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188.
GUERRILLA ART ACTION GROUP (GAAG). Two handbills.
NY: The Guerrilla Art Action Group, c. October/November, 1974. Original xerox sheets, printed rectos only.
Each signed in the copy, the first by Jean Toche, the second by Jon Hendricks. Both concern Jean Toche’s government-decreed obligation to undergo psychiatric examination for being a dissident artist in an attempt to diagnose him insane.
The US government’s request was made to Federal Judge Kevin Duffy and followed Toche’s action at the Metropolitan Museum of Art during a banquet where he released cockroaches onto the table in protest at how public funds were spent on lavish dinners. It ended in a violent assault by the police and Toche being arrested and banned for life from entering American museums (a Dr. Telch eventually acknowledged that Toche was of perfectly sound mind).
The FBI had previously arrested him in March 1974 for sending handbills to various galleries, newspapers and individuals strongly criticising the policing of American galleries and specifically MoMA. One of them called for the kidnapping of “museum trustees, directors, administrators, curators and benefactors”, a response to the arrest of Tony Shafrazi, a member of the Art Workers’ Coalition, who had spray-painted ‘KILL LIES ALL’ in foot-high letters on Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ in MoMA (itself an act of protest against William Calley, a participant in the My Lai massacre).
The handbill written by Toche reads (in part): “The perversity of American society is such that the dissident sane are in jail while such as Rockefeller (the butcher of Attica), Nixon, Ford, Dillon, and the like… are free to destroy and to mutilate and to rip apart and to maim and to kill and to bomb…”.
The second handbill begins with Judge Duffy’s statement of October 8, 1974 justifying the need for Toche’s psychiatric examination, with Hendricks adding a sarcastic commentary, reading (in part): “As everyone knows, all artists are crazy, and it is the museum’s duty as paternalistic benefactor of art to put artists where they belong… Mental health is extremely important to art”.
It ends with Hendricks’s recommendation that the Metropolitan museum’s chairman, C. Douglas Dillon “and his overworked go-fer, Ashton Hawkins”, should themselves “be immediately confined to the best public mental institution available”.
Folded twice for mailing. Light creasing and handling wear, o/w Very Good.
The Hendricks handbill is included in “GAAG: The Guerrilla Art Action Group 1969-1976, A Selection” (item #190), though not the one by Jean Toche.
