Visual artists choose political themes for many reasons. It sometimes puzzles me that many people with intelligent, analytical minds, even artists, cannot perceive the many possible reasons for political content cropping up in visual art. They dismiss it, diminish its value, decry it as propaganda, or despair the intrusion of real politics into the pristine purity of fine art. But artists are responsive to their culture and their environment. Consequently, there may be emotional outbursts of political content within the visual context. Artists are intellectual beings and may realize the potential to advance a political agenda by using their visual skills. Artists are sometimes described as self-centered, and so their art is a natural way for them to express their response to personal events: the untimely deaths of family members through war or injustice, threats to the homeland, individual security threats like the military draft during the Vietnam War, or the loss of close friends to AIDS or other diseases. Other people may go fight an enemy, join political action committees, form medical research support organizations, or write books about their experiences. Artists make art. I first learned hand papermaking in the summer of 1972. Richard Nixon was in the White House and his henchmen had just burgled the Watergate apartment building. The Vietnam War had taken over a million lives by then and was showing few signs of resolution. Civil rights and equal rights were still more theory than fact. One of my first projects in handmade paper a few months later was a book titled, The Politics of Underwear. Embossments and hand-printed offset lithographic contact images of underwear, on the best cotton rag paper I could make as a beginner, presented the analogy that America's underwear needed fixing or replacing. It was a thin, nearly transparent concept on which to hang a book, but it continues to amuse my students thirty years later. (For that matter, the concept still seems fresh and relevant to many people, alluding to the emperor's new clothes that adorn the current occupant of the White House.) The book found its way into my MFA thesis exhibition along with two Impeach Nixon prints in other media, as well as many non-political pieces. Politics was an active part of my life then, but just a part, as it is now. Visual artists respond to their landscapes, and while that means the inner landscape of the mind for some and for others the physical landscape in which they live, for me it means the cultural and intellectual landscape I inhabit. Political and social comment will surface in my art as naturally as the choice of brown over gray, red over blue. The spectrum of ideas and influences that percolates through my creativity is both broad and idiosyncratic. As I gained knowledge, experience, and competence in papermaking, the artistic possibilities inherent within the medium became more apparent to me. Eventually, the idea of content-specific handmade paper became attractive as a creative choice. I am a printmaker by training, temperament, and career. I found I could enhance and deepen the impact of meaning in a print on handmade paper by choosing fibers that had relevance to the subject matter. In 1988, I printed a keepsake of my father's family farm, which was sold out of the family after a hundred and thirty-two years. I made the paper solely from fibers I collected on the farm just before it was sold: sisal binder twine, a jute feed sack, straw, hemp ropes, and cotton seed sacks. A true keepsake, it is the stuff of the farm. It is the farm. While I did not create this piece to be a work of fine art, I found that it touched many people. The knowledge of the source of the fibers in the paper makes a difference in their perception, evaluation, and appreciation of the work. That and the curious satisfaction of creating a truly conceptually unified piece were small revelations to me at the time. Included in the historical text that described my family's ownership of the farm and its acquisition in 1856 was the reminder that the land "not long before had been home to the people of the Sauk, Fox, and Winnebago nations." My point was that as we celebrate and sentimentalize American land ownership, we must also recognize previous inhabitants. The political is never far from us. In 1991, at the book arts press I direct at Arizona State University, the Pyracantha Press, we decided to produce a broadside print commemorating the bicentennial of the United States Bill of Rights (see "Celebrating the Bill of Rights" by Gordon Fluke, Hand Papermaking, Vol. 7, No. 1, Summer 1992). In consultation with a law professor who teaches courses in the amendments, we chose to emphasize the first five words, "Congress shall make no law," because that phrase sets our constitution apart from many others. We printed it on paper that was handmade from cotton American flags and blue jeans. These are, to my mind, two quintessential sources of American fiber and absolutely appropriate for the substrate on which the Bill of Rights is printed. It is purple because it is a mixture of red, white, and blue fibers. A blend of people from throughout the world now live in the United States, so this mixture of fibers and colors is also a fitting metaphor for our nation. Although some people have viewed our use of flags in the pulp as disrespectful, most perceive it as an ultimate act of respect. Knowing what the paper is made from forces people to reconsider the content and meaning of the text. Although relatively mild, this is a political act. In 1996, I was asked to create a collaboration in handmade paper for the "Art of the Matter" Papermaking Symposium at the Cooper Union School in New York City. I asked Margaret Prentice, also a papermaker and printmaker, to join in the collaboration. We made an artists' book titled Spirit Land. She made paper from plant fibers of Oregon, where she lives, while I made paper from Arizona plant fibers. Margaret printed color woodcuts on these papers, showing the very different landscapes of each state. Further inside the book, I printed lists of endangered plant species of Arizona and Oregon. Even further in, I printed a poem on the Arizona side written by an Arizona writer, Gary Nabhan, about the environment, and a similar poem by an Oregon writer, Kim Stafford, on the other side. Signed by the artists and writers in an edition of fifty and held in a paper folder made from mixed fibers and dirt from both states, this book has found much appreciation. We designed it so that it must be handled and turned frequently, providing the viewer/reader with a tactile experience in touching the fibrous paper. This makes them more aware of the subject and content than a simple codex on plain paper with the same text and images would. Our use of content-specific handmade paper makes this book a much more effective political artwork than a straightforward presentation of the poems and scientific facts would be. That same year, I did a print for Hand Papermaking's juried portfolio Opacity & Translucency: Letterpress Printing On Handmade Paper, with the world arms trade as my subject. It contains information about arms sales and a list of the top ten arms exporting nations between 1990 and 1994. The United States was (and is to this day) the top exporter by far. The front of the folio print also has a list of arms sold as well as some woodcut and photo-relief images. Inside, the facts continue about the value of arms sold, and a list of arms, with more quotes and images. Included within the page are stories of victims of armed conflict, from South Africa, Iraq, and elsewhere. Finally, at the bottom, the colophon tells readers that the paper they are holding was made from the paper currency of the top ten arms exporting nations (United States, Russia, Germany, United Kingdom, France, China, The Netherlands, Italy, Czech Republic, and Switzerland) mixed with clothing from the victims of armed conflict. A papermaker friend in South Africa knew a woman whose sister had been murdered by the South African Security Police in 1985. She sent me a cotton skirt once belonging to her sister and it was pulped for this paper. A colleague at my university in the mathematics department is an Iraqi Kurd. He, his family, and the people of his village fled northern Iraq when the Iraqi army shelled them. The paper contains clothing from people killed in that action, sent by relatives who are in exile in southern Turkey. Repeatedly, I have seen that the impact of this piece is increased when people read about, or are told, the content of the paper. Some, in shock, have dropped it, unable to bear the weight of the connection to the concept of linking arms, money, and death. For an artist who knows the basic processes of hand papermaking, the idea of making paper from victims' clothing is only a small leap, yet the piece becomes a conceptual whole that is much more powerful. It has a wholeness like that of the farm keepsake, a satisfying unity and rightness, making the art into an object for deeper and further consideration, rather than merely a representation of an idea. The paper is not merely a substrate holding representative marks; it becomes something greater. A friend calls this symbolic paper, but the acts of making and printing it are political acts as well. An artist book published in 2000 at the Pyracantha Press uses paper made of plant fibers from specific places to reinforce the content. Entitled Eco Songs, it is a collaboration with Macedonian composer Dimitrije Buzarovski. who created a song cycle based on six poems about man's relationship to the environment. One poem is from the book of Job. The rest were written by Chief Dan George, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Stevie Smith, Alfonsina Storni, and Li Po. When we first began planning the book on this subject, which also contains a CD of the music, I wrote to papermakers all around the world (members of IAPMA) and asked them to send me local plant fibers that we could make paper from. Within a few months, we had received forty-two fibers from twenty-one countries. Dan Mayer, my staff printer, and I then separated the fibers into five groups and made papers for the parts of the book. By using fibers from around the world, the paper of the book represents the ecology of the world, which is what the text and music are about. Like Spirit Land, holding, handling, and reading this book provides a tactile experience that heightens the reader/viewer/listener's awareness and appreciation of the abstract political concept. My current project is titled Casting Paper Landmines. As with the arms trade piece, I am using clothing from victims of landmines. In travels to Cambodia, Mozambique, and Bosnia, I have interviewed landmine victims, deminers, and government officials. Some mine survivors have given me articles of their clothing to represent them in the paper. In Cambodia, I was able to acquire bamboo from the minefields. In addition, I have contacted people in other mine-affected countries—Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam—receiving clothing and victim information from some while I wait for material from others. Prints containing facts, maps, stories, and photos relating to each country have been created with some of this material and are in process for others. (I am continuing to collect clothing and stories as the project evolves. Readers who can contribute are encouraged to contact me.) In the end, I intend to fill art galleries with paper landmines, both flat prints and cast dimensional paper pieces. There will be very public "gallery demining events," at which people will come and purchase the landmines, taking them out of the gallery until it is empty. The proceeds will go to those organizations that help landmine victims, such as Landmine Survivors Network and the Vietnam Veterans of America. If education of the public, reminding the public of our debts, and supporting those affected by human folly is a political act, then this is political art. If art is an examination of life, if it is generated by experiences in life, then its content must include the political as well as the personal, formal, decorative, emotional, institutional, beautiful, and ugly. Art provides the maker and the receiver with an alternative perspective from which to view life experiences. Political art may be overt or sly but adding political content is one of the artist's choices. The attitude that political content in visual art is mere propaganda and that it does not actually convince anyone of anything fails to recognize other reasons and purposes for creating this kind of art. While some artists do, indeed, see their art as a weapon against the ruling class, others make this kind of art as visual journalism, reporting on history as it happens. This was brought to my attention for the first time by Bill Weege, in 1974, after Nixon had resigned. I commented to Bill that I might have to throw out my impeach Nixon prints. Bill, who had produced a fabulous suite of political prints in 1968 attacking Lyndon Johnson and his administration's conduct of the war, said, "No, no, they are a record of the time." In a 1994 interview, Eric Avery gave another, indisputable reason for this work. ". . . I don't demonstrate in the streets, but I witness what's happening around me." While I do, sometimes, demonstrate in the streets, it has become important to me, like Eric, to view my art as a witness.