February 2, 2013

Transcripts

PRESENTATION!!
http://phoebe-bachman-temple-contemporary-eorg.eventbrite.com/

Coming up! Please come and bring your friends. 


I've been reading through my transcripts and getting more and more overwhelmed by the incredible impact these women have had on me. I am forever grateful to have had this experience.

Some bits I'd like to share:

Janet Owen Driggs: And as Tania Bruguera said at the conference in Portland recently--Open Engagement, the social practice conference--she said that conceptual art is not political art. She didn't say this, I'm gonna say this. Conceptual art is fun and wonderful mind games, but it doesn't act on the ground. It might sometimes act peripherally in small and subtle ways on people's thinking, but as far as I'm concerned that's not enough. Art needs to be much more direct. So I kind of, you know, I'm always willing to leaner (laughing) and I learned, and I was intrigued, and the chess game of conceptual art is a wonderful thing, just as chess games are. But that's not why I'm interested in doing art, and it's not how I'm interested in acting in the world. By this time, I understood how far my work as an artist had come from my being as a political human.



Callie Curry (Swoon): But there like tends to be, in a lot of different systems, this like magic level of energy input and variables that allows you to, to have patterns emerge, and to have things form, and things stick together. So in my mind I was like, this feels very connected to like growth and healing, and to the fact that like things don't all just die and fall apart--they are born and they do heal, and things do regenerate themselves. And um, I really don't remember what I was talking about…Oh I was talking about sort of pessimism versus hopefulness. So feeling that if I could somehow align myself with that knowledge and be like things to come back together, things do form, things do regenerate, that like there is this lie force in the world that's about sticking things together and making meaning out of senselessness. And being like, ok I'm on that team (laughing), you know? There's only a few people on that team, but if you look at the whole world, there's some pretty remarkable people on that team.




#00:43:24-6# Judy Baca: Yeah. I mean, I didn't, well it's a little bit more complicated, but I mean all the politics and then what I had learned about how to advocate for that position…it was, I was just an administrator. So that's how I ended up doing it. I mean, I ended up, um, meeting the boys, putting together the first teams, realizing that they needed work and that they were really open to the idea of, you know, advocating for peace between them. They were willing to put down their knives for brushes, as the LA Times said. And I became quite famous very fast all along the country because, um, there was this woman working in the deep gang warfare areas, and there was like the knives for brushes kind of headline…and they'd never seen anything like it.





Peggy Diggs:  They had all these very colorful terms for what girls were called. but two for what
boys were called. So I had, through discussions with them, brought a bunch of white dress shirts and then had them silk-screened with these names on the back. And they were not ironed. I wanted to get them ironed, folded and put into plastic bags. So I took them to a local laundry
here, and I gave the laundry like 700 shirts. The women at the front desk said ohh I don't know
about this. And they brought the owner over, who was a very old kermugin guy and he looked at
it and said this is an outrage, that's just terrible, I don't think I want your business.

Phoebe Bachman:  Oh wow.

Peggy Diggs:  So I looked at him and said, 'then you know exactly how these girls feel who are
called these names and that’s the reason these shirts are being produced, to call attention to these horrible things that the girls were being called. That's all it took. He started smiling. and said oh then we welcome your business.

Phoebe Bachman:  That's so interesting.

Peggy Diggs:  It's these surprises that make this work so exciting. how you can unexpectedly
reach even one person in a very unexpected way. I love it.