Artforum, April 28, 2017

Critics’ Picks: “Finally Got The News: The Printed Legacy of the US Radical Left, 1970–1979”
by Tyler Curtis
INTERFERENCE ARCHIVE
131 8th Street, No. 4
January 26–May 14
Between military strikes in Yemen and a spike in auto-plant injuries in Alabama, the modern world persists in its technological brutality. The good news? It may have created the tools for its own undoing long ago. The mechanisms that subjugate workers, women, people of color, and indigenous peoples are as much the products of modernity as is the democratization of media in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The current exhibition here shines a light on a broad selection of historical pamphlets, newsletters, and posters—borrowed from the archive of historian Brad Duncan—where the American Left demanded more from the postwar social contract or called to utterly reconfigure it. The show presents an ambitious plurality of movements that were often fraught, with many organizations reluctant to include the struggles of women and minorities. On a poster from 1970, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement puts forth their program targeting the UAW’s institutional racism, while demanding dignified wages from the Detroit Chrysler plant. Across the room, a 1971 issue of the Third World Women’s Alliance’s newspaper, Triple Jeopardy: Racism, Imperialism, Sexism, outlines why socialism’s egalitarian and anti-imperialist tenets must be concomitant with women’s liberation.
At this early point in the Trump administration, bourgeois liberals and some segments of the Left alike clumsily try to wrench identity politics from meaningful considerations of class dynamics, and vice versa, to various ideological ends. This show is a powerful reminder of the overlapping and numerous continuities between postwar liberation struggles, providing more than a few cues for radical organizing—and subsequent media-making—today.
Originally published at https://www.artforum.com/?pn=archive&id=68109