by Robert Lederman(4/6/99), President of A.R.T.I.S.T. (Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)<ARTISTpres@aol.com>
provided through OPENAIR-MARKET NET
During the past year the NY Post has published no less than six editorials and commentaries denouncing the group A.R.T.I.S.T., myself, my paintings depicting Mayor Giuliani as Hitler and those who carry them in protests
[5/17/98 "The ARTIST Hustle"; 6/16/98 "Demonizing Rudy Giuliani"; 8/20/98 "Free Speech or Free Exhibition Space"; 3/20/99 "The Giuliani Pile-On"; 3/31/99 "They're After Rudy, Not Justice"; 3/31/99 "Al's Civil-Rights Coalition A Travesty of Dr. King's Dream"; 4/4/99 "Unlimited Cop-Bashing Has a Price"].
The Mayor, who routinely uses Post editorials to defend his least defendable policies, has directly referred to my paintings no less than five times in the past two weeks during interviews and press conferences.* Among his more absurd comments was that those creating and carrying these signs are, "the worst elements in society". He also persists in attempts to mislead the media, the NYPD and the public into believing that these signs are directed at the police rather than at him personally and at his policies.
An astute observer might ask themselves just why the Mayor and the Post's editorial board take my cardboard placards so seriously. If, as the Post suggested on 6/16/98 I'm a "moron"; if my deliberately crude caricatures of the Mayor are meaningless, why not ignore them? Why has the Mayor had me falsely arrested thirty-six times and had hundreds of these cardboard portraits confiscated and destroyed by the police? Why do my arrests, not one of which has ever resulted in a conviction, fine or plea bargain, usually involve NYPD Intelligence, captains, inspectors and a contingent of lawyers from the NYPD legal department?
Some of the recent editorials even imply that the thousands of New Yorkers who've carried my signs in demonstrations during the past six years were somehow duped into it or didn't realize what the signs meant. Are they all "morons" as well?
The facts are very different from the explanation offered by the Mayor and the Post. All of these signs comment on Giuliani's attempts to turn this city into a repressive corporate police state. I've taken great pains during the past six years to differentiate between "cop-bashing" which I don't engage in, and Giuliani-bashing which I'm proud to be one of the City's foremost exponents of. I've written numerous open letters to the NYPD and sent them to every precinct making my position and that of the group A.R.T.I.S.T. clear; i.e. we are not against the police-we are against Giuliani's Police State. Literally thousands of police officers have acknowledged that they understand our position and agree with it. In fact, police officers are among the biggest fans of these paintings. I'm sometimes cheered by the police at demonstrations and police officers have actually bought many of the signs.
The reason the Mayor and his defenders at the Post refuse to address the issues my paintings actually deal with is that they cannot do so without explaining certain things. It's interesting to note that the Mayor calls my paintings, "an exaggeration", rather than saying that they have no basis in fact. All art involves exaggeration, an emphasis and heightening of certain features for dramatic effect. Nevertheless, there's truth in these "exaggerations". The Mayor is a racist. He does violate civil rights. He is an enemy of free speech. His policies, while they don't target Jews (a group I'm very proud to belong to), are like Hitler's.
If I had used the Hitler analogy to attack Mayor Koch, Mayor Dinkins or any other elected official in recent memory my paintings would have been completely ignored by the media and the public. No one would carry them, no one would buy them and no one would comment on them. The reason they are seen as a serious threat to the Mayor is exactly because they convey a message about Giuliani that everyone can immediately grasp and that a great many people readily agree with. Unlike a Post editorial, a picture is worth a thousand words.
These images originated in the street artist struggle that began with the Giuliani regime. When I and other members of A.R.T.I.S.T. filed a First Amendment Federal lawsuit to stop Giuliani's illegal attempts to wipe us off the streets, the Mayor's attorneys filed legal briefs claiming that visual art was, "unworthy" of constitutional protection, that it didn't "convey ideas", and that it wasn't even expression. I determined to prove the Mayor wrong and announced at a City Hall press conference that I'd fill the streets of New York with portraits of Giuliani exposing his many crimes against the U.S. Constitution. My promise was realized better than I could ever have expected. Eventually we won the lawsuit, which resulted in visual art being given full First Amendment protection, a concept the Mayor seems unable to grasp.
His administration is still trying to pass laws aimed at eliminating free speech in general and street artists in particular from the public forum of the streets and parks of this city. That's why we have to keep suing him again and again.
It's likely that the ultimate problem Giuliani has with these images is that they are costing him a lot of money in lost campaign donations. Wealthy people are very careful about who they publicly give money too. Jewish contributors to Giuliani, even those who don't agree with my ideas at all, are concerned that they might be seen to be helping a man who's commonly referred to as a dictator, a fascist, a racist and a modern-day Hitler. That is why the Post keeps attempting to frighten Rev. Sharpton, the media, elected officials and the general public into distancing themselves from these images. The Mayor's fear of them only serves to prove how right on they actually are.
My advice to the Mayor is that if he doesn't want to be compared to Hitler and other repressive dictators he should stop emulating them. When even his closest African-American aide, Rudy Washington, has horror stories of being racially targeted by the police it's time to for the Mayor to address the message and stop attacking the messenger.
* References to Robert Lederman's 'Giuliani as Hitler' Paintings
"But the Mayor repeated his anger over signs and chants at the post-Diallo protests that liken him to Adolf Hitler. "The comparisons to Hitler, Adolf Hitler, and fascism have to stop, because they're sick, perverted, and they do affect some people," he said. "Invocations of Adolf Hitler are despicable no matter who it is. Nobody should participate in it, and nobody should do it." -NY Times Sunday March 28, 1999-"After Meeting Mayor Vows Major Changes for Police"
"The Mayor...complained that several protesters held aloft signs that compared him to Adolf Hitler and the Police Department to the Ku Klux Klan. "As the Police Department has made substantial changes in the way in which it behaves, not only in the last month or two but over the last five years," Mayor Giuliani said, "I'd ask people to acknowledge that and then to make the similar kinds of changes in their behavior. Not stand with people who try to pretend that the Police Department is the KKK, not engage in general bashing of the Police Department, stop the invocations of Hitler and Nazism and fascism, all this exaggerated hate rhetoric. It has an impact." -NY Times 3/30/99 "Indictments of 4 Officers in Diallo Killing Due Tuesday"
"It's time that we show them as a city more respect," Guiliani said of the city's officers. "As we ask the Police Department to show more respect and we make Herculean efforts -- they do -- to show more respect, we have something we have a right to demand. We have a right to demand more respect from the citizens of the city for the police officers of the city of New York." In reference to the protests outside Police Headquarters in Manhattan and the Bronx courthouse, the Mayor continued: "And it's about time to stop carrying signs pretending that they are racist. It's about time to stop carrying signs equating them to the K.K.K., and it's about time to stop invocations of Adolf Hitler about our Police Department." -4/1/99 New York Times "The Mayor: In Honoring an Officer, an Impassioned Plea"
"His voice choking with emotion and his fists clenched for emphasis, Mayor Giuliani yesterday demanded "respect and understanding" for his cops in the fiercest speech he has delivered since the killing of Amadou Diallo. Just two hours before four cops were charged with Diallo's murder - and only 3 miles from the Bronx courthouse - Giuliani urged protesters to lay down their "racist signs" and begged New Yorkers to stop second-guessing the NYPD. "It's about time to stop carrying signs pretending police officers are racists," the mayor told 175 cheering cops. "It's about time to stop carrying signs equating them to the KKK. And it's about time to stop carrying signs that invoke Adolf Hitler about our police." As he stood at the red-brick stationhouse, Giuliani attacked police "bashers" as "the worst elements in society." -Daily News 4/1/99 "The Mayor Rails Vs. Cop Bashers"
Question: "Are you personally stung by those signs at the demonstrations that say 'Adolf Giuliani'?" Answer: "Five years ago I might have cried over it. And now I just feel that this is a crazy exaggeration that we've allowed, and that our media coverage is selective... You cover Susan Sarandon. But [the police and the rest of the city] see the Adolf Hitler signs, the comparisons to the president of Yugoslavia. These [demonstrators] are getting arrested, some knowingly, some unknowingly, under that banner". Mayor Giuliani-Newsweek 4/5/99 Rudy on the Record
"I don't regard associations of my people that support me as fascists as a light matter ....But it's ultimately the results that matter." -NY TIMES 6/24/98
"I take a different view of someone comparing me to Adolf Hitler than when someone calls me a jerk." Mayor Giuliani, N.Y. Daily News 10/25/1998
"How many of those who joined in Al Sharpton's media-driven arrests du jour even criticized the signs held by the protesters with whom they'd joined - signs that depicted the mayor as Hitler and compared the NYPD to the Ku Klux Klan? David Dinkins, Carl McCall, Freddie Ferrer, Charlie Rangel, Eliot Engel: Did a single one protest the outrageous placards with which they marched? No - they went right along with the Sharptonite message, which claims that white cops love using blacks as target practice. - NY Post 4/4/99 "Unlimited cop-Bashing Has a Price" [also see photo of Robert Lederman with editorial]
"We'll say it simply: Just because people don't like Rudy Giuliani doesn't give them license to compare him to Adolf Hitler. The Hitler analogy is something that seems to amuse many people in this city. Cutesy stories have been written and published in the past week about an art installation on Madison Avenue called No York in which the mayor is depicted with a Hitler moustache. This image was first bandied about by an obnoxious twerp who claims to represent a group called A.R.T.I.S.T. - but which really ought to be called M.O.R.O.N. - who is outraged that the mayor attempted to enforce plainly written statutes regarding sidewalk clutter in front of the Metropolitan Museum. For this, the twerp (whose name we shall never again use because he deserves no more public mention) imagines that Rudy Giuliani deserves comparison with the personification of evil in this century...As the New York Times' gleeful seizure of the "bunker" story indicates, you don't have to be a cabbie, a vendor or a M.O.R.O.N. to issue forth such repulsive opinions. -NY Post Editorial 6/16/98
"And there's nothing a member of the liberal Establishment hates as much as a conservative anti-Establishmentarian. That's why he so enrages his foes, to the point that they happily march alongside caricatures depicting him as Hitler. That's why, in the interest of discrediting him, they are willing to make common cause with Al Sharpton, whom they would ordinarily revile." -3/31/99 NY Post "They're After Rudy Not Justice"
"In effect, King practiced the philosophy of personal suffering and of love. I dare say that he would have denounced those bigoted signs and banners equating the NYPD with the KKK, and depicting the mayor as ''Adolf Giuliani.'' Did the Rev. Sharpton protest those signs? Did any of the Jewish leaders or other white liberals who stood with him to rightly decry police brutality also demand that those carrying such calumny not be allowed to distract from a message of reconciliation?"-Post 3/31/99 Al's Civil Rights coalition: A Travesty of Dr. King's Dream"
Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T. (Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics), (718) 369-2111
Email: ARTISTpres@aol.com
Website: http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html