Vietnam War Report; The Artist

It was back in 1940 too. I was a member of the good blood too. We have our own maneuvers in Lousiana one night by the light of the moon. The captain told us to follow the river. That's all that all the guns we will need a been the Big Muddy the big fool says to push on. A Vietnam protest song. Yes but also a striking example of the voice of the artist when faced with the war of today. This is Vietnam War report. The artist and his response to the war. In April of 1966 3 days before I came bridge poetry read in sponsored by an organization named writers for peace. One of the scheduled participants was interviewed poet Alan Grossman. The turning of the poetic art toward the representation of private points of view disabled the artist in the 50s from responding the poetic artist in the 50s from responding directly to the Korean War. But at present it is just that routing of the poetic art in the private part of it which makes it possible indeed

necessitates the artist response to a current situation where the totality of it has been invaded by meaningless public acts which betray any individual as I have said who seriously regards the relation between his citizenship and his you know being. The duties of the poet aside the fact remains that few artists are producing work directly concerned with Vietnam. There are pleas for love and pleas for peace but little actually naming Vietnam as an area in need of such qualities. Sculptor Harold toadfish if they want to do the work alright which is directly related and yet no. Chance they'll have to you know turn their own particular style. And deliberately set out to do that. Very few artists no. Interest in politics is expressed. Now.

If you take an abstract artist and I was doing. Just designs on a campus. He's not likely to be able to say very strong about Vietnam this way. And so such a hardass they feel like doing a post that will have to do something else I mean to express their feelings about I don't have to do those figures a sum or something or lettering or some such thing. Well. You've got two exhibitions now see for instance fellows doing both interesting designs consisting of stripes mostly stripes. With something ludicrous almost insane about a comparison of what a man is concerned with his own small world with what's going around. Where is the connection between these two activities. This is

not to say that the guys doing this sort of thing is immoral. I would never make such a statement not moral at all. He may or may not be a Marlise that the point. Is just that there is a curious imbalance between what the concerns of the eyes seem to be today and what the concerns of the world around them. Let's see. How for instance can. I thank You don't need graphics. I've seen a case not many because I don't know too many but so many of the new ideas. Are not particularly interested in expressing a negro problem like they have been. They to get them. Here again they think they've been influenced by what's considered really important tonight. And these fellows are going to be doing what other guys white stripes and so on. Then why should that. I mean why should why not.

And yet imagine what a negro might be in view of what's been happening recently. Country and he's doing very elegant stripes on campus. Very colorful. I could make the same size story by myself. I'm an I'm an artist who has always been involved and yet the images that I do sometimes are very obscure. And it would be very difficult to find a direct connection with what I'm doing or what's going on around the world. Sometimes I stay in my studio. And it torments me that my work doesn't seem to be commensurate with what is going on. And there are other authors who are even less. Involved than I. And. All of this can be combined gives a peculiar picture of a. Whole group of people who seem to have in a sense. Once themselves from the life of it.

And I think the young people I mean the only people who are coming out now. I wouldn't be surprised if there's going to be a shock reaction against this whole attitude of this you know. I thought I'd say which is an old time but it's still a fact it still is essentially what's going on now. I somehow pure activity which in which the values have little or nothing to do with us. All right Mr. toadfish for example has failed to pay 50 percent of his income tax refusing to finance a war he has no belief in. Yet he also admits to being deeply troubled as to how his work reflects directly on the problems of the world. Why is this. Why does the Vietnam War at once arouse such vehemence in the artistic class yet produce such minuscule artistic response during the Second World War. There was neither this vehemence nor

mutinous. The second war was so different from this was really incredible to think that these things that both of these incidents happened in my own like different how differently we feel about them. In a certain way it was. Virtually no position. Actually none whatsoever in this country. It probably was similar in this respect to the first war where the kind of. Everybody here seemed to have been in love with the First World War you now going to go in over there and get the crisis now the second war. Which was not so romantic. The notion was that Hitler represented a clear and positive danger to not just. America but to the whole world. And. There wasn't any hesitation. Once the war

once we were in it. Most of us felt that we had to go. Oh I do I had met. I had that all riders who were conscientious objection as to what they were really less than a small minority. Nothing to compare with what was seen. One Vietnam and try different but the second world war which like all wars before it had raised from its participants the additional concepts of patriotism honor and glory ended in a manner profoundly different from any other. It ended in a fireball. Fifteen hundred feet above Hiroshima the second world war with its very clear division between good and evil and with the emergent knowledge that what we knew was not sufficient with its debacle. Sense of individual identity in

the slaughter of millions of civilians destroyed a conception of individuality which art is based and dissipated was joy. What seems now is senseless and moronic joy. The collapse of imagination the history the politics of artists in the 20s and 30s governed by the necessities of art and not by perception of history were betrayed by history themselves and found to be all wrong. In a sense the imagination was destroyed by the Second World War and the art after the Second World War with its dehumanization and its personal ism has exhibited the fact that we are in a state of slow regrowth. And that regrowth I say seems hardly begun. And in the case of poetic art in virtually sim virtually now a mere promise. Since the advent of the bomb the play in particular had been a reaching toward an image of our here's a social experience but has not achieved an image of its social experience. In the 20s the

onus was capable in the wasteland the great poems of Yeats and to a lesser extent the poems pound Fras to achieve an image of a society as a whole and outdrive their distinct lines from his own personal position and that to the world at large. Since the advent of the bomb and probably since the Second World War itself we live in effect in an image of this world. We have been incompetent of conceiving it as a whole and incarnate to mourn for the immense disaster the multitudinous and as yet unexpressed death of the Second World War. The artist is now just beginning to emerge from a mutinous which was cast over him by a collapse of imagination into history as a result of the Second World War and at present I would say we are in a period of of slow painful and to some extent sexual regrowth of that capacity to give an image of our social world. And when we achieve it it will be our terrible image indeed.

And now today when the artist attempts to comment on the war in Vietnam he often adopts a curiously oblique approach almost as though the existence of nuclear weapons the possibility of an entire world death had rendered the contemporary environment sterile to his imagination. Pete Seeger writer and singer recently recorded a bitter attack on United States policy but not a direct attack. He resorted instead to analogy. His subject the early stages of the Second World War before Hiroshima. It was back in 1942 as a member of a good platoon. We were on maneuvers in Lousiana one night by the light of the moon. The captain told us to follow the river. That's what all the guns we need been the Big Muddy the big fool says to push on. The sergeant said Sir are you sure this is the best way back to the base.

Sajan go on I thought of this river about a mile above this place. It'll be a little soggy but just keep slogging and we'll soon be on dry ground. We were waist deep in the Big Muddy the big fool has to push on. Well the sergeant said Sir with all this acquit no man will be able to swim. Sajan Don't be a nervous nellie the captain said to him. We need as a little determination men follow me I'll lead on. We were neck deep in the Big Muddy the big fool has to push on. Oh once the moon clouded over we heard a gurgling crying a few seconds later the captain's helmet was all it floated by. The sergeant said turn around men and I'm in charge from now on.

And we just made it out of the big muddy with the captain dead and gone. We stripped and dived in found his body stuck in the quicksand I guess you didn't know that the water was deeper than the place it once before been. Another stream and joined the Big Muddy about a half mile from where we'd gone. We were lucky to escape from the big muddy when the big fool said to push on. Well I'm not going to point anymore. Leave that for yourself. Maybe y'all still welcome your still talk and you'd like to keep your health. But every time I read the paper them old feelings come on we're waist deep in the Big Muddy the big fool says to push on waist deep in the Big Muddy the big goose has to Bushong waist deep in the Big Muddy the big fool says to Bushong

waist deep neck deep soon even a tall man will be all over his headwear waist deep in the Big Muddy the big fool says to push wrong. In March of 1966 when a poetry reading for Peace was held in St. Mark's Church New York the performances were conspicuous in their refusal to actually name the war they were protesting like Seeger. Poet Allen Katzman clothed his protest in the garb of a World War 2 soldier. Sometimes I go about the street hitting myself while I am carried by the wind across the sky. My body walks behind a note of death while the world stares at me like some up scene gesture a Polish woman her arms too fast hands that come alive and squeal when she bangs the lid against the garbage can. A Puerto Rican boy trying to like a cigarette ignoring the fact of the wind as if he was born. Inexhaustible flame the street busy with legs scraping across the granite altar of commerce having

some weather something to do and the negro child before the stoop. If I touched her would she go blind. I explained what is a man to do when the trees declare war. She fades to a background of stone shabby windows. My walk is of an easy gait planned without malice. My party of the tortoise slow to bring the hand from the shell to touch a woman to be a man. When there is no moon in the sky I turn and stare at what I have made. These are the people who will forgive me. I lift my head and listen. Someone is hiding in the wind. Someone I love Alan Grossman speaks of the future is promised and herald the vision of the next five or six years in the political world is so tightly knotted that in order to least it is better to bypass it completely. I think the major expression against the war in Vietnam now is in the political arena. No I understand I know.

Him and. Has written or composed composed sculptor painter. I work really major proportion. In relation to his feeling about Vietnam I know some poets have written rather sensitive poetry in this regard but I don't know of any artist that I have not seen any painting or sculpture which would seem to be directly tied. It will be interesting to see what comes out in the next five six years because where we're going to take is going to the Jets this. Really moment feel this implication. Meanwhile all we can do is the sort of thing we are doing we just have to line up with other citizens and express our ideas and feelings about this the way they do. There's nothing dishonorable about that it's

unfortunate. But the whole trend of not. So many years has been such that it is not an easy matter for an artist to make a direct say a statement about. Whether this will affect the look of what the next 10 years are hard to say. I personally think it may I think it may set a great many of us know deeply deeply upset. By their intense as artists in the face of this cosmic up people up he will this world is going to how can they be stopped of course and feel like complete human being. I. I think this is a terrible dilemma which we haven't done deliberately We haven't created it deliberately but he is causing them to have pushed us in a peculiar position where as I use the word impotent he's a good word to use in this case. We cannot. Create an affected

image which we express our feelings. Maybe I'm wrong. I haven't seen any yet until I do live. I'm afraid I'm right. Whatever is happening in the world really dictates for us very often what our material is about and as artists we try to find material that's significant for today I think that should be said for today and I think for all of us. The situation of the war is probably the most strongly the most depressing although there are lots of other things that we have chosen to do material about. I think we find that using an art expression like theatre becomes for us a healthy way of expressing our reaction. And I resent ment and feelings about what is happening today. The fact that our government and our society can engage in this type of war is kind of the structure of human being empowered and in a sense propounds us into theater and the using theatre not necessarily

as a propaganda stage but as an artistic stage as a means of expressing some of our inner feelings in a socially valuable way we can do only what we can do which is to put on plays and to put them on for as much for as many people as will come to see them. And we feel that in the cultural sphere area. By living there that this does affect people possibly even more so than direct political action. Although this is open to question because when you get people to come to a theater. And who watch observe listen and sometimes like quiet in the theater then you are in a way in a much more open situation often than when you have a political dialogue with a person who they usually had better fences up. Whereas in theatre they can be possibly more open to the questions being raised. And this of course would direct contention I think throughout much of his life. He was not himself a direct political activist but he was a cultural activists and I

think in a sense we are somewhat within his tradition within such groups as the caravan theatre. The young artist is learning his trade to ask what form his art will take when setting forth political views is to be premature. He is only now finding his way and his grasp and his reach have yet to match. Donovan a poet from England sings. Walk along talk along live your lives ride three elite but leave our children with the toils of a mint candy.

Bar seeing a light on what your wings. I don't want your freedom in. Your thoughts they are part of planning your speeches armed with sober. I read your faces like a parm a light a scope of pain we're. Are seeing a light on what your wings. I don't want your freedom in a lie to. Fill your glasses with the wine the limited negroes. Think you not to be a genie that spreads like the morning sun blows. Or seeing a light on what your wings. I don't want your freedom in a lie.

On the quilt the battlefield the soldiers dies leaving me to turn into. A big bomb like a child's hide. It's me them just so it's a one. On one showing as I don't want to read a minute. Literally for anything. While I was on Vietnam your latest game you're playing with your blackest going. Down the halls occurs your grannies I stand there with a fading dream.

I don't want your wing I don't want a freedom. You know. This Vietnam War report was written and produced by James McKenna. This is Jay Feldman speaking.