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Introduction | At UBC | What's In It | The Workshop

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Introduction

This website is a virtual exhibition of a unique and interesting body of political artwork.

At its heart is an online gallery of approximately 135 images, which comprise a substantial majority of the collection held at UBC's Rare Books and Special Collections Library.

Berkeley 26 One of several posters that attempts to humanize and recontextualize the Vietnamese 'common man'.

Placing these rather obscure materials online and making them accessible to anyone with an internet collection is the main goal of this exhibition; it seems a fitting tribute to the open and democratic spirit that infuses many of the posters and to the intentions behind them.

However, this exhibition also aims to be a guide to understanding these posters. It attempts to accommodate a range of audiences, from the long-sixties expert to the informed non-specialist to the casual browser. Obviously, not everything will be equally useful to everyone.

This website is divided into a number of sections. The first three - “The Collection”, “The Movement”, and “May 1970” - attempt to provide some useful context for the non-expert. Respectively, they offer a description of the collection at UBC, some background on the anti-war movement in America, and a look at some of the more immediate historical forces that helped form these posters.

“Close-Viewings” takes a closer look at some of the specific items in the collection, and “Democracy in Action” offers an analysis of the efficacy of the posters as a vehicle for social and political change. “Poster Gallery,” as the name suggests, includes the entire collection of digitized images, where they can be browsed, examined, and compared.

There is, however, another aspect to the website that is not necessarily reflected in its structure but which informs the writing throughout. In the process of creating this site, I realized that historical facts and analysis could tell only one half of the story. Any guide to understanding anything must be based in the personal understanding and responses of its author, and so I have deliberately mixed historical research with commentary on my own personal experience studying and responding to these posters — hopefully keeping a clear division between the two!

Berkeley 216, "Unity in Our Love of of Man"

This mixed approach seems to me unavoidable, and indeed, not one that should be avoided. The intention behind providing this historical and personal framework is not to limit viewers but to guide them towards their own informed engagement with these posters.

The Collection at UBC

The collection of 250 anti-war posters was donated to UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections Library in 1979 by Mr. Helmut Jung of Gold River, BC, accompanied by a sizeable collection of posters from the 1968 Paris student strike.

UBC’s accession files contain nothing to explain why and under what circumstances these unusual collections – far removed from the library’s usual acquisition priorities – ended up in the university’s possession. And unfortunately, this author was unable to locate the donor to obtain more information.

The story, therefore, of how these posters came together in large quantities, crossed the border, and were donated to a Canadian university – where they would sit in the archives and receive relatively little notice for the next 30 years – remains an obscure one. It is a story that should be told, and hopefully it one day will be.

In the meantime, here are the pieces of the story that we do have, along with the few hard facts that are known about the collection.

Berkeley 207 This poster, like many in the collection, promotes local anti-war events in the Berkeley area. 'Channing Way' is a main street in downtown Berkeley.

Following Mr. Jung’s donation in 1979, the collection was assessed in July of the same year by William Hoffer, bookseller, of Vancouver, BC.¹He dates the collection “from the second period of of the student movement at the University of California at Berkeley,” a collection “remarkably complete” and “very representative of the entire output of the period.” The posters “originat[ed] on various California campuses” and include some of the “famous computer paper posters which were characteristic of the California anti-war movement of the time.” Interestingly, Hoffer also remarks on the scarcity of the posters and their current high price, valuing the entire collection at somewhere between $3000 and $8000.² This seems like a remarkably large sum for a collection of mass-produced street posters less than a decade old.

It appears Hoffer's characterization was generally accepted as fact for the next 25 years— even though it is, for the most part, incorrect.

Poster scholar Michael Rossman - who was the creator and long-term curator of the AOUON Archive until his passing in 2008 - emailed UBC Special Collections in 2002, offering a nearly point-by-point refutation of Hoffer's original assessment. Hoffer characterizes the collection as relatively diffuse in time (as the date range “1969-1973” in the original collection title suggests) and geography (originating in 'multiple California campuses'); he also suggests that some of the more notable features of the collection, such as the posters printed on computer paper, are characteristic of the anti-war movement as a whole.

Rossman counters that the collection is, in fact, incredible concentrated and “quite unrepresentative in almost every regard, even of the original anti-war work of this extended period.” ³ He further states that

• Rather than being a compilation of posters from a five year interval , the posters come almost exclusively from the spring of 1970.
• The posters originate almost entirely from a specific workshop, active for a two month period in the spring of 1970, located at U.C. Berkeley (more on this below). For the sake of brevity, this specific workshop will be called simply “the Workshop” throughout this site.
• The computer-paper posters are atypical of the period, and almost entirely unique to this particular workshop.
• Most significantly, this collection “may contain the largest single extant holding of graphics from this Workshop, which was arguably the most prolific single event in world political poster history.”

This last point certainly raises the stakes in terms of the collection's significance.

Rossman's words also have the interesting effect (for this author at least) of bringing an apparently heterogeneous collection of objects into sharp focus; this revised perspective endows the assemblage of posters with a curious life of its own.

Although these posters take up a multitude of different themes, they also demonstrate a remarkable coherence as a collection. The pressures of place and time, and a certain desperate yet powerful energy, have stamped them all. These less tangible factors - along with the obvious similarities in material - help create the compelling case for viewing these posters as a unified body of work, not just an accidental collector's assemblage.

I handled each of these posters several times over an extended period; this close contact with the collection in all of its raw materiality reinforced my impression of their overall unity. A sense of that frenzied time - awash in energy, idealism, frustration, and rage - emerged clearly. I realized that, taken together, the various posters can serve as a kind of ideogramm⁴ for their time and place: they gesture towards their origins and help recreate an experiential glimpse of them in a way that a merely factual history cannot.

What's In It

The collection contains precisely 250 items, of which a number are duplicates, leaving 233 distinct designs.⁵ The origin of these posters can be identified by a number of means:

Crop of Berkeley 123 This poster was printed on the used side of the page, thus leaving both the silkscreen ink and the computer algorithms clearly visible.

The markings 'Rape' or '4973' were often used in effort to prevent police from taking posters down.

• Posters printed on tractor-feed computer paper are almost certainly a product of The Workshop. This material had “apparently never been used before [...] and was almost never used after that or elsewhere.”⁶ This unusual material was used primarily because it was free and large,⁷ and presumably readily available from U.C. Berkeley's fledgling Department of Computer Science, founded in 1968.⁸ Many interesting combinations result from this collusion of 'high-tech' re-used paper and designs that are often critical of technological innovation.
• Likewise, a number of posters bearing the marking “RAPE” or “4973” can be classified with certainty as originating at the Workshop. Scholar Lincoln Cushing writes of a conversation with Robin Repp, one of the artists from the Workshop, who explains that 4973 “was a sort of 'stamp of approval' number from the Berkeley Police Department,” which they believed would prevent the posters from being torn down.⁹
• Posters created using the silkscreen method can also be assumed to be of Workshop origin, as this method was not commonly used before or after the May 1970 workshops.¹⁰
• Various other factors (internal references, design similarities, and so on) can also be used to positively identify posters as having a Workshop origin.

The following table breaks down the original designs in the collection according to their probable origin:

Workshop Origin		Non-Workshop Origin
Exists in other Collections	Unique to UBC Collection	Possible	Certain
115	65	48	5
Total: 180		Total: 53
Total: 233 Original Designs

In summary, over 3/4 of the collection can be said with reasonable certainty to have come from a single workshop, all produced within a time frame of only a few months.

The collection has thus largely been formed by an extremely specific range of historical and geographic factors and are highly reflective of a particular time and place. They also reflect a set of materials and production techniques that is relatively unique within that context.

The Workshop

The Workshop that produced the UBC Berkeley collection operated for a few short months in the spring of 1970, one of several that sprang up across the country at this time in response to political events at home and abroad. Lincoln Cushing writes:

After the antiwar student demonstrations and killings at Kent State, Ohio (May 4, 1970) and Jackson State, Mississippi (May 14, 1970) there was a massive upswelling of resistance culture in the United States. Political poster workshops blossomed all over the country [...]. At the University of California, Berkeley faculty at the College of Environmental Design encouraged the use of campus facilities for a short-lived workshop that created an estimated 50,000 copies of hundreds of works.¹¹

Berkeley Silkscreen Artists, 197014

Rossman says this workshop “hosted an anarchy of production, open to anyone and supported by hundreds of volunteers, that went on for a month and printed some 250 designs, most on recycled computer paper.”¹²

The claims of these scholars are reinforced by a 1970 article in Art Journal, which describes the prodigious output of the workshop, produced by anonymous artists and “amateurs who had never cut a screen before.”¹³

This early example of 'open-source' art production created an artistic free-for-all, churning out images that range (technically) from childish to sophisticated and (in terms of expression) from tender calls for peace to gruesome indictments of American foreign policy.

The output of this workshop, and indeed its very existence, must be viewed in the context of the American political printmaking tradition from which it sprang.

Early 60s protest in the Bay Area was often imageless. The Free Speech Movement, for example, “lasted three months and involved 10,000 students, but produced not a single poster image.”¹⁵ So the tradition of political print-making in the Bay Area was in many ways quite young.

At the same time, the posters produced in May 1970 at U.C. Berkeley had roots in many other traditions, both national and international. Commenting on the American poster 'renaissance' as a whole, Rossman writes that it “includes pieces inspired by or imitating every other major chapter of poster history, political or nonpolitical, and many other graphic traditions as well.”¹⁶ These posters feature “[d]irect quotation of current Cuban and Chinese and older Soviet work” and “parody of patriotic WWI work,” all “interspersed with the styles of Art Nouveau and Expressionism, of the Egyptian frieze, the medieval illuminated manuscript, African tribal sculpture and the Oriental ideogram.”¹⁷

And there is indeed a reflection of this multi-generic richness and freedom of reference in the UBC Berkeley collection. We can find visual 'quotations' of everything from Goya to the 'Peanuts' comic strips to the posters of the May 1968 student protests in Paris.

In this online context, sanitized and digitized, we can gaze on these prints as historical documents and forms of artistic expression; we can trace their influences and speculate on their impact.

But it is admittedly hard for those without personal experience to imagine what impact these images might have had when encountered on the streets of Berkeley or Oakland, with the war still raging overseas and with the images of dead students still fresh in the national mind. It is equally hard to imagine the thoughts and feelings of the hundreds of volunteer printmakers as they designed and cut their screens, turning out copy after copy after copy, and thrusting images that now sit in archives out into the world. These were largely meant as calls to action or reflection — not as monuments for the ages.

But like it or not, when we examine the images now and reflect on the largely-faceless artists that created them, we study these prints and the historical moment that created them from the privileged viewpoint of the future. We are free to judge and analyze the posters, praise them or condemn them as we see fit, and disregard them if we will.

Their historical moment is gone; but these images do speak to historical patterns and human passions that exist in the here and now. They offer insights that are fundamental, and in this sense, radical.

There are lessons here worth learning.