“By 1967 the Vietnam War was escalating out of control.”
—James Rosenquist On the heels of radical social changes taking place in America in the late 1960s, See-Saw, Class Systems exemplifies Rosenquist’s progressive activist activities during the period. While many of Rosenquist’s 1960s compositions reference the Vietnam War more broadly, See-Saw, Class Systems refers to a specific incident related to the war, one which occurred on American soil: the 1968 police riots in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, where police exerted unprecedented levels of violence upon counterculture and anti-war demonstrators, including the artist Claes Oldenburg, who got caught in the shuffle. When Oldenburg subsequently cancelled his Chicago show with Richard Feigen Gallery, the gentle show about pleasure he concluded was “obscene in the present context,” Feigen decided to instead host a protest show against Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, who was largely seen as responsible for the police actions at the Convention.
The image of See-Saw, Class Systems was used as the exhibition poster for the show, prominently depicting the scowling face of Mayor Daley. Rearrangements of the words “upper,” “middle,” and “lower” printed at either side of the portrait echo the “new class struggle” evoked in Feigen’s manifesto-slash-proposal for the exhibition: “the week of Aug. 25 exposed the new class struggle. It is no longer the poor class against the rich or Democrat against Republican. It is the educated against the uneducated, the courageous against the terrified, young against old, thinking against nonthinking.” The show provided an outlet for politically minded artists like Rosenquist to both engage in art activism and negotiate the role of art and artists in relation to social crisis.
In 1967, a year before Rosenquist would create See-Saw, Class Systems, the artist painted a large-scale political picture and mounted it to a flatbed truck for a New York anti-war protest parade–the painting was eventually destroyed by people throwing tomatoes and rotten vegetables. The Richard J. Daley show and its rhetoric surrounding artist commentary on social crisis thus contained a personal connection for Rosenquist, whose own artwork had been defaced due to its political commentary.
