Among the many graffiti slogans scrawled upon the walls of Paris during the rebellion of May 1968, perhaps the one that best summed up the temper of the time was “Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible”. But poetic, politically pointed graffiti was not the only thing to adorn the walls of Paris in 68. Anonymous street art posters augmented the May uprising, leaving behind a legacy of socially conscious graphics that to this day have not been outdone in terms of political sophistication, simplicity, and effectiveness.

Produced anonymously by the workers and students of the Atelier Populaire (Popular Workshop), the posters of May 68 Paris have been enormously influential over the years despite the fact that they have never been made commercially available. My understanding of how art can have an impact on public opinion was in part shaped by exposure to those posters the year they hit the streets. Years ago I wrote an online illustrated article that traced the history of the prints, an examination that remains one of the largest archives of May 68 Parisian posters to be found on the web, so I’m pleased to see the posters of 68 receiving a long overdue reappraisal.

May 68: Street Posters from the Paris Rebellion, opens on May 1st, 2008, at the Hayward Project Space in London. It will be the first exhibition of Paris 68 posters to be organized in the UK, displaying 46 of the original posters created by the Atelier Populaire. The poster exhibit runs until June 1, 2008.

Meanwhile in France, a collection of over 250 rare May 68 posters produced by the Atelier Populaire, went on exhibition and sale at the world famous Drouot auction house on April 5, 2008. While I’ve not yet read about the results of the poster sale, I did get word that starting prices for individual prints began at 100 Euros (around $150 yankee dollars) - that such influential and historic posters could be priced so low invokes a number of tricky questions.

It should be evident that there is a tremendous difference between a historic May 68 poster and a street art stencil print created by a contemporary artist. How is it then that Bonhams London auction house sold a single Banksy stencil print of a Chimp for £228,000 ($449,000), while the starting price for any May 68 poster on the auction block at Drouot was so abysmally low? We should be aware of the forces at work here, and the Atelier Populaire itself had some instructive words regarding the commodification of political street art. As I noted in my previously mentioned essay on the Atelier Populaire, the poster making collective took an unequivocal stance regarding their works. “To use them for decorative purposes, to display them in bourgeois places of culture or to consider them as objects of aesthetic interest is to impair both their function and their effect. This is why the Atelier Populaire has always refused to put them on sale.”

In 1980 I created the silkscreen print, Nuclear War?!… There Goes My Career! The artwork was in response to public fears that a nuclear war would break out between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But the print wasn’t merely an assault upon those who possessed nuclear weapons - rather, it was a critique against those self-possessed and upwardly mobile individuals who were too busy with their careers to notice they were in part responsible for the state of the world.

It may seem that I followed the example of Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, couching my message in an image inspired by American comics, but in actuality my poster was inspired by the Situationists - whose intent it was to subvert the world of art. That my print was loosely based upon the comic book superhero, Wonder Woman, lent a disturbing irony to the artwork; even America’s superheroes were helpless before the nuclear juggernaut. I was astounded at the popularity of my print, its title even becoming a part of popular American colloquial speech. Eventually the New York Museum of Modern Art would display my print in an exhibition of political poster art.

Another anti-nuclear silkscreen print I created, We’re Number One, was printed in 1984. The title and theme of that work was inspired by a newspaper headline from the now defunct, Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Reporting on the intensifying nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the paper ran a banner headline that read, “U.S. plans to win nuclear war.” When I saw those words I pondered what “winning” a nuclear exchange with the Soviets would actually have meant? Major population centers in Europe obliterated, key cities in Russia and the U.S. reduced to nothing - resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions of innocent civilians.

The “winner” of course would inherit a smoldering wasteland of radioactive rubble. My print was never intended as an anti-American barb, but a forceful jab at those who thought a nuclear war winnable. The artwork depicted three deathly figures, two in radiation suits and one in military garb clutching a photo of a dead child from Hiroshima. The Day of the Dead inspired silkscreen was printed in a sickly radioactive green.

We’re Number One was meant as a condemnation of people like T.K. Jones - a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense in the Reagan administration who infamously said Americans would survive atomic war with the Soviets “if there are enough shovels to go around.” Like other cold-war civil defense advocates at the time, Jones promoted the notion that once the missiles started flying one could dig a hole with a shovel; cover the trench with a door; pile dirt upon the makeshift bunker; and then wait in the hovel until the nuclear blasts subsided.

Presupposing the “victory” of the U.S. in such an exchange, Americans would then rise from their foxholes to rebuild the country. The deadly and long lasting effects of radiation and the very real likelihood of a nuclear winter were never spoken of as being part of the scenario. Unfortunately, my print is still relevant today, as the characters from Doctor Strangelove keep popping up in the American political landscape.

On July 15th, 2005, Colorado congressman Rep. Tom Tancredo advocated nuking Mecca if America was again attacked by terrorists. Speaking on a radio station in Florida, Tancredo said the “ultimate threat” would have to be met with an “ultimate response.” Then there’s the news that the Pentagon, under instruction from Vice President Cheney, has assigned the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM), the task of creating contingency plans to conduct a large-scale air assault on Iran. The attack would include the use of tactical nuclear weapons and would be carried out in the event of another 9/11-type terror attack on U.S. soil.

We’re Number One and Nuclear War?!… There Goes My Career!, were exhibited at the Parco Museum in Tokyo, Japan, June 2005, as part of the Yo! What Happened to Peace? traveling exhibition. Then, as now, these particular silkscreen prints are dedicated to war enthusiasts of all countries.

“The spectacle… in ideology, art and culture, turns the wolves of spontaneity into the sheepdogs of knowledge and beauty. Literary anthologies are replete with insurrectionary writings, the museums with calls to arms. But history does such a good job of pickling them in perpetuity that we can neither see nor hear them. ln this area, however, consumer society performs a salutary task of dissolution. For today art can only construct plastic cathedrals. The dictatorship of consumption ensures that every aesthetic collapses before it can produce any masterpieces. Premature burial is an axiom of consumerism, imperfection a precondition of planned obsolescence.

Sensational aesthetic departures occur only because someone briefly finds a way to outdo the spectacle of artistic decomposition in its own terms. And any such originality soon turns up mass-marketed in every five-and-dime. Bernard Buffet, pop art, Andy Warhol, rock music–where are you now? To talk of a modern work of art enduring is sillier than talking of the eternal values of Standard Oil.” - From Raoul Vaneigem’s 1967, The Revolution of Everyday Life.