Political Protest

The years immediately following World War II were deceptively quiescent in the West. By the 1950s, the civil rights movement in the U.S. South and protests against nuclear weapons in Europe generated some oppositional graphics. These were overshadowed in the 1960s by the war in Vietnam, which was the catalyst for the greatest popular mobilization in the United States since the Civil War, and an unprecedented outpouring of first posters and then murals. It has been estimated that perhaps 100,000 different posters were produced during the height of the Vietnam War (1966–1973), by individuals and small groups, usually in association with one of the many antiwar organizations, large and small. The simple artless slogan and design "War is not healthy for children and other living things," conceived for Women Strike for Peace was repeated in every medium and endures. The posters may be regarded as a pictorial arm of the underground press, that alternative press made possible by cheaper printing; but many of the posters, produced in small quantities and silk-screen, testify to a crafts technology and the sacrifice of much Vietnam War protest. America Is Devouring Its Children, poster by Jay Belloli, Berkeley, California, 1970. Silkscreen on paper. COURTESY OF JAY BELLOLI time and personal money. Many of the more ambitious and professionally designed posters were sold from specialized stores catering to college students. Often unsigned, the posters used an array of styles enlarged by the simultaneous neo-art nouveau, psychedelic, and pop movements, with much reference to current commercial advertising, which it ipso facto subverted. The posters used national symbols such as the U.S. flag and the Statue of Liberty to expose the hypocrisy of the United States and its endeavor to suppress movements of national liberation; they condemned the suffering of civilians, the use of napalm and defoliants in Vietnam, and police brutality, the unfairness of the draft, and the corruption of the politicians at home. Posters took over the traditional role of the cartoon, which seems weak in comparison to the large, aggressive, and sometimes gaudy effects of the poster. Protest posters demanded an end to racism and the oppression of women, and moved ecology into public consciousness with awareness of destruction of the environment by industry.

The most bitter and pathetic of the designs condemn the cruelty perpetrated against Vietnamese civilians, and several of the concepts and photographs used have become classics. Live TV coverage (in color) and press photographs turned popular opinion and eventually opportunist politicians against the war. The photograph of a Vietcong suspect being shot in the head in broad daylight in a crowded street by an officer of the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese army; that of a ten-year-old girl running screaming and naked down a road, her back on fire with napalm; the Goyaesque heaping of corpses of the My Lai massacre—these images were used again and again. The latter was made and distributed for free by the Art Workers Coalition, an alliance of New York artists. A small number of posters actually called for the victory of the Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh. The condemnation of the U.S. war in Vietnam, like opposition to the war in Iraq forty years later, was a global protest, and there was hardly a country in the West that did not contribute its share. It is justly claimed that the antiwar movement, which had its own genius for publicity, played an essential role in ending the war by forcing U.S. withdrawal. In France, exasperation with the Vietnam War and the government of Charles de Gaulle led to a unique outpouring of posters in support of the student-worker strikes of May 1968. The "Affiches de Mai" are a stylistically homogeneous number of posters produced by the ad hoc group of students calling itself the Atelier Populaire, which functioned out of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris The designs were all based on very simple and drastic stencils silk-screened onto the cheapest paper; the style was imitated by students in the School of Environmental Design in Berkeley (1970), where a comparable surge of protest followed the invasion of Cambodia.

Cuba experienced a dramatic vitalization of poster art following the 1959 revolution that was out of all proportion to its size and resources. The production of one organization alone, the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL), which published the magazine Tricontinental, into which the posters were at first folded, ran into hundreds in the 1967–1987 period; the wit, ingenuity, and imaginative use of national symbols, in posters designed to support popular movements on three continents, had an impact far beyond the borders of the island nation, especially in the United States. The major dissident silk-screen artist-printmaker Rupert Garcia was much indebted to the Cuban style of posters, which acted on just about every sphere of Cuban life and revolutionary endeavor, consistently socialist, anticapitalist and anti-imperialist. Cuba's is the best example of officially sponsored anti-imperialist protest art. Perhaps the most enduring icons that emerged from this context are the portraits of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the immortal matrix for which is based on a photograph by the Cuban photographer Alberto Korda. This has been called the most famous photograph of all time, the Mona Lisa of photography. The image of the communist guerrilla in an apparent moment of serene vision appears with an astonishing ubiquity on T-shirts, buttons, banners, posters, and all manner of consumer objects. There has been a popular transformation of the historic Che (murdered by U.S.-backed Bolivian military in 1967) into a symbol of struggle for social justice, hope for a better world, and the spirit of personal sacrifice. Given the relative lack of native production, the number and variety of OSPAAAL posters for popular struggles of Africa emerging from European colonization and resisting the apartheid-supported wars of Jonas Savimbi, where Cuban soldiers were much involved, offers to North and West the most accessible iconography of African liberation. The Cubans were producing posters for Nelson Mandela at a time when the United States was still branding him a terrorist; in terms of ubiquity, he stands beside Che Guevara.

The political poster, the graphics of protest, has become the subject of many books, conferences, exhibitions, and collections; political posters are also actively traded on the eBay Internet site and elsewhere. Like the mural movement, political poster-making is a worldwide phenomenon, and much of the subject matter is similar. More like a pamphlet than a book, posters are unattractive to libraries because of their fragility and are distributed in the most random fashion by organizations large and small at public street demonstrations and otherwise informally. The collection of the Los Angeles–based Center for the Study of Political Graphics consists of some fifty thousand works from some one hundred different countries, with many thousands of different items from (or about) Cuba, Nicaragua, and Chile. The "about" is important in such cases where the countries have endured assaults from the imperial power, for the poster is one of the most potent expressions of solidarity, and often uses text in more than one language (OSPAAAL used four). The extraordinary outpouring of posters made in Nicaragua to support the revolution there is matched by the numbers done with the same intent, and particularly to condemn the U.S.-sponsored Contra war, in Europe and the United States; the topics represented, literacy and health for all, the rights of women and children, the right to national sovereignty strike a common chord worldwide. The mural in Nicaragua, again quantitatively and qualitatively exceptional, has likewise been a means of establishing and calling for international solidarity, for about half of the three-hundred-plus murals done in that country between 1979 and 1990, and some of the very best, were done with the skills and materials brought by internationalists from twenty different countries, in cooperation with Nicaraguans. The destruction of many of the murals by the "liberal" post-Sandinista government represented not so much an attempt to wipe out dissidence as such (which was impossible), but rather a demonstration of the will to rewrite history in an anti-Sandinista light.

Murals in the United States appeared in the late 1960s and immediately became more strident and provocative than their Depression-era forbears. They have proliferated to an extraordinary degree, in every U.S. city and even small towns, and worldwide. Their function as "protest art" is harder to define than that of the posters, partly because they have relied on the sponsorship of businesses large and small, and local civic authorities, which tends to soften their subject-matter. Being location-bound, they tend to favor local issues. Some favorite topics, like drug-abuse and AIDS, may hardly be called countercultural. Murals have been more subject to censorship than have posters, and they may be termed ephemeral, liable to destruction by sun and rain and the wrecker's ball. While it is virtually impossible to earn a living from making protest posters, there are many artists whose livelihood and reputation depends entirely on their skill as muralists.

Spray-can art, often mis-termed "graffiti" (which is something else), is the truly global, emphatically vernacular and irreducibly public mural style of the 1990s and early 2000s. Its explosively calligraphic style, which at its best attains to a Book-of-Kells-like intricacy of design, is less overtly political than populist in location (abandoned walls, playgrounds, and railway sidings) and in process: a joyous protest against the commercialdom of the world of high art, and the burned-and-bombed-out look of inner cities. With its multifarious references to pop culture (such as comic book, punk, hip-hop, and rap), it is both personal to the "writers," as they are called (or "taggers"), and socially homogeneous in its anarchic, semi-legal, and often illegal way—this amid many attempts to coopt and institutionalize it.

The poster of protest has been to a degree institutionalized by certain large organizations such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and the German Green Party. The international human rights organization Amnesty International has used the talents of artists everywhere for posters, which run the gamut of the beautiful and terrifying (often combining both qualities), and ring changes on the concept of bringing hope to those in jail and suffering torture. An example, sponsored by a major German corporation, testifies to corporate guilt over connivance with or exploitation of injustices, and to the desire to present a morally conscious face to the world. Greenpeace and Green parties have not only defended the environment against its destruction by governments and industry, but also condemned warmongering. Greenpeace activists have also engaged in direct action that branches, such as the Greenham Common protests of the 1980s and 1990s, into theater: in March 2004 two youths climbed the Big Ben clock tower in London with banners denouncing government lies. The government ignored the denunciation, but not the dramatic breach of security.

The Japanese Graphic Designers Association in 1983 launched a worldwide Hiroshima Appeal Poster competition, which resulted in a series of posters; a counterpart was started in the United States by Charles Helmken. In Britain in the late 1950s, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) gave the world the most universal peace or antiwar symbol, and has continued to produce and inspire posters, as have the Quakers and many other religious or spiritual organizations such as the World Council of Churches. Particular events, notably the stationing of U.S. Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe and the apparent readiness of the United States to consider Europe as a theater of nuclear war, elicited an array of visual protests of various kinds. The encampment of women against the missiles placed on Greenham Common in Berkshire, England, aroused great media attention for their theatrical flair and dogged determination in harsh conditions; the perimeter fence became the stage for both actions and decorations that frustrated and ridiculed the authorities. The demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989 combined a variety of visual effects: posters, banners, and a huge sculpture of the Goddess of Democracy

The German Greens stand at the center of the immense German production of the last decades. Their posters are very large and colorful and reach into all corners of German political and social life. Other major sources are the antifascist organizations ("anti-fa") resisting fascist resurgence and racism, which is anti-Turkish and anti-foreigner generally. The range of protest in Germany rivals that of the United States, touching U.S. missiles on German soil, the Berlin Wall, immigration (many posters are in Turkish as well as German and occasionally English), the plight of the homeless, housing, the right to legal abortion, and the rights of women, children, political prisoners, gays, and animals. Pollution, recycling, urban congestion, and every kind of environmental issue, as well as solidarity with popular struggles around the world, especially in Latin America, come under scrutiny. In the United States, Syracuse Cultural Workers have consistently produced designs, but the U.S. scene is more characterized by the sheer multiplicity of ad-hoc antiwar, pro-peace and solidarity organizations producing a design of the moment, often for an upcoming mass demonstration. Poster-making in Australia has also depended much on the consistency of small organizations, such as Tin Sheds (1972–1979), Redback Graphics, and the radical youth group Resistance (since 1967). All were inspired by the anti–Vietnam War movement but have also taken on local targets, especially the maltreatment of the Aborigines.