FEATURES - CULTURE

War Artists of the Class War

WE CONCLUDE OUR 3-part series on Art and Anarchism. Due to lack of space we were unable to publish this in the last issue of Organise! as promised. Upcoming articles will include the involvement of Surrealists with the revolutionary Anarchist movement.

The role of the revolutionary artist is to reveal the real nature of capitalist society, to attack the system that causes poverty, hunger and death; to rip aside the mask that conceals systematic corruption, heartless bureaucracy and biased laws; to remind people that they are not alone, that their individual acts of resistance can be more effective as collective action taken with other people.

One such artist is 69 year-old Carlos Cortez. His lino-cut posters attack the evils and hypocrisy of capitalism. They are fly-posted around the Chicago streets at night and provide illustrations to accompany articles in the revolutionary press. Taking the heroes of revolutionary anarchism and the quiet daily heroism of the oppressed as his themes, his art is popular and populist.

The son of a Mexican Indian, who was an organiser for the Industrial Workers of the World (the I.W.W. also known as "wobblies"), and a German socialist mother, Cortez has been a "harvest hand, construction worker, loafer, jailbird... vagabond factory stiff". He joined the I.W.W. after World War 2 and his articles, poems and illustrations have appeared in its paper, 'Industrial Worker' ever since.

'La Lucha Continua'
Cortez draws on his Mexican Indian origins and his involvement with the wobblies for his visual images. Typically these ideas came together in a woodcut entitled 'La lucha continua' ('the struggle continues'). Based on photographs of a peasant demonstration in Bolivia, Carlos added two skeletons and a pregnant woman, indicating that the struggle is something that takes in the past, present and future.

One striking woodblock poster depicts a Meztizo family, standing in front of a pyramid at the side of a stalk of maize, with the wording "Somos de la Tierra - No somos illegales" ("we are of the land - we are not illegal"). Produced to protect against the harassment of undocumented immigrants from Mexico by the U.S. immigration authorities.

"Imagine those whose ancestors came from another continent telling the natives of this continent that they do not have the right to move around in their own land. Migrating to better their economic conditions is precisely what brought the Europeans over to this hemisphere", Carlos explains. A similar point was made on a small card advertising an exhibition celebrating "500 years of Resistance" which portrays a group of American Indians laughing at a portrait of Christopher Columbus.

Central America
American imperialism in Central and South America has been a favourite target for Cortez. One poster depicts a nursing mother and child, holding the slogan: "Mirucomo trabajan tuo impuestos, CABRON!" ("look how your taxes work, cuckold"). Behind the mother and child tower skeletons in helmets marked "Policia". This poster was designed to draw attention to the way the taxes of U.S. workers are used against workers in Central America, in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. A smaller poster depicts parents grieving over a flag-draped coffin and lists the number of U.S. soldiers killed in wars of intervention. Printed down the side is the slogan: "Draftees of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your Generals!"

One woodcut has been based on the collective experience of Guatemalan women whose husbands had 'disappeared', after being taken from their houses by armed gangs. Cortez gathered their stories together, and synthesised it into the depiction of a family house invaded by a death squad, a masked informer points the woman's husband out to the killers.

Living in Chicago, Carlos is active with the Movimento Artistico Chicano (MARCH). One poster printed for MARCH is of the 19th century Mexican engraver Jose Guadalupe Posada, embraced by one of the calaveras (animated skeletons) for which he was famous. Mexican artistic influences shape Cortez's work and the striking black and white images recall those of the revolutionary Mexican artists grouped around the paper El Machete.

Resistance and Community
The depiction of Posada is one of many portrait posters, which include the legendary song-writer and wobbly agitator Joe Hill, the Mexican anarchist-communist, Ricardo Flores Magon, and Lucy Parsons, a former slave, who dedicated her whole life to revolutionary action. In all these portraits Cortez combines image and text, and the subject gazes out with a direct honesty which confronts the viewer.

In Britain the artist most closely identified with anarchism is Clifford Harper. An illustrator whose work frequently appears in the national press, Harper's graphics have celebrated resistance and community, providing a critique of all that is wrong with capitalism, attacking all forms of authoritarianism and projecting a utopian vision of possible alternatives. Born into a west London working-class family, his schoolboy rebelliousness - truancy, expulsion and petty crime - grew into involvement with the sixties counter-culture and increasing political awareness. This included a period of living in a commune which provided glimpses of life's potential - a potential described in one of his first major works 'Class War Comix' and a frequently reprinted series of illustrations commissioned for 'Radical Technology', which presented utopian ideas in a practical early obtainable manner - terraced houses with collectivised gardens, community workshops and medical centres in which the sexual division of labour had been transformed. These visions were contrasted with the reality of capitalism portrayed in Patriarch Street Scene.

Stirring Depiction
The idea that anarchism is realistic, is attainable, that its many strands make a vibrant alternative to capitalism was reinforced by the cover of a 1976 catalogue for Compendium Bookshop, which featured pictures of windmills, waterfalls working and demonstrating women alongside some of the historical figures of anarchism.

It is also the theme which runs through 'Anarchy; a Graphic Guide', which was published in 1987. This was written and illustrated by Harper, and provides one of the best introductions to the ideas of anarchism. All the variants of anarchism are explored, and represented as valid alternatives to capitalism. The illustrations draw on the various styles and artists connected with anarchism in the past, Farns Masereel being one obvious example. He also uses the traditional iconography of anarchism: Light, chains, hammers, prison bars, flags, crowds and barricades all reinforce the ideas explained in the text. In chapter 4 an explanation of the Paris Commune is accompanied by a stirring depiction of women in assertive and revolutionary roles.

Much of Harper's graphic work celebrates resistance. On of his most effective works was the black and white cartoon-strip tribute to Jim Heather-Hayes, the young anarchist poet who committed suicide in Ashford prison after serving four months in solitary confinement for fire-bombing a London police station in 1982. The cartoon-strip is a format he frequently uses, sometimes to illustrate poems, such as Seigfried Sassoon's anti-war poem 'Fight to a Finish', in which the returning soldiers turn on the press before driving the "butchers out of Parliament".

Rebellious Spirit
Harper's recent work includes the illustration and design of 'Visions of Poetry' an anthology of 20th century anarchist poetry, which he also helped edit. This and a slimmer volume published at the same time, the 'Prolegomena to a study of the Return of the Repressed in History' are skilfully designed and crafted, with text and illustration working together in harmony. The illustrations of the 'Prolegomena' stand in the edge of abstraction, yet provide the perfect foil for the bitter denunciations of authority found in the text.

In stark contrast to this move towards the semi-abstract are his series of picture-card portraits of 36 anarchists, men and women who have dreamed of a different way of life, including Emiliano Zapata, the Chinese writer Ba Jin and John Cage, the musician. Harper's work has been diverse, and he has illustrated book jackets, LP covers, magazine articles, but his best work has often been that which has related to a particular struggle, such as the poll-tax rebellion. His image of angry peasants captured the rebellious spirit of the mass of ordinary people, and linked it to similar revolts of the past. Little wonder that his particular image was reprinted again and again. Cortez and Harper live on separate continents, yet both are united in their opposition to capitalism by a determination to document the class war as it happens - in doing so they have created art with greater meaning, relevance and engagement than all the arid portraits and landscapes that fill the gallery walls.