Evan Apodaca at Grand Central
Art Center

Evan Apodaca, Oceanside ’69 (video still) (2021). Image courtesy of the artist and Grand Central Art Center.

Even with its camouflage vinyl backdrop, Los Angeles-based artist Evan Apodaca’s video work Monumental Interventions (2023) too effectively disclosed aspects of San Diego’s military presence that some would have preferred to keep secret. Featuring digital animations of toppled military monuments, the work was installed at San Diego International Airport for less than a month before controversially being censored and removed for its subversive content.¹ Similar themes of resistance to U.S. militarism in Southern California (and the attendant backlash) were present in Apodaca’s exhibition Insurgent Smokescreen, which was recently on view at Grand Central Art Center. Emulating an aesthetics of covert operations to investigate lesser-known accounts of anti-Vietnam War organizations in San Diego County during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Insurgent Smokescreen aptly constructed a people’s history of demilitarization movements, in turn uncovering the incessant counterinsurgency tactics deployed against them.

The exhibition revolved around three documentary videos, part of a series titled Retracings (2020–present), in which Apodaca follows activists from the Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM) and the San Diego Convention Coalition as they recall stories of armed vigilante attacks, state violence, and presumed Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) projects. MDM—formed in 1969 by active-duty G.I.s at Naval Base San Diego and Camp Pendleton—particularly represented a serious risk to U.S. imperialism, with its foot soldiers joining a growing multiethnic, multiracial, and gender-diverse civilian population protesting the country’s involvement in Southeast Asia.²

Apodaca’s videos, installed on upright poles in the center of the gallery, highlight the ensuing attempts to squash such efforts. In Oceanside ’69 (2021) (the title referring to the place and date of events discussed), activists take Apodaca to the Bandshell, an outdoor amphitheater where a fake bomb threat was called in to preemptively end MDM’s People’s Armed Forces Day rally, which included speakers like Angela Davis. In another scene, two members performatively reenact the events of a shooting at the house that once served as MDM headquarters, ducking under windows, crawling to safety, and continuing to ponder who might have been the culprits (the police are suspected). Moving south in Del Mar ’72 (2020), activists lead Apodaca on a walk along the railroad tracks that were once obstructed during a direct action to prevent the transportation of munitions, resulting in severe police retaliation and fabricated charges. In Ocean Beach ’72 (2021), members of the Convention Coalition show Apodaca the house where, following undercover infiltration into the group, another shooting occurred, this one believed to have been perpetrated by the Secret Army Organization, a rightwing paramilitary unit with reported ties to the FBI. Returning to the unassuming places where such remarkable events happened, these Retracings reveal how evidence of this rich antiwar history, although not publicly commemorated, remains embedded in the built environment, only made visible when shared by those who took part.

Despite being presented in a rather straightforward documentary style—interspersed with archival footage, photographs, and newspaper clippings for added veracity—moments of forgetting and slight misremembering arise in the activists’ recorded testimonies, due in part to changes in the urban settings that have since occurred. Apodaca’s work dwells within these gaps of collective memory, using drawing, language, and sculpture to incite new means of historical understanding. Seven chalk pastel drawings titled with geotagged street intersections creatively interpret and reimagine scenes described in the videos that could not have been properly documented in the present. Freeman & Minnesota (2023–24), for example, depicts a foreboding shotgun appearing in self-defense from an attic window at MDM’s headquarters, dramatizing the palpable danger faced by those who might otherwise be unsympathetically derided for their radical political orientation. Each drawing in the series is framed alongside related clandestine-esque typewriter communiques. Written by Apodaca in the third person, these texts narrate his experience interviewing activists in a bureaucratic tone that mimics an informant debriefing their handler, complete with transcribed quotations. Apodaca flips the typical audience addressed in these types of official reports, disseminating his findings to the general public rather than a government agency.

Further concerned with the agitational distribution of ideas, two squat, rectangular plaster sculptures spotlighting material from MDM’s self-published newspaper Attitude Check dotted the gallery floor. Atop the undulating surface of the sculptures are cyanotype printed images: digital scans of articles from Attitude Check superimposed on crumpled paper and floating against a dark background. While referencing a stack of newspapers awaiting distribution, the intentionally hard-to-decipher content—covering the MDM shooting and the organization’s political program—accentuates the ephemerality of most activist print media, reasserting the precarity by which movement history is ultimately preserved.

Art about the Vietnam War, particularly in the U.S., has never been in short supply, nor has the relevance of such work dissipated.³ Scholarship within the last twenty years has detailed the various responses of artists in real-time opposition to the War, including Julia Bryan-Wilson’s contention that the era’s heightened political awareness helped usher in the identification of artists as workers, linking class consciousness in the imperial core to anti-imperialist struggle in the periphery.⁴ Half a century removed, Apodaca’s place-based approach remains that of a worker, although of a specific vocation that combines the role of artist-as-historian with the commitment of a public intellectual à la Marxist geographer Mike Davis.⁵ Differing from the art made in immediate protest against—or, later, memorializing—the U.S. military’s atrocities in Vietnam, Apodaca’s multimedia practice functions as an operating manual, striving to bridge the generational knowledge gap between disparate demilitarization movements in Southern California then and today. Beyond merely affirming the ideology of the activists with whom he has interfaced over many years, Apodaca’s prolonged interpersonal process—of establishing connections, building trust, and ensuring safekeeping—more precisely speaks to the foundational cultural work that is a necessary component of organizing any anti-imperialist popular front, especially in the heart of empire.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 39.

Evan Apodaca, Movement for a Democratic Military (Reruns Series) (installation view) (2024). Cyanotype, paper, and plaster. Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, California, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Grand Central Art Center.