The book Revolution as an Eternal Dream: The Exemplary Failure of the Madame Binh Graphics Collective is a compelling first-person narrative by Mary Patten, one of the founding members of the radical art group Madam Binh Graphics Collective (MBGC) active in New York City from 1977–1983, and it makes a significant contribution to the history of feminist collectives and activist art practice more broadly. Patten does not limit her examination of MBGC to a diaristic account, however, but breaks the text into eleven brief parts, exploring the founding of the group, its philosophical and artistic sources, and concludes by considering what lessons the history of MBGC may provide for today’s activist artists. Overall, her text’s accessible prose, useful explanatory footnotes, and glossary help make a complex political moment very real and clear for readers unfamiliar with this territory.

In the introduction Patten outlines MBGC’s radical politics and life as the graphic section of May 19th, which was established as a Marxist-Leninist organization of white anti-imperialists that traced its roots to the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground. The group’s chosen date for a name was significant for a number of reasons. First, May 19th celebrates the birthdays of Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X. In addition, it marks the anniversary of the death of Jose Martí, the father of Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain. MBGC chose their name in honor of Madame Nguyen Ti Bình, known for representing the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam at the Paris Peace talks in the 1970s. Much more extreme than many activists on the left in the 1970s, May 19th and MBGC sought revolutionary “war in amerikkka” (11). Therefore, as Patten notes, they “were on the margin of the margins, the periphery of the periphery” (11), making other women artists’ collectives, such as A.I.R. also located in New York City, appear positively conventional.

A majority of the text describes MBGC’s artistic production, accompanied by illustrations of both the collective’s posters and art that influenced or contextualized their practice. Unfortunately, most of the group’s works rarely have been published, and in some cases the images reproduced here are very small or blurry. Primarily agitprop in their aesthetics, the posters draw from a variety of sources, such as Chinese peasant paintings from Huhsien County, the pyschedelia of Cuban political posters, and the Dada collages of John Heartfield. Legibility was essential to their task, and borrowing images freely from other activists was typical. Patten explains that this appropriation was a not a postmodern gesture, but in fact an act of solidarity and proclamation of the “assumed collective ownership of revolutionary ideas and methodologies” (21). In addition, she addresses the enormous responsibility and struggle for a group of radical white women representing individuals of color in their posters. For example, Pamberi ne Zimbabwe (1981) became controversial because MBGC used a flat, burnt umber for skin color and no modulation of skin tone when depicting the faces of children and Zimbabwe African National Union leader Robert Mugabe. The unintended dark printing of the poster led to accusations of racism resulting from what was perceived as the flattened and dehumanized faces of Zimbaweans. When seen on the streets, however, many of the posters produced by MBGC would have been non-attributable. Assata Shakur Is Welcome Here! (1979–80) is signed the “Republic of New Afrika” after the group who commissioned it and was rapidly reproduced and found hanging in storefronts in Harlem, Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the South Bronx. MBGC’s willingness to renounce authorship for the sake of wider dissemination of their political imagery became a critical part of the group’s influence, yet in art-historical terms would become a contributing factor to their disappearance.

In reclaiming one’s history, there is often a temptation to idealize events, but throughout the book Patten resists and traces both the pleasures and conflicts of MBGC’s collective practice. She contends that in its early years the group was very open to collaboration, willing to teach workshops or produce posters for anyone part of anti-racist, anti-imperialist, or national liberation organizations, practicing what they loved “limited only by our own energies and exhaustion” (21). As time progressed, however, Patten argues that MBGC became increasingly calculating in using every encounter with those outside the group as a possibility for recruitment to its cause. One humorous anecdote she shares involves a member attending an opening dedicated to the work of Ben Shahn in the hopes of meeting the canonical political artist, only to be told that he died eight years earlier. This shift extended to methods of poster making as well. When first collaborating, individual members proposed an idea for a poster as well as its design; members would then offer feedback without imposing stylistic restrictions. According to Patten, by the end, however, MBGC demanded that art be “produced by committee,” culminating in designs that lacked the visual innovation of previous works (45).

Historians frequently comment on the tremendous risk taken by women engaging in feminist art activism during the 1970s, but members of MBGC paid a price for their political commitment that few would be willing to chance. In the section “How to Disappear Without a Trace,” Patten illuminates how in 1981 MBGC became a prison collective after she and three other members were arrested for attacking the South African Rugby team, the Springboks, at John F. Kennedy airport in protest of the country’s apartheid policy. Soon after, one of Patten’s co-defendants would be indirectly implicated in the Brinks robbery in Nanuet, New York, carried out by the Black Liberation Army. Utilizing the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, the FBI and New York District Attorney raided MBGC members’ homes and studios; those arrested were jailed for a considerable period before being convicted. This time in jail reinvigorated their commitment to the collective, prompting them to produce art for fellow-prisoners, as well as organizing an annual crafts sale for human rights. Patten notes that while they became the “political prisoners” they long idolized in their posters and reached many who normally do not have access to art, they simultaneously became erased and overlooked by the art world.

The last two chapters provide a number of lessons regarding the historical impact of past and present collaborative art practices. In the epilogue readers learn that MBGC’s beautiful dream may have failed, yet Patten proposes that the collective should not be considered a dead entity. Rather, she emphasizes the skills and persistence developed by its members and how they later carried this expertise into other spheres of significant political action after the group’s dissolution. Patten remarks, for instance, that when she later joined ACT UP Chicago she could “contribute to a different genre of agit-prop—banners, T-shirts, posters, street art—that was in-your-face, subtle, ironic, funny, deeply sad, militant, scathing and celebratory, all at once” (61). In the last chapter, “Some Notes Towards Making Art Politically, In the Present Tense,” Patten turns to a consideration of recent political artists and collectives who have moved away from confrontational tactics and embraced an “aesthetics of duration, stillness, and slowing down” (63), using the queer operas of Lee Relvas (a.k.a. Dewayne Slightweight), Claire Pentecost’s drawings, Laurie Palmer’s writings, The Friends of William Blake’s “Baghdad Poster Project,” and Aaron Hughes and the Iraq Veterans Against the War mud stencil murals to substantiate her point. In describing these examples, Patten provides three critical criteria for evaluating collaborative and political art produced today: first, encouraging artists to move beyond a desire for quantifiable results; second, artists should engage a surrealist and imaginative politics; and third, artists should not be afraid of ambivalence, indeterminacy, and doubt.

The preface and afterword, written by Lucy Lippard and Gregory Sholette respectively, are essential bookends to Patten’s narrative and situate MBGC’s tenuous relationship with the art world. Sholette, in particular, relates his personal experience being taught silkscreen printmaking by Patten’s fellow member Donna Borup at the Cooper Union in 1982 and watching her slowly withdraw from teaching and eventually disappear. Although he positions himself “as an artist-dissenter, member of a collective, an organizer of guerilla art projects and student of political theory” (66), Sholette openly expresses his difficulty finding a way to support Borup and MBGC after the Springbok incident, arguing that they were too isolationist and did more damage to the left than good. This honest response documents further how MBGC could “disappear without a trace.”

It is difficult to offer substantial criticism of a book in which an author like Patten so directly and openly confronts her own role in a controversial art collective. Certainly, her testimony demonstrates that an expanded and more intricate mapping of the relationship between art and politics from the 1970s and 1980s is needed, and it is hoped that Patten’s absorbing account persuades many others to write remaining hidden histories lying in wait.