J: Janet Patricia Owen Driggs
P: Tell me a little about who you are
J: Who am I? That's a difficult question; an artist, writer, political person, member of the Metobolic studio, mom, friend, teacher,
P: What about your background, where did you grow up.....
Janet is an incredible storyteller, she grabbed my attention the other night at the lecture at MOCA. When I asked her about her background she set the stage for me. She grew up in North London, in a suburban, edge of london area. Her family was working class and very politically active. She was convinced that the way out of the trap of economics that they were in was education. She described how her life was based around the idea of the "public." She went on to tell me that she had free public education, free public health care, lived in public housing, grew up next to a public park, walked to the public library, in general lived a very public life. Then Margret Thatcher came along with neoliberalism...
She was very politically active from a young age due to her family being so involved. When I asked her about this she said she joined her first political party when she was 13. It was the international Marxist group, revolution youth. For her it was a bit of rebellion because her dad was in labor party, a socialist, and her sister was in the labor party, a Trotsky party-- the militant. Eventually, she joined the militant as well, but then they were expelled from the labor party. A bit of British politics to brighten your day.
At that time she got started as an artist because she was good at drawing. She kept doing it because of the attention she got from her innate skill and because she loved doing it. She told me how her dad used to take a day off work, steal her out of school, take her into central London and go to the Tate gallery, royal academy, and all the bookstores. This fueled a love for art. She knew this was something she had to do.
I asked her about whether there was an intersection of art and politics in her early days as an artist. She told me they were kept separate. Most of her friends were activists, and activism was very much a part of her life. For amusement her friends and her would go to protests and marches. But there was no crossover, she said she had a split personality.
After the loss of the Miner Strike in the 80's, she turned to fine art. As she perceived it, at the time, fine art and politics did not quite match. She became buried in her craft, called herself a true painter. She told me she was a storyteller, she wanted to tell personal stories about fears, fictions, and dreams. She did this through portraiture for 10 years.
P: What Changed?
J: The internet came along. And I moved to America.
Could not just transplant herself and her painting studio. How essential place is to the perception and experience of the world. Could not just live in disbelief within the white studio walls. She then went to art school at USC because she could not access the art world within LA. Then she found it. Interesting experience in different ways, she did meet the art world, and found it was a place where the politics occurred as conceptual art. She told me that Tania Bruguera had said at the Social Practice Conference in Portland, Open Engagement, "conceptual art is not political art." Janet then went on to contextualize this.
J: "Conceptual art is fun and wonderful mind games, but it doesn't act on the ground. Sometimes might act peripherally in small and subtle ways on peoples thinking but as far as I am concerned, that is not enough. Political art needs to be much more direct"
Back to the internet. She was fascinated by its capacity for mass communication and inter-communication as a tool for political activism. Out of this interest she established a festival of Time Based Media. She started organizing, and getting involved in what was happening. And she realized that those people whom she was working with had a language, a vocabulary, that she did not recognize. She then said the most interesting thing, which I think a lot of us artists feel sometimes, that she suspected this was an emperors new clothes situation. That they were "puffing out" all of these words but in actuality were saying very simple things. She went on to talk about how she learned the language in order to break down the walls of inaccessible words, and then share it with everybody. She found that instead she fell in love with the language, which had her become a writer. This began to have her far more engaged in politics than she had been previously and theorizing in a way she hadn't been before.
J: Then I had a car crash and nearly died, then I got married, then I had a baby... then occupy happened. Well the Metabolic Studio happened.
Occupy was a turning point for Janet and her work. Suddenly all the threads came together in support of change. Her interest in public space came together with skill of being an image maker, and also a story teller.
J: All of a sudden I felt like I was whole again.
Our conversation went on, this is only the first half but I wanted to give you all a preview to what we talked about. I found my personal connection to Janet through storytelling. I have always been interested in telling stories, first it was through illustration, then painting, now public practice. Some interesting connections I found between Janet and some of the artists, was that she was from a working class family, is interested in history and archiving, and looked for this type of language that others have been talking about.
Check out some of Janet's work at performing public space and at the Metabolic Studio! Also if you're an Occupier (or not) you should definitely look at the Occupy Octopus which made an appearance in the Rose Parade this year!
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