operation rapid american withdrawl
RAW (1970-2005)
Crane Arts Building, Icebox Project Space, Philadelphia, USA
2005

Operation Rapid American Withdrawal or RAW 1970 –- 2005 was an extensive multimedia art event that was exhibited in the Ice Box Project Space at Crane Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA from September 2nd – September 25th, 2005.
  
This was a thematic exhibition that focused on the commemoration and homage to the 35th anniversary of something called “Operation Rapid American Withdrawal”.  This was a wonderful example of true guerilla theatre/performance art that was a reenactment of a search and destroy mission performed by anti-war Vietnam veterans of the time.  Operation RAW happened in Philadelphia/New Jersey area and nowhere else in the USA.
 
The Vietnam Veterans Against the War demonstrated in order to bring their buddies home, it was a creative act, and visual artists as their heirs of contemporary art created art works that re-call attention to this kind of heroic dissent with the same committed fervor and the same lovingly created tools.
 
75 artists were invited to create work because newspaper articles and oral histories say this is the number of veterans which began the 4 day march in Morristown, New Jersey on September 4, 1970. By the end, over 200 Vietnam veterans reenacted a final sweep mission at Valley Forge Military Park culminating in a peace rally where they “broke arms” with 2000 supporters looking on. Soldiers, sympathizers, politicians, and celebrities - including John Kerry, Jane Fonda, and our own, Donald Sutherland, offered speeches.

More information about this exhibition can be found on the website: http://www.freewebs.com/operationraw/about.html
I received documentation and important research provided by the officiating Curator, Jane Irish who put together an important team of artists and art historians who collaborated to the success of this exhibition and its reenacting. The form and vision of the show was actually intended to resemble a demonstration and to contribute a piece for the exhibit was similar to showing up to march.  

In researching this particular historical era and combining the extensive documentation provided by the Curator, I came across, Abbie Hoffman, an anti-war protest leader from the Sixties who promoted countercultural values and was against the Vietnam War. I then proceeded to create an artwork that took on an activist tone in support of the proposed exhibition thematic using the juxtaposition of word and image
  
Using a political quote from Hoffman in response to the Vietnam War as the thrust for this work,  I shot a digital photograph of a family at home seated around their dining room table having a family meal and in prayer. This meal contains a slight twist by replacing the food on their plates for meaty bloody, large butcher bones.

(please refer to the very first image above (digital image framed in a window box) entitled: "if people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars"”, 2005)
  
The indictment of the text reminds us that language and its use within culture is constructed in order to provoke questions about power and its effect on the human condition: to investigate the way power is constructed, used and abused.  I hope to project through this work that power is interrogated and interpreted through social, economic and political systems influenced by mass media.  I hope to present and reflect an emotional response that comes from the private space of family and community that motor life's impulses and reminds us of this place in our oral history and the political consciousness of our time. “

(Abbie Hoffman was a social and political activist in the United States , co-founder of the Youth International Party, "Yippies" and, later, a fugitive from the law. He came to prominence in the 1960s and has remained a symbol of the youth rebellion of that decade).
 
His quote:  “"I believe in contemporary cannibalism.  If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars".” Hoffman, Abbie


The focus of my performance reflected on or even intervened with the social and political conditions of our time. Since the 1960s, if not before, artists have centered their work more increasingly and offensively on issues of socio-political parameters. The exhibition, Operation American Withdrawal was a creative act in the form of a search and destroy mission performed by anti-war Vietnam veterans of their time.  My brother,  Elio Espana, an American Tattoo Artist and I engaged in a collaborative creative act by drawing a tattoo of two of the soldier participants on my back and linking this moment in time.
Aligning with the participants of the march through the drawing process, with what began as a stencil grew and evolved on my skin.  I was not in Vietnam.. I felt the mark of the pen on my back but could not see it.
With this analogy, the finished image reveals the mental anguish and physical manipulation endured in Vietnam but for those who were not there, we cannot feel it entirely..only speculate..