In Conversation: Sue Coe and Peter Kuper with John Carlin

John Carlin: In this era of exaggeration where there is no such thing as bad media and you have figures like Donald Trump, it seems to me a kind of epistemological challenge for a political artist, because you become part of their narrative.

Sue Coe: Yeah, but you know, John, Orwell wrote about this during World War II. It's a flattening, because all totalitarianism, let's say monopoly capitalism, is all lies. So when you tell the truth, you're flattened. How I think of it as an artist is like a pantomime or Punch and Judy Show. I go, “the world is not flat” and they go, “The world is flat, the world is flat.” “No Judy, the world is not flat,” and we're in this pantomime lock, and we can never give up the Punch and Judy show.
To understand the structure we're placed in is part of the struggle. We have to never give up, never give up, never give up. The responsibility of any artist is to tell others the truth, the scientific truth: Earth. Not. Flat.

Peter Kuper: It’s like turning that Picasso quote on its head, “art is the truth that enables you to see the lie.”

SC: Yeah, exactly. To be an activist artist, the artist represents the struggle, and in America we have a very bad situation, where there is no organized left. We have two parties that are both pro-capitalists, both pro-growth, they're not dealing with any scientific reality. So what is happening is from grassroots, to grow unions, grow grassroots, grow mass struggle. It's hard, it's very, very hard. But it's always hard, it's always been hard through history. 
If you look today - in the UK it’s practically a mass strike: you've got ambulance workers, you've got firefighters, you've got nurses, you've got barristers, you’ve got bus drivers, going out on strike. The plan of the corporate capitalist, extractors was that the UK becomes Singapore-on-the-Thames, a free market, totally free, unregulated corporations, not taxed, no human rights, no protection of the environment, this is their plan, this was their plan since Margaret Thatcher. But now, the working people, the ones that have the power are rising. This has been critical in England, austerity for years and years and years has cut back health service, the thing that the British people are most proud of, cut back to nothing. So I look to that region, I'm looking to Europe to see the next stage for America.

JC: I like that Singapore on the Thames, very, very great phrase. Maybe I'm being a romantic, but this is to me why art or visual communication is still important because it is speaking truth, or the Punch and Judy show, of untruth/truth. In these elections, it is that 1% where you're really fighting, and that terrifies me because that shows something deeply corrupt.

SC:     Wait a second, wait John, you know Karl Marx said never bother with them - he dismissively called them the lumpen proletariat. I think he had a point that you only work with people who cannot organize for the better. One person could close a factory farm, whereas 50 others, it's just a chip on their shoulder and they're not gonna do much, okay?  So it's a focus on the few that are actually going out, getting people to vote,,picking up seniors, picking up people that can't get to polls, providing chairs to stand in line for hours to vote. We can't spend time figuring out why 65 million voted for these useless scumbags, forget them. You focus on the people that need a teeny bit of help, just a little bit of help, those are the ones.

JC: My real worry is the fascists understand how to control narrative better than the progressives right now and what they're doing, Trump being the greatest example of it, is deliberately creating epistemological chaos, which undermines the ability of activists to communicate. They’re disabling the ability to punch back, because there is no dialectic anymore, we’ve moved into this post truth reality. Living in this media world, it’s like Marx's opiate of the masses, that's the danger, social media is the greatest opiate ever created.

SC: Well, John, that comes to an end when people withdraw their labor, but now you haven't seen much of that. That's not in your history, but if you see mass strike, if you see working class people mobilize, picket lines.  You get no train. Sorry, can't get to work, bad luck. We've tried. No more ambulances. No more Amazon packages. Sorry, no more Starbucks, bad luck, get someone else.  So that's the missing piece. 
You talk about the power of the bourgeois, the power of a rising artistic class, but we never read that, we never see it, we’re never inspired by it, but it doesn't mean it's not happening.

PK:     Thinking about current events, because of the pandemic and the empowering of workers, potentially it is the way it was after the Black Plague, which is what made a middle class. Suddenly all these people are dead and the fruit has to be picked and the church wants me to do this, if you want me to do it, then you're gonna have to pay me. I'm always perplexed, by the illogic of corporate decisions, destroying everything for the next quarter. It’s as if they think they're going to fly off the planet, we'll have Mars… I've become pretty anti space-travel, I have to say.

SC: Yeah, no, no, no, we are all anti-space travel.

JC: I think all those billionaires forgot that science fiction was a coded form of political expression during repressive regimes, I mean that's the whole purpose of science fiction.

PK: Yeah, it was loaded with warnings.

SC: The Corporate Overlord now becomes the political, it's all becoming one, it's getting to the perfect example of what Marx and Engels wrote about, these overlords controlling everything. 
But we have learned passivity, and I understand your point John. Everywhere around me is dairy farming, they’ve electrified the fences, but they're not electrified, right?  So you see, all the cow has to do is get electrified once and they have the memory, and that's us. It's learned passivity, diversion, diversion, Trump, anyone. Could be anyone, but every time he speaks, every time he does something it erodes the nation of laws. It tells people that, yeah, he's above the law. How many lawsuits does he have going? Of course he's above the law, the systemic laws are written to defend the capitalist class.  Yes, so, every time the New York Times runs this: special prosecutor again, oh, wow! This will be it. I don't think so!  Another special someone looking at the paperwork in Mar-A-Lago, whatever that dump is, sordid, yech, someone's looking at paper, no, the judge won't let them look at paper, yes, it's got to be a Special-Paper-Looker, blah, endless. It's eroding for a middle class that actually believes in the system because it worked for them. They could get a living wage, but now they can’t.

JC: You just basically gave a version of Dave Chappelle’s routine that he's been doing recently.

PK: Exactly. He's the best liar, the most honest liar out there because, it's like he says: the system is totally rigged, I know, because I'm part of that system and I use it. He's the best truth teller about the fact that he's lying to you. He tells you what he's doing all the time.

JC: Your brain starts to hurt - you can't keep this much contradictory information in your brain at once!

PK: This is where art comes in.

JC: I think artists are immune to logic,  the logic tricks just don't work and that's why artists make great activists because they don't have that part of their brain. The electrical fence of logic actually doesn't work because most people who are creative and artists you get up every morning, and you -

PK: - you keep on touching the fence! You want to see if there's gonna be a different outcome, or if it's off the main, I can cut the fence, or if the jolt was kinda, that wasn't so bad, I like that jolt, yeah I'm gonna do more drugs!
You know we've been doing World War 3 for 43 years and it's still almost completely unknown. We didn't spend a lot of time promoting it, because it's so much work just promoting it and that doesn't seem like the point of what we're doing. It can feel really futile, but then I just keep coming back to it and it's still here and so many things aren’t.

JC: I agree with you, Peter. I’ve seen in the last five years that the labor of the artist, whether you're an activist, or just a creative person, the value of that labor’s been completely diminished. Companies realized that creative people will just keep creating because it's a necessity of their life. There was like somebody who realized, Wow! We don't even have to pay these people, and they'll still make content for us. Younger people I work with, they have no future in doing this because they can't sustain their labor through this practice, it takes a tremendous amount of energy. You know, Sue -

SC: and Peter as well, yeah, to run multiple systems. 

JC: Sue, I’m curious how that compares to when you were young in the Seventies and the Punk movements that were happening while you were in art school?

SC: Well, it was a lot of resistance to Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher was just destroying unions. The reason corporations want to destroy unions is unions fund the Left, right? The working class fund the Left and in a political organized way.  And she wanted to get rid of labor. So the Punks, before that it'd be Teddy boys and Mods - these are working class kids, who didn't necessarily have the political structure.  But they had the political instinct to resist, because all that was for them were factories. It would be an Amazon warehouse today. 
I grew up in the ruins of London, the ruins of World War II, so it was just ruins and where I went to school was tin huts because it was bombed. So coming from the ruins, and then seeing oh, this is the next plan for capitalism? Everyone I knew was Labor. I mean in the US, it's weird to be on the left, ideologically perhaps, but not there. Teachers were Marxists, it was resist now, or it will be what it is today, which is Singapore on the Thames, and that's the plan for the entire world.

JC: So I'm curious what was it like for you to be a student then? Is that when you became politically engaged?

SC: Oh, no, it was much younger than that, but this was a time of the rise of Labor, post World War II, Churchill failed, Labor got in. Working class or lower middle class kids could get into university for the first time. It wasn't pay to play as it is now, if you got into a university, the government paid for your fees, tuition, art, supplies, everything and I was lucky enough to live then so I got a free education. A lot of the students were from the working class, the majority were kids of the ruling class, but it was a great education, and the lecturers, they were amazing, amazing people.

JC: So talk about some of them, because I know you had some interesting teachers, while you were there

SC: Well, I did have Edwardo Paolozzi, did have Peter Blake, I never met [first name] Hamilton but [David] Hockney did come in a few times, so you know, very radical, you know. These were brilliant artists, they didn't really teach, you just hung out with them. Then you go to the pub and they really start teaching, they really start talking. Paolozzi in particular was an absolute genius, genius.

JC: What did he talk about? Paolozzi and Blake, what kind of things did they show you, what kind of art were you looking at?

SC: Well, okay. So when you go to the pub, I remember being the only female, but as not desirous of any males, or never having any intention of being desirous to any male, I could get them to critique my work. Paolozzi was about putting all these pieces together. He liked my work, it was big plane crashes and he said put more pieces in that - make the pattern, make the puzzle. The philosopher Edward de Bono was there too and it was fitting these puzzle pieces. Hockney, he didn't really like my work, he said I put too much in it, so on the one end, I got Paolozzi, put more in it, and then Hockney, too much. I didn't think Blake was interested in my work at all, because he never said a word to me in 3 years.  But then he said at the end he gave me an A and he said what I'm looking for in art is the heart. Technique doesn't mean anything if you don't have the heart. So that gave me a little bit of hope.
Politics was not even worth discussing actually because they were imbued with the idea of resistance, I can't say they even really noticed me but I could hang out  And listen.

JC: Did they show like work in classes that you did get exposed to?

SC: In art school? No! You had the big book history of art, and it had the one woman artist in it, one that does vaginas in the desert, what's her name again?  The one that was naked with the photographer who does - 

JC: Georgia O’Keeffe, of course.

SC: Georgia O’Keeffe, yes. This is supposed to be my one example? Fuck that shit! So I thought, this is serious, this is gonna be really hard!

JC: So this was around 1970, was your work political?

SC: It was political. I had been in magazines, newspapers since I was 16. I was working all the time I was in college, and I was very competitive in a good way. We would say “I’m gonna be on the cover of Nova next week, and you’re not” and “I’m gonna be on Time Out and you're not.” We were going to get jobs in wallpaper design or greeting cards - I never thought of illustration or editorial work as anything, but then it came to me, and then I knew I could do it so I’ve done it ever since. You know the first job I did was Watergate and that was for the London Times and I was 16. I had no idea what Watergate meant, no idea, what the fuck? The art director called and said “Watergate, need it by tomorrow. Do you know anything about Watergate?” I said “Absolutely, I know everything about it.”

JC: It's hard before the Internet.

SC: I know! Tell me about it.

JC: So what did you end up doing?

SC: Oh, I can't honestly remember, but it was good and all that, I mean.

PK: Did it involve a gate and some water?

SC: It looked okay, Peter, but it's like 75 Dpi, right?  Those were the days… The artwork wasn’t any good, but then I knew I could do it.

JC: When's the first time you saw Kathe Kollowitz and Hannah Hoch, and other people that gave a little bit more context?

SC: Through the Communist party - we started looking at all the great American political artists and that's where I saw that art, and I thought wow!  You know, this is amazing work!

JC: The Communist party in the UK had art lessons?

SC: Yeah. I came to the US at the same time, even though I was still at Royal College, I came and the Communist party had workshops down on 23rd street, and then we'd look at all that work. Oh, it was unbelievable, I’d never seen anything like it. So it was that growth, then from the history of satire in England, I started to find - it was discovering [William] Hogarth, [George] Cruikshank, all this satirical work for the printed page. And that was not in art books, and it wasn't taught either.

PK: What about [Gerald] Scarfe and [Ralph] Steadman?

SC: Yes, yes, yes, yes, thank you, thank you. And then seeing their work, also [Ronald] Searle did this amazing series when he was in an internment camp, he was captured when he was a soldier in World War II and he did this brilliant series. But Steadman was really rising and Don McCullin changed the Sunday Magazine. David King, who was an art director back then, invented the Sunday Supplement, he had huge double spreads of Don McCullin’s War in Vietnam, it's amazing photo journalism, and then came in Steadman on those pages, so it was a time of the rise in big graphic statements. Big visual, political statements, that hadn't really existed before.

PK: I know Scarfe was doing work on Nixon and he, and I know, he had exhibitions in London, they seem like they were doing an exhibition, you know, Scarfe, and that was in Private Eye, that they were both working?

SC: Oh, yes. Private Eye! Yes. So there was resistance, and the resistance was in universities throughout Europe, specifically France and England, there was a rising to support youth in the United States being called up for Vietnam. Then alongside that was the movement of cruise missiles onto common land in the UK. I went to Greenham Common where the cruise missiles were, to demonstrate, and then we got work published in these big visual formats. That was a first, where I could be a demonstrator, and then get it published, the collateral of yourself that's going to be arrested and the visual recorder, and how to get it in print. My sister was arrested, she had to go to trial, but I was taken out of that first arrest group.  So I could carry on with the work. That was my first idea of becoming the collateral, in the physical powerless body sense, placing your body there and doing the work, and getting it out there.

JC: You were published in fairly mainstream publications, these weren't underground -

SC: Yeah, but this is because those art directors come from that radical perspective. David King, he's done a whole book on Russian constructivism, he was absolutely Communist, Marxist. These were the editors and art directors, there was nothing unusual to them in that milieu of being in the mainstream. That of course was crushed with the rise of corporate ownership of media.

JC: Why did you come to New York?

SC: Well, at the time it was actually welcoming. It wasn’t brilliant, welcoming, but it was actually quite acceptable that people moved around, especially for cultural workers.  I mean, you go to Israel, and work in a kibbutz, and you could be working for Esquire, you could be working anywhere, all you need is Fedex, and you'd send the original on. This was acceptable in the day. I regarded America as a locus or epicenter of resistance too and back then, it was.
The art world didn't exist for me. I never contemplated it at all. The printed page was what I did. I'd just do the deadlines, that was my job, but then the corporate censorship got more extreme, it was more tedious. My friend Marshall Harrisman would say, “I’m not doing sketches for $200 so you can send it to your corporate executives.” So we started to break off from that work, and I had to seriously think about -  I never saw galleries as anything. I didn't go to them, that was that. But then when it became so hard to get the work through I thought, okay, the gallery, that might be a way.

JC: Sue, when you came to New York what was the political world, that you saw, you entered into?

SC: The political world I entered into was landlord/tenant. Soviet Bloc countries, their embassies in New York had printing presses in the basement, so we could use those to do our work because no one represented the tenant. This is the beginning of the great takeover of real estate, and the art fit in with that. The issue was no affordable housing, tenants being evicted, the eviction policies, senior citizens with no rights, thrown out on the street. That was our job: how can we make the posters? Or find lawyers - all the lawyers were bought up by real estate, so how do you find a lawyer that can represent an eighty-year-old that's just been thrown out of her apartment, just thrown out! It was our duty to do this work, working with other people with a moral idea of humanity, that comes before profit.

JC: Gentrification was just starting then, by the eighties, everything you're talking about like real estate, capitalism, just became you know the greed is good era.

PK: When I got to New York a bit later there was so much visual activity on the streets, there were Keith Haring drawings in the subway. There was graffiti on the walls, but there was definitely a sense, on the other hand, that a lot of people just seem to be bored with it and my generation definitely. There was a locus of activity, there was a no nukes rally that was a big deal, concerts, the big march in Central Park and things like that, but not a lot of feeling.
My friend Seth Debachman and I started doing World War 3 because we really wanted to comment on these things. We saw this work, but there weren’t any outlets that we could find, I didn't have my foot in the door with the political magazines.
Sue came and talked when I was at Pratt institute, around 1980, and it just completely blew my hair back because it reordered my sense of what was out there. My sense was that somebody like Sue had made it and that was it, you're done, now I'm a famous artist.

SC:Peter’s the next generation of social, political resistance, what World War 3’s done is phenomenal, giving kids the platform to start practicing with content. How are young artists who are political, how are they nurtured? World War 3 is doing that.

PK: Because we saw work like yours!

JC: I see World War 3 coming from that underground comics movement in the US, a kind of personal expression changing the boundaries of what an individual could draw and write about.

PK: That was a factor, I also saw these popup galleries on the Lower East Side doing political work. That was in the early eighties, it was this moment where people would take over a squat and have a show. 

JC: I think a lot of what people call political art or is represented as political art tends to fail as art. It's an editorial about something out of a particular moment and it tries to communicate that in a one dimensional way. Both of you as artists have created a different formula to do that -

PK: these days one thing I'm reconsidering is how I think images will serve what I'm trying to do. Will it just give me this energy while I'm doing it, like drawing that picture of the policeman beating the guy up because I’m so angry that I can show the evil cop doing that. There's re-traumatizing in that and I have to consider a little harder.

SC: I think that's brilliant, so agree with that. I think the other side is having false humanism, sentiment. It's between that, we can see that pattern or pulse of life that speaks to everything, speaks to each other.

JC: It's your observed experience, it's your empathy, you giving voice to people that can't speak whether they're tenants or animals in factory farms, that's the thread I see you've constantly been drawn to depict.

SC: I think the animals, John, is the most difficult thing to do in art, because people are human-centric. They dismiss and trivialize anything that's not human. Animals are unique beings with feelings, families, connections, maps, everything, and are a relative, you know, of fur, fin and feather. It's very, very hard to do this work because there's no recognition - that's why it's important. 

PK: They don't do a lot of publishing themselves.  Also they haven't done that many books, you know -

JC: Right, not being able to voice -

SC: No no no no no wait, wait, wait! They can voice, we're not hearing, they have a voice, they’re screaming, they're crying, they’re singing - fish sing to each other. They have a voice, we’re just not listening.

JC: I think humans are not just human-centric, but we have this horrible optical bias that if we can't see something, it doesn't exist. What both of you have done is make visible, translate: they're singing, they're intelligent, they're doing things. We're trivial other than our ability to destroy everybody else

PK: I’d say the political culture is saying don't look up, like that movie, but I think what Sue and I are doing is saying DO look down. See what's all around you, nature.

SC: When I meet a student and they say, I want to be a political artist, I say, “well, you take a foot, or ten square feet of land anywhere.  A park, sidewalk, you draw everything on that square foot you can see. Get a microscope, look at night, what’s on the sidewalk at night in that ten square feet? If you can forensically observe all the life around you, then you're equipped to maybe be a social political artist.” That's the way to be to be an artist, I think.

JC: Sue, I wanted to ask what you're working on right now?

SC: In January there’s gonna be the biggest anti war conference in Europe. In Berlin - it's the Rosa Luxembourg Conference, and I'll be doing the poster, if I can do the deadline. So I've been researching, I mean obviously I'm familiar with Rosa Luxembourg's work, but more of a forensic look - you know because this is over a 100 years since she died. She was murdered in 1919, just after the first World War; a proto fascist group, it was Freikorps, murdered her and this was a group of people that formally would be populists, I suppose, but became the fodder for fascism. The similarities between this country, certainly, are very, very strong, so that's what I want to figure out in the artwork, without making it, you know, any false parallels, but just figuring out well, how can you have an anti-war movement when you've got real fascist, murdering oppressors. You know, what does one do in light of that? That's what I'm working on.

JC: Awesome. So how does that relate to the other work that you've done in the past year or so, the prints?

SC: Yeah, the past year is just blocking the rise of fascism.  I didn't want to do that work. You know I'm more interested in climate and animals than in the predictable thuggery of capitalism. This is the duty to keep struggling. I called up all those prints, summoned them up out of the ether to encourage people to vote. Raise money for voting, you know, to fit all these pieces together, just to get one percentage point over the line. And we’re back again, fighting for that one percentage point that's the tipping point. I hear a lot of people say it’s so pointless voting. No! You're the 1%, you're the one person that can prevent this. Fascism never comes into power, totalitarianism: it's never a majority, they just need one-third. If fascism gains complete control, then there's no more discussion for, well, forever. So we need to rally doing this.