Turning FBI files into art

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, Oct. 18, 2002

PUBLIC LIVES
Uncovering Art in the Ache of Being Spied Upon
By JOYCE WADLER

AN artist sees beauty where others may not. In the case of Arnold Mesches, 
in his F.B.I. files.

Granted, there was pain: the realization that for 27 years, through the Red 
Scare of the 1950's, people Mr. Mesches thought to be friends had been 
spying on him. A lover; a student, who, it would transpire, was 
photographing him with a tiny camera in his tie; a buddy with whom he 
attended a funeral; his next-door neighbors, to whom he and his wife had 
given their stroller and baby clothes.

But there was something besides curiosity that made Mr. Mesches, lifetime 
leftist activist, request his files.

"I saw other people's files and realized they were aesthetically 
beautiful," Mr. Mesches says. "Kind of like Franz Kline sketches. Those 
big, black slashes where they block things out."

The Bush administration has called upon Americans to report the suspicious 
activities of their neighbors. To Arnold Mesches, whose work is in the 
permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this is a dangerous 
proposal. A onetime member of the Communist Party, he was under an 
F.B.I.-sponsored surveillance from 1945 to 1972. Obtaining his files two 
years ago under the Freedom of Information Act, he found 760 pages filled 
with the large black slashes he so admired.

He has made those reports into collages, and they make up a show at the 
P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens. The files reporting that Mr. 
Mesches worked as a set illustrator on a Tarzan movie or wrote a postcard 
to President Dwight D. Eisenhower protesting atomic weapons are juxtaposed 
with images: Marilyn Monroe, American soldiers in the Korean War, Malcolm X.

Walking through the exhibit, sometimes laughing, Mr. Mesches says, "This is 
nuts," and "This I don't understand," pointing out an F.B.I. report saying 
that he was teaching at an art school that "showed a Czech film," that he 
worked as a courtroom illustrator. He stops in front of a report that says, 
"A child was born to wife of subject at Queen of Angels Hospital."

"Not only did they have the dates my kids were born, they also had how much 
they weighed," Mr. Mesches says. "I can't tell you how nonsensical it was."

He is 79, but 79 in artist years, which translate to a spiritual age, in 
his case, of perhaps 36. He is Bronx born, spent much of his life in Los 
Angeles, and now lives in the East Village with his wife, the novelist Jill 
Ciment, who happens to be 30 years his junior. Compact, gray-haired, he 
wears a leather jacket and blue jeans ? the sort of outfit cited in one 
report as evidence of his questionable standing. "Dresses like a 
Communist," it said. Speaking of his files, Mr. Mesches laughs often. A 
frequent image in his art is Coney Island; he has a good appreciation of 
the absurd, although, he admits, learning how many people around him had 
been spying on him left him shaken.


THE student who spied on him using a camera in his tie? He remembers him. 
It was a warm night in Los Angeles and the student was all buttoned up and 
Mr. Mesches asked him, "Hey, why you wearing that tie?"

He is also very open. "My first marriage was never good, I was always 
playing around," he says.

He met his second wife, Ms. Ciment, he adds, when she was one of his 
painting students, age 14.

Uh-oh.

"No, I was good," Mr. Mesches says. "I waited three years. I was 48, she 
was 17 1/2."

But to politics. Mr. Mesches' political activism began in the sometimes 
violent Hollywood studio strikes of the mid-1940's, during which he was 
arrested and spent three days in jail. Asked about whether he was indeed a 
Communist, he first sidesteps the issue, wary after all these years. "I 
stand on the Fifth," he says. Then he says he was, and adds that Communism, 
at the time, appeared to be concerned with peace and racial equality. 
Later, he drifted away. He supported Henry A. Wallace of the Progressive 
Party in the 1948 presidential race ? a position, he says, that caused him 
to be fired from a teaching job at a Salt Lake City art school. He 
demonstrated for clemency for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who would be 
executed for espionage, and did a series of paintings about the case. In 
1956, those paintings and others were stolen from his studio. Mr. Mesches, 
who suspects F.B.I. involvement, says that when he received his files, 
reports from three months before and after the break-in were missing.

(An F.B.I. spokesman, William D. Carter, who had no knowledge of the case, 
posed a question: "Why would we break in and steal somebody's paintings?" 
He added that it was "certainly not the policy of the F.B.I. to steal 
paintings.")

Comparing the days he was under surveillance with the present, Mr. Mesches 
acknowledges the difference. The country is at war, he says. But he finds 
the notion of neighbor reporting on neighbor "dangerous as hell."

"There were too many ugly things happening," he says. "Too many things will 
happen if we become a country of spies. I guess having had firsthand 
experience with this thing, I find it dangerous. And un-American, to use 
the old expression."


Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org


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