-1974)
238

Fig. I.9 Martha Rosler, Red Stripe Kitchen (1967-1972),
from Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful

Fig. I.10 Collage of Indignation (1967)

239

Fig. I.11 Eddie Adams, photograph of the execution of General Nguyen Van Lem (1968)

Fig. I.12 Art Workers’ Coalition, Q: And Babies? A: And Babies. poster (1970)

240

Fig. I.13 Wally Hedrick, War Room, 1967/2002

Fig. I.14 Martha Rosler, Hooded Captives (2004),
from Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (New Series)
241

Fig. 1.1 Richard Barnes, Cavalry cede the field to a truck hauling away cannon after a
reenactment of the crucial Union victory at the 1864 Battle of Cedar Creek, Virginia,
from Civil War series

Fig. 1.2 Willie Anne Wright, General Robert E. Lee and Staff, CSA, at the Lee Monument,
from Civil War Redux series
242

Fig. 1.3 William Earle Williams, Earth Works, Battle Site, Fort Pillow, Tennessee, 1999

Fig. 1.4 An-My Lê, Rescue, 1999-2002, from Small Wars
243

Fig. 1.5 An-My Lê, Sniper, 1999-2002, from Small Wars

Fig. 1.6 An-My Lê, Ambush II, 1999-2002, from Small Wars
244

Fig. 1.7 An-My Lê, Untitled, Ho Chi Minh City [billboards], 1998, from Viêt Nam

Fig. 1.8 An-My Lê, Untitled, Ho Chi Minh City [kites], 1998, from Viêt Nam
245

Fig. 1.9 An-My Lê, Special Operations Forces, 1999–2002, from Small Wars

Fig. 1.10 Winslow Homer, Skirmish in the Wilderness, 1864
246

Fig. 1.11 An-My Lê, Lesson, 1999-2002, from Small Wars

Fig. 1.12 An-My Lê, Tall Grass I, 1999-2002, from Small Wars
247

Fig. 1.13 An-My Lê, Tall Grass II, 1999-2002, from Small Wars

248

Fig. 2.1 Peace Tower, Los Angeles, 1966, Charles Brittin Papers,
Special Collections, Getty Research Institute

Fig. 2.2 Peace Tower, Whitney Biennial, New York, 2006, Whitney Museum Archives
249

Fig. 2.3 Peace Tower, Chicago Cultural Center, 2007, Chicago Cultural Center Archives

Fig. 2.4 Peace Tower, Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival,
Los Angeles, 2012, Files of Cesar Garcia
250

Fig. 2.5 Artists’ Protest Committee, “Stop Escalation” advertisement,
Los Angeles Free Press, May 14, 1965

Fig. 2.6 White-Out Protest, May 15, 1965, Charles Brittin Papers, Getty Research Institute
251

Fig. 2.7 Hardy Hanson (Artists Protest Committee), “A Call from the artists of Los Angeles”

Fig. 2.8 Page from Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip
252

Fig. 2.9 Map issued with Frank Zappa’s “Freak Out!” Album, 1966

Fig. 2.10 Photograph of the Peace Tower (1966) under construction, sign re-erected after
vandalism
253

Fig. 2.11 Peace Tower (1966), photo of it with car suspended, Charles Brittin Papers

Fig. 2.12 Photograph of Peace Tower (1966) with painted barricade
254

Fig. 2.13 Paolo Canevari, submission for Peace Tower, Whitney Biennial (2006)

Fig. 2.14 Call for Artists, Peace Tower, Los Angeles (2012), Archives of Cesar Garcia
255

Fig. 2.15 John T. Lange, submission for Peace Tower, Los Angeles (2012)

Fig. 2.16 Stephen Prina, submission for Peace Tower, Los Angeles (2012)

256

Fig. 3.1 Max Bunzel delivering Paul Potter’s 1965 speech on location at the National Mall,
Washington, D.C. on July 26, 2007, Port Huron Project

257

Fig. 3.2 Ato Esandoh reenacting Stokely Carmichael, Port Huron Project

Fig. 3.3 Gina Brown reenacting Coretta Scott King, Port Huron Project
258

Fig. 3.4 Sheilagh Brooks reenacting Angela Davis, Port Huron Project
259

Fig. 3.5 Ricardo Dominguez reenacting Cesar Chavez, Port Huron Project

Fig. 3.6 Matthew Floyd Miller reenacting Howard Zinn, Port Huron Project
260

Fig. 3.7 Wall of Flyers advertising Paul Potter Reenactment, , Port Huron Project,
Creative Time Archive

261

Fig. 3.8 Port Huron Project Flyer for Angela Davis reenactment

262

Fig. 3.9 Port Huron Project English and Spanish flyers for César Chavez reenactment

263

Fig. 3.10 Port Huron Project Oakland Museum program

264

Fig. 3.11 Paul Potter reenactment, Port Huron Project, Creative Time Archive

Fig 3.12 Sheilagh Brooks delivering Angela Davis’s 1969 speech on location in DeFremery
Park, Oakland, on August 2, 2008. Creative Time Archive, photographer unknown.
265

Fig. 3.13 Bob Adelman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Delivering His “I Have A Dream” Speech,
Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963

Fig. 3.14 Bob Adelman, Stokely Carmichael speaking at the “Spring Mobilization to End the
War in Vietnam,” United Nations Plaza, New York City, on April 15, 1967
266

Fig. 3.15 Port Huron Project screening organized by Creative Time in Times Square, New York
City, September 2008. Photograph by Sam Horine.

Fig. 3.16 Installation View of Port Huron Project at the Park Avenue Armory for Creative Time,
Democracy in America. Photograph by Sam Horine.
267
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archives

Chicago Cultural Center Archives, Chicago, IL
Creative Time Archives, New York, NY
Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA
Special Collections, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA
Studio of Mark di Suvero, Long Island City, NY
Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, New York, NY

Interviews and Correspondence

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Conner, Lois. Letter to Karen Huang. “Small Wars,” October 15, 2014.
Di Suvero, Mark, and Ivana Mestrovic. Interview by Karen Huang. Long Island City, February
19, 2014.
Dominguez, Ricardo. Interview by Karen Huang. Skype, June 24, 2014.
Downsbrough, Peter. Letter to Karen Huang. “Peace Tower,” July 13, 2015.
Durant, Sam. Letter to Karen Huang. “Peace Tower,” July 10, 2015.
Garcia, Cesar. Interview by Karen Huang, August 11, 2015.
Hamrol, Lloyd. Interview by Karen Huang. Telephone, July 29, 2015.
Kelley, Elizabeth (Lee). Interview by Karen Huang, February 10, 2014.
Lê, An-My. Interview by Karen Huang. Skype, November 18, 2014.
Linden, Liz. Interview by Karen Huang, February 17, 2014.
Paolo Canevari. Letter to Karen Huang. “Peace Tower,” April 6, 2015.
Petlin, Irving. Interview by Karen Huang. Telephone, March 25, 2015.
Phillips, Glenn. Interview by Karen Huang, September 21, 2015.
Tribe, Mark. Interview by Karen Huang, September 10, 2013.
Yuri Avvakumov (AgitArchStudio). Letter to Karen Huang. “Peace Tower,” February 21, 2015.

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract The practice of reviving history in the present is widely found in contemporary art. It is labeled re-enactment, re-do, re-staging, re-construction—each term nuanced according to the needs of those who employ it, but signifying the same general principle. These recent investments in reanimating the past raise questions such as: What work does reenactment as artistic method do? How does reenacting aid in understanding historical narratives? How does it contribute to the alteration and production of collective memories? How does reenactment put pressure on the relationship between art and politics? Delving into one area of reenactment’s practice, this dissertation explores how contemporary American artists use reenactment as a strategy to engage with the politics and protest movements of the Vietnam War era. Specifically, this text examines the intersection of two major avenues of inquiry in contemporary American art: the practice of reenactment and the revival of the protest culture circumscribing the Vietnam War. ❧ This project interrogates the politics of reenactment in contemporary artmaking by looking closely at three recent projects: An-My Lê’s Small Wars (1999–2002), a series of photographs of hobbyist Vietnam War reenactors

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Asset Metadata

Creator Huang, Karen I. M. (author)

Core Title Artists' reenactments: the Vietnam War, the War on Terror, and the performance of American activism

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Art History

Publication Date 04/19/2018

Defense Date 02/23/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1960s,activism,American art,An-My Lê,communication and the arts,contemporary art,Mark di Suvero,Mark Tribe,memory studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance studies,photography,political art,public art,reenactment,Social Sciences,socially engaged art,Vietnam War

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Flint, Kate (committee chair), Hudson, Suzanne P. (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member)

Creator Email karen.i.huang@gmail.com,karenihu@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-235509

Unique identifier UC11276946

Identifier etd-HuangKaren-4304.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-235509 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-HuangKaren-4304.pdf

Dmrecord 235509

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Huang, Karen I. M.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA