Protest/Time: Wally Hedrick's Vietnam Series

In 1957, Wally Hedrick began a remarkable series of monochromes. The works were made using thick, tarry black paint to cover over, and thus destroy, the artist’s previously finished canvases. Hedrick worked on the series for nearly ten years in an act of knowingly impotent political iconoclasm: “I started taking old paintings ... and painting them out. At the beginning I used old paintings because I was obsessed with the idea that I was going to deny humanity these world-shaking images. It’s like holding my breath and, ‘you’ll be sorry.’” He named the works collectively the Vietnam Series, transmuting them into a trenchant and early response to the military violence then taking place in Southeast Asia. The artist returned to the same canvases at regular intervals, repainting several of them black again after the Gulf War, and a third time after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. This paper investigates the artist’s compulsion to repeat his iconoclastic act in and through time. Hedrick’s black paintings have been discussed in relation to other “protest art” of the 1960s, such as Peter Saul’s scathing DayGlo works and the Peace Tower project erected in LA in 1966. Yet Hedrick's series plays a complex temporal game that differs in kind from other work in the same vein. Its mode of concealment, making the previously visible invisible but still physically present, folds together past and present—a folding that recurs with each enactment of repainting or exhibition, rendering the results powerfully material yet ghostly.