by Osha Neumann
Somewhere, a dam had broken. The miasma of alienation that had enveloped a generation condensed into a great flood of disaffection. The rising waters swept the hippies out of their homes and into the ghetto. It threatened to tear the rotting clapboard of public and private life from its foundations. It seemed only a matter of time before the tide would reach everywhere. There was no escaping, and on my part, no desire to escape.
What broke the dam? Too many rotting corpses dragged through the rice fields of Vietnam? Too many Black children beaten on the evening news. Who knows? We who are in the business of undermining dams don’t really know what makes them go. We’re always taken by surprise when they do.
In order to stay afloat in the flood it was necessary to discard some baggage. All the accoutrements with which we protected our privacy had to go. It was like a baptism. We immersed ourselves in the water and emerged as members of a new tribe. We left the old behind. We would have new friends, new relations, a new family. The Vietnamese peasant harvesting rice with a rifle on her shoulder, the civil rights worker registering voters in Mississippi—they were our brothers and sisters. We would share with them the danger and the victory. I had missed the first half of the Sixties. SNCC had been founded in 1960, the year of the first sit-ins. In 1961 Black and White Freedom Riders sitting together on Grey-hound buses drove into Birmingham Alabama and were beaten with pipes and chains by a Ku Klux Klan-led mob. In 1963 Vietnamese Buddhist monks turned themselves into flaming torches to protest the war. President Johnson began bombing North Vietnam in 1965. It was now the waning months of 1966. Earlier in the year James Meredith had been shot in Mississippi. Buddhist monks were again setting themselves on fire in Vietnam.
And I was preparing to make up for lost time.
My plunge into the countercultural politics of the Lower East Side began in January 1967 when I noticed fliers posted around the streets calling for artists to participate in an Angry Arts week to protest the war in Vietnam. I started going to organizing meetings. The artists who attended the meetings on the Lower East Side were an oddly assorted mix of actors in street theater groups, stray poets, and painters. Michael Brown was there from the Pageant Players, and so was Peter Schumann from the Bread and Puppet theater. And there was Ben Morea, an anarchist painter.
We met in crowded apartments. Some of us squatted on the bare floor while others of us sat on brokeback sofas and leaned against the walls. We smoked and talked about the need for art to be a tool of the struggle. As artists, we had an obligation to use our skills in support of the movement. Our angry art had a purpose—to encourage people to oppose the war in Vietnam. The orthodoxy espoused by the avant-garde establishment held that true art doesn’t have a purpose. Art is for art’s sake. Propaganda and pornography, tools to arouse the masses on the one hand and the genitals on the other, were excluded from the temple of true art and confined to squat outbuildings on its outskirts. We could care less.
The avant-garde artists sipping cocktails in the living rooms of wealthy patrons, and guzzling wine at 57th Street gallery openings, were irrelevant. They played at revolutionary intent while cultivating marketable outrages. We were the real thing. We had little time to waste on subtle theoretical discussions of aesthetics. There were demonstrations to organize, leaflets to produce.
I listened to the organizers express their opinions. I compared myself to them. They all seemed very strong, certain of themselves, formed. There were no famous artists in the room. But famous artists had bought their fame at too heavy a price. Here was something potentially better, membership in a group with a handle on history.
I threw myself into Angry Arts week with enthusiasm. Here was a way out of isolation and introversion, a way to flush the residue of guilty sexuality with a fresh stream of legitimate shared anger. The photographs of napalmed children and burning villages pouring out of Vietnam had not made me angry. Somewhere in my childhood I had lost my ability to feel angry. But they were a call to step outside the closed universe of my subjectivity, to stand with others, to push in the real world against the horror. And perhaps, standing there with others, anger would come to me as a blessing, as a release.
For me art had always been a place of peace. It was something I did quietly by myself. I’m not sure now, and wondered even then, if art can ever be truly angry, no matter how angry the artist who produces it. Art stands against and reconciles with horror. It can make horror beautiful. But I was prepared to waive my intellectual reservations. I was done with thought that interfered with action. If art could not join in the struggle, I was prepared to jettison the art.a
In early adolescence I had discovered a book of Goya’s etchings in a bookcase in our living room. I would sneak the volume down from its shelf, take it up to my room, close the door, and leaf through the unflinching depictions of murder and sexual violence. Bodies of slaughtered prisoners lay heaped in tangled piles like garbage. A firing squad executed blindfolded prisoners tied to stakes. Women were raped and women begged not to be raped. Naked corpses without arms or legs hung on trees like meat in a butcher shop. In one etching two soldiers held a naked prisoner upside down with his legs apart so a third could split him down the middle with a sword. In another a mob exacted revenge on a soldier who was being dragged along the ground by a rope tied to his legs. He had been stripped of his pants and a man shoved a stake into his anus. The captions beneath the pictures were terse: “What Madness,” “A Cruel Shame,” “Forced to Look.” They neither explained nor consoled.
I remember in particular an etching of a child being spanked. The child has broken a pitcher, which can be seen in the background. His punishment is being administered by an old woman who pins him across her knees with her left hand. She holds his skirts up in her teeth revealing his buttocks. In her right hand she holds a shoe with which she beats him. I masturbated to this image. Goya was a great artist. His work was part of my cultural heritage. It did not need to be hidden, like the tattered black and white photograph of a chained naked woman that I picked up on the street one evening and secreted in a hole in the bottom of a bookshelf in my room. But Goya was my first pornographer.
Sitting in my Lower East Side flat after our meetings, I thought about Goya. He went deaf and mad. The title plate of his Caprichios bares the caption: “The dream of reason brings forth monsters.” I imagined him hunched over his etching plate, gouging into it by candle light, gouging, gouging deep into the night. He clenches his etching burin until his hand aches. Spread out on his work table are all the reassuring solid materials of his art—his acids, engraving tools and copper plates. He digs his burin into the plate. As he draws the groove of the buttocks his burin pushes into it. Who is he at that moment? The child who is being beaten or the woman who beats him? Is he the penis of the rapist or the vagina of the raped? Is he the sword of the dismemberer or the body of the dismembered? Is he the gray sky above the man hanging from the gallows or his dead unseeing eyes? Is he all of these or none of them? Whose side was Goya on? Was he angry when he drew, or lost in a more complex mood?
SACRILEGE
On Monday, January 23, 1967, the New York Times reported on a demonstration organized by the Lower East Side contingent of Angry Arts week:Twenty-three peace demonstrators unfurled posters portraying a maimed Vietnamese child in the central aisle of St. Patrick’s Cathedral during the ten o’clock high mass yesterday morning, causing the celebrant to interrupt the liturgy. . . In a statement they left with a friend, the protesters said they were leaving the church in the midst of the ceremony “out of disrespect for Cardinal Spellman” to protest his recent statement that “the war in Vietnam is a war for civilization.” The paper posters carried the fifth of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shall not kill” above the child’s photograph and below it the legend, “Vietnam.” They were no sooner unfurled than the demonstrators were surrounded by detectives and plain-clothes patrolmen who had been tipped off that a demonstration would take place.
The Times, at least in this i
nstance, was a model of journalistic accuracy. No sooner had I stood up and begun to extract the rolled cardboard from under my tweed overcoat, than I was surrounded by burly men in black trench coats. I was passed from one of them to the other out into the vestibule, where I was I.D.’d and informed I was being charged with disorderly conduct, unlawful assembly in a church, and disruption of a religious ceremony. In the firm grip of my arresting officer, I was escorted out of the dark church into bright winter sunlight. As I was loaded into the paddy wagon I managed to catch a glimpse of photographers, a picket line, and a crowd of onlookers standing in on the sidewalk. The door slammed shut and the van drove off, carrying my fellow arrestees and me first to the local precinct and then to a holding cell at the Central Police Station, 100 Center Street, affectionately known as “the Tombs.”
We spent the night in jail. A jailor brought us pineapple marmalade sandwiches and cocoa. We talked quietly among ourselves and then someone began chanting “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Rama Hare Rama.” We all joined in, and as we chanted I relaxed, the tension flowed out of me, and I began to feel an enormous peace, as if a tense journey that had consumed my entire life was coming to an end. I had arrived at my destination.
I chanted quietly along with the rest of my cellmates. And as I chanted, all at once, it seemed that the harsh light in the cell—glaring on the naked walls, reflecting off the stainless steel toilet—underwent a transformation, becoming simultaneously brighter, clearer, and softer. There I was, having a “mystical experience.” I felt a twinge of disloyalty to the rationality I had learned to admire while listening to the dinner table conversation of my parents. But those days seemed far away. There was no need to feel ashamed in any case. Such experiences were a sign of the times. The membranes separating various compartments of the counterculture were permeable. Their contents flowed together. Just let yourself go, the times were whispering, and you’ll be saved.
We were bailed out the next day. I returned, reluctantly, to the solitude of my railroad flat with its familiar mess, canvases stacked against the wall, and roaches feeding in the garbage. I set my typewriter on the enamel cover of the bathtub next to the sink in my kitchen, pushed away the dishes, and poured out a pornographic fantasy in which Cardinal Spellman is sexually humiliated in front of his congregation, choir boys are sodomized, and his congregation stripped and beaten. Pausing to catch my breath, I continued:. . . One must be just in one’s fantasies. One must not allow oneself to be lenient. Difficult as it may be one must force oneself to imagine ever new indecencies to inflict on criminals who are the embodiment of real obscenity. Only in one’s fantasies can one preserve for future generations the image of justice that perhaps it will be their joy to inflict. It is an obligation which one must fulfill in private.
Nothing inhibits the carrying out of this obligation more drastically than this action. To give way to the temptation to turn one’s fantasies into reality is an unmitigated disaster. For immediately one is lost in a world in which they, the obscene ones rule. Their laws apply, their game is played, their dance is danced. Everything one says is used against one: one must become sincere, witness one’s ethical convictions, proclaim oneself willing to suffer for those convictions, make sacrifices.
. . . Beware of action! Beware of its temptations! Preserve the truth inside you! Publish it privately among your friends. Live by it secretly. Draw strength from it. Reveal it to broader circles only in veiled allegories. But do not act on it. Do not witness it. Deny it under oath.
And if the desire to act is too strong, do something half-hearted. Picket outside the Cathedral. Run the peace candidate. Proclaim the possibility and necessity of moral outrage (do not admit that you have passed beyond outrage to something harder, glittering, vicious) Do not show your teeth. Be very careful. Shake hands with the right people. Smile. But inside, keep the faith. . . .
Ethics is a bog. They have made it an instrument against us. They have poisoned its waters. It is the most tempting part of their system and the most dangerous. In defense one must become inhuman. One must cling to one’s inhumanity, spit full in the face of their poisoned platitudes so that beyond those platitudes, beyond our own inhumanity there is preserved the possibility of a true ethics that will exist not in the minds of the moralist, but in our mutual happiness.
A-men
Fuck off!
The outrages I perpetrated in my imagination far outdistanced the mild disturbance we had created in reality.
Our disruption of Cardinal Spellman’s mass—a moral act, committed in the name of napalmed babies whose pain and suffering we asked the world to witness—had another dimension. It was an intrusion, a rending of the veil of civility, an invasion of the rabble into the sanctimonious safe house of the hypocrites.
It was not extraordinary that I, in the seclusion of my apartment, wrote “unacceptable” reflections in my journal. It was extraordinary how quickly, and with how little mediation, these private fantasies would enter the arena of public political discourse. In the mimeographed fliers I produced for the Motherfuckers, they emerged almost verbatim. Private fantasy freed itself to roam the streets, titillating the police who picked my ravings out of the gutter and preserved them in their files as evidence of the terrible menace we represented.
A poem by Rex Weiner we put out as a flier.
BEN MOREA AND THE FOUNDING OF THE MOTHERFUCKERS
When Angry Arts week ended, a group of Lower East side artists continued to meet with the intention of carrying on where Angry Arts week had left off. We eventually decided to call ourselves “the Motherfuckers,” short for “Up Against the Wall Motherfucker.” The name came from a line in Leroi Jones’s prose poem “Black People!” that he’d written as his hometown, Newark, was erupting in a riot sparked by police brutality:. . . you can’t steal nothin from a white man, he’s already stole it he owes you anything you want, even his life. All the stores will open if you will say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall mother fucker this is a stick up!6
Our name had the advantage that it could not be spoken in polite company. That which could not be spoken, could not be co-opted.
The unacknowledged leader of our group was Ben Morea. His life story could not have been more different from my own. He had grown up in Hell’s Kitchen on the West Side of Manhattan and lived all his life on the streets of New York. He never knew his father. He loved jazz and learned to play the vibes. He hung out in clubs where heroin was hip and got hooked. That period of his life ended after he was busted for possession. He kicked his heroin habit cold turkey in prison, but in the process became so sick that he almost died. He was transferred from his cell to the prison ward of a hospital. There, in the art therapy room, he did his first paintings.
Ben had tried to kick his habit many times, but always he would go back to the jazz scene and get hooked again. When he left the hospital, he decided he was done. He put away his vibes, stopped going to the clubs, and started painting. While looking to fill the void in his life left when he abandoned the jazz world, he met Judith Malina and Julian Beck, the founders of the Living Theater, an improvisational anarchopacifist theater of communal ritual and provocation. Judith and Julian were Ben’s introduction to anarchism. After meeting them he joined a study group organized by Murray Bookchin. It met in Murray’s apartment on 9th Street east of 1st Avenue. Murray was a pugnacious working class intellectual, committed to anarchism and interested in technology and ecology. Ben was never entirely comfortable with the intellectual theorizing that went on in the group. According to Murray, he would show up, listen impatiently for a while, and then start screaming. He’d call everybody a petty bourgeois white honky and storm out. Everyone thought that was the last they’d see of him, but the next meeting he would be back, and go through the same ritual. Even after the group disbanded, Ben would show up regularly at Murray’s home to talk and argue politics.
Ben began searching for a way to turn art into an instrument of revolution,
which meant to turn art against itself. He wanted to destroy art in the name of art—and life. With Roy Hahne he put out Black Mask, a four-page magazine in which he published his manifestos. Ben gathered together a group of likeminded artists. They called themselves Black Mask after the magazine and proceeded to stage a series of theatrical provocations.
On October 10, 1966, they traveled uptown from the Lower East Side, with the intention of shutting down the Museum of Modern Art. They had handed out fliers announcing their action in advance. At the entrance to the museum they were met by barricades and a line of cops. Art, which refused engagement, now required police protection. It was a victory.
On another occasion they announced they would change the name of Wall Street to “War Street.” Ben and his fellow provocateurs concealed their faces behind black woolen ski masks and paraded down the street carrying skull masks on stakes while handing out fliers proclaiming the name change.
A January 1968 action targeted the poet and playwright Kenneth Koch. Koch was a friend of abstract expressionists and a beloved professor of poetry at Columbia University. His poems were often playful, endearing, and somewhat obscure, but never “political” or angry. He did not write to put anyone up against the wall. Ben learned that he was scheduled to give a reading at St. Mark’s Church on the Lower East Side. Newark was erupting in riots, and Leroi Jones had just been arrested for carrying firearms and resisting arrest. Black Maskers made a flier with a picture of Jones, shackled and chained, his arms behind his back. He had what looked like a bloody welt on his forehead. Below the picture were three words: “Poetry is Revolution.” Ben and his cohorts took seats in the balcony. One member of the group, a man over six feet tall with a great head of tousled black hair, wore a trench coat. He looked impressively sinister, the very image of a turn-of-the-century anarchist bomb thrower. Concealed under his coat was a pistol. As Koch began to read, the man stood up. He shouted, “Koch!” When the poet looked up, the man aimed the pistol and fired. It was loaded with blanks. There was a loud explosion, and according to Ben, Koch fainted on the spot.b Ben and his cohorts threw their fliers from the balcony and ran out of the church.