Petlin had been living in France (France had had a similar past with the Algerian War of Independence that had recently ended in a cessez-le-feu in 1962 and Algeria’s full Independence, French troops finally left in 1968). Petlin left Paris in 1964 and was in LA the following year organizing a grassroots movement to “discuss the possibility of organizing events that would begin to challenge the (Vietnam) war”. The first meeting was held at the Dawn Gallery and roughly sixty people attended. The APC was formed and their logo became a “diminishing ladder - larger at the bottom than at the top. At the bottom it said STOP, and at the top it said, in smaller letters, ESCALATION”.

A movement was born, it however, remained frustratingly local and Petlin & Co. were looking for larger fish to fry. They decided to picket the RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, Petlin says

where nice liberal academics were doing research, going to galleries and buying art, supporting all the liberal causes, civil rights, and so on.

Much to everyone’s dismay, RAND was actually under contract with the Department of Defense and was developing something called the Protected-Hamlet Concept, which essentially put Vietnamese peasants behind barbed wire fences and declared the rest of their land as a “Free-Fire Zone”. The protest ended with an eventual open public debate between RAND and the APC. Politics being what they are, curiously enough, Robert McNamara then Secretary of Defense under Johnson, OK’d the debate in hopes of better understanding the growing resistance to the war. When all was said and done, there was still little to no exposure from the press for Petlin.

Petlin’s APC then decided to physically make their presence known. Mark di Suvero was having a show during this same time at Dawn, and agreed to design and build a 60 ft. high Peace Tower. APC sent letters to hundreds of artists in LA, the US and abroad asking for works of art – on small 2 ft. x 2 ft. panels – to be exhibited alongside the tower. 418 works of art were received and displayed from the likes of Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, Elaine de Kooning, Frank Stella, amongst others and survived despite continual night & day harassment and drive by’s, cursing & swearing, physical attacks on the participants and vandalism from the community and local military bases. The Peace Tower stood for three months under constant surveillance and protection from volunteers sympathetic to the fight against the war in Vietnam. After three months, the art works were then auctioned off to raise money and continue the anti-war movement. Petlin had this to say,

We had our victims, but nothing like what was being done to the Vietnamese people, and similarly nothing like what is now being done to the people of Iraq. But that was then and this is now.

Indeed that was then and this is now, and the now comes in the form of a new Peace Tower – complete with art work from contributing artists the likes of Nancy Spero, James Rosenquist, Ethelyn Honig, Hans Haacke… designed and constructed once again by Mark di Suvero, with help from Irving Petlin and a newcomer to the project Rirkrit Tiravanija. However, you won’t find the new Peace Tower, slightly altered from its initial design, on the corner of La Cienega and Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. Instead, you’ll find it securely in front of the The Whitney Museum of Art, NY for its Sculpture Court just in time for the 2006 Whitney Biennial. The purpose is

a reminder of the eerie applicability of such political discourse to today’s situation, just as it demonstrates how the questions it provokes about collaboration, activism, and institutionalism remain as central to today’s artists as they were to their predecessors four decades ago. Jeffrey Kastner, ARTFORUM

This also proves in my mind, how little mankind has learned the lessons taught by war.

Mark di Suvero had this to say about the new Peace Tower,

I feel the Peace Tower has that capacity for pulling all the people together through art, which is, I think, the reason why Rirkrit and I are working on it. I think that’s really Rirkrit’s central wish, and when he described that to me, I immediately wanted to participate. Whatever we can do for peace, I think we should do.

Rirkrit Tiravanija had this to say,

Many artists have strong feelings about what went on back then and what still goes on. It’s important to think about all that in the context of contemporary protest and peace movements, which in a way haven’t really gelled as much as they might have. So maybe the Peace Tower is something to help foster that. Obviously, I like the idea of platforms, of places for people to express their opinions. And I see a coming together of like-minded people as something that’s always current.

Not too unlike the modern day Blog I think.

to be continued…