 Welcome, I am Catherine Morris. I'm the Sacra Family Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sacra Center for Feminist Art here at the Brooklyn Museum. On behalf of myself and my co-curators of Agiprop, Saisha Grayson, Jess Wilcox, and Stephanie Weisbergs who's standing there, sorry. We welcome you to today's talk. We're very excited at the opportunity to have three remarkable artists who also happen to be a lineage within the curatorial project of Agiprop, which you'll hear more about in a minute. Nancy Buchanan, Martha Rosler, and Andrea Bowers, thank you so much for being here today. Saisha Grayson, the Assistant Curator of the Sacra Center, will be leading today's discussion. And if you wouldn't mind turning off electrical devices, that would be helpful. Thank you. And I'll turn it over to Sai. Thank you. Hello. I'm Saisha Grayson. I'm the Assistant Curator, as Catherine said, of the Sacra Center, and one of the four co-curators of the Agiprop exhibition. It's an honor and a privilege to be here today with you and our invited speakers for this program. This conversation is the kickoff event for Wave 2 of the Agiprop exhibition, and is both an opportunity to hear these three extraordinary artists speak and an opportunity to highlight the unique structure of this experimental exhibition, which includes these waves and these nominations. So for those of you who haven't seen or are just encountering our Agiprop show, some background. For years, Sackler Family Curator, Catherine Morris, has been interested in doing a show that would highlight the cross-cultural trans-historical phenomena of artists forwarding political agendas and, in fact, doing politics through their work. In the spirit of Agiprop, she thought, and its collective mode of production, she decided the project should be a co-curated venture with the entire Sackler Center, with Stephanie Weisberg and Jess Wilcox, as she said. As a group, we organized focus presentations of five historical case studies from the early 20th century. That's a moment when reproducible media allowed artists and activists to really creatively distribute their ideas quite widely. The case studies start with the Soviet Revolution, which birthed the term Agiprop, a mashup of the word agitation and propaganda, to emphasize the activation that was supposed to come through this practice. And we continued with Tina Medoti's socialist photography in Mexico, the visual rhetoric of the U.S. suffrage movement, the WPA's living newspaper theater productions, and the NAACP's cultural campaign against lynching. We also developed an international selection of 20 living artists and collectives whose work would be presented alongside the historical material, allowing for lineages, recurrent issues, and shared strategies to emerge from this century-long span. But we didn't stop there. We had a few goals that encouraged us to experiment with the typical exhibition protocol. First, we wanted opportunities for other voices and opinions to enter the fray. We wanted to acknowledge our partial view of a global phenomena. And we wanted to present, have the presentation, have some of the dynamism and performativity that often characterizes work not intended for static gallery experience. So with this in mind, we asked the first 20 artists that we had selected to nominate an artist collective or project that they thought was an outstanding example of AgitProp. And then we worked with those artists to select projects and add those to a second wave of the installation, which just opened on Wednesday. And then we got really crazy and we asked those second wave artists to nominate a third wave of artists and projects. And those will open April 7th additively to what's already upstairs and beyond view through August 11th. And we sort of imagine this final round will look more, maybe feel like the heated debates and excitement that comes when you're in a room of activists really debating their issues and bringing that excitement to it. So that's the genesis for the show upstairs and also for today's conversation, which features one chain of this nomination process. Martha Rossler is a brilliant artist, writer and unrelenting agitator who is always on our list for the kickoff of the project. Since 1960s, Martha has worked in video, photography, text, installation and performance with a focus on the public sphere exploring issues from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment, especially as they affect women. She worked in the California as the other two artists here did as well. But she's now born and or she was born and is firmly based in Brooklyn. Throughout, Martha has produced work on war and national security climate, connecting life at home with the conduct of war abroad, especially in the photo montage series that are featured upstairs. She's also published several books, text, commentary on public space and has had retrospectives tour internationally. Her writing is published widely in art forum, e-flux journal and text circumst. And most recently, in November, she was named the first recipient of the new foundation Seattle 100K Prize, which is allowing her to launch a series of year long integrated projects and exhibitions, starting with housing as a human right in Seattle, a reactivation of projects that she did in New York in 1989. Martha in turn nominated Nancy Buchanan. Nancy Buchanan is a Los Angeles based artist who we're thrilled to have with us here in New York today. Her work often addresses social issues and her practice has included installation, drawing, mixed media, performance and video, as well as an interactive CD ROM about housing and development. She was a founding member of several groundbreaking artists, collectives of space gallery, Grandview gallery at the women's building in Los Angeles and double X of feminist art network. She taught a variety of courses related to video art as well as art and politics at the California Institute of the Arts from 1988 to 2012. She worked closely with Michael Zinzen from 1988 to 98 on a message to the grassroots, which is also on view upstairs. And on other projects with Michael, including a documentary about Namibia's transition to independence. Buchanan's work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoMA New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and MoCA LA, as well as part of the important traveling exhibition, React Feminism. In addition to producing her own work, Buchanan has also curated and written about exhibitions. And finally, Nancy, in turn, invited Andrea Bowers, also from LA, thank you for being here, whose work will go up in the third wave on April seventh, working extensively with drawing and drawing based installations, sculpture, videos and actions. Andrea Bowers projects intimately connect her art practice and her work with activists operating on the front lines of environmental issues, feminist challenges and intersections with immigration, labor and trans rights. Recent solo exhibitions include the Just Opened Whose Feminism Is It Anyway at Andrew Kreps Gallery, which I think we'll talk about more later. Self-determination at Kauffman Reperto Milan. In situ, Andrea Bowers at Espace Culturelle, Louis Vuitton in Paris. Hashtag Sweet Jean, Pomona and Pitzer College Museum of Art and Transformer at the Francis Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art and Skidmore College. Andrea is a LA-based artist and studied at California Institute of the Arts, where Nancy taught. And so this is the amazing trio that we've brought together that have brought each other together really. And so without further ado, I'm going to engage them in what I'm sure will be amazing conversation. Thank you so much for being here today with us. And because we think of you as co-curators of this exhibition, I wanted to start by talking about the works that are in the show, but also how the invitation to nominate and fellow artists hit you when we first opened that up as part of the invitation to participate in an exhibition. That's sort of an unusual model. How you thought about who you wanted to invite. And then how you guys thought about which works made sense for this context from your own practice. You're asking this. Yes. That's my opening volley. It threw me into a panic. Absolute panic. It took me ages to answer. There were so many aspects of art and activism to consider not to mention the title of the show, which is Aged Prop. That's a very specific type of address to the public. I've been an ardent supporter of Nancy's work for decades upon decades ever since we knew each other in California. Her work is complex, always political in every aspect. Feminist and other forms of activism as well as always embodied, pervades all her thinking and is in every work. But because of the Aged Prop part of the brief, I thought that it would be really important to bring forward something that she was an integral part of, though not the initiator of, but which I knew about at the time as it was occurring, which is the work that she did with Michael Zinzen and students every week or so was every month in L.A., which was brought to a close by Michael's untimely death, and which I thought spoke to the present as well to every audience and for many reasons embodies not only Nancy's commitment to speaking, if you'll allow me, to the grassroots, but also her feminism in her collaborative relationship to it and her willingness to sort of take a back seat in its public presentation. So I propose Nancy and this project. And when I was thinking about who to nominate actually very quickly, I thought of Andrea because her work always involves an activist group. She has managed somehow to bridge so many different issues with her work and yet still present things that are elegant, that are beautiful, but that bring in a lot more than just the artwork. Usually there's a component that involves some kind of activity out in the real world so that people come away not just educated about the issue, but able to then contribute to change. I didn't have to curate anyone. You know, I'm so honored to be in this chain because I think one of the most important things for me as an artist is the ethical aspects of it. And I think there's probably five artists who I really look to for guidance in these issues. And two of them are sitting on the stage right now. So it's really wonderful to be a part of this that this exhibition brought us together. Yeah, and one thing that came through as we were talking about this and planning this was when we thought about this chain of nominations, we weren't really sure what the chain would be structured like. Would it be people people had admired from afar or chains of influence? And my sense is that the three people I have on stage now are actually all friends, you're really a circle of friends and you hang out like this maybe without the microphones in other contexts. And so I wanted to kind of get you guys to talk a little bit about how each of you have gotten to the place where it absolutely made sense to fuse your activism and your art for some of you that sort of right away and some of you, you thought about practices sort of separately and they merge later on. And so maybe Nancy if you wanted to start, I know you brought some clips. Okay. Well, when I was a student, an art student, I was also demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. And then I realized that I didn't have to compartmentalize my life that I could bring the subject right into my practice. And so that was like an amazing revelation at the time because it wasn't a very popular thing at that moment in in some art circles. And then after that, I guess, one of the major central questions that I've always had is how can the individuals responsible for some of the problems that we see actually think the way they do. When I met Michael, I was actually doing community art workshops in the city of Pasadena. They had just set up their cable television station. And I did these workshops for adults and children. And I met Michael on an art panel actually in an exhibit. And then later on, as I was planning to leave the Public Access Corporation, he walked in one day and said, Well, I want to produce a show. And I said, Oh, great, I'd like to help you. And that was that. And then when I went on to work at Cal Arts, we had a program that was a public program, where artists and students went out into the community and did their workshops out there. And I was in the film school. My partner was the Watts Towers Art Center. And I said, Well, if I'm going to go to this center, I would like a collaborator who really knows this community. And I will do it if you will also hire Michael Zinsen. So then we also did these workshops together with people down in Watts and also some of the members of the groups that came together in the historic gang truce in 1992. And that was part of the show. And that was also part of our workshops. Hey, cool. And Martha, where did do you want to art and activism? I was a junior abstract expressionist painter and training partly here. I grew up about 10 blocks from here. And there was an art school that was half of the museum wing. It was a Sunday. You're not going to find it up there. Oh, no, I know, I'm getting, well, we'll go back and forth as makes sense. One could say for Sunday painter, I was a high school kid. And it was there were real people teaching, you know, serious painters teaching. So that's where I was when I also became a protester first against the having to take cover for air a drills as though we could hide from a nuclear bomb. And it was illegal to not take cover and to be standing in the public space. Took a while for me to try to integrate any kind of subjectivity aside from an abstract one into my work. But my end was actually photography because I got the idea that the way that abstract painters dealt with narrativity was by taking photographs of things in real life every day life. But I think it started with feminism in that I started making montages, photographic montages, obviously, of the representation of women. It was always a question of the representation and how that produces and promotes and carries on a picture of who we are. And one day sitting at my mother's dining room table looking at a photograph of a woman, a Vietnamese woman swimming across the river desperately with a child trying to escape. It occurred to me that that kind of imagery was central to trying to talk about who are we and who are the supposed days and that I could incorporate this kind of work into the work that I was doing. And it took me about six or seven years to quit the painting, which I carried on simultaneously. But at that point, I was doing activist work, which I kept out of the art world, I have to say, was not intended to be art world. It wasn't accepted. It was requested at various points, but that wasn't the point. It really was Agitprop. And, you know, it came up a little bit during the nomination discussion. But this idea of the definition of Agitprop, you said there's some things that mean something quite specific to you, maybe talking about what that specificity is. For us, it had to do something with distribution, where it lands originally. And then the other thing, she mentioned being an abstract painter, and you mentioned that male activists in your opinion were sometimes like abstract painters, and I thought maybe you want to talk about that moment where you bring those two together, that critique. Oh, geez, do I want to say that? From studying with many feminists, you know, I went to school, I studied with Millie Wilson, Nancy was there. And then also studying with Charles Gaines and Michael Asher. Nancy, let's see, I don't know. Anyway, I became really aware of issues of subject activity, and that that was the standard modernist methodology for how you work. You know, what did Pollock say? Like he's painting his internal arena or something like that? And it just seemed like, if that was the standard, then women and artists of color just didn't live up to that standard. And so I didn't want to work that way. I wanted to throw that out the window. So I think in almost all of my work, there are jabs at these kind of like, involuntary, you know, these like, you know, expressive emotional, dysfunctional men that are that are celebrated in the art world. And so I realized, though, like once I became really involved in activism, but especially in climate justice and environmentalism, these same personalities existed. And so just because I was doing activism didn't mean I was overcoming patriarchy, or mansplaining. So, you know, yeah. Yeah. So I've been making some work like this that kind of comments on that. This one you said is a radical feminist pirate show? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was working with, you know, I got arrested for tree sitting in Arcadia, California. There was a forest of like 250, like pristine oaks and sycamores. And it was weird. I've never walked on ground like that where no one's ever walked. You know, when it was all this kind of like growth and it was really soft. And it was pitch black because we were breaking in at like four in the morning. But anyway, there was four of us. And one of them was this young man named Travis, who spent three of the last six years as like an earth first activist living in a tree in northern California. So he doesn't really make money living in a tree. So he's doing really good work, but he has no money. So every once in a while, he was, you know, he would call and say, do you have any work for me? And I said, Well, sure, let's make some sort of like, you know, on pit my ride tree sitting platforms, because when you're in a tree, you can't sit on a tree branch for like a year. You have to have a platform up there. And I thought it would be really funny to make these really, which is in your show, like done this, but it's one of the other sitting platform, you know, I just see them as like super elaborate ornate political posters, because they're covered in slogans. And they're just really like entertaining. You can sit on it. It's often you can sit in them. But I had said to Travis, I was like, Travis, so what's like your dream tree sitting platform? And he was like, a pirate ship. And I got like, I got like so pissed off, because I was like, I would never have thought of that. Like there is this gender separation in my head that like, of course, of course, a boy a guy would make that, you know, like, I just don't have that mentality. So then I thought I'll make this radical pirate tree sitting platform. But like the problem with this piece is there's this amazing quote from Mary Daley about cultivating the courage to sin and being a radical feminist pirate that was in the New York Times, which I love. But then you know, I found out like that Mary Daley wrote and it was a long time ago, but wrote a lot of transphobic comments. And I didn't know that I hadn't done my research properly. And so I kind of decided to correct that with this show. But like in a kind of amazing way, learning that led me to the current show that's up now, you know, so, you know, to kind of address this particular piece that I did. That's always an interesting question, sort of how I think all of you have so many intersectional issues. That too, that too. We do intersectional, they're all part of the piece. And, and there's a sort of root in feminism, but it leads you to so many different places. And there are so many issues that you really take on at different moments. How do you how does the urgency or how do you prioritize when you're across the board concerned about economic injustice, environmentalism, racial issues? I mean, how do you move between these and well, I guess you're looking at me. I think that I've been in the last several years, many years actually really concerned about money and consumption. And so for me, it's like, how can I bring the issue of commodification and consumerism really upfront? What's a new way to do that? Because to me, that's at the bottom of so much that's wrong. And in fact, I pulled up a speech that Michael gave in 2002, in which he talked about that himself, you know, that that's the root of everything. That's the problem with police brutality. That's the problem with housing. That's the problem with almost everything is are these issues of disempowerment and inequality. So, you know, there's always a new way to represent it. And the image on the left is from a web based piece that was called Sleep Secure. And it invited people visiting the website to create a pattern inside one of the slices of the pie chart that the War Resisters League made. They make one every year to show you how the US taxes are divided up in terms of how they're spent. And so I tried to find then web based images for these different categories. And so you could click on one of the slices and then you could kind of play with it and you could make a pretty pattern. But you could also print out that pattern and make your own real, not virtual, but physical quilt. And also you could save your decorative pies on the website and share them. I like to use some humor when I can with things and make them playful. And then on the right is a sequin embroidery that represents income inequality. And I kind of glommed on to George Bush's statement about voodoo economics. And I thought, okay, all right, let's make some voodoo flags about economics. Yeah. And I think that's interesting because also, Martha, your metamonumental garage sale and the garage sales was also is very sort of feminizing of an economic critique or getting at these things through the question of domestic into international economics. There's a quote. Well, there's a wholesale quote from capital commodity fetishes and that plays continuously through all these garage sales as they occur. But I understood back in 73 that when actually this is built into the piece, it's one of the images though, not this shows a very large real to real tape player playing it. It's a meditation, but it's commodity fetishism. I understood that when you say to someone here's some cheap stuff, they're not listening to somebody talking about commodity fetishism. But it was in itself a kind of playing out of the fact that the under pinnings of our lives are often neither audible nor visible, even though they're in our face every minute, which is kind of what you were talking about as well. I think that you and Michael were both pointing to the way in which shall we say bluntly capitalist and particularly neoliberal capitalism basically controls who we are and how we inhabit our social spaces. Martha, I think it was night before last or was it last night before last where you were talking about I mean, like particular to being a woman artist, like you were talking about being invisible. And then like, they won't I don't know if you talked about like then they want the old broads back again or something, you know, it was like, like this, like, I don't I don't feel like there's any equality in the art market whatsoever. So I don't know if you could talk about that at all like as the oldest one on the stage. Yeah. Yes, every actress will tell you this as well, that as a young female, you're a phenomenon, the talking dog kind of, you know, like, wow, she's got this shape and that shape in this shape. And she talks, she walks, she acts, she makes art. Look at that. Wow. And then in middle age, you know, the blooms off the rose. That's then, you know, and then when you reach the certain age, it's, look, she's still alive. Maybe we should talk to her before she stops being alive. And, you know, so yes, you know, nothing that has changed. But when I say this sometimes to men, they say, Oh, but I disappear to know you didn't. He didn't. Of course. So the course of women's visibility is like this, which is not so when I was talking about this to Suzanne Lacey, she said, we're not any more active when we used to be. I said, No, it's it's visibility. I'm talking about Suzanne. But for men, of course, it's a much more well, more like that. And I think that's, you know, yeah, because I've been we've been having some some of some of my some of the women are just my age in LA. We've been kind of meeting together because we're like all in our early fifties. You don't mean the group called girls. But we've been kind of like, you know, like there's like really discussing that kind of the visibility issue because it hasn't changed really that much. Well, I'm talking about now. Yeah. Yeah. And do you feel like from inside the art world, there's what what can you do? What would you like to see change that we shall be working on? Huh? Yeah. Okay. Well, as a curator, I mean, your quality right? Like, like, I think it's like visibility and its economics, right? I mean, we would I would personally, of course, love to get rid of patriarchal capitalism. But that's probably not going to happen immediately. That's going to take a longer time. But in the meantime, I would like to see, you know, women have equality to men, you know, and have the same visibility and also survive financially. You know, you know, I don't I don't I guess we do talks like this and say that this needs to be fixed. We do it in every way we can. Yeah. Throughout all of your projects, you also are very often building platforms and creating spaces for other people to present and talk about their issues. And I wanted to, you know, just kind of focus on that and open up the conversation about what how that connects to feminism, because I think very often, as you said, you can feel conscious of the your own invisibility and how that is created. And I think what that results in is feminist artists constantly making space for and opening up platforms for other people to speak to this kind of generosity that is built into a lot of the work like message to the grassroots or the platforms that you created and shifting focus. Well, I think that that it's some it's a matter of deeply feeling and understanding our connection to other human beings. You know, I mean, that's that's it. It's not, you know, me struggling to be at a certain level in the art world or anywhere else. You know, it's it's a real visceral, literal connection. You know, we're all going to think or we're going to change. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I learned about, you know, like an alternative practice through feminism in the 70s, studying you guys and some of your early practices. Like, why can't we have models of collectivity? Why can't you know, why can't we start to question authorship in some way? And for me, it's just about learning to, you know, like I need to be around other artists I respect so I can grow and learn. And also, I don't know. Nancy's always calling me to like, Okay, there's this protest. Okay, there's this talk, you know, like she keeps she keeps me on my toes. You know, like I need that. That's what I need community to help me with. It's sort of selfish in a way for personal growth. I'm so grateful for it. Obviously, the art world is driven at base by the fact that it's a market economy. And the institutions within it have to figure out how to carve out spaces that are relatively insulated from the payment structure. But because public spaces on that, the freeze art tour, I literally forgot to have the group interview a dealer. We did everybody, but every single person from the toilet keeper, which is a famous toilet to the freeze to the sandwich, people on the VIP lounge and the V VIP lounge. But I forgot to talk to the dealers, which was idiotic. But that's one of the VIP lounges. So there, there every institution within it tries to open up a space of autonomy. But those constraints can never be cast aside. And there are obviously the museum world is driven by donors and budgets that come from places where people don't look kindly on stuff that doesn't exactly fit that aesthetic separation between the street and the museum itself. And there's something to be said for that. But this is not, there's a constant negotiation of how we make a space within these places. But I think also for curators, they have to answer to that same structure. You can't do a show because you feel like doing a show, you have to sell it and then it has to go up the chain and then it takes years or whatever. It was a moment of relative democratization. Oddly enough, because the art market was not doing that well in the US in the 70s, when we had artists run spaces and it when the market reestablished that. And I mean, it's quite literally the market with neo neo expressions painting reestablished a certain kind of control over the whole system. The funding for artists run spaces was yanked, which meant that we then had to be cast back on the kindness of institutions. But at the moment, because of the gigantic floods of wealth flowing everywhere through the economy, the art fairs actually supplanted the exhibition model, which makes things a lot worse. They're not worried about ethics. I mean, people with big bucks to buy a Wu Tang album and stick it in the drawer or whatever the hell it is. Is that what they're buying? There was a great moment at one of the recent LA art fairs where some younger artists, Audrey Chan and Alana Man remounted Suzanne Lacey and Leslie Labowitz piece about myths of rape. And so at this cocktail reception, when people were, you know, enjoying themselves and having their drinks, they, you know, were accosted or confronted by young people carrying colorful signs and talking about, this is a myth about rape and here's the truth. And it was some, it was a nice collision, I thought. That's an interesting example, because it touches on something that also kind of keeps coming back, which is both the usefulness of history in a lot of your projects. You work with archives a lot. You revive the structure of certain strategies. You called it a meta-criticism at one point. And the question of why we're either not learning from history or how we can learn better from history through a look to the archives, a look to older performance projects that are in danger of being lost and so become re-performed, this kind of strategy. I mean, I think archiving, in a certain way, accidentally fell into my lap because most of my projects sort of start with an activist that I learned about just through, you know, circles of friends or I seek out because I see they're doing something and I email them or I try to get a hold of them. But what I started finding out was that all of these activists that I would go and like interview in videos, because I almost always interview in videos, because I'm trying to create literally an archive of activists that, you know, during my lifetime that I think are amazing and maybe underrepresented. But what I discovered was in all of their closets or in all of their drawers were these amazing archives that no one was seeing. So I just asked them if I could scan them. I'd give them all the scans back and then that started, that starts circling into, you know, social media and stuff. And then, you know, I'm collecting all of that stuff too. But it's really about under-recorded, under-represented, under-seen, really important historic events because activism doesn't end, right? These actions don't end. They, they, people work their lifetimes doing different things, but the issues keep coming up again and again and again. So it's important to look back at those things. So I'm just trying to, I don't know, use my art skills to like bring them out in the public more, in any little way I can. There's a trend in academe and perhaps elsewhere to critique the idea of collaboration and participation. And interestingly, a number of these attacks on inclusiveness have come from female scholars, which I always found interesting. I did write a little bit about it beforehand in the book that I did on the, the culture class. The idea that somehow public projects wind up being social management tools for social and political elites. But that's a totalizing criticism. I hope I'm not becoming incoherent. A totalizing criticism of something that's a process that's actually very porous. The idea of inviting other people in to whatever space you've been accorded for whatever amount of time. But the problem is twofold. One is you never want to speak for people, which is really a serious issue. And there have been a number of critiques about re-performance. I'll just mention Kenny G, for example, and other critiques of people who tried to reproduce the speech of people who are not in a position to speak for whatever, which is not, not a small issue. This is serious. A lot of the critique does stem from academe, so I have to be careful. But repeatedly, when I've invited other people to participate with me, I've run into a problem with the curators and the art space who refuse to acknowledge, and someone is here who, Noah, if you're still here, who's actually worked directly on this issue, Noah Fisher, with Occupy Museums, the problem of saying, no, it's not a work by me, it's a work by me, and this person, and this person, and this person, and this person, and this person, and this person. And Noah is the only person I know actually, who has managed to write a contract in which the institution acknowledges the co-authorship of the other people who participated. Because otherwise, you wind up against your will with people in a subordinate relationship to you because of the way the institution insists on naming. And I think this is something that's never talked about publicly, the way that institutions themselves insist on saying, I nominated you, you don't have the right to nominate anyone else, which is what makes this particular exhibition unique. Thank you. And I want to say Interference Archive, which is in the show, which has this great poster that says we are who we archive. So really understated, isn't that fantastic? And they gave us a wall label with, I think, 60 people's names. Every single person who's involved in that group during that period of time, because we do want to say this is not, we're not trying to shut down the market-driven interest, based on the market-driven interest to name one artist in relation to this. My friends, Christine and Margaret Wertheim, who made the Crochet Coral Reef, which is traveled around the world, felt that the reason why some places didn't want to take their work and why there's no market for it is that they insisted on every single name of every person involved, being a part of that work, that they would not, you know, allow it to be represented as by Christine and Margaret Wertheim. Yeah, it is not the status quo of how institutions tend to work, and it's something that the artist's pushing back on as part of the way we change this, yeah. I thought the wax show was amazing, but I thought that it kind of didn't, it kept to that tradition of, like, the individual. I felt like it didn't deal with collectivity, you know, although that show is super important. But I don't know, I was wondering, you know, like Nancy wasn't in it, Nancy should have been in that show. You know, but I'm wondering if there's a curatorial model, like this is an interesting curatorial model for, like, collectivity or, I don't know, I wanted that show to have more of that in it. I have a little rant about this kind of thing that I have been belting in my head. Oh, please give us a rant. Which happens to do with the fact that at the moment the anti-war flyers that I did, the montages are in an number of shows in three different places in the US and each place wanted to show the newspapers. Well, the works were done in, like, 65 to 70 whatever, the newspapers were because I was part of a feminist newspaper collective and we happened to throw a couple of them into the newspaper in the 70s. And I understand that art historians need proof. The degree to which the proof is even to the point where they're, like, thinking you say you did this, but prove it. But, okay. So I then asked these places belatedly to show flyers. Of course, I don't have the flyers from the 60s. They rotted and I threw them away. But it occurred to me, let's just make some flyers, but you can't give them out because you're not giving out anti- Vietnam stuff, but at least put them in the vitrine. But I had an even more annoying realization, which is a photo by Ron Haberly, I guess, if he's the one who took it, of the Milai massacre. Suddenly in the art world, people, I happened to put it in one of my Iraq montages and someone, curators cannot stop themselves from saying, and babies. And it occurred to me that that photograph, which the world knows as a photo of the Milai massacre, has a little TM at the top, guerrilla art action group, and babies. And they know it only as an art intervention, at which point I felt like throwing my hat in the air that way, as in, what was that, gold finger, and leaving. Because this is a kind of an ossified mindset that comes from people who have been trained, and rightly, to verify historical facts. But they become so stuck in the fetishization of the evidence that they have trouble stepping backward to an actual larger event or a larger piece of evidence. But that goes along with this problem of segmenting the artist as the one who gets nominated, and everybody else is, who the hell are you? And focusing on the fetishized object instead of the issue or the moment or the event that's being brought up. Speaking of fetishization, maybe we can end with one question I have. I'm just going to keep going back to the actual group. We're just getting started. Have you any questions? Yes, no, we will go to the audience. But I wanted to ask, you know, I've read a number of interviews sort of preparing for this, and almost in each case, you guys are asked to speak to the efficacy of activist art. You know, did you successfully end the war or stop patriarchy through your work? Yes, we did. Okay, good. So maybe that's just a settled question. But I was wondering, I think you all start in feminism, and I think maybe it gives you a better place to work in activist spaces without an expectation of sort of these totalizing successes or failures, whether you think that there's a connection between feminism as a rude ideology and a comfortability with through focusing on the work and sustaining the movement instead of imagining that you are going to be the hero when you wake up tomorrow, though maybe you already are. Yeah, I actually think you are. We're dealing in a world of objects. I mean, I mean, it's an, you know, activist change is inherently about collectivity, right? We're back at that idea again. So all you can do is you can do your part, right? You do your part, you speak up, you know, as a citizen, right? It's about citizenry and you wordbread at it. And you trust that there are others who are like minded, who are out there working as hard as you are. And together, over time, change will occur. And it's, it's this activist, I forget his name is Chris from San Francisco, who said, you know, in radical hospitality or radical patients, radical patients, right? You have to have radical patients like knowing that it was started before you and it will continue after you. Yeah, I have a quote from Michael, which I think is, is really important. Michael Zinzen founded the Coalition Against Police Abuse in 1976 and was tireless as a worker and an advocate working with families whose children or loved ones had been injured or killed by the police and a lot of other issues. So any, any called for a lot of changes that we still need to change today about racial profiling, about demonizing young people. And he ended this, this speech that I found by saying we have a motto in Kappa that we all should relate to. We won't struggle for ya, but we will struggle with ya. We can bring some lessons and experience to the struggle, but the most important one is that the people are their own liberators. I want to say something about art. Okay, great. Because you asked specifically about art and did you guys stop the war? You know, I, I want to affirm that I think art is revolutionary and I truly mean that. I think we probably all do, but art doesn't make revolution. People make revolution. And it's as citizens that we struggle. And if our art is imbricated and implicated in that struggle, that's what we do. But it's still people who make the revolution, whatever that revolution is. Emory Douglas said art should be in service of the revolution. I mean, it's that simple for me. Yeah, and one thing that's great about the show having these historic components is that I think you can actually see moments when the issues like police brutality that have not been, you know, solved overnight and continue to be things we struggle on. And then the US suffrage movement where we can vote, right? So we have visibility issues and things we're still working on. But that did help build a movement that, that changed something very important and material. You don't want an argument. So I won't give you one. I, what, how actually what suffragism did was it foreclosed the revolutionary movement that was women. It gave us something we needed. But then people said, I know, go home. I agree. Can I ask one more? Sure. OK, so I, I want to talk to you guys about this because there have been so many negative kind of transphobic comments from second wave feminists. And it's freaking me out. And I'm really worried. And like, you know, there are these young radical feminists who are, who are making transphobic comments. Like, I don't understand why or not by this feminist movement isn't embracing trans women. Can I? Yeah. Yeah. First of all, I object to the characterization of second wave feminism because it was OK. I'm sorry. No, it's OK. OK. Yeah. Well, that's my preamble because it's an academic born distinction and it's full of shit because I always ask the young guys who come for work for me, what is it? And they give you some bullshit definition, which involves exclusions. First of all, let's remember that there were numerous. The reason it was called second wave feminism was because when we reinvented feminism, some of the older women said, idiots, this is the longest revolution. It's been going on for a while. Oh, yeah. But we just invented it. All right, all right. We're another wave. We're the second wave. It was simply a historical marker that we acknowledge our four mothers. But feminism, oddly enough, unlike any other movement, attacks its four people, its ancestral lineage. I'm being sarcastic. But there are a few media chosen feminists of our age who say idiotic things. And I would say that they do not represent the vast majority of the older feminists. And it's a convenient distinction. And I'd also like to remind people that what was called radical feminism, and it's except for the media women who are saying these things, the media chosen names like Germaine Greer, who's been crazy for a long time Why? You know, I think that this is an artificial distinction between as a feminist who basically found my voice as a feminist in California, I would always say there were no leaders. They were more likely to be people like Roxanne Dunbar than Gloria Steinem, who was after all a bourgeois feminist. But socialist feminism was a really important element of feminism. And radical feminists were separatists. The voices that we're hearing of exclusion, I have to say, very often, except for the media chosen voices of media-itized women, stem from women who are radical feminists to the point of being essentializers. But out of that as well came the trans movement, which is interesting. Like Pat Caliphia? Was that her name? Oh, yeah. So these schisms have been going on for a long time. It's just we didn't have social media to carry them forward. And I really seriously object to the idea that a lot of so-called second wave feminists are. I mean, in a lot of ways, it's more like not born with equipment. The women from deep green resistance who call themselves radical feminists. And yeah. And yeah, I agree. But I just want to get that. I kind of wanted you to respond that way because I feel like this schism is kind of growing through social media. And I'm trying to bring your point forward. You have to ask who it serves. So yeah, which is maybe not always a nice answer. Well, and what happened to the notion that there isn't some monolithic thing called feminism. It's always multiple. It's always all over the place. It's all over the world. It's, you know, there isn't one group. And nobody has the right to speak for all feminists. At the time, traveling in other countries, I was invariably met by people saying, in very hostile manner, well, feminists are just lesbians, which, you know, is true and untrue. It was the word just. That was the problem. But you know, it's easy to have. It's like, you know, there's an attack that's made on people on the basis of some element of their multiplicity, which then becomes a convenient spear with which to stab you whenever possible and shut you up. I don't think that the division between older and younger women is a useful one. I think it's incredibly divisive. And I'm very much agreeing with Nancy that it's a multiple. Can we, what do I call what happened in the 70s in feminism if I can't call it second one? Well, you can call it that, as long as you don't accept that it's an actual doctrinal split. I would add, in looking at all of your work, I was so struck by the term intersectional feminism as used now sometimes as if it's a distinction from second wave feminism, which again, I find so untrue and unvaluable in the larger discussion. But thinking of other voices, I'm gonna encourage us to open up to the audience now. So if there are questions, we are being live streamed, so please go to the aisles. Can I say one more thing? I just talked about collaboration. I just wanted to say that these photos were a collaboration with Ada Tenelle who's sitting in the audience. So she gets half the authorship for those two. Great, thank you for sharing that. I don't think I have the ability to put it on scroll mode, but in the back, if you wanna put the PowerPoint on scroll mode, and then we'll take questions from the audience. Please go to the aisle for the microphone so that it gets picked up and recorded for posterity. Well first, thank you very much. This has been great. To allow women to be seen as great artists or great anything since forever, to allow that to happen or not happen is very deep. And my question is in countries that have more equality for women or are less capitalistic, do you find that or do you feel that they promote women artists more than we do? Which country is that? Yeah, I was gonna say what country is that? Well, all for instance, Iceland, all of the Nordic countries or some of the European countries where they're less capitalistic and women are represented and have more rights, do they have also more rights in the art world or seen or promoted? I lived in Sweden, no. Capitalism is the hegemonic system. It controls everything. When I say capitalism, I don't mean some fang-toothed monster. I'm talking about the way our global economy works. Sweden has a vibrant feminist movement and one of the reasons it's so vibrant is because they believe in equal rights but they know that they're nowhere near equality and it's only recently that women have achieved any level of, it's like the question about African-American players if they don't get to be managers, you know there's a problem with the system that uses them as players. So women, there were no women running museums in Sweden until mama and it's still a problem. Now, some women are running lower level that is less prominent museums, like not the modern Mosaic. It was a little better in Finland actually but there is no such country and they still sell their stuff on the international market and it's still people who donate work that determine what gets shown. I'm curious about how feminism shapes your critiques of consumerism for each of you and Ms. Rosler, for instance, I'm thinking of your use of the image of the supermodel in your recent Return to House Beautiful and what her role is within your critique of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do you wanna try that first? You were talking about consumerism. Well, but she referred to House Beautiful. Okay, so the original set of these anti-war montages had women in mostly from home settings because they were from the magazines that everyone received in their houses and you saw women. The ones that I did about the representation of women in advertising tended to focus on things like lingerie ads or makeup and things like that, but the anti-war ones, except for the one that we saw were by and large about women with vacuum cleaners or not that many women, it was more the setting. There were only a few women who were not Vietnamese, but the nature of the home magazine has changed and in the interim between the 60s and 70s when I did that project and now, we've seen the emergence of the lionization of models and modeling before that models were considered to be clothes, horses, idiots. It was not a position of status until celebrity culture took over. So most of the women whose images were available to me were walking down runways in newspapers and magazines and not that that struck me as the, I'm sorry for going on so long. It struck me as being the uniform, the militarized uniform of the representation of the newly glamorized home space. I hope that made some sense. Yeah, and speaking. They are working women, but. Speaking of homes, also the whole issue of the real estate market, you know, I mean that has become this bizarre commodified area and fetishized as well right within the interior magazines which are porn for a certain kind of design aesthetic itself. Hi, I just wanted to go back really quickly to what Andrea was speaking to about transphobia and transmasogy in some sections of the second wave, but not all. And I wanted to ask about that in terms of the idea of collaboration and you said that you used some of Mary Daley's quotations or that you drew power from them in a way before you realized that she had written some things that you vehemently disagreed with. And my question is really, can you collaborate with people that you dissent with and is that even possible and is that really a collaboration in that way? So, right the day before this show opened, I figured out about this quote. And so I was having a panic attack, like a literal panic attack and I was in Germany. So I actually called Suzanne Lacy and I was like, oh my God, like what do I do about this? And she was like, oh, I didn't realize Mary Daley said those things, you know, whatever. But she's like, look, she's like, let's look at it this way. Look at what some of those Black Panthers said, and who are totally idolized. Let's look at some of the male activists who kind of, you know, there's so many who, or male, I don't know, male writers who said some kind of really awful things. Like we don't throw their whole personas or their whole body of work, right? Life's work out the window, because in certain aspects they said some nuts or politically incorrect things, right? And she said, so why would we do that to women? And she said, you know, let's look at the time it was written. You know, and it started to make me think about, you know, instead of heroicizing these people that come before us to think about them as complex individuals and humans. And so, I mean, it really changed my thinking, but it was through talking through it with a lot of people. Like that we have to have a whole new model for how we look back on generations and what we kind of idolize or look up to and trying to change my whole pattern or my whole model for how we do that. I don't know if you guys have anything to say about that. It's a problem that we know nothing about history, and yet history is an open table where you can find things that maybe you wish so and so hadn't said. Right. And it becomes very problematic, but I would also support what you said. Why should we do this to women? But I think that this is a really serious issue. I'm sure I won't surprise anyone by saying I'm a Bernie Sanders supporter. Yay, Flatbush, but I'm completely horrified. I feel the burn, I feel the burn. I'm completely horrified by the attacks on Hillary Clinton, which are just outrageous. And the interesting thing is they don't have to be about her status as a woman in order to be within a general, let's not say misogynistic, let's say patriarchal framework, the way that what's ordinary and normal for politicians is something that's somehow sticking to her like mud that can't be removed. So you do have to recognize that oppressed groups and those with less power are always going to be easy targets. I'm not defending misogyny in any way at all. I'm not defending it. And I'm referring to what you said about Black Panthers. Black Panthers, right. It wasn't just Panthers, but the men in the movement is what created feminism. But... Or like the way... Transphobia is... The Paris, you know, the situation is treated women. You know, like that was the same thing. I would say the Beatniks and the Robert Frank crew were worse. Yeah. Okay. I think we have time for one more question. No, no, it's fine. I think that debate of who's worse could go on for a long time. We can carry it on afterwards. I love Robert Frank's work. I know me too. Yeah, thank you so much for putting on this conversation. It was really interesting. The question that I wanted to ask was kind of around issues of complicity and autonomy and the relationship between sort of global imperialism and racial domination domestically and the ways that women oppress other women and how we're complicit in these sort of global systems. And I'm thinking of, in particular, sort of the constructions of the desire for the American dream or for commodities and the ways that you all balance how our desires are actually constructed to replicate these different types of oppressions and how that plays out in your work. If that makes sense. It's a big one. I know. It's such a high level of abstraction. It's a little bit difficult to grab hold of. Well, something that I'm thinking of in particular is again in like the Bringing the War Home series, the ways that young women turned into sort of housemakers actually desire something like an American dream or something like these commodities and the ways that these commodities might, you know. A lot of my work is about desire. The garage sales about desire and women's role in the economies of desire and complicity. I do think I'm not smart enough to attack it directly. To by attack, I mean take it on as an issue because it is very high level of abstraction in terms of social thinking. But one hopes that work that one does sets off trains of thought within viewers. I'm not a Protestant either. I'm not against desire and I'm not against trying to remake the world whether it's the world close at home or the larger social world. So to talk about implication would require a really long conversation which is not so appropriate right now. But I do appreciate this as a major issue about who gains, who loses. But I think if people are only motivated by guilt, we consume, a lot of my work also has been about that, you know, they make we take, you know. That is much too complicated to just answer a question relating to an image or a set of images. It's, you know, Nancy's work, Nancy did a kind of never-ending work or ending video project called The American Dream which is precisely about these issues of desire, home, remaking and real estate values. And there was a quote from one of them that I'm gonna paraphrase it, good news, your neighborhood's coming up, bad news, but not for you. And that's from one of your videos where you have a community activist saying it. And I've used that quote over and over again because it really tells you about dispossession, possession. And that also fits in with how artists get caught up in gentrification and all of those things. Yeah, that was from the 25th anniversary of the Watts riots in 1965. And yeah. And now, now also with regard to the gang truce and things like that, I just ran across an ecstatic realtor who was advertising the fact that now in Compton it's getting safer and it's a great time to invest. And, you know, people will be displaced. I'm loathe to end on that sad note but I think our time is up. So maybe these conversations can continue in the gallery and through the work that is amazingly on view and through all the juxtapositions that you'll see there. So thank you for joining us today and go upstairs and see the show. Thank you guys, thank you so much.