Unknown Speaker 00:00 I graduated and I work with Unknown Speaker 00:08 no we've got some, but I think we need it now. You want to take some time off, you're more than welcome. We're Unknown Speaker 00:19 just going to follow the order that's going on in the program, and we don't have that much time to go. And we'll wait to hear your time for about 20 minutes for each speaker. And then we'll have a question and answer period. And our first speaker is a painter and critic. The showing slides of alerts were collectively from Euro projects all over this country, South America. Unknown Speaker 00:53 Thank you. Um, I just want to say a few brief words first, and I wonder if someone could pull down the blinds at the same time. As I'm talking so that we can see some slides, I brought with me some slides of murals painted by women, which contain images of women. Women played a tremendously important role in the US community murals movement in three different ways. As artists, they were instill are among the foremost artists and it's been an outlet for women artists, who have had, who have had in the past and still have a tremendous problem getting into galleries. This has been an arena in which they could function just as other minority groups functioned in the arena of public art. And the second role is is organizes most of the very early mural movements in various cities were organized by women. It was a woman artist who started the mural movement in Boston, one of the first cities to have a mural movement, and it was a woman in New York, Susan Qian, who began city arts workshop and developed a pattern of cooperative murals. It was a woman out in LA Judy Baca, who stuck basically gave the impetus to a whole branch of that mural movement and then ran a tremendously large Los Angeles program through the city that produced maybe 30 murals a year for several years while Sita funds were coming in. So the role of women has been in three different ways as instigators as painters, and another one, well, maybe we'll find it in the slides if someone can get Unknown Speaker 02:43 the lights. Unknown Speaker 03:02 This is a mural from Boston and one of the first murals painted in that city. It's also was done by a black woman artist called Sharon Dunn. And it's also one of the first feminist murals painted in the country dealing with precisely that kind of definition of what is woman. Unknown Speaker 03:27 This is a feminist mural painted in a woman's Center at Livingston College, in New Jersey, by a group which I was a part of peoples painters that was selected based on the model of the way and mural brigades in which we tried this was in 1972, in which we tried to work collectively and eliminate ego from our work. And so the three women when we designed the wall, the Bureau for the woman's center, and then each of us worked over the others designs, and then when it was actually painted, it was painted by all the women in the center, and that's one of the reasons for the design and find areas. Unknown Speaker 04:16 Says the wall of respect to women in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which was coordinated by Tamiya right for city arts workshop, and was painted by nine women of varying ethnic and racial backgrounds working together and it was collectively designed and collectively painted. The images that they used in this particular mural off women are very traditional images for the most part, because while they came from a basically feminist orientation, it's a community mural and based on what the community will understand and the community wants, and so the images that they showed were images that could be understood by the community and Unknown Speaker 05:00 Could you very briefly not even just briefly describe why it's a little hard just to get flat like this to know what what would Unknown Speaker 05:11 you describe what's depicted is a little hard to tell Unknown Speaker 05:21 Well, there's one detail from this view. But while I'm alone recited some stone by ESIC, down below Essex street where are the manpower centers if last year was still there, which is okay, the images are images of woman as, as they woman existed on the lower side. So you have woman as Mother, you woman is in work situations as seamstress as wondrous. And then you move up the scale to the top image, which is a multi racial, multi ethnic image of women as together as sisters joined together in that kind of way, because the idea behind the mural was that through unity, and unity, multiracial unity and multi ethnic unity that women could overcome the obstacles that they have been facing. Unknown Speaker 06:41 And this is the image of wondrous and scrubland. And these traditional roles for women are not being criticized in this mural. They're being represented as roles that women in the Lower East Side, women immigrants in that area, you know, took on and then these are the roles that they fulfilled this is from a mural that was painted also very early. I think somebody by a woman called Lucy Mahler, an artist in New York, on the Upper West Side, around 130/8 street, I think over under the highway on a school and this image from it, which shows woman basically as the protector says mother. This is in Chicago, by a woman artist called Astrid fuller. This is a shot taken of that mural before it was actually finished. And it's a mural in an underpass. And Astrid fuller painted about four or five murals and underpasses on the south side of Chicago, portraying different themes, this one on the history of social work, and the role that women play in the development of that field. Unknown Speaker 08:30 From Los Angeles by a Chicano woman, artist, Norman Montoya, in a development called Estrada courts, and this is a large housing project. In LA, it used to be one of the worst projects in the city. And in 1973, artists began to work in this housing project, and paint walls with the young people that lived in the project on these buildings. And it's rather simple, because the buildings are not the same scale as they are in New York, they met the same height. So you didn't need a whole lot of elaborate equipment. And at this point, I think there are probably maybe 130 murals in the housing project, and it's become an art kind of novelty tours Center in Los Angeles. And the people who live there, of course, are very proud of the environment and it's long, no longer one of the worst projects in the city. This one by a woman Norma Montoya representing women in this kind of doll like fashion that she uses in her work Unknown Speaker 09:40 a mosaic from Chicago by two women who painted this for Jewish Center and portrayed once again the roles of women in the struggle and this begins like, in a sense another sequence Because the first murals I showed you, basically represented woman. But a lot of when women paint murals as opposed to when men paint when murals, you see women in active roles you see women represented more often, very often the male artists will paint a mural on a particular historical thing. And all the main actors in the mural are men and you don't see women acting when women paint murals, they tend to put women in the mural inactive roles. And this is another way of presenting a feminist approach to mural painting. Unknown Speaker 10:37 This is in San Francisco in the Mission District, and one of the most important of the early murals that was painted there, it was painted by a collective, composed of four women with that time were students at the San Francisco Art Institute. They were all Latin American, and formed a group called mu Harris moralists. And this mural was called Latino America. And it was very interesting because it was a collective group of women and a collective group of women that work together each of the four of them painting in a different style, and yet painting a mural together on the same thing. So let me show you a detail. And you can see in this detail the work of the four different women with the circle, by one woman, the vegetation, by another, the style of the fingers on the bottom by third woman, and the figure of the devil from Venezuela, by fourth woman happens to be Venezuelan. However, the way that they arranged the mural was way of working together, that made the whole thing seem as if it were a unified whole, in spite of the fact that it contained for very separate individuality is within it. And this was a very important breakthrough. For means of working together collectively and still preserving individuality within that it's a, the idea of the collective Hall and the individual each separate within it is there's some more work by these same women, two of them, in this case, two of them working together on this mural, which is actually for a taco stand in the Mission District. And it's called pockels Tacos. And they built a subway in San Francisco and called the bar and there was a station stop right on the corner, just down the block from here. And McDonald's was going to build a restaurant from that corner, to, you know, get some of the money from all the people who ride the subway and we get off of that corner well pockets tacos guy wants, was a little bit worried about the competition. And so he hired these women to paint a mural on the history of food and all the different countries and places that it comes from, and the hope that people would eat tacos instead of Big Macs. Unknown Speaker 13:22 So that here again, is they're showing the history. This is by the other two women working collectively. So that first half was by two women, and this is by the other two women out of that group of four. And as you can see here also, even though the theme is not women, the role of women in this mural is far more important than it might have been if it had been painted by someone other than a woman so that the lead figure with the machete becomes a woman. And on in the farm working as a picker and so on and so forth. You see that women play a very important role in every part of this and at the same time, it's not a obtrusively feminist Unknown Speaker 14:03 hero. This is by a muralist called Karl Jasco, who has is perhaps the most important woman muralist. In Chicago. She began as one of the early mural painters has been working in Wisconsin for about the past five or six years. This was out of her first mural, and it's also an underpass mural, which has a whole series of figures. It's maybe 100 feet long or longer than that. And this particular section is just a few of the figures. There's another section in which she paints herself with her baby on her back. They go along being crushed, in a sense or moving in harmony, depending on where you are with all the machinery in the smoke, and the debris and equipment. That is also a part of this massive Chicago Excuse me I don't remember Unknown Speaker 15:08 millions and millions, millions on the millions. Yeah, Unknown Speaker 15:11 it runs all the way through you're gonna think that McDonald's runs right through the entire mural movement. But this is McDonald's turned out to be a big mural sponsor in Chicago. And this is the first mural that was painted. It's painted opposite of McDonald's and their parking lot. And it's the first mural in Chicago that was painted in a white ethnic neighborhood. And it was painted in kind of a Ukrainian Polish area of Chicago. And it's a homage to the people in people's work, and people's participation in all the realms of life. And this is also by Carol Jasco. And as you can see the beautiful thing here of the family, it's a homage to the family and the roles that people play in this kind of society. Unknown Speaker 16:17 The artists in Chicago two years ago, painted a mural that wasn't a commissioned mural that wasn't a community mural in the sense that they initiated it. And they painted it on a wall long wall that they got the use of and it was called the anti World War Three mural. And each of the artists painted separate sections. This is a section done by Carol Jasco, Nicky Glenn, who was muralist out in Montana and another woman about the problems war, and the political problems of world war three and the forces that were generated. Earlier I showed you the wall of respect for women in New York, this is another mural by the same artists that coordinated that woman called to me a ride. And it's on a school on Third Street. And between A and B in the Lower East Side, and it's also a mural painted basically by a woman's group that developed out of that first mural, they developed a larger group of women, many of the women worked on the first project, a wall of respect for women also worked on this one. Along with at this point, some men and they designed the mural collectively, and used images from the Lower East Side, and it's called Women hold up half the sky. Excuse me today and first. Yeah. First, yeah, okay. Unfortunately, it's peeled a lot because of problems of preservation. This is another mural coordinated by Tamiya for city arts workshop, and it's on Towson Street and Second Avenue. And it has to do with the problems of housing. And a problem which is very current right now on the Lower East Side of gentrification, where the landlords burn down the buildings. And then sell them to developers sell the site to developers and the developers come in. And this shows the people kicking out the rich landlords and those people and redoing the buildings for themselves. Once again, the idea of unity amongst the people of different races. Unknown Speaker 19:01 This is a mural that I did in a small town upstate town is called Warrensburg. And it was a bicentennial mural. And town, which is not far from Lake George, but definitely not like Georgia and inland, kind of a town is a very Republican, very conservative area. And so one of the solutions to the problem of how to paint something that holds with your own political ideas, and it's also pleasing to the conservative population to dealing with I found to be local history. And so this is this is the history of a working class town in the Adirondacks. And amongst the workers who worked in the mills and all these buildings, which still exist, but are kind of rundown at this point. Were a whole great number of women workers and that's an image of them. I also did a series of paintings on the history of women's participation in the Iranian revolution because it was a revolution in which women play a very important role in fighting against the shot. Even though afterwards, their contribution was more or less entirely negated by what the Ayatollah has done there. But women's history and the history of their participation struggles is something that has generally been wiped out by the history books, very often forgotten, so I wanted to document their role in the actual struggle. And this is based on the image of the women in the hospitals protecting the sick from the shot soldiers as they came in to shoot the wounded demonstrators. This is based on a photograph of women in a hospital in Iran. During the time of the uprising, the Shan soldiers would come into the hospitals after demonstrations, and pull out the prisoners that had been wounded soldiers and, and shoot them. And these are women from like a neighborhood vigils that have gone into the hospital and are trying to protect the wounded from the child soldier, where's this? Oh, this is not a mural. Unknown Speaker 21:29 And this is another image of women who won a struggle this in Mexico where they were going to put a nuclear plant and build it in lands that belong to the Indian peoples on the north side of late Patzcuaro. And in the struggle against having that nuclear plant be there it was the Indian women that played perhaps the most significant role, and it was a struggle that they've won. Nearly Mexico. Yeah. And this is a painting that I did about women as as a part of the whole immigration problem from of the illegal immigrants from Mexico, to the US and that whole problem and behind the woman with her children is the fence, the paper curtain that divides Mexico and the US. This is perhaps the most the largest mural project in the world. It's was coordinated. It's still in process. It's coordinated by Judy Baca in Los Angeles, and is in a flood control channel, which is a kind of a ditch, basically, through which floodwaters run when the waters are high in Los Angeles and which is pretty much dry during the summer. And if you look next to the water, you'll see that there's a row of sandbags. And the first step, every early summer when they prepare to paint again is to lay the sandbags so that you don't get you don't have to get your feet wet while you're working. This has been in process since 1976, and is now almost two thirds of a mile long. This section deals with the 1940s It begins with pre history, and has gone through the 1950s. This section deals with the 1940s and shows the struggle against the Nazis and the whole history as seen from the point of view of the minorities. This is the figure of the Jewish refugees the figure from out of the concentration camps, the specter as it was personified by Judy and this the figure of Louisa Moreno was very important in the farmworkers organizing efforts. Unknown Speaker 24:10 This is from the section about the 1930s. It shows the refugees from the Okies as they went across the country to go to California, and a particularly beautiful figure of the mother with the children from the Dust Bowl called the dustbowl refugees. And from the section on the 1950s that was completed last summer of this image which comes out of a a housing struggle that took place in the Chicago community where in fact where the baseball field was built. Both that area Logan heights was a Chicano community. There was a communist or a left wing person in the housing department who HUD arranged that they should build new housing in that area and all the people signed over their releases from their homes. And then the guy was fired during McCarthy's period. And the land was taken instead, since it was all releases to build the baseball stadium. And the people who were thrown out of their homes at that point still have not received the housing they were promised back so many years ago. This woman was a fighter against all that injustice. And that's it thank you one answer to Unknown Speaker 25:41 make is that please be aware we tempting everything, all speakers have sign releases, if there's anything you would rather not have recorded or if you don't want your name on the tape, please be aware of that. Unknown Speaker 25:57 Okay, we're gonna hear from a starboard Garson. And she's authored the book, all the lift on ze the meaning and the meaning of routine work. She's a playwright. And probably other interesting occurred, which concerns mostly the the transformation of office workers and how so much office work is being automated. She has written many books and articles and is currently working on another piece about the automation of white collar work. So Unknown Speaker 26:32 well, I know I was asked here, or, you know, I was just asked over the telephone, because of my play the department, which was about a group of office workers. And I wrote it with a group of office workers called Women office worker as well, and was written play, but I used their personalities to be the women in a department that was being automated in a bank. So I, to tell you the truth, I hadn't looked at the program till I got here, and did not know that the topic was resistance through arts, I just thought it was resistance. And I was going to talk about office workers these days. So what I might say is that I write about struggles, and I struggled to put my plays on once I write them. And, but the second, the second struggle, is kind of boring to me. I'm very interested in how these murals finally get on the wall. But um, I didn't want to talk about how you get those plays on. I mean, it's all you know, the stage managers boyfriend who works in a Broadway play steals the jail and how awful it is to have such terrific actors who don't get paid, and you feel terrible about that. And then you feel terrible, and you don't get paid. And it's a struggle. And it's a struggle against technology to have because the other means of reproducing themselves, that is, movies and recordings and things like that, of course, it's hard to entertain 200 People 20 People to entertain 200 On a night, and make a living at it. But that's somebody else's living. That's my living, I really wanted to talk about the people that I wrote about in that play and the struggle that they're in. And something that's of a very different scale to describe, then then you would put on the mural, which I noticed work very well with extreme expressions and horrible things you saw from a great big distance. And we're big times in history and big times of passion. But let me tell you about the kind of struggle to assert yourself as a person that's happening. Now with white collar work, we're in a situation where everybody's dummies kind of office works. And as they get more and more automated, you're in the situation where you are sitting at a little desk, and you're working on a screen where the forms that you have to fill in drop right in front of your face, you don't even get to push a button to get the next one. And you can be called down for flights away until the electronic monitoring is continuous. You call down flow for flights away and told that your keystroke count fell to under 9000 hour after lunch for three days in a row. And is there something wrong? In other words, you have this constant monitoring on you into which to just to resist to sort of be a person is very difficult. I remember GE it's strange to think how far back I go in this if any of you can remember that with these generations of so called in progress in office automation, back to actual key punching. When you had those little cards that you know you weren't supposed to fold, bend or mutilate, and the little holes did get in those cards some way. And I was way back then talking to people that did keep punching in big offices. Well, this one as a matter of fact, I was talking to some people that worked at Columbia Teachers College, and then the MetLife and the supervisor of this department was trying To explain the problem that of people who are in a situation where your hands are occupied, your eyes are occupied, you're you can't really turn your body, your mind is semi occupied. I mean, Unknown Speaker 30:16 you're totally controlled with something that is totally meaningless to you. And you sitting there doing it all day long. You when You don't get to move the piece of paper even because as soon as you finish, keep punching one thing, the next card jumps up in front of your face, the thing you're kept picking and a three digit number, that means nothing to you. And then the thing just transfers over like that to the next set of columns, and you key in a four digit number, which might be the address, or it might be the bill or it might be the day, but you don't know three digits here, you pick up from a piece of paper and four digits there and two digits to the next place. So what do people do under these circumstances to keep from going crazy? And I would have thought, you know, I really didn't know and one woman told me that she used to race. Well, what could she race with and work with? What did she have free only her ears were the only part of her body that wasn't totally controlled in a circumstance. And she used to listen, she said she had a friend next to her. And she used to listen to know when the next woman was moving into the next field. Remember, if I describe these four column numbers with three column numbers, well, that's a field and you type, tick, tick tick, that would be the date perhaps and then it would move Zook into the next field, you go bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, zoom into the next field, bump bump, and then the card would the next card would come up. And she said well, I used to race with the person next to me who was a very good worker to try to keep along or to try to keep one ahead of her. And that's the game I was playing while I was working. And, and however, of course, if she made a mistake and had to backspace, which I could hear I, you know, my productivity was constantly being counted constantly being monitored. So I would, well, I just have to go on. And I fall out of the racing pattern. And this was a very articulate woman that I was talking to who was telling me about this. And I started mentioning it to other people, you know, you go into a room full of people and God, they look weary and dull, and they're very hot tents, they yell at their children when they come home. And if you tap somebody on the shoulder in a room like that, they just practically jump up to the ceiling. And you just have to believe that everybody is human like you if you've got a game to play, they've got a game to play. And I talked to it ask people, well, what kind of games did you play? And they looked at me like I was sort of crazy. And then I would describe what someone else did about the racing and everybody had some kind of game it was too and they would sort of giggle and laugh like, like he was sitting around in the park and talking about among a group of women things that you hadn't talked about before. And what is it Oh, my God, I thought I was crazy. You know. And I remember one woman saying to me, she said, as as to what she did while she was in she was very, very quiet woman. But she turned out to be a very complex, single payer compared to the other ones that were just keeping pace with each other. She said, this will sound crazy, she said, but I like to keep a certain rhythm, a certain sound going I mean, I'd move forward when the next woman next to me was halfway through another field. And then she'd moved in when I was halfway through the next. So you get a constant like Bum Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum bum bum. And you'd only do it, but you could only do it with certain jobs. This was a place where they weren't always doing the phone company thing. In fact, it was Columbia Teachers College. No, no, she didn't know what I was doing. If she slow down, I'd sort of slow down. But if she made a mistake or stopped, I just have to go on. Sometimes, I had it going with three people. So we'd all be doing exactly together. I don't think the others noticed it. It's like sometimes you notice that three friends will be walking in the street and their footsteps of the oldest same. It'll last for a while and then it'll get broken up and nobody's noticing. We never planned it. I never mentioned it to the other girls. I don't think they noticed it. Everybody just does their work. I never knew anyone was listening to my sounds. And she was very barest to talk about that. Well, it sounds like such a small thing to assert your independence in. I've been in so many circumstances like that where you couldn't tell what you were typing and what you were doing. I remember that I was doing Q sips of Bankers Trust. I don't know what a CUSIP is, to this day, just this was already on screens. And somebody explained it to me first you had a menu and I don't know what any of the things on the menu meant. But she said if it's down here in white, it's it's an SPC and it's an eight, you push eight, and an eight automatically brings out another screen and the other screen, something moves over to this place where there's room for six digits and you put in the CUSIP number, which is a certain place on the paper, and you don't know what it is. And this particular screen, everything was meaningless like that. Except there was a place where there was numbers and you picked up a number from a certain place. Now I have evolved later to know that a CUSIP is a number to identify some kind of security. I still don't know whether it's CDs or I don't know what. And there was a question of 10 there was a place where you actually put a real number 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000. I guess they were like bank CD's. I loved it when you got to that figure. And I was sort of playing this game with myself the screen. This was a screen, which was a fairly long series of 18 screens, all of which was meaningless except this number to me. And I was playing this game with myself, which was kind of like a one of these, you know, those those games you do on television where you can buy box one, box two, box three, program go off? Let's make a deal, right. Yeah. And I would say to myself, I would say now, I can only do this once each morning, from the next three, CUSIP things that I work on, I'm going to say whether I choose the first one or the second one or the third one, and I get the amount of money that comes up in that the $10,000 with the $30,000, or the 20, that most of them would 10,000. See, and I would, it would keep me going would make me happy. And then when I got only 10,000, I would say I can't retire on this money, and I'd play the game again. You know, even though I wasn't entitled, even though I had in fact, lost my chance, I thought I was nuts. Unknown Speaker 35:59 And, and my game was fairly simple. Now there was also a screen on this for sub accounts every once in a while that would be what I later figured out must be a second holder of the CD or something in interest for type a name. And if the thing came up with a sub account, you had to press a certain button and fill in an actual line that was not in already a number of digits, like six digits was accused of number, you actually filled in a name, Mr. John Jones, or Arthur Schwartz and trust for Alfred shorts or whatever it was. And I didn't like that poor I was new at and it was always I was made mistakes in that area. But after I finished working this job, I went to interview some of the people that I worked with, who seemed on first glance to be extremely tired, extremely bored, extremely uninterested in anything. And I would ask them what they were doing on screens and one of the women who had three children who was very upset because the job required you to work. It was a bank, you see in the electronic transfers from the moment of the transfers from the moment the bank starts getting the interest on the money. So they require you to stay until the work is finished. 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock at night, she had three children, she was in great agony. He didn't know what to do about the fact that she had this is this was almost the whole office was black. And this was she I visited her in Bedford Stuyvesant, and we were talking about the things and the general conditions of the work. And she was quite, you know, all she wanted to figure out what some way out. But she could hardly figure any way out because she was even to go job hunting. She was so occupied with the job and the long hours and the children. But then when we came to the thing, I said to her what I thought was a silly question, what's your favorite screen? And she said, I like sub accounts and sub accounts. She said why? I said, What do you mean? She said, Well, I'll tell you what I try to do on sub accounts. sub account is align remembering, you don't have to make it six figures with three figures or two figures. She said, Well, you couldn't go over the line to she said, I like to try to space out the sub account. So it fits out. Fiddle fills out as much of the line as it can but without going over. So I will sometimes write Mr. m i s t e r, or spell out you know, an initial or something like that. Because the thing about this, I forgot to tell you about this is that when we did something wrong, if you put down the date, the 32nd of the month, or you tried to fill in a five digit figure for Ford's ignition figure, the machine we go are for era and where everybody would hear. And so it was a terrible situation. But the key was this woman, she was obviously much more literate than I was really she had gotten into the swing of the thing, which she could make a guess that in this situation, Mr. would bring her out to the end of the line. But in other situations, you'd have to abbreviate an M R, which you know, she's sometimes she'd spelled interest for sometimes she'd spell out a number the number three, because in that particular screen, although they may not like it typed up that way. And it may say what is this when they finally see it, it didn't come back at you at that moment going or so that was freedom. That was the line of freedom. That was a lie where she asserted herself. And she was doing a difficult job the kind of job that a composer or typesetter does that they look and they figure out, you know, it's true that the column justifies itself, but you have to do a little figuring with the headline. So how to get approximately justified headline, you know, she was doing that level of figuring out on this job that didn't call for it. That sounds like so little of such a little piece of self assertion in a situation that's designed to have no discretion for you. And I found in all these situations where people just typing numbers just doing something that the system had been deliberately set up so they couldn't be an error. That couldn't be a way of putting in the wrong thing. People always had these little games going, however small so that people were doing when the first two numbers on the CUSIP are the are even or double each other. That's when I'm going to start to take a lifesaver somebody else was you know, when it comes up the day to my kids birthday, I'm just going to get up and go to the bathroom. I don't care what they say. Unknown Speaker 39:58 This sounds so little so hard to dramatize, it is nonetheless, a struggle to be human in a situation where the people who plan the thing wish they could do it without humans, of course, they move to machine readable numbers as soon as they can, where you don't have to have an interpreter, look at the number and copy it over. I mean, they try to have the nowadays the original data entered on machine to begin with, by the bank teller or by you, that eliminates the bank till about you with the bank. When you do the information on your card, you'll soon be self ticketing in airlines and things like that. And those try to eliminate this middle person, they've eliminated the middle person as much as they can as a batch or someone who takes these little pieces of cards and enters them. Now they try to eliminate the person who deals with you as a person, the ticket taker, the sales woman in the store, and so on, and you make the proposition and put your credit card in is the is the goal, well, I'm not gonna go into the whole what's what's, what's the goal of modern automation. But I looking back at that. Now, here, I am trying to write about that. And I did a play about an office being automated. And I did it with a group of people who had their own stories to tell about situations where they were skilled secretaries. And they're given, you know, suddenly, they're given a word processor, which is really quite most people love word processors, who get a chance to use it as they used it before. I mean, if you if you're a writer, and now you can do it on a word processor, you're pretty happy about it if you're secretary, and then you don't have to use the white orphan. You don't have to use the correction fluid and you're happy usually, except that what normally goes along with this is a situation of now you're doing six people's work, or now you're putting in a typing pool. And you've got a constant keystroke count, this monitoring is keystroke counts. And these people had experienced this and you know, she go up and she'd say to her boss, well, I think I deserve a raise. Because I'm doing the work of the three people that you fired. And he'd say, what? We've got you a $10,000 machine. Isn't that bonus enough? You know, and situations like that? Well, I wrote a play with these people about but it was it used their personalities. I mean, that was the the people in the group who stuck to the end of the workshops were in the play. So their personalities were there. And it was easy to ride around that. But the situation was one where we made a real situation, a department and office being automated, the archaic department in the bank that hadn't This is suddenly being automated bye bye yum. Well, we use as a model as a matter of fact, to real thing, the city bank's operation paradise when they come in and what have made a place and we use all that language from right out of Citibank, which everybody told me she I don't know why you gave the boss is such crazy language. Of course, it was true, it was no excuse for me, you can't put if the characters weren't good enough weren't real enough, I have to do something about it. The fact that they're that they're not real and and unbelievable. To start with this is a problem, I have to work with a fat I mean, the fact that it was literally true that these bosses were saying all the things that I had them say is no excuse for putting such horrible stereotype characters on the stage if they were but and the one of the things we had a lot of difficulty with was everybody wanted to win. None of them had won in real life. None of us have stopped the second. It is a full second industrial revolution or the second half of the Industrial Revolution. It's the same conditions being brought to white collar work that were once brought to skilled, skilled mechanical work. The same assembly line conditions, the same attempt to try to count and know every every single thing you do, Unknown Speaker 43:34 to find the most efficient methods or even if they're not efficient, at least to be able to have a quota for everybody and account on that a typist is supposed to be able to do 125 lines of rough draft per half hour, that may not be faster than than a real secretary was when she got on the gun to get something out. But it's a figure you can hold everybody to and count the keystrokes as they do. This was happening is happening higher and higher up the line in white collar work. And the people in my play wanted to win against this situation, we'd set up an automation coming to a particular department. Except none of them had one in real life. Their organization didn't have a program to deal with it. I hadn't seen any situations of winning, I had seen situations of unions being able to hold their own and saying you can't fire our people until they fade away. Or you can't you can't change our pay if there was a strong union and this is frankly in other countries or like the typesetters at the time he had to keep hiring us and paying us or buying us out but the next generation will have a very different an automated job hadn't seen anybody really when I had seen demands peripheral demands on the situation. Glare guards on the machine adjustable chairs, by the way, which if you do the job is very important to have. But no situation had I seen anybody really win against this either by saying we reject The whole automation until such time as we can plan it for ourselves or, okay, if we can do the job quicker, we're gonna have, you know, a four hour day or most of what this job is this bank is doing is so absurd anyway, we want to really restructure the whole thing. I never seen anybody win or keep the automation off. And it was a terrible problem for the characters in my play. And for the play, which we were kind of writing very quickly as we went along, but which is not, which was not just like these murals are not was not a was not a group project. I mean, that is it was written was written play was group in that the characters of the group have written, but we've had a beginning and a middle and an end and seem to be getting somewhere. And we had a terrible problem of the fact that what was finally developed was a kind of a fake, happy ending, where this particular department managed to save itself because of a certain relationship of the boss's wife to the secretary, and they just managed to keep it all off and send it to some other department. And then they started fighting among each other, whether that was a good enough problem. And, you know, one person walked out, and the other people, you know, stayed and so on. But it was a, it was a real difficult thing to deal with. Because I think, you know, when you write a collective thing, and you've gotten yourself together, you want this, you know, you want to say rat a tat tat, but most artists can portray extremely well. Something that they see or know about, or I mean, we don't literally do that these are not literal representations. And I don't do tape recordings. It may sound like oral history, but it sure isn't to punch lines, it wouldn't be funny, if the punch if there wouldn't be a funny punch line on my jokes, if they really were the way people really talked, obviously, is a lot of cutting to make the thing come out funny, and so on. But yeah, we do represent well, what we what we've seen, what we know, things that make, the way that my play works is that people in the audience say, Oh, my God, oh, it's so true. You know? That's right. I mean, all the jokes that are exactly about people typing their, their bosses, kids turn papers and how they get carried away. And and so if you don't have the real details, it's not interesting. And that makes it interesting. And you can do that, and you can do it well, but what you haven't seen and what isn't happening and what's not true, very hard to represent, and do a good job of it comes out heroic and unmoving. And so that was the big struggle within our struggle was what to do with the fact that we had unfortunately set up a situation of real conflict and none of us knew a way to win, or had seen anybody win. And we, I think, I think we were all a little unhappy with the, the, with the fit with it with the The Threepenny Opera, fake, happy ending that came in with everybody knowing that they hadn't really stopped this automation or turned it around or done anything. So, anyway, that's one. That's one. story basically then, right now, what I'm trying to dramatize is something which is been deliberately made very undramatic, and almost meaningless, the white collar work that's going on now. And so within the struggle of white collar workers, I guess that's my struggle, how to make that back office work, which is so surreal, and so weird, come alive for other people to know what the people who are doing it are going through. Unknown Speaker 48:37 It WBA Unknown Speaker 48:40 eyes executive producers behind the green curtain. And today she's going to discuss theory, practice, practice and honesty in the cultural and media arenas of organization resistance. She's drawing on 25 years of experience as a cultural and political organizer on many fronts. And I also think she might give us a song. And she has a beautiful voice. We haven't. Unknown Speaker 49:02 Yeah, I was asked to do a song this morning. And with two, which I readily consented, because as a person who has eventually started to call herself a cultural worker, this is in fact, the kind of work that I've prepared myself for that cultural work does happen on an everyday level. In fact, all of our different speakers have emphasize that point. And it comes as a kind of wonderful surprise to me, although I had faith that this might happen. That when I got here, I not only discovered other people with whom over the years our paths keep crossing and not crossing but crossing and that the work that we've set out for ourselves brings us together because we are seeking subjective freedom within and an area of self expression and the totality of personality that is possible for all of us. It does not require bureaucratic organizations as for us to do this work it doesn't require a whole structure leadership to keep bringing us back and forth together, it doesn't require constant ideological reinforcements for us to go out independently and seek other people to do actual work. To my mind, the idea of collectivity is not again, a an analysis of rigid structures, but how you can bring out the best in each other, how you can bring out the best in terms of your own work, to achieve a collectivity of work. And I have found in my work at WPI, and in my work everywhere, that if you pursue certain kind of honesty of your own thought, and seek that honesty and other people that it will constantly come back to you, as a science teacher of mine once said, When you cast your bread upon the waters always expected to come back a sardine sandwich. And so that in our pursuit of what I would like to call a revolution in daily life, and I have even just, in the course of preparing for this morning, discovered a book with the title revolution in daily life, which comes out of a movement of intellectuals in France, who were involved in the May 1968 events and previous to that, and what they're postulating is that revolution, in fact, cannot occur through ideologies and through leadership and power structures as we ordinarily see them as we are living with them. And since I've been asked to sing a song instead of carrying on with my thoughts, I will do that because the song itself and our experience itself illustrates what I want to try to say. This is an Irish version of a song that has appeared in other cultural forms and other cultures. I think it has a very unique Irish perspective which I will talk about later but it's a song about factory girls or a factory girl again a subjective experience as I went walking one fine saw MERS morning up birds in the bushes did wha Lansing gala his and losses in couples sporting going down to young factory their work to be Can I spot one among them more fair than any? Her cheeks like the red rose? That none can compare her skin like the flower that grows in a valley and she was a hard working factor ri girl I went in among them more closely to view her and on me she kept such Luca just in saying young man have manners and do not come near me for although I'm poor girl. I think it no shame it's not for to score new fair men adore you. But grant me one favor. say where do you dwell kind sir you'll excuse me, but now I must leave you for youngsters. The sound of my factor re Unknown Speaker 53:54 I have learned I have houses with IV I've got in my pocket and silver as well. And if you go with me, lady I'll make you and no more need you heed your four factor re now called and temptation runed many nation go marry our lady and may you do well. But I am an orphan without friend or relation. And today I am a hard working factor every girl with these words she turned and with less she had left me and for her sake. Go wha wander away and in some deep valley where no law and hear me, I'm Lauren, my ring girl so what does that song tell us? To my mind and in other versions of the song that I alluded to before, she very frequently goes off with him and she becomes a lady. And this supposedly is the happy ending to the story. But as we all know, this is not only a happy ending, but it's not a real ending. It's not a reality ending. And you see that the the man involved has not only objectified her, but he objectifies objectifies his own feeling, he goes off into a deep valley to mourn for the sake of someone that he actually doesn't even know and doesn't really even care to know. And he has this whole affair with himself about how sad he is about all this stuff. But what strikes me about the Irish version of this is that this is an assertion on the part of a woman who realizes where she is in the world, and who is involved in an everyday reality experience, and who is bringing her own ability to analyze that situation to her relationship with this man. And not only does she recognize that she is in a factory situation, but it's a certain independence in that era of time, she has been removed from the old immutability of the family. She's an orphan, she has neither friend nor relationships, which in a certain sense, the Industrial Revolution precipitates a change in a lot of those relationships. The family doesn't really hold up under the stresses and strains of people going out and meeting each other beyond the family. So you can no longer play those roles of you have to play different roles in the supermarket of roles, which the situation is talk about. We have all been sort of forced, again to repress the subjective intelligence, the subjective freedom, our own existence, the daily life existence, that we that we all know that we're living as the people in the bank that Barbara was talking about, know that they're living. And we have to find some way to get past all of that. So that's why I look at this song as being on another level, what does it mean to us? It means that it comes down to us through an oral tradition. And what does oral tradition mean, to us, it means that it's the creation, again, of art of daily life, or daily life through art of commentary, and there's no polarization, there's no separation. It's not created by people who are then going to be given $10,000 A week or 100,000. I understand Bonnie Franklin gets $100,000 For every half hour episode of that incredible show that she puts on, I mean, start to think about them, and what are we really talking about? So the oral tradition, we go back this, there's so many things that I could say about that we don't have all that much time. So what I wanted to do is is be true in a sense to what I said I was going to talk about, and that is drawn some of the 25 years of experience that I have had as a political and cultural organizer. It means that I came into the world 47 years ago, at a time when all of these discussions did not exist on any level, perhaps maybe in very private areas, perhaps. Unknown Speaker 58:35 Maybe among some intellectuals, but not not really, I think that the telepathic communication that women have been forced to develop for themselves. And I think, Thank Heaven for that we have nothing, no stake whatsoever in the hierarchical order, we have no internalized experience of any rewards from it. So in a certain sense, we have not been part of it, we have achieved our own expression, even though it hasn't always been able to be articulated through our knowledge that somebody else in this world, in fact, is standing on the planet at the same time as we are that other people have stood on the planet and they're seeing and feeling the sun, the wind, the rain. They're feeling and seeing and experiencing a great many of the things that we see and feel and they are frustrated and Well, in any case, let me let me get on to some of the experiences. I met a woman named Ruthie Gorton with whom some of the people in this room may be familiar now, Ruthie was very instrumental in my life, because I met her at a time when I was part of a revolutionary song workshop that kind of flowed out of certain left, you know, left situated people and organizations and ideas. And she had come from California and she was in New York to give us some of her own songs. And it turned out that she She had the previous year, met a group of people from Ireland musical group, some of whom had been imprisoned on a torture ship and so on. And she also had stopped off in Texas to see a group of people in prison in Fort Worth five and a grand jury charge. And she was beginning to become very interested in involved in the situation Ireland. Meantime, I was very best friends of perhaps one of the most well known Irish, traditional singers alive today. And he's had a very great struggle himself, just to be able to keep that tradition and be able to present it in his later years, because during the time of his Prime and his youth, the conditions being what they were, he was not able to do that. So he somehow struggled through and kept that flame alive in himself. And finally, at the end of great many years of struggle, he has been able to, to use and pass on what he has. But any case Ruthie, and I became friends because of our interest in the situation in Ireland and in, in the attitude of, I'll say, the left towards that particular struggle. And it illustrated for us the bankruptcy of a great many ideologies and how they approach the actions of ordinary people in their ordinary lives and how they are confronting powers that oppress them how they develop those resistances. So in any case, Ruthie and I became very good friends, although we don't see each other very often. I haven't seen Ruthie now, in five or six years, we don't even write letters. But even at the time, we understood that we were not going to be able to write letters, because we were going to be working in whichever areas we found ourselves in. And that we would always know about the existence of the other person, they would always be very real for us, no matter how much time passed, because time doesn't really pass. It's always there. And when we met each other again, we could then compare notes with each other and talk about the work that we were doing just as today we come together, and we see people doing similar work, we don't have to worry about it. We don't have to have a committee to say do you have the right line? Do you have all your T's crossed and all your I's dotted we do this work because we have confidence in each other. And that's what brings us together. So Ruthie had written a song about the people that she had met from Ireland, which she gave to me. And as it turns out, in the intervening years, I took that song to a cultural event with the within the Irish community that was the cultist culture Iran, which, every year in Ireland, it's a grassroots cultural organization responsible, I would say very significantly in Unknown Speaker 1:02:53 reviving the creative aspects of traditional Irish music on a grassroots level in Ireland, and it also has done so within this country and other countries. So I took the song to the flower over here, where you qualify, and entered into the newly composed ballad category. This is unbeknownst to Ruthie, of course, because I didn't even know where she was. And it was a first prize, which then qualified me to take it to Ireland, which I did. Now this is a very militant song, and I was going to be singing this song, in an area 14 miles from the border, and in the so called free state, and I was not really sure of just what kind of reception I was going to receive with it. Well, not only did I receive a reception from the committee, which awarded it in all Ireland, it won the all Ireland newly composed valid for that year. But the adjudicators wanted to tape it and they asked me to come and sing it at the prize when it was concert that night. And as I say, it's a very, extremely militant song, but it's a song again, about real life about daily experiences, to song from her to a real person that existed in her life. And it's about what he is doing and why he is doing it, what she is doing and why she is doing it and how the force and the energy of singing songs together and refusing of resisting and continuing that resistance would someday result in dancing in the streets together on that future time, which would then become the present time, you know, since there is no such thing as time, it's always here. So I didn't see Ruthie again for at least two three years. In the meantime, sing out magazine was going to be publishing a series of issues on ethnic cultures in this country. And one of the issues was going to be about England, Scotland and Wales and they asked me to help them out with that issue, which I was able to do because the work that I do As a cultural worker puts me within a community of people that I as Margaret Mead, almost you go in you live and you, you work together, you listen, you are not there as an idealogue to tell people in what you consider to be a backward culture, you know, all these wonderful fine ideas that you have learned from academic academicians and theorists? No, because these are the people who are actually creating their lives. And these are the people who are going to have to transform society with us all eventually. So you listen, and you find out that there are subtleties within everybody's culture that have been missed by all the theoreticians. So in any case, we we did this thing out issue and we published the song that had won the all Ireland championship, with a little introduction by myself that talked about a woman that I had met when I was over there. And a month after I'd come back, she was shot dead in her hospital bed by three people in white coats. Now, all of these things you see come together in my mind as in terms of what I'm doing as an artist and as a as a cultural person. So I was able to tell the story of the woman I had met, in Belfast who was shot a month later, I was able to bring Ruthie song, another step forward in that journey of relationships. And eventually, I finally did meet up with Ruthie and I was able to give her her medals, and so on. And now there was no question and Ruth his mind that this was, in fact, something that we had done collectively, but we never had a single meeting about it. And that kind of work came out of the confidence, it seems to me that, that you do acquire, when you insist on finding in your everyday daily life situations, each and every time, the creative moment, how are you going to refuse the costumes that are put upon all of us. My way of doing that is to wear costumes myself and go out into the street and certain subtle ways, which I'm not going to get into that because there's not enough time. For that. I'd like to talk about another thing that I participated in. And again, it stems from being available as a cultural person at any time or at any place to be able to go and do and meet the needs of the situation. I had been Unknown Speaker 1:07:30 contacted to participate in several different Secretary day things, which I did, which brought me into contact with other people. And which ultimately, when a group of women from now we're going up to Albany, to lobby about certain kinds of issues, I was contacted by Noreen Connell, who knew me through a whole lot of other things and asked to come up to sing. She couldn't really tell me what exactly what it was that she wanted me to do. But she had an idea. I said, Okay, fine. And one of the ideas that she had was in this big legislative building up there, there's this big, enormous well, that goes up eight floors or so and is surrounded by very resonating marble. And very simply what we were going to do after everybody finished their lobbying, was to come back to the central point sit everybody down very informally. And for me to sing, give me that old time feminism and various people will then suggest different names or different people or different situations that came to their mind through their experience, or that happened as a result of that day. And that's what we did. And I was very tired. And I could hardly sing at all but didn't matter, because the voice just lifted and carried and bounced and resonated all over the place. And all the women sitting on the steps having finished their day's work also were resonating and bouncing. And it was a work of art that we created together as a result of our own work as a result of the day's work. And people came from all over the building a little more leaning down into the but it was an unpretentious act of art. It was a spontaneous creation of art. Not a spur of the moment thing because it really came from experience it came from your history came from your own resistance at all times at every moment, 24 hours of the day, it was like something that you could articulate in a spontaneous fashion that was so directly related to a daily life situation that it achieves its own profundity. It doesn't need to be presented on a stage it can't be reproduced in in exactly that same form at any other time. You know, each situation will call forth a different kind of form for what you want to do. In terms of organization again, and collectivity, I'd like to just briefly say that a web API and the women's department we've also been raised Dealing with a lot of these problems of collectivity. And what does that really mean? And International Women's Day, I participated in one of the programs that was presented. And what I found was that again, even though there was not a bureaucratic structure that was coordinating all of this, nevertheless, it was coordinated on perhaps one of the most collective levels that I know of, I mean, everybody sort of had a thing that they knew that they had to do. Everybody else had confidence that everybody else was going to do whatever it was, they had to do if everybody was very sensitive to if somebody needed work, you know, done or help or whatever. And eventually, the whole thing was was put on in a rather short period of time, I might add, which means that you can learn how to use technology, it doesn't mean that anything has to be sacrificed. As far as quality is concerned, it means that, that, again, you you bring out the best in each other that you don't have to get into ego conflicts about who's going to do what and who's going to do the other thing, because your goal, part of the act of creation, part of the objective that you are reaching for, is to bring out the best in each other, if you fail to do that, then you failed as a creative person, you failed as a collective person, so that this process is available to us. When Bella talks about the power structure, I pose the idea that there is another power and that power does not rely and reside in power structures, it resides in all of us that there is an organization already built. And that organization is planetary, it's it manifests itself, every time two people look each other in the eye, and talk to each other as one person to another and seek the best in yourself and the other person as they will be doing with you. And so that the the conflict is simply not there, that ego struggle isn't there, because your objective is something else. And the honesty that is required here is that if that objective does not get achieved, then you have to seek a better way to do it, that it does not, the solution to these problems is not how to elect a different leader or a better leader, or Unknown Speaker 1:12:19 to create a structure where these many people have more votes, or these many people have less votes, or we will now divide all the votes up into you know, like eights or quarters or 20 of us or however we're gonna quantify all that stuff. It means that our structure in our organization in our daily life really has to address itself to how do we arouse that contact? Everywhere we go. How do we confront these things on every level? Does a writer as Barbara does does does the writer observe from a great distance far away? Does a leftist political ideologues spin their theories from their daily contact with people? Or are they sitting in some room off to a corner and speculating about all this stuff. So that a concept that I call the frontline soldier in the great costume wars, leads me into a daily confrontation. Not that I walk out into the street every day looking for a fight. In fact, I walk into the street every day looking for some kind of pleasure. Now, if a situation arises, where somebody challenges, my right to enjoy that pleasure, then I have to stop and address myself to that person. Do I draw my gun out and shoot them in the head? No. What I draw on is my own, you know, confidence that I am allowed to address this person on some level of humanity where I say, No, you can't do that, to me, you can't do that to other people. And sometimes this draws you into situations where you have to instantly think of theatre you have to put yourself sometimes in embarrassing situations, where people will say she's a crackpot, because she did this public thing, because she made a confrontation. You have to be willing to take those risks, you have to be willing, it seems to me to be very sure of what you're doing. And you do have to be able to challenge make those challenges of language of appearance of who you want to be at all times. And as I say, I'm throwing this out only because had I prepared a scholarly paper. All of this would be very organized. However, I felt that the the form of what we're trying to go for here should perhaps be more appropriate to that objective. And that is to say that we're opening up dialogues I think and real examination of what just what it is that we're going to do with all these structures in organizations and whether or not we need them at all