The Grand Union. Wendy Perron
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In the fall of 1970, a political protest was brewing against censorship. In the art world, the spurring incident was the arrest of a gallery owner who had shown the work of artist Steven Radich, which supposedly denigrated the American flag. During the late sixties and early seventies, the flag had come to represent US military aggressions against Vietnam and Cambodia. In solidarity with the gallery owner, a coalition of arts and justice groups held meetings to decide on a public action they could take. Among them were the Art Workers Coalition, New York Art Strike, and the Guerrilla Art Action Group. They formed the Independent Artists Flag Show Committee with an eye to inclusiveness, aiming for “equal representation, women and men, of Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Whites.” The committee sent out a call for proposals for works of art that would reimagine the flag. More than 150 artists of all disciplines, including Jasper Johns, Leon Golub, and Kate Millett, responded to the call. The three organizers were Jon Hendricks, Faith Ringgold, and Jean Toche.1
Hendricks, who had been director of the Judson Gallery, knew that Reverend Howard Moody was a longtime supporter of the arts within community. When Hendricks approached Judson Church to host The People’s Flag Show, Moody was already aware of the issue. He had written a long letter of support to a Long Island woman who had been arrested for hanging a flag upside down as a protest against the Vietnam War.2 On Sunday, November 8, the day the exhibit opened, he gave a sermon defending the artists. He sent the written version to the Village Voice, which printed it. Here is the last paragraph: “The flag is a simple symbol, half a lie and half true; more of a promise than a reality. Its respect must be elicited, not commanded; the love of what it means must be given, never forced. When the flag becomes a fetish, we’re on our way to a tyranny that all patriots must resist.”3
After the Sunday service, the artists began arriving with their offerings. This was not a curated exhibit because the participating groups wanted it to be democratic and inclusive. The show officially opened at 1:00. According to Moody, Mayor John Lindsay sent staff to protect the artists.4
At 5:00, Hendricks and Toche, representing the Guerrilla Art Action Group and the Belgian Liberation Front, held a flag-burning ceremony in the Judson courtyard.5 At 6:30, Rainer and four other dancers performed Trio A with Flags, which was followed by Symposium on Repression at 7:00. Participants in the symposium included Kate Millett (representing the Women’s Liberation Movement), Leon Golub (Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Vietnam), Cliff Joseph (Black Emergency Cultural Coalition), Abbie Hoffman, Faith Ringgold, and Michelle Wallace. Other groups included the Gay Liberation Front, Women Artists in Revolution, and the Black Panther Party.
Hendricks had invited Rainer to perform for the opening—the only time-based art of the exhibit—prompting her to come up with Trio A with Flags. The dancers, in the nude except for a flag tied around the neck like a long bib, performed Trio A (which is less than five minutes long) twice through. For Rainer, “[t]o combine the flag and nudity seemed a double-barreled attack on repression and censorship.”6 The dancers who joined her, flags flowing and flapping against bare skin, were Paxton, Dilley, and Gordon from CP-AD and two of the new Grand Union people: Nancy Lewis (then Green) and Lincoln Scott. This was not a Grand Union event per se, but Rainer relied on the GU dancers, most of whom knew the long, intricate sequence of Trio A. Becky Arnold, however, refused to perform on the grounds that she was proud to be an American and “proud of the flag.”7
Feminist writer/sculptor/activist Kate Millett draped a flag over a toilet bowl (or perhaps stuffed it inside), titling the piece The American Dream Goes to Pot. This was the same year that her book Sexual Politics took the emerging feminist movement by storm, becoming a best seller.
Other offerings: Chaim Sprei assembled a flag out of soda cans. Sam Wiener made a box with mirrors that reflected rows upon rows of flag-draped coffins from Vietnam.8 Activist Abbie Hoffman came to the People’s Flag Show with the same flag shirt he wore when he was summoned to the US House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1967—for which he was arrested.9 As he spoke at the symposium, he made a point of wiping his nose on the flaggish sleeve.10
The district attorney’s office ordered the show to be closed, but the church defied the order and kept the exhibit open till the end of the week. Within two days, an unnamed person made a citizen’s arrest of Moody and Al Carmines, but then never showed up for the court dates.
The organizers of the People’s Flag Show were arrested by the district attorney’s office, charged with flag desecration, and dubbed the Judson Three.11 They were all old hands at activism. Jon Hendricks was a member of Fluxus; Faith Ringgold had previously protested the Museum of Modern Art’s exclusion of black artists; and Jean Toche was active in the Guerrilla Art Action Group, along with Hendricks. They were arraigned and released on Friday, November 13, but the legal case lingered. On February 5, the Judson Three plus Abbie Hoffman and their supporters stood on a flag to protest being shut out of a press conference in the court. On May 14, 1971, the Judson Three were found guilty. Ten days later, they were given a choice of being fined $100 or spending thirty days in jail. They paid the fine and wrote a statement saying, “We have been convicted, but in fact it is this nation and these courts who are guilty.” It went on to accuse the United States of “mutilating human beings” both in Southeast Asia and at home.12 Faith Ringgold’s poster for the People’s Flag Show, a bold design suggesting a flag on a ruby red background, was included in an exhibit at the Phoenix Art Museum in 1996, causing some controversy, and was acquired by Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art in 2013. “We felt in protesting a dishonorable war that we were acting as patriots,” Millett said. “And also we felt we were defending the First Amendment, which is free speech, and to us that was precious and important.”13
I have gone into some detail in order to give a sense of the political activism that Rainer and most of the Grand Union dancers felt comfortable with at the time.
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Trio A with Flags is an elegant version of Rainer’s signature work Trio A. Though I did not see it in 1970, I have seen it performed (and have produced it twice myself, both times at Judson Church) in various contexts over the years. When the audience is sitting on the same level as the dancers—that is, not on a proscenium stage—the potential titillation of their nudity is mitigated by the even, steady dynamic of the choreography. The ongoingness of the phrasing, the precision of the choreography, and the averted focus serve to make the dancers into a kind of sculpture, or objects, much like parts of CP-AD. Both the human body and the flag are drained of symbolism. Gender differences, so obvious in the nude, diminish in importance because the women and men are doing the same movement with no gender affect. The dance is so calm and uninflected that the audience is free to focus either on how the specific movements—loping, tapping the foot, thrusting hips sideways, somersaulting—affect the flag, or on what it means for an American flag to grace or graze the body as it moves through odd coordinations.14
Trio A with Flags, by Yvonne Rainer. Foreground: Lewis. Screen grab from film of The People’s Flag Show, Judson Memorial Church, 1970. Courtesy Special Collections, New York University.
Watching the archival film, one can feel that the five dancers are all swimming in the same stream, even though this was not officially a GU event. Of course, in later performances they would all be swimming in different directions—in pairs, groups, or alone. But it is also possible to glean from this film a kind of loose aesthetic container, an awareness of the breath and rhythms of their coworkers.
CHAPTER 4
A SHARED SENSIBILITY
All the Grand Union members had their own brand of charisma, each vivid in her or his own way. The downtown audience flocked to see them because we felt we knew them. Even their management agent, Mimi Johnson of Performing Artservices, called the group “personality driven.”1 If the term personality can be stretched to include compositional flair, responsiveness