Fit to Print

It’s comforting to know that some traditions are eternal. Political protest graphics are one such tradition; you can trace them all the way back to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, when the printing press was still a new invention and Martin Luther’s followers expressed their opposition to the Roman Catholic Church in raucous cartoons known as broadsides or penny sheets.

Political graphics were regarded then as a bastardized form of visual art, and that attitude hasn’t changed. High art of the Reformation was devoted to the greater glory of the church; high Modernism aspired to similar spiritual abstractions, eschewing the grimy realities of life in the street for the untainted realm of pure aesthetics. That the avant-garde continues to look askance at political art was evident in the vigorous thrashing given the 1993 Whitney Biennial, which devoted itself to issue-oriented art.

As can be seen in “Los Angeles: At the Center and on the Edge--Thirty Years of Protest Posters,” such carping hasn’t stopped anyone from making political art. The survey of protest posters produced in Los Angeles, on view at the Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica through Aug. 9, is drawn from the collection of Center for the Study of Political Graphics. The L.A.-based center also organized a sequel to the Track 16 show, “Los Angeles: The Collectives,” which opens Aug. 22 at Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery and looks at the activities of 16 political collectives.

The shorthand social history on view at Track 16 kicks off with a 1965 poster from the Watts Riots and closes with a poster calling for a boycott of Guess?

clothing that was produced by the L.A. garment industry collective Common Threads (which accuses Guess? of operating sweatshops in Southern California). In between we encounter posters reminding us of such diverse subjects as malathion spraying, the Gulf War, the Ku Klux Klan, gay rights, the National Endowment for the Arts, police brutality and domestic violence.

“I started thinking about establishing the center in 1986, it was incorporated in 1988, and we got nonprofit status in 1989,” explains Director Carol Wells, who curated the show and also had a hand in “Che Guevara--Icon, Myth and Message,” an exhibition of 200 posters, largely drawn from the center’s collection, that opens Oct. 5 at UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History. (The Guevara show was curated by UCLA art history professor David Kunzle, who is on the center’s board of directors).

“Our archive includes 30,000 pieces from around the world, about half of which are in foreign languages,” Wells says. “Less than 1,000 of them are dated prior to 1960, and our oldest piece is a Russian poster from 1908.

“The country that’s been most fertile in the production of political graphics was Cuba in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” says Wells, whose activism began in the ‘60s when she was galvanized by the civil-rights movement while attending a racially mixed high school in South-Central L.A. “The visual language they developed was extraordinary because it was designed to communicate with a population that was largely illiterate.

“In America, the Bay Area leads the country in terms of poster production--it’s a region with four politicized cities,” she says, referring to Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco and Sacramento, “so the activity level there has always been high.”

Government intervention where the public feels it shouldn’t be intervening is the dominant recurring theme in the center’s collection.

“Protest art isn’t always directed at the government, but the bulk of it deals with rights that have been taken away and is produced by people who don’t have a voice in the power structure,” says Wells, who earned a master’s degree in art history at UCLA in 1975 and taught at Cal State Fullerton from 1980 to 1992. “You didn’t see Ronald Reagan’s cohorts producing posters promoting their policy in the ‘80s, for instance, because we were living their policy. The targets of protest art are almost exclusively male too, and as to why that is, just look at the makeup of the U.S. Senate; there still aren’t many women in positions of power.”

The Vietnam War and U.S. policy in Central America in the ‘80s generated the most vigorous outpouring of political art in Southern California. Current poster subjects include budget cutbacks, affirmative action, immigrant rights and women’s rights.

“Curiously enough, the abortion issue hasn’t generated many posters in L.A. And ecology is also one of the city’s weaker areas--I’m speaking here in terms of quality, not quantity,” Wells says. “With the first Earth Day in 1970, some great things were produced, but once corporations got involved with underwriting ecological issues, the look of the graphics went soft and we got lots of smiling seals.

“L.A.’s Latino community has produced many powerful posters--beginning in the late ‘60s and continuing today with posters protesting Proposition 187--and in the late ‘70s the Little Tokyo Arts Workshop created a series of posters about Japanese internment camps. Some incredible AIDS posters have come out of L.A. too, many of them created by ACT UP,” Wells says, referring to the activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.

“With the exception of some posters produced by the Women’s Action Coalition, the O.J. Simpson trial generated T-shirts rather than posters--people were exploiting that event, not protesting it. The center collects buttons and bumper stickers, but we don’t handle T-shirts, because they’re a huge storage problem--they’re also a completely American phenomenon. Other cultures don’t walk around with their political position on their chest, because it’s too dangerous.”

Collectives often spring up around a single issue, then disperse when the issue is resolved. Group Graphics, a UCLA collective formed in 1970 in opposition to the Vietnam War, for example, existed for less than a year but nonetheless produced dozens of posters. Membership of most collectives ranges from three to 50 people, and for obvious reasons most posters they produce are unsigned. Poster makers in South Korea or El Salvador, for instance, risk their lives with their political activity, so anonymity is crucial in those situations, and it has become part of the tradition of poster making.

“Because they’re timely, most posters are destined to become inaccessible,” Wells says. “Right now, everybody knows who Rodney King is, and we have more than a dozen posters in the collection referring to him. Twenty years from now, people probably won’t be familiar with Rodney King, and they’ll have a hard time grasping the nuances of posters referring to him.”

With this in mind, the center requires that any poster it lends for exhibition be accompanied by explanatory text.

“There are, of course, posters that continue to be relevant,” Wells says. “ ‘War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things’ was the most widely disseminated poster of the Vietnam War era, and its message is unfortunately still timely. That, by the way, was the only poster ever made by Lorraine Schneider, who created it in 1967 when she was part of the Beverly Hills collective Another Mother for Peace.”

A political graphic needs to get its message across quickly. If the viewer doesn’t know what it means almost immediately, then it isn’t working, and the techniques used have a lot in common with advertising--both speak in blunt, bold visual shorthand.

“Editions typically range from silk-screen prints of 10 to 100 copies, to offset prints of 10,000,” Walls says. “Most offset prints are made to be affixed to exterior surfaces with wheat paste, but that’s less the case with a silk screen. You are more likely to see a silk screen wheat-pasted in the Bay Area, where the logistics of the region make it possible to reach lots of people with relatively few posters.

“The Internet is now being used as a forum for political discussion, but the information highway will never reach the audience you speak to with a poster wheat-pasted on a street corner,” Wells says. “The only people who find you on the Internet are people who are looking for you. Posters reach out more effectively because there’s less choice on the part of who sees them. In other words, you can’t control what you see when you’re driving down the street.”

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* Through Aug. 9 at Track 16 Gallery in Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave, Building C, Santa Monica. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. (310) 264-4678.