Allison Meier : Radical Archive Exhibits 'Rebel Newsprint' from the Sixties

Image from “Rebel Newsprint: The Underground Press” at Interference Archive. Photo by Allison Meier / Hyperallergic.

One radical archive offers a
hands-on approach to activist art

The indie counterculture newspapers of the 1960s multiplied to over 500 around the country, with their art and design as radical as their messages.

By Allison Meier / Hyperallergic / March 6, 2013

The intensified activism of the 1960s fueled by the Vietnam War and struggles over class inequality, women’s rights, and black liberation drove the rapid growth of the underground press. Between 1965 and 1969, the five indie counterculture newspapers scattered across the United States multiplied to over 500 around the country, representing and communicating the voices of feminists, the Black Panther Party, gay activists, psychedelic aficionados, and other social movement groups with their art and design as radical as their messages.

"Rebel Newsprint: The Underground Press" at Interference Archive in Gowanus [a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York] is digging into this historic period with over 100 newspapers from across the sixties underground.

The exhibition of ephemera is curated by Sean Stewart, the editor of On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S. (2011), and was drawn from his own collection, with yellowed and folded issues of newspapers like the bilingual community publication Basta Ya started in San Francisco in 1969, the experimental San Francisco Oracle published from 1966 to 1968 out of Haight-Ashbury that reflected the area’s psychedelic scene in trippy rainbow ink and spiritual poetry, and the sexual revolution sourced Screw: The Sex Review co-founded by pornographer Al Goldstein.

Most of the newspapers are held in plastic and suspended from the walls of the Interference Archive’s small space, a cascade of counterculture messages like “End the War Now,” “Don’t Mourn, Organize,” and “All Power to the People” blaring out from vibrantly hued cover art and rapid fire text.

One issue of the East Village Other, responding to the 1967 storming of hippies convening in Tompkins Square by police, has an image of a man with a bloodied face, his hands handcuffed and stretching down while text frames him on two sides: ”My God! My God! Where is this happening? This is America!” (You can see this and some other covers in detail on the Interference Archive blog.)

The Rag. Image from
Interference Archive.

The importance of a visually engaging communication device was especially essential for movements that were located outside of the radical coastal centers, like Space City! in Houston. Thorne Dreyer, part of its editorial collective, is quoted in the exhibition text: “Houston was all spread out, you know, there were antiwar people and there were rock ‘n’ rollers but there wasn’t anything to pull them together. Space City! created a place where all these people could come together.”

There was also the relaying of information between distant parts of the world where activism was broiling. Alice Embree, a staff member at Austin's Rag, is quoted: “The importance of Rag and the underground press movement was that it was the connective tissue; it spread the news of what was happening from here to other places. It brought the news of, say, People’s Park or whatever was going on in Berkeley or New York, back.” This extended to movements in Mexico and even across the ocean in Japan and France.

True to the Interference Archive’s mission of providing hands-on access to their materials, there are a few copies of underground newspapers to flip through, such as an issue of the radical California-based Berkeley Barb that includes an article on activist Jerry Rubin and a tantalizing story on “Erotic Lennon.” ”We prioritize use, not preservation,” said Cindy Milstein, one of the members of the Interference Archive collective of volunteers. She also emphasized the archive’s focus on the history of aesthetics and art in activism.

Opened in December of 2011, the Interference Archive is run by a volunteer collective with Kevin Caplicki, Molly Fair, Josh MacPhee, Cindy Milstein, and Blithe Riley at its core. Their small library in Gowanus is packed with materials from around five decades of social movements, with a significant portion of the archives related to activism outside the United States. As a public resource, anyone can stop by during their open hours and dig through boxes of zines, comics, protest banners, books, and some audio and video material.

There are also buttons and t-shirts and flat files of prints from Just Seeds, an art cooperative for graphic designers started by Interference Archive founder MacPhee. Much of the Archive is sourced from the personal collections of MacPhee and fellow founder the late Dara Greenwald, which was amassed from their own participation in social movements and the punk rock culture of the 1980s and 90s.

The Berkeley Tribe. Photo by Allison
Meier / Hyperallergic.

Every drawer and box and shelf of the Interference Archive is overflowing with valuable research on social movements, from the Paris Rebellion of 1968 to the Latin American solidarity organizations to materials on apartheid, with the importance of art as an avenue for a message’s resonance appearing throughout the decades and the physical connection with the relics of movements really bringing them to life.

While access to all of this is their main goal, their regular exhibitions are a way to examine the role of visual messages in these materials. Looking at the walls covered in the underground newspapers can be a bit overwhelming, but is worth spending time with for the innovative takes on design and use of visuals to convey their fervent messages that were unrepresented in the mainstream press.

"Rebel Newsprint: The Underground Press" is at Interference Archive (131 8th Street, Unit 4, Gowanus, Brooklyn) through March 24. Hours are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Sundays 12 – 5 pm.

[Allison C. Meier is a freelance and fiction writer based in Brooklyn. Originally from Oklahoma, she has been covering contemporary visual art for print and online media since 2006. You can read about her New York and world travel adventures on her website.  Meier wrote this article for Hyperallergic, "a forum for serious, playful and radical thinking about art in the world today."]

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Vision of a Better World : Let the Poets Speak

Meridel Le Sueur. Photo from Working Women.
Class, race, empire, and resistance:
The vision of the poet

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / June 28, 2010

• Oil Spills as the Gulf of Mexico is Destroyed
• Judge with BP Stock Rules Against Government Regulation
• Several States Contemplate Arizona-Like Laws to Install Police Repression Against People of Color
• Millionaire Politicians Vote to Cut Off Benefits to the Jobless
• Media Ignores Massive Detroit Mobilization Against Poverty and War
• Media Continues to Advertise “Tea-Party” and Sarah Palin Without Ever Addressing Capitalism(fantasy headlines by the author, morning June 26)

Some of our finest poets described so well the nature of the empire in which we live and the need for resistance against it. Meridel Le Sueur, the socialist/feminist poet, novelist, and chronicler of the Great Depression and beyond wrote with power about twentieth century America in a way that could have been written this week.

None of my sons or grandsons took up guns against you.

And all the time the predators were poisoning the humus, polluting
the water, the hooves of empire passing over us all. White
hunters were aiming down the gunsights; villages wrecked,
mine and yours. Defoliated trees, gnawed earth, blasted embryos.

We also live in a captive country, in the belly of the shark.
The horrible faces of our predators, gloating, leering,
the bloody Ford and Rockefeller and Kissinger presiding over
the violation of Asia

-- Meridel Le Sueur

Langston Hughes. Photo from Arts Edge / Kennedy Center.

Langston Hughes, African American poet, captured United States history powerfully in the words of class and race

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek --
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean --
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today -- O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

-- Langston Hughes

Woody Guthrie, 1943. Photo from Rounder Records / Bluegrass Journal.

And balladeer Woody Guthrie wrote verses, often unsung, for the unofficial American anthem, “This Land is Your Land?”

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

-- Woody Guthrie

Carl Sandburg. Photo by Al Ravenna, 1955 / World Telegram / Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons.

Carl Sandburg, poet, biographer of Abraham Lincoln, and children’s author, reminded us of who has made history and ironically created the exploitation of the producing class.

I am the people -- the mob -- the crowd -- the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and
clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me
and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons
and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing.
Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out
and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes
me work and give up what I have. And I forget.

-- Carl Sandburg

Poets usually are driven by a vision of a better world. For Langston Hughes:

O, let America be America again --
The land that never has been yet --
And yet must be -- the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME --
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

-- Langston Hughes

And for Woody Guthrie:

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.

-- Woody Guthrie

And finally poets offer the hope of resistance and change:

How can we touch each other, my sisters?
How can we hear each other over the criminal space?
How can we touch each other over the agony of bloody roses?
I always feel you near, your sorrow like a wind in the
great legend of your resistance, your strong and delicate strength.

It was the bumble bee and the butterfly who survived, not the dinosaur.

-- Meridel Le Sueur

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

-- Woody Guthrie

Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to
remember. Then -- I forget.

When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the
lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year,
who played me for a fool -- then there will be no speaker in all the
world say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a sneer in his
voice or any far-off smile of derision.

The mob -- the crowd -- the mass -- will arrive then.

-- Carl Sandburg

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain --
All, all the stretch of these great green states --
And make America again!

-- Langston Hughes

Selections from the following poems:
Meridel Le Sueur, "Doan Ket”
Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again”
Woody Guthrie, "This Land is Your Land?”
Carl Sandburg, "I Am the People, the Mob”

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. His blog is Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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