“As a matter of fact, Hoffman’s name came up in the ride to Nevada pretty frequently. Serra had gone to school at Santa Barbara and, after Isla Vista, was having serious doubts about whether he was the most revolutionary1 thing that ever came out of that campus. What, we argued, was the most revolutionary thing to do?
…
“We came back again to see the piece in the early morming, and Joan made a videotape of it. Then we left. On the ride back to Las Vegas we talked about the piece a lot, about politics not at all. It wasn’t as if the problem had gone away; it was, at least for me, as if revolutionary art is where you find it and that the question of what is revolutionary art isn’t too different, in the end, from the question of what is good art. Anyway, nobody mentioned Abbie Hoffman. We all got very happy. Serra wondered whether anyone in the ‘Information’ show had submitted a piece of paper that said: ‘Go to a mesa and dig a slot forty feet deep and one hundred feet long. Then go to the other side and dig a slot…’
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“1 ‘Revolution’ was the most often-used word I ran into this summer. Nobody used it to mean the transfer of political power from one class to another. Most of the time it seemed to refer to those activities which would most expeditiously bring America to her senses and force her to stop the war, end racism, and begin to take the lead among nations in rescuing the planet from the certain destruction toward which it is headed.”
[Excerpts from Philip Leider’s account of traveling with Joan Jonas and Richard Serra from Berkeley to see Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, published in Artforum (Sept. 1970) as “How I Spent My Summer Vacation or, Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco and Utah (Read about it in Artforum),” excerpted further from Richard Serra Early Work (Steidl/Zwirner, 2014), a book you have one more day to buy for $10 at the David Zwirner Books Summer Archive Sale.]
FWIW, I think the Isla Vista reference is to either the torching of a Bank of America building or the shooting by police of a UCSB student in the Spring of 1970.
I was just going to post the footnote of their road trip’s working definition of revolution, but every piece of context kept spiraling into a vortex of depressing relevance.