Jon Wiener: When Art and Politics Collided in L.A.

Jon Wiener teaches U.S. history at UC Irvine and is a contributing editor at the Nation.

This week, a forgotten work of political art is being reconstructed on Sunset Boulevard. But it is unlikely that the new Tower of Protest, going up as part of the months-long, Southern California-wide Pacific Standard Time art initiative, will spark the kind of reaction it did during its first appearance in 1966.

The skirmishes back then began before the tower even existed. One day in January 1966, a group of artists announced their intention on a billboard-sized sign on Sunset near La Cienega Boulevard. "Stop War in Vietnam," it screamed in 3-foot-tall letters. "Artists' Protest Tower to Be Erected Here."

The very night the sign went up, vandals knocked it down. The artists put up a new one, which was knocked down again, and this time the attackers tried to burn it. A months-long battle had begun....

...[P]olitical art today rarely stirs up the kind of sentiments that the tower did in 1966. These days, we have "street art" — but we don't have hundreds of people fighting in the streets over art. Instead of attacks by ideological opponents, "we expect attacks on the work — in the form of weather," says Glenn Phillips of the Getty Research Institute.

What made the Artists' Tower of Protest so potent in 1966 was not so much the art but rather the politics. It was the intensity of feeling about the war that made people care about the art — and fight. It was a time when political art mattered in a way that's hard to imagine today.