WEBVTT

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(cat purrs)

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(women singing faintly)

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(funk music)

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- [Joan] The day I finally
moved to New York City,

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like all the cliches, to become an artist,

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well, a filmmaker, I was driving from D.C.

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in my \'64 Simca packed
with everything I owned.

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The traffic was kind of stop and go.

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My life felt that way too.

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August, 1971.

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I found an apartment
at 392 Bleecker Street

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in the Village for 150 bucks a month.

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In Washington Square,
my welcoming committee

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were the usual perverts
making kissing sounds

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as I strode toward my destiny.

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Why were these uninvited
and invasive shadows

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tracking me from city to city?

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How did they get a
ticket to enter my world?

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I was going to find out,

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but I had no clue how to make a life

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that combined my ideas
about what is a person

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I needed to achieve with what is a woman

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I could actually get away with.

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My real life was about to begin.

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♪ I\'m dreaming of the night ♪

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♪ Tell me can you feel it ♪

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♪ Tell me can you feel it ♪

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(slow funk music)

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Coalition work took me through the

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Puerto Rican Independence
movement and to the South Bronx.

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There, I helped organize the
two-day People\'s Convention

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for 5,000 people from all over the country

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who slept on the dirt we
cleared on a 12-block area

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on Charlotte Street that we
liked to call People\'s Park.

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I considered myself an anarcho-pagan,

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post-situationist democratic
socialist feminist.

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But as a woman, who was
I really supposed to be?

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By the fall of \'75, I
had joined a collective

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of feminists in the arts,

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women who felt like real peers

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with our shared and profound commitment

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to rewriting the histories
and future of women.

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We poured our dreams into the
founding of our own journal,

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Heresies, a feminist
publication on art and politics.

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As each issue was created, Heresies became

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an ongoing experiment
in feminist creativity

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and power sharing.

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And along with us, the
original Mother Collective,

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thousands of women worked on Heresies,

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developing ideas,
learning from each other,

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editing, designing,
writing, and making art

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that felt true to our lives.

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Heresies the magazine published 27 issues,

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from 1977 to 1992.

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30 years later, I set out to discover

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what had become of these Heretics.

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I also wanted to know how we had moved

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from that time, when
everything seemed possible,

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into this one, where fear
corrodes even the young.

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And too often, it\'s every
man for himself again.

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(rock music)

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- [Joan] Tracking down the Heretics

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and shooting them on location
was an adventure in itself.

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We followed them to
wherever they were working,

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from Venice, Italy, and Carboneras, Spain

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to New Mexico and New York City.

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- This is who I am; brace yourself.

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- This large, green canvas,

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I intend to drown Virginia Woolf in it.

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- It\'s about sharing a
certain time and a place,

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and it\'s about work.

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- So this piece is called carate boat

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because it represents
a Spanish immigration.

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- Hi Crescent, good to see you again.

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- [Joan] The women were
thrilled when I marched

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through their doors with
my young crew members,

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Crescent and Lily.

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A three-woman crew on a feature

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would have been hard to find
when we started Heresies.

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(gunshot fires)

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- When I would come down in the taxi

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\'cause it was dark, there would
be the light at Fanelli\'s.

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I would think, \"Oh, my God.

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\"At least there\'s some place.\"

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There was this wonderful
meeting of these women.

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- Well, if I learned anything, I learned

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that democracy is difficult and messy

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and nasty and sensational.

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- There are more women artists
than there are male artists.

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More of them will get
into the best programs

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and then what happens?

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The boys still have the edge on us.

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- I was married three times.

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Now, these marriages ended mostly because

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I was outraged by what
these men expected me to do.

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- Like if you were a feminist,

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does that mean that you dislike men?

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If you\'re a feminist, does that mean

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that you\'re not satisfied
with yourself as a woman?

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- Now, see what I think is that

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being a feminist is believing
in the ability of women

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to do what they feel they would like to

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accomplish in their lives.

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- Just don\'t marry.

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No, I\'m joking.
(woman laughing in background)

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I\'m kidding.

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(gunshot fires)

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- So, we\'re going to a very
popular stop right now.

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It\'s called San Marco.

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What is it called, Siete?

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- It was very much a moment in which women

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were caught up in this
very large-scale movement,

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and there was enormous optimism
about changing the world.

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We really believed that
this was the moment

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for this to happen.

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(thunder rumbling)

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- I just heard the word
\"female liberation\"

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and that was enough for me.

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To transform consciousness,
not just for women,

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but for everything alive.

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- And I had four kids,
and I went back to school.

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But I remember the
instructors would say to me,

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\"That is good.

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\"You paint just like a man.\"

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And you know what?

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I was so flattered. (laughing)

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- [Interviewer] Who do
you think the first person

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who told you you paint like a man was?

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- A man.

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I don\'t know, some man.

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It\'s really not like a man.

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It\'s more like a quaint hermaphrodite.

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(laughing)

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- I went to the Harvard Business School,

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and I refused to connect their dots.

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I mean, I was really on the road to ruin

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from their point of view.

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- It became very clear to me that

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everything in my life in terms of my art

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I was going to have to fight for.

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- This idea that I could
go out and do something

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in a different way,
that I could think about

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how to engage individuals with an artwork

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who knew nothing about art.

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- The metaphor in my mind is readiness.

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You have to walk through
your life ready all the time

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\'cause you don\'t know in which direction

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it\'s going to take you next.

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- In those days, utopia
was really a code word

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for any kind of social change.

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Utopian thinking is always around, Joan.

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And this is going to be my studio.

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- And I went to him very meekly and said,

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\"I think I wanna go to Cooper
Union and be a painter.\"

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And he said, \"You can\'t be a painter.

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\"You\'ll be a waitress.\"

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- I may have breasts and a cunt,

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but that doesn\'t mean I
can\'t do absolutely anything

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in the world.

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- What I decided about Heresies

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was that, for me, it was a love affair.

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- And I think we fell in
love with each other\'s minds

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in Heresies in a very real way.

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And the journeys we would take each Monday

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were just extraordinary.

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- Come on, guys.

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It was one of the few
moments where you were

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involved in a publication
that wasn\'t owned by anyone.

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There was no advertising.

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There was no affiliation.

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It was ours.

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- Things start happening.

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I worked a lot with each
different issue collective

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because my responsibility was making sure

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the magazine actually got to the printer.

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- I was fourteen years
old and my father said,

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\"I know that they have a class so that

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\"you can draw from nudes now.\"

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And I walked down to
where the teacher was,

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and he says, \"How old is she?\"

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And my father said, \"How
old does she have to be?\"

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The guy said, \"She has to be 19.\"

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And my father pushes me
and says, \"She\'s 19!\"

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- [Interviewer] And you were 14?

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That\'s great.

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- And I got in.

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- There was a panel discussion at A.I.R.

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The panel were male art critics.

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- [Joan] Most of whom
were married to feminists.

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- Right, and they were to tell us

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what should be said about women\'s art

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and why they weren\'t saying
it, or whatever was going on.

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And I remember I left with Joan Semmel

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because we were both sick to our stomachs.

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Lucy left earlier.

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She couldn\'t stand it.

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So Joan and I were saying,

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\"Something\'s gotta be done about this.\"

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And you know what we were saying?

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And Joyce Kozloff said this all the time.

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\"We have to do it ourselves.

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\"We have to do it ourselves.

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\"We will make our own galleries,
make our own magazine,

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\"write our own articles,
we\'ll do, oh the whole thing

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\"because nobody else can do it.\"

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- [Interviewer] What year was that?

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- I don\'t know when that was.

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- Look, Lily.

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Nivia has number right on her desk.

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- Oh, yeah.

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(jazz singing)

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- The first one was probably the most

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exhilarating one, I mean that was the one

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where we really though we were gonna

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change the world immediately.

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(laughs)

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This whole place.

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(jazz singing)

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- This was a good issue.

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So this is really impressive, I haven\'t

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looked at this for a long time,

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but look at the people who were in it.

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Barbara Ehrenreich, Martha
Rosler, Eva Cockcroft,

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Adrienne Rich, May Stevens, Carol Muske.

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My thing called The Pink Glass Swan:

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Upward and Downward
mobility in the Art World,

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which I much enjoyed writing.

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Then this wonderful thing
of Mary Beth Edleson\'s,

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The Death of the Patriarchy.

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(swelling music)

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- I love this, that I\'m standing in

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the front there with a gun.

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(gunshot)

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(laughs)

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So I know I must have
played some role there.

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You know, Lucy\'s really trying

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to figure the whole thing out,

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and I\'ve got the gun.

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- And there goes the
patriarchy, biting the dust.

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(laughs)

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- [Interviewer] Buh-bye!

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- Well I mean, pacing up the first issue

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in May\'s loft, what is
it, a sixth floor walkup?

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And we kept running up and down

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running up and down the stairs, you know!

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- There were groups within Heresies.

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And you, and Harmony, and Lucy,

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and Bethy Hess, and I,
we were the Politicos.

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I remember there used to be debates

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about whether we were a Marxist-Feminists

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or Feminist-Marxists,
do you remember that?

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Everything was critical, how we described

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our politics was, we were very
serious about all of this.

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There was also this sense of sort of

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inventing it as you went along

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\'cuz it was a new magazine.

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- I often find myself working for reform

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rather than revolution because

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I can\'t bear to see nothing done.

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Within the art world, I work to get

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women artists into a system I oppose.

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Outside in the real world, this means

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I want the ERA passed because it\'s

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going to make a difference
in women\'s lives.

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I want to see a politically-aware,
feminist culture,

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and I hope that Heresies
will help create it.

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- The fact that artwork keeps the

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bourgeoisie in style and the bourgeoisie

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keeps all the art, suggests that most

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artists don\'t bother with
politics and ideology.

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Instead, they are united by a lifestyle.

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Generally, you must privatize your work,

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hang your head to the left
late at night in the bars--

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I must have been there to see that--

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The point is that an
understanding of feminism

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without an analysis of class is like

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a long-tailed cat in a
roomful of rocking chairs.

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Demystification of art,
we were very big on that.

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Sounds like air freshener,
demystify. (laughs)

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(jazz singing)

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- [Male Voiceover] Sigmund
Freud, an expert on

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women, if there ever was one, once said

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that despite his 30
years of research, he was

00:13:48.360 --> 00:13:50.860
unable to answer one great question:

00:13:50.860 --> 00:13:52.429
What does a woman want?

00:13:52.429 --> 00:13:54.810
(thunder rumbling)

00:13:54.810 --> 00:13:58.980
- When I got to New York,
I wanted to get a gallery.

00:13:58.980 --> 00:14:00.820
So I went to a gallery,
and I don\'t remember

00:14:00.820 --> 00:14:03.230
the man\'s name, or the
name of the gallery.

00:14:03.230 --> 00:14:05.430
I just remember I sat with
him in his little office,

00:14:05.430 --> 00:14:06.760
and I explained the paintings.

00:14:06.760 --> 00:14:09.867
You know, deeply, all
my heart going into it.

00:14:09.867 --> 00:14:12.930
And he seemed so interested
(gasps dramatically),

00:14:12.930 --> 00:14:16.000
I was so thrilled, oh
boy I got a show here!

00:14:16.000 --> 00:14:18.640
And after a while he said \"Why does a girl

00:14:18.640 --> 00:14:21.110
as pretty as you wanna paint anyway?\"

00:14:21.110 --> 00:14:22.880
- I got this you\'re-too-cute-to-be-a,

00:14:22.880 --> 00:14:24.756
Mark Rothko actually told me that.

00:14:24.756 --> 00:14:27.570
\"You\'re too cute to be an art critic.\"

00:14:27.570 --> 00:14:28.480
Fuck you, buddy.

00:14:28.480 --> 00:14:29.313
But this was before I was a feminist,

00:14:29.313 --> 00:14:31.740
so I didn\'t say that either.

00:14:31.740 --> 00:14:33.779
I just-- (laughs nervously),

00:14:33.779 --> 00:14:35.400
it was Mark Rothko after all.

00:14:35.400 --> 00:14:38.710
- We all had this, the curator comes over

00:14:38.710 --> 00:14:41.010
and is flirting with you, or you

00:14:41.010 --> 00:14:43.768
go for an interview and to not be taken

00:14:43.768 --> 00:14:46.560
seriously is just the worst.

00:14:46.560 --> 00:14:49.090
- If a woman would go
to interview for a job,

00:14:49.090 --> 00:14:51.433
she\'d be given a typing test.

00:14:51.433 --> 00:14:53.290
No matter what!

00:14:53.290 --> 00:14:56.250
- It was just a shock to me, how seriously

00:14:56.250 --> 00:15:00.982
behind women were, and
I was just one of them,

00:15:00.982 --> 00:15:02.673
nothing special about me.

00:15:03.804 --> 00:15:06.190
And in fact, they weren\'t
ready for me at all.

00:15:06.190 --> 00:15:07.610
- [Male Voiceover]
Congressman Emmanuel Celler,

00:15:07.610 --> 00:15:10.300
who voted against the women\'s
rights bill yesterday,

00:15:10.300 --> 00:15:13.170
made one of the more profound
observations of our time.

00:15:13.170 --> 00:15:15.580
He said, \"There is more difference between

00:15:15.580 --> 00:15:17.580
a male and a female than between

00:15:17.580 --> 00:15:19.814
a horse chestnut and a chestnut horse.\"

00:15:19.814 --> 00:15:21.570
(thunder rumbling)

00:15:21.570 --> 00:15:25.260
- [Joan] All births are bloody,
and so of course was ours.

00:15:25.260 --> 00:15:26.950
We had each come to the women\'s movement

00:15:26.950 --> 00:15:28.930
from a different direction, but were

00:15:28.930 --> 00:15:31.025
all coming of age in a remarkable,

00:15:31.025 --> 00:15:33.923
world-shattering period of time.

00:15:38.730 --> 00:15:39.940
- Many of us have been active in

00:15:39.940 --> 00:15:42.151
things like the civil rights struggle.

00:15:42.151 --> 00:15:45.320
And we saw that one of its strongest cores

00:15:45.320 --> 00:15:47.217
was that it applied to the people

00:15:47.217 --> 00:15:51.127
who were struggling,
and that if you were not

00:15:51.127 --> 00:15:54.970
yourself being hurt by racism, you were

00:15:54.970 --> 00:15:57.893
watching it and therefore witnessing it.

00:15:59.237 --> 00:16:01.800
- [Joan] Registering voters with my mother

00:16:01.800 --> 00:16:04.280
and the League of Women
Voters, and standing on

00:16:04.280 --> 00:16:06.037
picket lines to end segregation,

00:16:06.037 --> 00:16:09.110
I cut my teeth on the
civil rights movement.

00:16:09.110 --> 00:16:10.960
I was on the mall for Dr. King\'s

00:16:10.960 --> 00:16:12.680
famous \"I Have a Dream\" speech.

00:16:12.680 --> 00:16:17.490
Words like equality and
freedom were in my blood.

00:16:17.490 --> 00:16:20.485
- It was an incredible time, we had

00:16:20.485 --> 00:16:22.540
the Vietnam war, we had activism,

00:16:22.540 --> 00:16:25.040
it was a time the world
was sort of up in flames,

00:16:25.040 --> 00:16:27.713
I felt like I was up in flames.

00:16:32.647 --> 00:16:35.111
(rock music)

00:16:35.111 --> 00:16:36.830
- And I think the next thing of course

00:16:36.830 --> 00:16:38.370
that was in all of our lives was

00:16:38.370 --> 00:16:40.785
a war we bitterly opposed.

00:16:40.785 --> 00:16:43.160
And we had to find our own footing

00:16:43.160 --> 00:16:46.561
because there was not a good public

00:16:46.561 --> 00:16:49.653
metaphor for what we
were supposed to do next.

00:16:51.340 --> 00:16:53.360
And we all got on our feet and protested,

00:16:53.360 --> 00:16:58.000
but I think we began to understand
how to develop the self.

00:16:58.000 --> 00:17:00.470
And so I was attracted
not because of gender,

00:17:00.470 --> 00:17:02.980
the abstract, but because I was female,

00:17:02.980 --> 00:17:06.867
and had to understand the
self in a political way.

00:17:06.867 --> 00:17:09.284
(rock music)

00:17:19.550 --> 00:17:22.650
- I think something very
mysterious happened.

00:17:22.650 --> 00:17:27.650
Which is that this wave
went around the world,

00:17:27.810 --> 00:17:29.963
which was the discovery of joy.

00:17:30.970 --> 00:17:34.353
The discovery of the possibility of fun.

00:17:35.530 --> 00:17:38.890
The discovery of the
possibility of liberation,

00:17:38.890 --> 00:17:41.420
not as a struggle, but as if being,

00:17:41.420 --> 00:17:46.420
being and playing and
enjoying love and sex.

00:17:51.660 --> 00:17:54.513
- Sexual expression was
a big deal in the \'60s.

00:17:57.080 --> 00:17:58.430
I sometimes feel like I grew up

00:17:58.430 --> 00:18:00.683
in the charmed generation in a way.

00:18:04.280 --> 00:18:07.702
I mean pre-AIDS and all that, I had skirts

00:18:07.702 --> 00:18:10.490
that were up to here and people would say

00:18:10.490 --> 00:18:12.890
somehow your skirt seems shorter

00:18:12.890 --> 00:18:14.958
than everybody else\'s because
your ass is right there.

00:18:14.958 --> 00:18:17.530
(laughs)

00:18:17.530 --> 00:18:20.920
That was who I was then,
and it was okay by me.

00:18:20.920 --> 00:18:22.550
Because I had some confidence about it,

00:18:22.550 --> 00:18:24.810
and I didn\'t have confidence
about other things.

00:18:24.810 --> 00:18:27.860
That was the way I punched
myself out of a paper bag.

00:18:27.860 --> 00:18:29.620
- [Male Voiceover] To me,
American cities compared

00:18:29.620 --> 00:18:32.890
to those in Europe present
a relatively dull scene.

00:18:32.890 --> 00:18:35.540
But women American women
adopted the miniskirt,

00:18:35.540 --> 00:18:37.770
displaying much more woman, it was

00:18:37.770 --> 00:18:39.820
the biggest advance in
urban beautification

00:18:39.820 --> 00:18:42.313
since Central Park was
created in Manhattan.

00:18:48.740 --> 00:18:50.970
- Oh I would say I was four or five.

00:18:50.970 --> 00:18:53.420
(laughs)

00:18:53.420 --> 00:18:55.880
I never felt I became a feminist.

00:18:55.880 --> 00:18:58.410
It was and still is a big necessity.

00:18:58.410 --> 00:19:00.160
- I didn\'t understand the word feminism,

00:19:00.160 --> 00:19:01.050
but I knew there was something

00:19:01.050 --> 00:19:03.140
wrong all the time being a girl.

00:19:03.140 --> 00:19:04.310
Always.

00:19:04.310 --> 00:19:07.560
It was something that came
on me not that slowly,

00:19:07.560 --> 00:19:10.830
and it came very, very
early on, and frankly,

00:19:10.830 --> 00:19:14.230
it was how power worked, and
it didn\'t work in my favor.

00:19:14.230 --> 00:19:17.470
- I was in the backseat of a car in 1964

00:19:19.750 --> 00:19:23.934
with my then-either boyfriend or husband,

00:19:23.934 --> 00:19:27.470
and another woman named Nancy,

00:19:27.470 --> 00:19:30.570
who is now a police person, and

00:19:30.570 --> 00:19:33.740
she had just read The Feminine Mystique.

00:19:33.740 --> 00:19:36.100
And Nancy said to me you\'re being

00:19:36.100 --> 00:19:38.120
overwhelmed by this male world.

00:19:38.120 --> 00:19:39.970
This is a male world that we\'re in,

00:19:39.970 --> 00:19:41.887
and you\'re doing this
and you\'re doing that.

00:19:41.887 --> 00:19:44.030
(whiny voice) No I\'m not!
I\'m totally independent!

00:19:44.030 --> 00:19:44.863
This is this and this is this!

00:19:44.863 --> 00:19:46.747
And then I started noticing, and

00:19:49.547 --> 00:19:52.963
I\'m gonna say I was pissed of for decades.

00:19:54.476 --> 00:19:55.970
- I remember putting the book down

00:19:55.970 --> 00:19:58.510
and thinking oh I\'m not crazy.

00:19:58.510 --> 00:20:00.910
And it was like Saul on
the road to Damascus.

00:20:00.910 --> 00:20:05.300
The scales fell away, and
that was extraordinary.

00:20:05.300 --> 00:20:08.330
And so my commitment to the feminist

00:20:08.330 --> 00:20:10.340
movement is very deep and very

00:20:10.340 --> 00:20:12.040
personal because it saved my life.

00:20:22.610 --> 00:20:25.760
- And these are all the women\'s,
all the books, remember?

00:20:25.760 --> 00:20:28.468
When we started seeing the women\'s books,

00:20:28.468 --> 00:20:30.830
and how much we loved it?

00:20:30.830 --> 00:20:32.610
- I don\'t know when Betty Friedan\'s book

00:20:32.610 --> 00:20:33.810
came out, The Feminine Mystique,

00:20:33.810 --> 00:20:35.860
I know that sort of blew everything open.

00:20:36.840 --> 00:20:38.956
- Sexual Politics.

00:20:38.956 --> 00:20:40.800
- [Interviewer] That was an early one.

00:20:40.800 --> 00:20:43.360
- Very early, almost the
first, wouldn\'t you say?

00:20:43.360 --> 00:20:45.699
- I think Kate Millett was the first

00:20:45.699 --> 00:20:49.430
feminist that I sat down and read.

00:20:49.430 --> 00:20:52.180
- Alice Neel, she was a character.

00:20:52.180 --> 00:20:54.840
- Oh Doris Lessing, Golden
Notebook changed my life.

00:20:54.840 --> 00:20:58.170
- One after the other I
read the Golden Notebooks,

00:20:58.170 --> 00:21:00.713
by Doris Lessing, and the Second Sex,

00:21:00.713 --> 00:21:03.760
by Simone de Beauvoir, and my head

00:21:03.760 --> 00:21:06.000
turned around 360 degrees.

00:21:06.000 --> 00:21:07.640
- I do like Doris Lessing a lot,

00:21:07.640 --> 00:21:09.530
I\'m just thinking of the short story

00:21:09.530 --> 00:21:11.230
in Room 19 which I\'ve taught a lot.

00:21:11.230 --> 00:21:13.340
- You know Adrienne Rich\'s book

00:21:13.340 --> 00:21:15.100
called Diving Into the Wreck.

00:21:15.100 --> 00:21:16.840
- You know Carol Gilligan\'s book?

00:21:16.840 --> 00:21:19.870
You know, about how men learn about rules,

00:21:19.870 --> 00:21:22.460
and women only care about relationships?

00:21:22.460 --> 00:21:23.960
- This is Lucy Lippard.

00:21:23.960 --> 00:21:26.499
- Oh but I had read Simone de Beauvoir.

00:21:26.499 --> 00:21:28.233
I\'m a post-Beauvoirian feminist.

00:21:30.163 --> 00:21:34.200
- There\'s one thing it
quoted Emmanuel Levinas,

00:21:34.200 --> 00:21:36.883
a philosopher, who said,

00:21:39.017 --> 00:21:43.978
\"Femaleness is the
opposite of consciousness\".

00:21:43.978 --> 00:21:46.364
(laughs)

00:21:46.364 --> 00:21:48.610
Femaleness is the the
opposite of consciousness!

00:21:48.610 --> 00:21:53.610
In other words, you\'re not
conscious if you\'re female!

00:21:54.604 --> 00:21:55.937
Can you imagine?

00:22:03.267 --> 00:22:04.610
- You know, women got the vote in

00:22:04.610 --> 00:22:06.900
the United States in 1920?!

00:22:06.900 --> 00:22:09.848
I was born in 1924, and four years

00:22:09.848 --> 00:22:12.100
before nobody could vote?

00:22:15.934 --> 00:22:17.780
- [Joan] In the first wave of the women\'s

00:22:17.780 --> 00:22:20.080
movement, women left home in droves

00:22:20.080 --> 00:22:22.160
to stage marches and parades.

00:22:22.160 --> 00:22:24.810
Daring public acts.

00:22:24.810 --> 00:22:26.670
Hundreds were beaten and jailed

00:22:26.670 --> 00:22:28.470
for picketing the White House.

00:22:28.470 --> 00:22:30.593
Just to gain the right
to express their opinion,

00:22:30.593 --> 00:22:32.123
and make it count.

00:22:36.816 --> 00:22:37.910
- When I first moved to New York,

00:22:37.910 --> 00:22:39.926
I met a number of people who themselves

00:22:39.926 --> 00:22:41.653
had been political activists in

00:22:41.653 --> 00:22:43.340
they own youth, but who were,

00:22:43.340 --> 00:22:44.920
by the time I got to New York,

00:22:44.920 --> 00:22:46.753
really in their 60s and 70s.

00:22:46.753 --> 00:22:48.780
They were waiting for us.

00:22:48.780 --> 00:22:51.610
They were ready for us to come back

00:22:51.610 --> 00:22:53.380
into view, and to create that same

00:22:53.380 --> 00:22:55.930
sort of sense of continuum that older,

00:22:55.930 --> 00:22:57.810
wiser people pass on to younger

00:22:57.810 --> 00:23:00.513
people for all generations
of mankind-- humankind.

00:23:06.000 --> 00:23:07.460
- Now the first women\'s group that I

00:23:07.460 --> 00:23:12.170
was involved in was in
LA, and it\'s in 1971.

00:23:12.170 --> 00:23:13.580
- I was so excited, Joan, when I

00:23:13.580 --> 00:23:15.990
heard about the first CR
group that I joined, too.

00:23:15.990 --> 00:23:17.810
- Sitting in a circle, going around,

00:23:17.810 --> 00:23:19.610
each woman was speaking her bit.

00:23:19.610 --> 00:23:22.070
- How do you feel about your mother?

00:23:22.070 --> 00:23:23.550
How do you feel about your body?

00:23:23.550 --> 00:23:26.420
- Father, relationship between siblings.

00:23:26.420 --> 00:23:29.430
- And everyone speaks for
15 minutes to that subject.

00:23:29.430 --> 00:23:31.070
- We would identify a problem,

00:23:31.070 --> 00:23:34.006
almost a confession, and
then we would confess.

00:23:34.006 --> 00:23:35.290
(laughs)

00:23:35.290 --> 00:23:39.893
- Every woman\'s voice, as
she spoke, is taken as truth.

00:23:39.893 --> 00:23:44.893
Because it is her experience
as she experiences it.

00:23:45.800 --> 00:23:47.810
- That whole thing about talking it out,

00:23:47.810 --> 00:23:50.560
and going ah-ha, I didn\'t know,

00:23:50.560 --> 00:23:52.356
it was my private experience,
but now I understand it\'s

00:23:52.356 --> 00:23:55.420
a shared experienced,
and cultural experience.

00:23:55.420 --> 00:23:58.240
- And that most of the problems weren\'t

00:23:58.240 --> 00:24:01.805
my shortcomings as a person or as a woman,

00:24:01.805 --> 00:24:05.260
but they had to do with women
being treated as a class.

00:24:05.260 --> 00:24:08.350
- I think we gotta bring
back the CR groups.

00:24:08.350 --> 00:24:13.350
I think that was the critical
piece, we lost our fuel.

00:24:13.500 --> 00:24:16.710
It was the gas pump, it was
the fuel for everything we did.

00:24:16.710 --> 00:24:18.640
It was those relationships, and that

00:24:18.640 --> 00:24:21.790
level of conversation, and
that sense of connection.

00:24:21.790 --> 00:24:24.330
To bring all the work back to each other

00:24:24.330 --> 00:24:25.677
back to you in the room, you in the room,

00:24:25.677 --> 00:24:27.760
and you in the room, and I think that\'s

00:24:27.760 --> 00:24:29.590
the rock on which the whole women\'s

00:24:29.590 --> 00:24:30.973
movement was built, really.

00:24:33.476 --> 00:24:36.226
(women chanting)

00:24:42.900 --> 00:24:43.760
- [Joan] The second wave of the

00:24:43.760 --> 00:24:46.190
movement took place closer to home.

00:24:46.190 --> 00:24:48.383
Ours was a fundamentally
leaderless movement.

00:24:48.383 --> 00:24:52.810
The media selected our
cover girls, not us.

00:24:52.810 --> 00:24:55.853
Our movement was local, local, local.

00:24:57.090 --> 00:24:59.290
It was made up of
thousands of small groups

00:24:59.290 --> 00:25:02.310
of women, each formed
around a different issue.

00:25:02.310 --> 00:25:06.040
In some cities, women
would found a bookstore,

00:25:06.040 --> 00:25:08.380
in others, a battered women\'s shelter.

00:25:08.380 --> 00:25:12.170
Many women stared their own
childcare centers and CR groups.

00:25:12.170 --> 00:25:13.690
Supporting each other as they looked

00:25:13.690 --> 00:25:15.950
inside themselves trying to assemble

00:25:15.950 --> 00:25:18.110
the pieces of the gender puzzle.

00:25:18.110 --> 00:25:21.990
The pieces we had been
given did not quite fit.

00:25:21.990 --> 00:25:26.140
- So you were reading
Big Mama Rag in Denver,

00:25:26.140 --> 00:25:29.720
and you\'re reading So Ain\'t
I a Woman in Minneapolis,

00:25:29.720 --> 00:25:31.610
and you\'re reading
these other publications

00:25:31.610 --> 00:25:34.590
because that\'s just the way it was,

00:25:34.590 --> 00:25:36.607
it was very charged at the time.

00:25:36.607 --> 00:25:38.970
- There was a constant stream of

00:25:38.970 --> 00:25:41.655
events, happenings, that gave all of us

00:25:41.655 --> 00:25:44.755
the kind of concern and concentration on

00:25:44.755 --> 00:25:47.946
How do I contribute? Am
I part of the problem?

00:25:47.946 --> 00:25:50.710
And how do I deepen the awareness

00:25:50.710 --> 00:25:53.643
of self to make a political difference?

00:25:58.020 --> 00:26:01.943
- But then, there was Heresies. (laughs)

00:26:08.780 --> 00:26:10.816
- I do know that my next door neighbor,

00:26:10.816 --> 00:26:15.732
Michelle Stuart and I, had been
doing the laundry together,

00:26:15.732 --> 00:26:19.840
and we started talking about the

00:26:19.840 --> 00:26:22.110
need for a feminist publication.

00:26:22.110 --> 00:26:24.930
- I was very interested in a magazine.

00:26:24.930 --> 00:26:27.470
I was extremely interested in a magazine.

00:26:27.470 --> 00:26:30.020
- Not a publication that was kind of

00:26:30.020 --> 00:26:33.230
a woman\'s version of other
publications with monographs,

00:26:33.230 --> 00:26:35.560
but a publication around the ideas

00:26:35.560 --> 00:26:37.550
that women artists were interested in.

00:26:37.550 --> 00:26:40.350
I invited somebody who invited
somebody who invited somebody

00:26:40.350 --> 00:26:42.950
and Michelle maybe invited
somebody who invited somebody.

00:26:42.950 --> 00:26:46.730
- And all these (laughs) I
guess those were the original--

00:26:46.730 --> 00:26:49.116
(gunshot)

00:26:49.116 --> 00:26:52.533
(swelling western music)

00:27:02.570 --> 00:27:04.480
- I think about the second wave

00:27:04.480 --> 00:27:08.710
feminist art movement, and it
was a moment that was about

00:27:08.710 --> 00:27:12.678
collectivity, not about individual voices.

00:27:12.678 --> 00:27:17.020
And you have a whole new understanding

00:27:17.020 --> 00:27:20.120
of your life, the
personal, but also yourself

00:27:20.120 --> 00:27:22.813
in terms of the political
and the larger world.

00:27:23.670 --> 00:27:25.990
And that we could make art, and

00:27:25.990 --> 00:27:30.773
look at art, and critique art
from a gendered perspective.

00:27:36.230 --> 00:27:38.883
Painting is an additive process

00:27:38.883 --> 00:27:41.763
moving from the inside out.

00:27:43.060 --> 00:27:44.750
It\'s taken me years to develop

00:27:44.750 --> 00:27:47.560
this particular surface, this particular

00:27:47.560 --> 00:27:49.636
way I handle paint, and create

00:27:49.636 --> 00:27:53.610
something that is what it
is in the material sense,

00:27:53.610 --> 00:27:57.250
but it hopefully has a
presence to it that is

00:27:57.250 --> 00:28:01.283
more than the actual physical
space that it occupies.

00:28:12.080 --> 00:28:13.400
- You know, Joan, one of the things

00:28:13.400 --> 00:28:15.796
that happens is real estate.

00:28:15.796 --> 00:28:19.840
When we come New York
City in the early \'60s,

00:28:19.840 --> 00:28:22.773
all the small manufacturers are fleeing.

00:28:24.350 --> 00:28:27.210
There are these lofts abandoned that are

00:28:27.210 --> 00:28:29.380
40 dollars a month, 60 dollars a month

00:28:29.380 --> 00:28:33.650
for a half a city block
with raw, torn up floors

00:28:33.650 --> 00:28:37.250
from the machinery, A/C
current very dangerous.

00:28:37.250 --> 00:28:39.599
Women teach each other to wire,

00:28:39.599 --> 00:28:44.263
and fix plumbing, and put in a sink.

00:28:45.200 --> 00:28:48.450
We\'re all there with a
kind of equal adventure,

00:28:48.450 --> 00:28:50.980
and that\'s the new rural territory,

00:28:50.980 --> 00:28:52.634
it\'s not Texas it\'s not California,

00:28:52.634 --> 00:28:55.253
it\'s New York City in
the very middle of it.

00:28:57.436 --> 00:28:58.483
And it\'s pure magic.

00:29:11.065 --> 00:29:14.870
- (laughs) Oh my god. I don\'t.

00:29:14.870 --> 00:29:17.580
- Do you know when was the first meeting?

00:29:17.580 --> 00:29:19.170
Like what month or season?

00:29:19.170 --> 00:29:23.110
- I know it was a loft, we
were at the back end of it,

00:29:23.110 --> 00:29:25.310
and it was just a big open space.

00:29:25.310 --> 00:29:27.440
It might have been Miriam\'s?

00:29:27.440 --> 00:29:29.710
- I\'m not sure, it think it was the first

00:29:29.710 --> 00:29:32.330
Heresies meeting, and I
think it was at Joyce\'s.

00:29:32.330 --> 00:29:33.670
Is that right?

00:29:33.670 --> 00:29:35.130
- The first meeting was at Lucy\'s.

00:29:35.130 --> 00:29:38.310
- Gee, we were meeting in
all sorts of weird places.

00:29:38.310 --> 00:29:42.248
- I mean we had so few resources,
we didn\'t have an office.

00:29:42.248 --> 00:29:44.470
- They didn\'t have sofas.

00:29:44.470 --> 00:29:46.730
They didn\'t have separate kitchens.

00:29:46.730 --> 00:29:49.857
So my class background was showing.

00:29:49.857 --> 00:29:53.450
These were women who
lived in their studios.

00:29:53.450 --> 00:29:55.150
It didn\'t occur to them to put

00:29:55.150 --> 00:29:57.880
everything away when they had company.

00:29:58.730 --> 00:30:01.250
In other words, they were
living a room of their own.

00:30:01.250 --> 00:30:03.440
And there was no line between those things

00:30:03.440 --> 00:30:04.880
that were sentimental and part of

00:30:04.880 --> 00:30:06.470
their lives, and part of their work.

00:30:06.470 --> 00:30:07.370
There was no line.

00:30:12.471 --> 00:30:14.890
- [Joan] Thinking back as Sally spoke,

00:30:14.890 --> 00:30:16.720
I remembered my own experience of

00:30:16.720 --> 00:30:19.723
those glorious lofts
full of life and work.

00:30:22.270 --> 00:30:24.450
For the first time, I really believed

00:30:24.450 --> 00:30:27.250
that you could live a rich, productive,

00:30:27.250 --> 00:30:29.800
and un-lonely life without a man

00:30:29.800 --> 00:30:31.413
and kitchen at the center of it.

00:30:35.040 --> 00:30:38.110
Though with the Heretics,
all of us together,

00:30:38.110 --> 00:30:41.760
I knew in my heart that a woman
could live a life of her own

00:30:41.760 --> 00:30:44.833
doing something that mattered
with or without companion.

00:30:58.030 --> 00:31:00.226
- The name, we spent at least a year

00:31:00.226 --> 00:31:02.540
coming up with the name,
and I have the list,

00:31:02.540 --> 00:31:05.170
the piece of paper, I have about 300

00:31:05.170 --> 00:31:09.430
handwritten names listed,
and one of them is Heresies.

00:31:09.430 --> 00:31:13.973
- We were each asked to come
to a meeting with 20 names.

00:31:13.973 --> 00:31:16.810
This was after we\'d finally
formed the collective,

00:31:16.810 --> 00:31:18.726
and every name we ready people would go,

00:31:18.726 --> 00:31:22.261
\"Ohhh!\" (all join in)

00:31:22.261 --> 00:31:23.678
You couldn\'t win!

00:31:25.810 --> 00:31:29.690
And finally, we picked,
Lucy wanted \"Pink\",

00:31:29.690 --> 00:31:31.580
and people didn\'t like that.
- Thank God I didn\'t win.

00:31:31.580 --> 00:31:33.490
- But you know what?

00:31:33.490 --> 00:31:35.350
It won, for a while it won.

00:31:35.350 --> 00:31:39.640
- People said call it Pink, I\'m quitting.

00:31:39.640 --> 00:31:40.610
- I said that.

00:31:40.610 --> 00:31:42.720
- You\'re tough, Joan, you\'re tough.

00:31:42.720 --> 00:31:44.020
We all fought with our sleeves

00:31:44.020 --> 00:31:45.340
rolled up when we had to.

00:31:45.340 --> 00:31:47.530
- I hated it so much that I found

00:31:47.530 --> 00:31:50.872
a British teen magazine called Pink,

00:31:50.872 --> 00:31:53.534
and I said we can\'t use it!

00:31:53.534 --> 00:31:55.340
- That did it for me too.

00:31:55.340 --> 00:31:56.830
- And then there was a Susan Sontag quote

00:31:56.830 --> 00:31:58.772
about heresies that was heresies

00:31:58.772 --> 00:31:59.769
that was wonderful that I got them.

00:31:59.769 --> 00:32:02.490
- Well heresies, we talked about the fact

00:32:02.490 --> 00:32:04.520
that heresies has \"her\" in it,

00:32:04.520 --> 00:32:08.203
and that we are going to be
heretical, and it was lovely.

00:32:14.370 --> 00:32:16.850
- This is one of the
most wonderful things,

00:32:16.850 --> 00:32:18.950
oh if you could use this in any way,

00:32:18.950 --> 00:32:22.113
I\'m gonna put it up so we can read it.

00:32:26.220 --> 00:32:29.340
I\'m gonna read it out loud, okay?

00:32:29.340 --> 00:32:30.867
I love doing this.

00:32:30.867 --> 00:32:33.937
\"The power of art to create connections

00:32:33.937 --> 00:32:36.957
\"denied by the intellect working alone

00:32:36.957 --> 00:32:41.737
\"to transform the
unnameable into something

00:32:43.987 --> 00:32:47.747
\"palpable, sensuous, visible, audible,

00:32:47.747 --> 00:32:51.807
\"to take our unexpressed
thoughts and desires

00:32:51.807 --> 00:32:56.007
\"and fling them with clarity and coherence

00:32:56.007 --> 00:32:59.617
\"on the wall, a screen, a sheet of paper,

00:32:59.617 --> 00:33:03.149
\"or against the long silence of history

00:33:03.149 --> 00:33:04.647
I could cry.

00:33:04.647 --> 00:33:08.057
\"this power has been
instinctively recognized

00:33:08.057 --> 00:33:12.877
\"by women as a key to our
deepest political problem,

00:33:12.877 --> 00:33:16.977
\"our deprivation of the power to name.\"

00:33:17.907 --> 00:33:22.027
\"In beginning to create art,
which claims this right,

00:33:22.027 --> 00:33:24.727
\"we begin to create a politics that is

00:33:24.727 --> 00:33:27.888
\"a critique of all existing culture,

00:33:27.888 --> 00:33:31.040
\"and all existing politics.\"

00:33:31.040 --> 00:33:33.830
Now, isn\'t that we\'re talking about today?

00:33:33.830 --> 00:33:35.160
Isn\'t in wonderful?

00:33:35.160 --> 00:33:37.610
It is so wonderful, I know.

00:33:37.610 --> 00:33:38.830
And guess what?

00:33:38.830 --> 00:33:40.430
The power to name?

00:33:40.430 --> 00:33:44.322
I swore I would get that,
and don\'t you think I did?

00:33:44.322 --> 00:33:45.444
- I do.

00:33:45.444 --> 00:33:46.777
- Femmage, yeah.

00:33:56.580 --> 00:33:59.450
- I think that what
made it possible for us

00:34:00.351 --> 00:34:03.822
to do some of the things that we did

00:34:03.822 --> 00:34:05.723
was the fact that so many of us

00:34:05.723 --> 00:34:08.987
were not really at the
time part of any system.

00:34:10.232 --> 00:34:12.510
We were outsides, and being outside,

00:34:12.510 --> 00:34:16.773
we could freely reinvent
things to our own liking.

00:34:17.770 --> 00:34:19.900
This is pat\'s artwork,
it was her handwriting,

00:34:19.900 --> 00:34:21.770
it was about markings, kind of ancient

00:34:21.770 --> 00:34:23.350
and contemporary at the
same time, and I think

00:34:23.350 --> 00:34:25.190
we all sort of fell in love with it.

00:34:25.190 --> 00:34:26.610
- Yeah I think I did the cover,

00:34:26.610 --> 00:34:29.897
my handwriting, I wrote
a poem on the cover.

00:34:29.897 --> 00:34:32.510
- What brought us together to work

00:34:32.510 --> 00:34:35.000
on that issue was the realization

00:34:35.000 --> 00:34:38.146
that the change that we wanted to see

00:34:38.146 --> 00:34:43.146
happen it really had to be spatial-ized.

00:34:43.240 --> 00:34:48.040
It had to be made physical,
and put in a space.

00:34:48.040 --> 00:34:50.920
Whether a space meant the human body,

00:34:50.920 --> 00:34:53.797
or a landscape, or even a page.

00:34:57.022 --> 00:34:58.270
When we were publishing stuff,

00:34:58.270 --> 00:35:00.370
we were going out theree
and doing research.

00:35:00.370 --> 00:35:02.740
Not being published anyplace else.

00:35:02.740 --> 00:35:04.990
It was a very, very interesting mixture,

00:35:04.990 --> 00:35:08.059
and at that time taking
place in my loft on Crosby.

00:35:08.059 --> 00:35:10.480
I remember there were nights when I was

00:35:10.480 --> 00:35:13.046
dying to go to sleep
and it was still going

00:35:13.046 --> 00:35:15.623
til 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning.

00:35:17.970 --> 00:35:19.960
I love to look at them now, because

00:35:19.960 --> 00:35:21.390
what I\'m looking at now, it looks

00:35:21.390 --> 00:35:23.460
like something so ancient, it\'s not

00:35:23.460 --> 00:35:26.330
glossy, it wasn\'t digital, it\'s

00:35:26.330 --> 00:35:30.973
almost like a hand-ground out object.

00:35:31.830 --> 00:35:34.670
- We were together because we thought it\'s

00:35:34.670 --> 00:35:37.408
necessary to investigate and examine

00:35:37.408 --> 00:35:40.590
every bloody thing in the world.

00:35:40.590 --> 00:35:43.193
Every practice, every way
of doing, the language.

00:35:48.400 --> 00:35:50.620
The things that I was working against

00:35:50.620 --> 00:35:52.020
that were so important had to do

00:35:52.020 --> 00:35:55.194
with there not being any
active pronoun in the language.

00:35:55.194 --> 00:35:58.283
I was only a caboose, but all my books had

00:35:58.283 --> 00:36:02.360
the man and his images, the
artist and his materials,

00:36:02.360 --> 00:36:04.804
every student will move his car,

00:36:04.804 --> 00:36:07.440
there was no neutral pronoun until

00:36:07.440 --> 00:36:08.870
it was fought for, desperately,

00:36:08.870 --> 00:36:11.020
in the middle \'70s, as you know.

00:36:11.020 --> 00:36:15.689
- At one point, we were going
his slash her, his slash her,

00:36:15.689 --> 00:36:17.470
(laughs)

00:36:17.470 --> 00:36:19.530
which I found very annoying to read

00:36:19.530 --> 00:36:22.660
and have to rewrite in that way, but

00:36:22.660 --> 00:36:25.387
it was a way of getting people to be

00:36:25.387 --> 00:36:28.430
very conscious of yeah that\'s right,

00:36:28.430 --> 00:36:31.101
the books are always him and his,

00:36:31.101 --> 00:36:35.270
and here we were trying to slash \'em,

00:36:35.270 --> 00:36:36.700
and trying to make \'em equal.

00:36:36.700 --> 00:36:38.530
- How do you expect to get cultural

00:36:38.530 --> 00:36:41.630
change if you can\'t even
change a goddamn pronoun?

00:36:41.630 --> 00:36:43.940
Even know, somebody just told me to

00:36:43.940 --> 00:36:48.210
go to a website called Save Mankind.

00:36:48.210 --> 00:36:50.461
And I thought, nah.

00:36:50.461 --> 00:36:52.593
How \'bout Save Humankind?

00:36:59.910 --> 00:37:01.990
- [Male Voiceover] Quote, three things

00:37:01.990 --> 00:37:06.630
have been difficult to tame.
The ocean, fools, and women.

00:37:06.630 --> 00:37:08.960
We may soon be able to tame the ocean,

00:37:08.960 --> 00:37:12.713
but fools and women will take
a little longer, unquote.

00:37:13.620 --> 00:37:16.683
- When we had the lawsuit
at Time Incorporated,

00:37:18.080 --> 00:37:19.840
New York Magazine came and did

00:37:19.840 --> 00:37:22.800
a story on that because it was a big deal.

00:37:22.800 --> 00:37:26.870
They took a photograph
and it was the women from

00:37:26.870 --> 00:37:29.170
Fortune who were involved,
the women from Time,

00:37:29.170 --> 00:37:32.962
the women from Sports
Illustrated, the women from Life.

00:37:32.962 --> 00:37:37.240
And there was a picture of
us in New York Magazine,

00:37:37.240 --> 00:37:40.920
and Robert Hughes, the great art critic,

00:37:40.920 --> 00:37:43.350
who was at Time and said,
looked at the picture

00:37:43.350 --> 00:37:46.500
and he said, \"A bunch of
truck drivers in drag.\"

00:37:46.500 --> 00:37:48.752
It was very widely know everywhere

00:37:48.752 --> 00:37:53.752
that women were the researchers,
and men were the writers.

00:37:54.450 --> 00:37:56.410
A woman would say \"I think I\'m ready

00:37:56.410 --> 00:37:59.990
to have a tryout as a
writer\", and the editors

00:37:59.990 --> 00:38:02.187
would laugh behind her back and say

00:38:02.187 --> 00:38:05.073
\"She wants a key to the
men\'s room\" ha, ha, ha.

00:38:05.073 --> 00:38:08.520
And this is why, you have to acknowledge

00:38:08.520 --> 00:38:13.143
every act of courage
because it is so hard to do.

00:38:14.440 --> 00:38:17.150
If I say, \"Can you please move that nail

00:38:17.150 --> 00:38:20.477
two inches to the left?\" they say,

00:38:20.477 --> 00:38:24.527
\"Oh what a picky bitch\", if a man says,

00:38:24.527 --> 00:38:28.640
\"Can you move this five thousand ton

00:38:28.640 --> 00:38:31.847
piece of sculpture four
inches to the left?\"

00:38:32.740 --> 00:38:35.840
They say, \"He\'s brilliant
isn\'t he? He knows what

00:38:35.840 --> 00:38:37.330
he wants, he\'s brilliant, he knows

00:38:37.330 --> 00:38:40.173
it\'ll look better there.\" Why?

00:38:41.100 --> 00:38:44.780
- My best painting
teacher, who was a gruff,

00:38:44.780 --> 00:38:47.300
cigar-smoking, abstract expressionist,

00:38:47.300 --> 00:38:50.360
and very supportive of what I was doing

00:38:50.360 --> 00:38:54.047
said, \"Don\'t set your heart on art.

00:38:54.047 --> 00:38:56.339
\"You\'re only a girl,
you\'re a talented kid,

00:38:56.339 --> 00:38:59.239
\"but don\'t set your heart on art.\"

00:38:59.239 --> 00:39:04.239
There were no women
teachers, none, not one.

00:39:04.820 --> 00:39:08.700
- When I moved to London in 1972, I was

00:39:08.700 --> 00:39:10.860
given a one-woman show at the

00:39:10.860 --> 00:39:12.940
Institute of Contemporary Art in London

00:39:12.940 --> 00:39:15.410
where I\'m sure no other Latin American

00:39:15.410 --> 00:39:18.453
woman had ever had a one-woman show.

00:39:21.699 --> 00:39:25.150
The entire Board moved to push

00:39:25.150 --> 00:39:29.460
my exhibition away into a hallway

00:39:29.460 --> 00:39:31.890
because for them, it was imprudent

00:39:31.890 --> 00:39:35.043
transgression to have a woman like me.

00:39:43.948 --> 00:39:45.310
- The way people treated women

00:39:45.310 --> 00:39:47.273
you had to be very courageous.

00:39:47.273 --> 00:39:49.520
Women artists would move all the

00:39:49.520 --> 00:39:51.220
toys out of the entire house,

00:39:51.220 --> 00:39:53.060
get the kids taken care of somewhere else,

00:39:53.060 --> 00:39:54.650
even the husband, I mean God forbid

00:39:54.650 --> 00:39:56.870
you be anything but an artist.

00:39:56.870 --> 00:39:58.720
We did a little survey once where

00:39:58.720 --> 00:40:00.420
we sent women into galleries,

00:40:00.420 --> 00:40:01.560
or, women went into galleries,

00:40:01.560 --> 00:40:03.340
with their slides and the galleries

00:40:03.340 --> 00:40:04.617
would say \"Thank you very much,

00:40:04.617 --> 00:40:06.317
\"we\'re not looking at slides now\",

00:40:07.733 --> 00:40:11.170
and then we sent men in
with the same slides,

00:40:11.170 --> 00:40:13.199
and they were interested!

00:40:13.199 --> 00:40:17.570
It was just that kind of basic stupidity.

00:40:17.570 --> 00:40:19.450
So we just started gather slides,

00:40:19.450 --> 00:40:21.310
hundreds and hundreds of slides.

00:40:21.310 --> 00:40:23.762
And when they did something, we would

00:40:23.762 --> 00:40:25.124
call them up and say \"You have

00:40:25.124 --> 00:40:25.957
to look at the women\'s registry!\"

00:40:25.957 --> 00:40:28.410
- Before the summer, Elizabeth Murray had

00:40:28.410 --> 00:40:30.658
a retrospective at The Modern, okay?

00:40:30.658 --> 00:40:34.000
Big, big thing, we all were very, very

00:40:34.000 --> 00:40:37.030
excited about it, and I love her work.

00:40:37.030 --> 00:40:39.820
And the the Times comes
out with an article

00:40:39.820 --> 00:40:42.540
and the article says a visit

00:40:42.540 --> 00:40:46.803
with MoMA\'s first grandmother,
written by a woman.

00:40:47.708 --> 00:40:49.103
Should I name her?

00:41:05.550 --> 00:41:07.130
- If you\'re a child looking through

00:41:07.130 --> 00:41:10.110
art history looking for female names,

00:41:10.110 --> 00:41:12.393
they don\'t really exist.

00:41:14.140 --> 00:41:15.950
Now, with the internet, you can find them,

00:41:15.950 --> 00:41:18.843
but they were hard to
find when I was a child.

00:41:21.810 --> 00:41:23.003
Let\'s put it flat.

00:41:24.730 --> 00:41:27.933
Put the top of the painting here.

00:41:33.000 --> 00:41:34.651
- [Joan] So what do you think

00:41:34.651 --> 00:41:36.201
the principle thing was that you

00:41:36.201 --> 00:41:37.034
were fighting for then?

00:41:38.605 --> 00:41:39.574
- Then?

00:41:39.574 --> 00:41:40.499
- Yes.

00:41:40.499 --> 00:41:41.575
- Myself!

00:41:41.575 --> 00:41:43.175
I don\'t wanna be a woman artist,

00:41:44.461 --> 00:41:47.390
I don\'t wanna be a man artist,
I wanted to be an artist.

00:41:47.390 --> 00:41:49.813
I wanted that to be my title, artist.

00:41:50.750 --> 00:41:53.750
I thought the only way
that I could do that

00:41:53.750 --> 00:41:57.293
was to be political, to fight for it.

00:42:00.830 --> 00:42:03.070
So then that has to try and I\'ll go back

00:42:03.070 --> 00:42:06.503
and do it again, and again and again.

00:42:15.440 --> 00:42:17.548
- It was so exciting
to be part of Heresies

00:42:17.548 --> 00:42:19.470
that there was never any question

00:42:19.470 --> 00:42:21.800
in my mind that I wanted to be there.

00:42:21.800 --> 00:42:23.670
I would come home at night from a meeting

00:42:23.670 --> 00:42:27.320
which had gone on into
the wee, small hours,

00:42:27.320 --> 00:42:30.435
absolutely exhausted, but so thrilled

00:42:30.435 --> 00:42:33.585
and so keyed up, and do you know what?

00:42:33.585 --> 00:42:38.585
We were smarter with each other
than we were by ourselves.

00:42:39.770 --> 00:42:42.300
- We were arguing about issues, and ideas,

00:42:42.300 --> 00:42:44.240
and politics, and aesthetics.

00:42:44.240 --> 00:42:46.650
We were meeting three four nights a week,

00:42:46.650 --> 00:42:48.835
I would go home, and I
had some of them there,

00:42:48.835 --> 00:42:49.833
and I have some of them there in a folder,

00:42:50.921 --> 00:42:51.754
writing position papers like a class

00:42:51.754 --> 00:42:53.760
or something to present the next day!

00:42:53.760 --> 00:42:57.300
- Yeah, it\'s true, it was heavy duty.

00:42:57.300 --> 00:42:59.450
I don\'t remember how often we met,

00:42:59.450 --> 00:43:01.711
but it was probably once weekly.

00:43:01.711 --> 00:43:04.885
I remember that the
meetings went on forever.

00:43:04.885 --> 00:43:07.900
- And we would pass ground rules.

00:43:07.900 --> 00:43:10.560
Alright, the next time, no one is

00:43:10.560 --> 00:43:13.021
allowed to speak for
more than ten minutes.

00:43:13.021 --> 00:43:16.610
No, eight minutes, but they can speak

00:43:16.610 --> 00:43:18.930
again after five other people have.

00:43:18.930 --> 00:43:20.960
We would make all kinds of rules,

00:43:20.960 --> 00:43:23.061
and we were very earnest about it,

00:43:23.061 --> 00:43:25.690
and it never worked for long.

00:43:25.690 --> 00:43:27.100
- I think there were people like me

00:43:27.100 --> 00:43:30.711
who managed to talk too much
and bull things through.

00:43:30.711 --> 00:43:32.960
Cow things through?

00:43:32.960 --> 00:43:35.393
- This was in all of the
feminist groups I was in.

00:43:35.393 --> 00:43:37.060
It\'s who has the most power.

00:43:37.060 --> 00:43:39.235
It\'s the woman with the biggest mouth,

00:43:39.235 --> 00:43:44.235
with the most aggravating argument,

00:43:44.320 --> 00:43:48.225
that is an argument that
is just unrelenting,

00:43:48.225 --> 00:43:51.580
I\'m right and everybody else is wrong,

00:43:51.580 --> 00:43:54.125
there were no issues
of gray in those days.

00:43:54.125 --> 00:43:55.875
- I think there were so many things

00:43:55.875 --> 00:43:58.610
we were trying to do as feminists.

00:43:58.610 --> 00:44:01.350
So many ideals we had about how people

00:44:01.350 --> 00:44:03.240
would behave if we just got everybody

00:44:03.240 --> 00:44:05.625
in a room and set up a plan.

00:44:05.625 --> 00:44:07.840
And I think it was really good

00:44:07.840 --> 00:44:10.090
to try all of those things.

00:44:10.090 --> 00:44:11.570
- And the arguments were great, too,

00:44:11.570 --> 00:44:13.660
because they were very healthy arguments.

00:44:13.660 --> 00:44:15.680
They were the kind of arguments that

00:44:15.680 --> 00:44:18.140
most Americans, I think, don\'t

00:44:18.140 --> 00:44:21.030
participate in because they get worried.

00:44:21.030 --> 00:44:22.120
- Did people actually walk out?

00:44:22.120 --> 00:44:23.890
I mean, I\'ve been trashed in other groups,

00:44:23.890 --> 00:44:25.690
but did people walk out
of a Heresies meeting?

00:44:25.690 --> 00:44:27.597
- Well, I don\'t remember that.

00:44:27.597 --> 00:44:29.998
I remember us really
struggling with whatever

00:44:29.998 --> 00:44:32.190
it was that was freaking someone out

00:44:32.190 --> 00:44:34.085
until the whole group was freaking out.

00:44:34.085 --> 00:44:36.470
(both laugh)

00:44:36.470 --> 00:44:39.860
- But there was that sense of honesty,

00:44:39.860 --> 00:44:44.100
and there was that sense of no where else

00:44:44.100 --> 00:44:46.175
in your life do you
tell the truth but here.

00:44:46.175 --> 00:44:49.140
This is safe, this doesn\'t go any further.

00:44:49.140 --> 00:44:51.420
And now you\'re making a film about it.

00:44:51.420 --> 00:44:53.350
- [Joan] So much of what
went on in our meetings

00:44:53.350 --> 00:44:56.925
was private, intimate, no
one brought video camera.

00:44:56.925 --> 00:45:00.520
No wonder most of humanity has no idea

00:45:00.520 --> 00:45:02.280
what the second wave was and what

00:45:02.280 --> 00:45:04.033
it meant to thousands of women.

00:45:04.930 --> 00:45:09.040
- It\'s so hard in this
day and age to kind of

00:45:09.040 --> 00:45:11.785
go back to that period where the

00:45:11.785 --> 00:45:15.270
engagement and the passion was there.

00:45:15.270 --> 00:45:17.293
And that\'s what I hunger for.

00:45:25.956 --> 00:45:27.260
- There it is.

00:45:27.260 --> 00:45:29.645
- One of the decisions that the

00:45:29.645 --> 00:45:32.795
editorial collective
for the lesbian issue,

00:45:32.795 --> 00:45:35.670
because that was designated
to be the third issue

00:45:35.670 --> 00:45:39.200
very early on which was
quite remarkable, I must say.

00:45:39.200 --> 00:45:41.470
But when we began to do
a call and we had a group

00:45:41.470 --> 00:45:43.130
of women who were going to be the editors

00:45:43.130 --> 00:45:46.450
for that issue we decided that you must

00:45:46.450 --> 00:45:50.610
be a self-identified lesbian
to be an editor of that issue.

00:45:50.610 --> 00:45:53.210
So when Marty and I brought that back,

00:45:53.210 --> 00:45:55.300
to a main collective meeting

00:45:55.300 --> 00:45:57.610
all fuckin\' hell broke lose.

00:45:57.610 --> 00:46:02.600
It\'s like what, you\'re
discriminating, we can\'t be on that?

00:46:02.600 --> 00:46:06.532
And we\'re going like
no, you can\'t. So there.

00:46:06.532 --> 00:46:10.205
And so certain women who
shall remain nameless...

00:46:10.205 --> 00:46:11.230
- Well, I\'ve never been told before

00:46:11.230 --> 00:46:13.450
that I\'m in a mixed group, you know being

00:46:13.450 --> 00:46:15.280
in Heresies that this is a mixed group.

00:46:15.280 --> 00:46:17.560
She sort of thought we\'re all women,

00:46:17.560 --> 00:46:21.070
and we had to enlighten her on that point.

00:46:21.070 --> 00:46:23.510
And say well, we\'re all women, but some

00:46:23.510 --> 00:46:26.232
of us are different kinds
of women than others.

00:46:26.232 --> 00:46:28.323
- Where do you go to be you?

00:46:29.320 --> 00:46:31.870
I was born in 1952, and growing up was

00:46:31.870 --> 00:46:34.831
like not having the
word for the color blue.

00:46:34.831 --> 00:46:38.200
And the sky was blue
and the ocean was blue

00:46:38.200 --> 00:46:39.970
and your friend\'s eyes were blue,

00:46:39.970 --> 00:46:41.879
and you had no word for it.

00:46:41.879 --> 00:46:44.659
I think for a lot of
lesbians in my generation,

00:46:44.659 --> 00:46:49.659
we felt different, we were
willing to risk ostracism,

00:46:51.830 --> 00:46:53.853
we were willing to be that brave.

00:46:54.780 --> 00:46:58.982
- We had to dig so deep find material.

00:46:58.982 --> 00:47:01.772
This is like so many other situations

00:47:01.772 --> 00:47:06.397
in life now, that people who are coming up

00:47:10.021 --> 00:47:13.890
and who are in their 20s
and 30s, who are gay,

00:47:13.890 --> 00:47:16.830
or lesbian, don\'t have a clue.

00:47:16.830 --> 00:47:18.920
It\'s just impossible to know how

00:47:18.920 --> 00:47:22.430
what a vacuum we were
working in compared to now.

00:47:22.430 --> 00:47:25.580
Now everything is everywhere,
and there was just like,

00:47:25.580 --> 00:47:27.385
you\'d find one little photograph in the

00:47:27.385 --> 00:47:30.600
New York Public Library files that might

00:47:30.600 --> 00:47:32.870
have some hint of lesbians and just think

00:47:32.870 --> 00:47:34.850
(gasp) that might be, that might be!

00:47:34.850 --> 00:47:37.620
A lot of making this issue was like that.

00:47:37.620 --> 00:47:41.060
But then you know, we
made certain assumptions

00:47:41.060 --> 00:47:44.190
like this picture of
these two Chinese women

00:47:44.190 --> 00:47:47.510
at an embassy in Mexico
City at some event.

00:47:47.510 --> 00:47:50.093
And of course, they might
not have been lesbians.

00:47:52.259 --> 00:47:55.148
- A radical gesture was
just putting your work

00:47:55.148 --> 00:47:57.565
in your name in that context.

00:48:00.132 --> 00:48:05.132
It was so tense because
it mattered so much.

00:48:18.790 --> 00:48:20.780
- Being a part of Heresies was

00:48:20.780 --> 00:48:23.663
really a very up thing for me.

00:48:25.330 --> 00:48:28.370
I didn\'t have the boy group anymore.

00:48:28.370 --> 00:48:31.630
I didn\'t have those old
guys, I didn\'t have Bearden,

00:48:31.630 --> 00:48:34.280
I didn\'t have Hale Woodruff.

00:48:34.280 --> 00:48:37.720
I was weaving multicolored linen canvases

00:48:37.720 --> 00:48:41.170
in very geometric minimalists shapes.

00:48:41.170 --> 00:48:45.360
And it was boring, and I was desperate

00:48:45.360 --> 00:48:48.880
to try to bring these
parts of my life together.

00:48:48.880 --> 00:48:51.970
The textile part, the painting part,

00:48:51.970 --> 00:48:54.613
the printmaking part, all of that.

00:48:54.613 --> 00:48:56.880
Before I was a member of Heresies,

00:48:56.880 --> 00:49:00.427
I really thought that the problem of women

00:49:00.427 --> 00:49:02.860
not being recognized was purely

00:49:02.860 --> 00:49:04.890
a white women\'s problem.

00:49:04.890 --> 00:49:08.552
And that\'s what Heresies became for me,

00:49:08.552 --> 00:49:13.090
all my disdain for white feminists just

00:49:13.090 --> 00:49:15.360
disappeared because we
were all in the same boat.

00:49:15.360 --> 00:49:19.707
We just had come at the
boat from different spaces.

00:49:33.200 --> 00:49:34.300
- Commercial art was always the

00:49:34.300 --> 00:49:37.173
step sister of fine arts, and denigrated,

00:49:37.173 --> 00:49:39.562
and I was very impressionable

00:49:39.562 --> 00:49:41.520
even though I always loved type

00:49:41.520 --> 00:49:45.630
I took that very seriously,
that that was a lesser art form.

00:49:45.630 --> 00:49:47.870
And, I think through working on Heresies

00:49:47.870 --> 00:49:49.180
I discovered I didn\'t care whether

00:49:49.180 --> 00:49:51.502
it was a lesser art
form I really liked it.

00:49:51.502 --> 00:49:53.760
And what I liked the most
was the collectivity of it.

00:49:53.760 --> 00:49:57.530
The process is deeply collaborative,
the process of design.

00:49:57.530 --> 00:50:02.150
And that I loved working
in a situation in which

00:50:02.150 --> 00:50:04.190
what was worth doing wasn\'t in question.

00:50:04.190 --> 00:50:06.400
This was the task at hand, now go do it.

00:50:06.400 --> 00:50:09.783
And it liberated me, it
freed me up to be creative.

00:50:11.010 --> 00:50:15.760
The story behind this is
that it was Tuesday, 9/11.

00:50:15.760 --> 00:50:18.050
And when I got into work
my then-editor, Adam Moss,

00:50:18.050 --> 00:50:21.802
who\'s just a brilliant editor, said to me,

00:50:21.802 --> 00:50:24.440
\"What about a memorial?\"

00:50:24.440 --> 00:50:26.780
These clouds were moving this way,

00:50:26.780 --> 00:50:29.210
and we brought it into a digital house,

00:50:29.210 --> 00:50:33.120
and we worked it, and moved
that dust cloud this way.

00:50:33.120 --> 00:50:35.090
Every September I look up in the sky

00:50:35.090 --> 00:50:39.193
and I see those vertical
beams, and I get chills.

00:50:46.752 --> 00:50:49.252
(jazzy music)

00:51:01.290 --> 00:51:04.050
- How do you get to figure out,

00:51:04.050 --> 00:51:05.360
as you\'re becoming radicalized,

00:51:05.360 --> 00:51:06.950
you really haven\'t got a clue?

00:51:06.950 --> 00:51:09.970
All I knew was certain things felt good.

00:51:09.970 --> 00:51:12.210
It felt good to hear I was like a man.

00:51:12.210 --> 00:51:13.940
I wanted to be a man for God\'s sakes,

00:51:13.940 --> 00:51:15.273
they got to do everything.

00:51:16.220 --> 00:51:19.110
So it took me a really
long time to get there.

00:51:19.110 --> 00:51:21.640
And a lot of it had to do with coming

00:51:21.640 --> 00:51:25.393
into Heresies where I
suddenly knew I was home.

00:51:30.430 --> 00:51:33.810
Well I did a whole series a take-off on

00:51:33.810 --> 00:51:35.380
all the fashion.

00:51:35.380 --> 00:51:37.560
And I did a whole serious of drawings

00:51:37.560 --> 00:51:38.963
with the fancy shoes.

00:51:40.300 --> 00:51:42.090
One is Payless.

00:51:42.090 --> 00:51:43.800
- [Interviewer] She has no arms.

00:51:43.800 --> 00:51:45.790
- [Ida] Why does she need arms?

00:51:45.790 --> 00:51:46.940
She\'s got her shoes on.

00:51:48.780 --> 00:51:50.453
Our culture has so changed.

00:51:52.550 --> 00:51:54.600
It\'s all so fast, so accelerated.

00:51:54.600 --> 00:51:56.577
I feel like I\'m running around
(sharp staccato sounds).

00:51:59.360 --> 00:52:03.250
Right now, I am very good on the computer.

00:52:03.250 --> 00:52:06.390
Everything you can see
here is off the computer.

00:52:06.390 --> 00:52:08.490
And this has to do with what the world is

00:52:08.490 --> 00:52:11.057
that you have to catch up with it.

00:52:11.057 --> 00:52:12.413
I love a computer.

00:52:16.407 --> 00:52:20.020
I became a working artist in tandem with

00:52:20.020 --> 00:52:21.828
both the rise of the second wave,

00:52:21.828 --> 00:52:25.119
and the moment that video,
as a small format medium,

00:52:25.119 --> 00:52:27.060
fell out of the industry and into

00:52:27.060 --> 00:52:29.420
the hands of independent artists.

00:52:29.420 --> 00:52:32.670
These two terms, feminism on the one hand,

00:52:32.670 --> 00:52:34.690
and video on the other, became the

00:52:34.690 --> 00:52:36.963
defining features of my work and life.

00:52:38.320 --> 00:52:41.110
Each area was a site for radical shifts.

00:52:41.110 --> 00:52:43.143
One bang upon the next.

00:52:46.800 --> 00:52:49.010
I learned to make images in analog

00:52:49.010 --> 00:52:51.410
photography and 16 millimeter.

00:52:51.410 --> 00:52:54.837
This piece is made in 24p digital video,

00:52:54.837 --> 00:52:56.950
and I can count 17 formats of

00:52:56.950 --> 00:52:59.423
film and video in my studio alone.

00:53:02.520 --> 00:53:05.434
I was raised by a lady, and became a girl,

00:53:05.434 --> 00:53:09.700
a chick, a bitch, a babe, a sista,

00:53:09.700 --> 00:53:11.663
a compañera, a feminist.

00:53:12.950 --> 00:53:15.793
A woman, now and forever, in transition.

00:53:18.430 --> 00:53:19.980
- You know when we first had the idea

00:53:19.980 --> 00:53:23.202
for Heresies, trying to design it,

00:53:23.202 --> 00:53:26.210
the first idea wast that every issue

00:53:26.210 --> 00:53:29.024
would be different from every other one.

00:53:29.024 --> 00:53:31.430
And someone suggested they
would be free standing

00:53:31.430 --> 00:53:32.974
pages that we would roll \'em up

00:53:32.974 --> 00:53:34.993
and put them in a tube and mail them.

00:53:40.743 --> 00:53:45.326
(scissors cutting through thick paper)

00:53:48.670 --> 00:53:50.460
- Young people today never even seen

00:53:50.460 --> 00:53:53.274
a mechanical they don\'t know what this is.

00:53:53.274 --> 00:53:56.500
- Su Fredrich, who is a professional,

00:53:56.500 --> 00:53:58.823
went to make our boards and

00:53:58.823 --> 00:54:00.750
nothing was coming out right.

00:54:00.750 --> 00:54:03.870
And carpenter that I am, at one point

00:54:03.870 --> 00:54:06.993
decided to investigate
the issue of the boards

00:54:06.993 --> 00:54:10.980
and they were not square,
the boards were not square.

00:54:10.980 --> 00:54:13.160
- [Interviewer] No, they were rectangular.

00:54:13.160 --> 00:54:16.640
- Well they were not correct 90 degrees.

00:54:16.640 --> 00:54:18.970
And I went back to Su
and I asked her about it

00:54:18.970 --> 00:54:22.019
and she said, \"Oh yeah,
I used an album cover.\"

00:54:22.019 --> 00:54:24.350
(both laugh)

00:54:24.350 --> 00:54:25.360
- [Interviewer] To trace?

00:54:25.360 --> 00:54:26.910
- I think for a lot of viewers,

00:54:26.910 --> 00:54:28.856
they don\'t know what paste up is

00:54:28.856 --> 00:54:30.580
because now we have
computers, but it was when you

00:54:30.580 --> 00:54:34.830
manually got the galleys of the type,

00:54:34.830 --> 00:54:37.850
and you either waxed them or put

00:54:37.850 --> 00:54:39.480
rubber cement on them and pasted them

00:54:39.480 --> 00:54:41.360
down onto pieces of paper and then

00:54:41.360 --> 00:54:43.961
if there were errors, you would cut it

00:54:43.961 --> 00:54:46.380
between all the lines and then shift

00:54:46.380 --> 00:54:48.330
everything else back into place.

00:54:48.330 --> 00:54:50.330
Which was nightmarish.

00:54:50.330 --> 00:54:52.330
With Heresies, we couldn\'t afford to

00:54:52.330 --> 00:54:55.360
keep making galleys over and over again,

00:54:55.360 --> 00:54:59.370
so doing the paste up for
Heresies was really a trial.

00:54:59.370 --> 00:55:00.650
- I think at the second meeting,

00:55:00.650 --> 00:55:02.360
we went around and I thought these

00:55:02.360 --> 00:55:04.624
women were all whack jobs.

00:55:04.624 --> 00:55:06.401
And I said you need a budget,

00:55:06.401 --> 00:55:08.701
and you need a plan, you
need a business plan.

00:55:10.884 --> 00:55:13.734
And May Stevens starts yelling at me.

00:55:13.734 --> 00:55:15.721
(laughs)

00:55:15.721 --> 00:55:16.554
- [Interviewer] What did she say?

00:55:16.554 --> 00:55:19.107
- She said, \"That\'s exactly
what we don\'t need!\"

00:55:23.190 --> 00:55:25.132
- Remember when we moved from a

00:55:25.132 --> 00:55:26.020
little office to that big office

00:55:26.020 --> 00:55:27.450
over there on Lafayette?

00:55:27.450 --> 00:55:30.532
And then we were gonna
hire an office manager

00:55:30.532 --> 00:55:33.419
and that was worth many discussions like

00:55:33.419 --> 00:55:37.640
what we were gonna pay
her, it was so utopian to

00:55:37.640 --> 00:55:39.605
think that we were gonna just survive

00:55:39.605 --> 00:55:42.542
without grants or funding and somehow

00:55:42.542 --> 00:55:46.140
do this on subscriptions alone.

00:55:46.140 --> 00:55:48.102
- But Harmony would absolutely

00:55:48.102 --> 00:55:52.713
not take money from men for the magazine.

00:55:55.399 --> 00:55:57.620
And I didn\'t feel that
it made any difference

00:55:57.620 --> 00:56:00.173
whether we took money from men or not.

00:56:01.042 --> 00:56:03.760
As long as we got money.

00:56:03.760 --> 00:56:06.140
- I worked at Book of the Month Club, and

00:56:06.140 --> 00:56:10.693
I used to always do things
for free at work for Heresies.

00:56:13.160 --> 00:56:17.070
So, I took in all this
artwork for the Sex Issue,

00:56:17.070 --> 00:56:19.000
and I was there late at night and I was

00:56:19.000 --> 00:56:23.340
in the stat room, making
a stat of like some

00:56:23.340 --> 00:56:26.500
incredibly pornographic
images from the Sex Issue,

00:56:26.500 --> 00:56:30.393
and the boss walked in
on me, and I got fired.

00:56:31.660 --> 00:56:33.850
- Our normal printer was in Vermont,

00:56:33.850 --> 00:56:37.840
and when we sent the issue to them

00:56:37.840 --> 00:56:39.050
I didn\'t hear anything for a while

00:56:39.050 --> 00:56:43.140
and then I heard that
they refused to print it.

00:56:43.140 --> 00:56:44.820
And they were saying it was because they

00:56:44.820 --> 00:56:47.010
were images of full frontal nudity

00:56:47.010 --> 00:56:49.470
and that the women working on it

00:56:49.470 --> 00:56:52.280
were offended by them.

00:56:52.280 --> 00:56:55.133
And that was strange
because there certainly

00:56:55.133 --> 00:56:56.530
had been full frontal nudity in

00:56:56.530 --> 00:56:58.435
other previous issues of Heresies,

00:56:58.435 --> 00:57:00.803
but they weren\'t called the Sex Issue.

00:57:03.330 --> 00:57:05.518
- Oh, I\'m sorry it was
erotica, not pornography.

00:57:05.518 --> 00:57:07.601
(laughs)

00:57:10.350 --> 00:57:14.070
- There were open
meetings after every issue

00:57:14.070 --> 00:57:17.000
where we invited everyone
and anyone to come

00:57:17.000 --> 00:57:18.963
and give us grief, and they did.

00:57:19.870 --> 00:57:22.900
And the way we all sat there in public

00:57:22.900 --> 00:57:26.020
and waiting for people
to throw tomatoes at us,

00:57:26.020 --> 00:57:27.240
there was something sort of so

00:57:27.240 --> 00:57:29.200
vulnerable and exciting about it.

00:57:29.200 --> 00:57:31.787
- I mean we did some crazy things.

00:57:31.787 --> 00:57:35.100
No two issues would have the
same people working on them,

00:57:35.100 --> 00:57:36.870
so that there were no skills that anyone

00:57:36.870 --> 00:57:39.725
gained that they could
pass on to anyone else.

00:57:39.725 --> 00:57:44.020
And it would be redesigned every time.

00:57:44.020 --> 00:57:45.500
But, when you think about it,

00:57:45.500 --> 00:57:48.170
hundreds of women had experiences

00:57:48.170 --> 00:57:51.020
learning things and doing
things they wouldn\'t have done.

00:57:53.000 --> 00:57:56.280
- In essence, whoever had
the idea about changing

00:57:56.280 --> 00:57:58.970
the editorship in every issue was probably

00:57:58.970 --> 00:58:02.620
very smart because it was more fluid,

00:58:02.620 --> 00:58:05.263
and people didn\'t have
to work on every issue.

00:58:06.980 --> 00:58:09.120
- There had to be at
least one or two people

00:58:09.120 --> 00:58:11.870
from the Mother Collective on each issue,

00:58:11.870 --> 00:58:13.460
and then there would be an open call.

00:58:13.460 --> 00:58:16.020
I think that\'s how they were generated.

00:58:16.020 --> 00:58:18.440
And that theme, I don\'t know how they

00:58:18.440 --> 00:58:21.273
announced stuff without
email, but they must have.

00:58:21.273 --> 00:58:23.420
(laughs) Posters?

00:58:23.420 --> 00:58:25.070
It\'s like living in a small town.

00:58:26.260 --> 00:58:29.420
- So in a sense, it\'s
really a way of turning

00:58:29.420 --> 00:58:34.061
feminism into a verb
rather than a noun. Right?

00:58:34.061 --> 00:58:36.960
Like with democracy itself, if you don\'t

00:58:36.960 --> 00:58:38.703
reenact it, it doesn\'t exist.

00:59:05.030 --> 00:59:08.053
- This piece is an old piece
that I did over many years.

00:59:08.930 --> 00:59:10.380
And it\'s actually about my abortion

00:59:10.380 --> 00:59:11.713
from which I nearly died.

00:59:13.030 --> 00:59:14.060
In Guinea.

00:59:14.060 --> 00:59:16.853
And so that\'s me in 1965.

00:59:18.560 --> 00:59:20.410
I never tell everything, so it\'s

00:59:20.410 --> 00:59:23.953
like it\'s a synthesized
story and I\'ll just read it.

00:59:24.937 --> 00:59:28.880
\"1-quinine, 2-pills,
3-soak feet in cold water,

00:59:28.880 --> 00:59:33.880
4-wait, 5-they did this
in Paris Nicole said,

00:59:33.980 --> 00:59:37.471
6-the leaves Guernsey women use, 7-wait,

00:59:37.471 --> 00:59:38.304
8-the leaves arrive,

00:59:38.304 --> 00:59:39.137
9-abortion is legal in
Czechoslovakia I read,

00:59:39.137 --> 00:59:44.137
10-trip to Czech doctor in
Kankan, I lie about the date.

00:59:50.880 --> 00:59:51.713
And then,

00:59:53.297 --> 00:59:56.360
\"13- Sally heard me hemorrhaging,

00:59:56.360 --> 00:59:58.700
I was making morning coffee,

00:59:58.700 --> 01:00:00.367
14- he left the placenta.\"

01:00:02.090 --> 01:00:03.493
So, that\'s the story.

01:00:14.860 --> 01:00:15.693
- C\'mon, Max.

01:00:22.290 --> 01:00:24.313
That\'s my mother, as a young woman.

01:00:26.470 --> 01:00:29.729
Before Heresies I went
into new kinds of work.

01:00:29.729 --> 01:00:31.640
I started using Rosa Luxemburg

01:00:31.640 --> 01:00:33.730
and Alice Stevens, my mother, together.

01:00:33.730 --> 01:00:36.540
Because I wanted to take a woman who was

01:00:36.540 --> 01:00:38.650
terribly accomplished, and a woman who

01:00:38.650 --> 01:00:41.260
never made it, didn\'t have a chance

01:00:41.260 --> 01:00:45.240
to do the things that Rosa
or many women have done.

01:00:45.240 --> 01:00:48.620
And I wanted to say that
both women are valuable.

01:00:48.620 --> 01:00:52.240
In that photograph over
there with all the heads,

01:00:52.240 --> 01:00:54.706
this is after Rosa has been killed,

01:00:54.706 --> 01:00:57.290
and those are the men who killed her.

01:00:57.290 --> 01:01:01.783
Particularly the one with a
black mustache on the right.

01:01:03.320 --> 01:01:05.640
And the woman in the
center is the waitress

01:01:05.640 --> 01:01:07.590
bringing the champagne to them so

01:01:07.590 --> 01:01:10.273
they can celebrate having killed Rosa.

01:01:11.660 --> 01:01:13.930
And then they carried her to the canal

01:01:13.930 --> 01:01:16.370
in the park in the middle of the city

01:01:16.370 --> 01:01:18.400
and threw her into the canal,

01:01:18.400 --> 01:01:20.303
so she was really dead three times.

01:01:31.468 --> 01:01:35.280
- The Goddess Issue came
out of a goddess group,

01:01:35.280 --> 01:01:38.841
and it came out of this
growing interest in

01:01:38.841 --> 01:01:41.420
defining something that could possibly

01:01:41.420 --> 01:01:43.253
be women\'s spirituality.

01:01:44.400 --> 01:01:46.693
- It was very important to establish

01:01:46.693 --> 01:01:50.590
the culture of the
goddess and it goes back

01:01:50.590 --> 01:01:52.740
in time to where we have a different

01:01:52.740 --> 01:01:56.670
model of work and power, a completely

01:01:56.670 --> 01:01:59.010
different cultural art history.

01:01:59.010 --> 01:02:00.750
- What we were doing was extremely

01:02:00.750 --> 01:02:02.940
experimental at that time.

01:02:02.940 --> 01:02:06.470
We were heavily criticized for doing it,

01:02:06.470 --> 01:02:09.830
for even thinking it
let alone acting it out,

01:02:09.830 --> 01:02:13.510
and then when we put together the idea of

01:02:13.510 --> 01:02:16.240
wanting to submit this
to Heresies, we were

01:02:16.240 --> 01:02:18.760
very surprised to learn that 33 women had

01:02:18.760 --> 01:02:20.560
volunteered to be on the collective.

01:02:23.450 --> 01:02:28.266
There had been a conference
in a very impressive church.

01:02:28.266 --> 01:02:31.720
And from the audience a group of women

01:02:31.720 --> 01:02:34.223
decided it was time for a snake dance.

01:02:35.190 --> 01:02:37.170
So they got up in the church and they

01:02:37.170 --> 01:02:41.750
stripped to the waist, and snake danced

01:02:41.750 --> 01:02:45.400
all over the cathedral
and up onto the altar,

01:02:45.400 --> 01:02:49.150
around the altar and then
back down through the church.

01:02:49.150 --> 01:02:50.083
And it was like,

01:02:51.863 --> 01:02:52.696
Wow, whoa!

01:02:53.870 --> 01:02:57.803
The gutsiness of those
women was very inspiring.

01:03:04.011 --> 01:03:07.261
(chanting and singing)

01:03:21.060 --> 01:03:23.960
- It was a year-long discussion,

01:03:23.960 --> 01:03:26.590
a very intense discussion,

01:03:26.590 --> 01:03:30.298
and the conclusion was
we would tell the story

01:03:30.298 --> 01:03:34.683
of how each one of us experienced racism.

01:03:35.530 --> 01:03:37.973
How we had lived and how we had

01:03:37.973 --> 01:03:42.513
discovered this in our own
selves, in our own bodies.

01:03:42.513 --> 01:03:44.680
(singing)

01:03:48.260 --> 01:03:51.249
So I invited the contribution of

01:03:51.249 --> 01:03:54.320
a wonderful Mexican woman called

01:03:54.320 --> 01:03:59.320
Isabel Fraire who had know Alaide Foppa

01:03:59.523 --> 01:04:03.433
who was a Guatemalan woman
who had been disappeared.

01:04:05.690 --> 01:04:09.310
So to be able to include that story,

01:04:09.310 --> 01:04:11.343
that was something very powerful.

01:04:13.960 --> 01:04:17.130
Being a Chilean and having lived in Chile,

01:04:17.130 --> 01:04:22.130
racism was never ever
discussed in Chilean society.

01:04:22.320 --> 01:04:26.790
The pretense was that Latin
Americans are not racist,

01:04:26.790 --> 01:04:29.400
that only Americans are racist.

01:04:29.400 --> 01:04:31.683
And its a very convenient lie.

01:04:32.530 --> 01:04:35.160
Because the truth is that in the places

01:04:35.160 --> 01:04:39.290
where racism is hidden, it\'s
because it\'s more pervasive.

01:04:39.290 --> 01:04:41.980
So to be part of the
collective and to hear

01:04:41.980 --> 01:04:45.890
these women on a regular basis, to go into

01:04:45.890 --> 01:04:49.113
the sphere of what is
unknown, what is really

01:04:49.113 --> 01:04:53.110
gutsy, it was the most enlightening

01:04:53.110 --> 01:04:54.793
and freeing experience.

01:04:57.850 --> 01:04:59.810
- [Joan] As women, we were deeply aware

01:04:59.810 --> 01:05:01.340
of the way our culture divides

01:05:01.340 --> 01:05:04.020
and ghetto-izes us, and we shared

01:05:04.020 --> 01:05:07.470
right from the start, a commitment
to tolerating difference.

01:05:07.470 --> 01:05:10.970
Different politics, aesthetics, cultures.

01:05:10.970 --> 01:05:13.740
Consensus was simply not necessary

01:05:13.740 --> 01:05:15.880
for what we had set out to do.

01:05:15.880 --> 01:05:17.936
We took a broad world view,
inviting and publishing

01:05:17.936 --> 01:05:21.823
work from women on every continent.

01:05:21.823 --> 01:05:25.520
And the odd structure we
had devised for Heresies

01:05:25.520 --> 01:05:28.530
with its autonomous
issue collectives made it

01:05:28.530 --> 01:05:31.550
possible for a variety
of women to represent

01:05:31.550 --> 01:05:33.840
the hot issues of gender and power

01:05:33.840 --> 01:05:36.113
within the terms of their own communities.

01:05:42.490 --> 01:05:45.450
- The first thing I said
when I came into Heresies

01:05:45.450 --> 01:05:47.507
was \"I\'ll do anything but I won\'t write\".

01:05:50.664 --> 01:05:53.497
(laughs) This is what it\'s about, baby!

01:05:54.373 --> 01:05:56.277
- When something would come
in we\'d have a folder for it,

01:05:56.277 --> 01:05:58.313
and then everybody would read it.

01:05:58.313 --> 01:06:01.027
There was a sheet in there
where everybody made comments.

01:06:01.027 --> 01:06:04.993
\"I hate this, I love
this, This is incorrect\"

01:06:05.849 --> 01:06:08.350
- [Interviewer] \"This is contentious\" ?

01:06:08.350 --> 01:06:09.993
- Yes, \"This is illiterate\"

01:06:11.973 --> 01:06:15.153
- Being on a collective
and reading every thing

01:06:15.153 --> 01:06:17.463
that came in and every design,

01:06:18.330 --> 01:06:20.860
oh, and oh my goodness,

01:06:20.860 --> 01:06:23.950
and oh my goodness the
writings were so fabulous.

01:06:23.950 --> 01:06:25.776
The collective was great, but the writings

01:06:25.776 --> 01:06:30.776
and the visuals that were in
those magazines are priceless.

01:06:31.700 --> 01:06:35.347
- You know Art in America,
Art News, Art Forum,

01:06:35.347 --> 01:06:39.070
we were publishing stuff that
they would not have touched,

01:06:39.070 --> 01:06:42.203
and that made it so much sexier and fun.

01:06:45.410 --> 01:06:48.430
- So I had been really
interested in political art

01:06:48.430 --> 01:06:52.010
from the beginning, I
mean that was the reason

01:06:52.010 --> 01:06:55.817
I went to work with Diego Rivera. (laughs)

01:06:58.673 --> 01:07:02.180
There is, in the nature part of my work,

01:07:02.180 --> 01:07:06.740
an anger about what
we\'re doing to the world.

01:07:06.740 --> 01:07:10.633
Probably motivated by
melancholy for what\'s lost.

01:07:12.050 --> 01:07:13.947
There was something about the \'70s,

01:07:13.947 --> 01:07:16.960
and I don\'t know what it was and it\'s

01:07:16.960 --> 01:07:19.033
really hard to capture,

01:07:21.606 --> 01:07:23.160
it was a time of really interesting

01:07:23.160 --> 01:07:26.333
intellectual investigation.

01:07:26.333 --> 01:07:29.283
And a kind of freedom, too.

01:07:32.280 --> 01:07:36.720
Because money really wasn\'t
that much of a concern

01:07:36.720 --> 01:07:40.053
I think in the art and intellectual scene.

01:07:41.390 --> 01:07:46.203
It was more about
investigation and imagination,

01:07:47.680 --> 01:07:49.693
it was poly-interesting.

01:08:03.870 --> 01:08:06.190
- Everyone is always
saying that the \'70s were

01:08:08.300 --> 01:08:13.300
the non-years for art because it wasn\'t

01:08:13.360 --> 01:08:15.680
pop art, or abstract expressionism,

01:08:15.680 --> 01:08:18.946
or minimalism, and I really think that

01:08:18.946 --> 01:08:21.790
the women\'s movement and women

01:08:21.790 --> 01:08:24.746
had a tremendous amount to do with

01:08:24.746 --> 01:08:27.213
kind of taking everything
apart during that decade.

01:08:28.480 --> 01:08:30.946
And after that I was a little surprised,

01:08:30.946 --> 01:08:35.140
I didn\'t understand the conservatism

01:08:35.140 --> 01:08:39.210
that came in after the \'70s,
I didn\'t really get it.

01:08:39.210 --> 01:08:43.293
Why are people not exploring
all these territories?

01:08:45.510 --> 01:08:47.510
Knowing these other women who were

01:08:47.510 --> 01:08:49.570
also taking things apart,

01:08:49.570 --> 01:08:51.653
doing what you\'re not supposed to do,

01:08:52.680 --> 01:08:55.630
was an affirmation that you weren\'t crazy

01:08:55.630 --> 01:08:58.720
because as I came to New
York in the late \'60s,

01:08:58.720 --> 01:09:00.870
if you said you wanted
to be a public artist

01:09:00.870 --> 01:09:02.170
that was really laughable.

01:09:05.560 --> 01:09:08.600
But if you could have artist doing things

01:09:08.600 --> 01:09:11.153
that would make the issue tangible,

01:09:12.700 --> 01:09:17.700
how in a very public
situation can you get a

01:09:18.320 --> 01:09:21.330
sense of immediate
engagement and intimacy,

01:09:21.330 --> 01:09:23.010
and it\'s like that moment out that

01:09:23.010 --> 01:09:26.233
breathing space, ah, of just a moment.

01:09:44.000 --> 01:09:46.868
- What was the definition
of art that Heresies used?

01:09:46.868 --> 01:09:49.410
We didn\'t even need to define art.

01:09:49.410 --> 01:09:53.881
It was so uninteresting to
worry about what art was.

01:09:53.881 --> 01:09:57.040
We were inventing it as we went along,

01:09:57.040 --> 01:10:00.550
and the point was to look at the stuff

01:10:00.550 --> 01:10:02.340
that women were making because no one

01:10:02.340 --> 01:10:03.910
else was looking at it, nobody else

01:10:03.910 --> 01:10:06.533
had access to it, and
it was all about life.

01:10:07.410 --> 01:10:09.540
It was really all about women\'s lives.

01:10:09.540 --> 01:10:12.263
There are so many stories in Heresies.

01:10:13.540 --> 01:10:16.860
- [Joan] Over the course of
our 15 years of publication,

01:10:16.860 --> 01:10:19.630
Heresies made visible
hundreds and hundreds

01:10:19.630 --> 01:10:22.793
of artists and writers whose
work is well know today.

01:10:25.530 --> 01:10:28.900
- There was body art, and
performance art, and video art.

01:10:28.900 --> 01:10:31.080
Feminist art was on the cutting edge

01:10:31.080 --> 01:10:33.180
of all of those things that were emerging.

01:10:35.480 --> 01:10:37.130
- And I think figurative painting

01:10:38.298 --> 01:10:39.998
came out of the fact that there

01:10:39.998 --> 01:10:42.580
had been, in the \'60s and \'70s,

01:10:42.580 --> 01:10:44.930
so many female performance artists,

01:10:44.930 --> 01:10:47.185
and dancers, and filmmakers.

01:10:47.185 --> 01:10:49.170
- There was a certain trajectory

01:10:49.170 --> 01:10:52.340
of modernism and
postmodernism and somewhere

01:10:52.340 --> 01:10:54.770
between those two things
there was feminism

01:10:54.770 --> 01:10:57.810
which completely changed the refraction of

01:10:57.810 --> 01:10:59.160
everything that came after.

01:11:03.420 --> 01:11:06.248
- The story of women\'s traditional arts,

01:11:06.248 --> 01:11:08.810
it was supposed to be an homage

01:11:08.810 --> 01:11:11.870
to all those arts that
women did anonymously.

01:11:11.870 --> 01:11:15.690
And then we discovered
that in some cultures,

01:11:15.690 --> 01:11:18.210
it was actually a form of oppression.

01:11:18.210 --> 01:11:21.285
Like little girls going blind making lace.

01:11:21.285 --> 01:11:24.700
The politics of that issue
became very complicated,

01:11:24.700 --> 01:11:26.980
and very interesting, and
there was a dialectic.

01:11:26.980 --> 01:11:30.310
So we ended up-- women\'s
traditional arts, slash,

01:11:30.310 --> 01:11:32.270
the politics of aesthetics.

01:11:32.270 --> 01:11:33.940
- In the decorative arts issue,

01:11:33.940 --> 01:11:36.930
we did a combination of looking at women

01:11:36.930 --> 01:11:38.840
contributing to what were sometimes

01:11:38.840 --> 01:11:40.530
called decorative arts as if it were

01:11:40.530 --> 01:11:44.850
a lesser phenomenon, or indigenous arts,

01:11:44.850 --> 01:11:47.580
as if that was something less than Fine.

01:11:47.580 --> 01:11:49.190
And by putting these
together in the issue,

01:11:49.190 --> 01:11:50.930
I think we made the point very clearly

01:11:50.930 --> 01:11:53.340
for ourselves and we hope for the public,

01:11:53.340 --> 01:11:58.340
that these were clean,
interesting, and dynamic forms.

01:11:59.680 --> 01:12:02.909
- And that issue had a huge
impact with art historians.

01:12:02.909 --> 01:12:04.690
Not just breaking out of the grid,

01:12:04.690 --> 01:12:07.700
but breaking off the
boundaries of painting.

01:12:07.700 --> 01:12:11.019
- We got a lot of press,
and we also got a lot of

01:12:11.019 --> 01:12:15.500
very negative press,
we were really reviled.

01:12:15.500 --> 01:12:18.160
But we got under people\'s skin,

01:12:18.160 --> 01:12:21.020
and they responded very strongly.

01:12:21.020 --> 01:12:23.850
- That\'s the other part
that I think went beyond

01:12:23.850 --> 01:12:27.340
the pattern of decoration
was bringing back content.

01:12:27.340 --> 01:12:30.910
And no one, I think, has
looked at that very seriously.

01:12:30.910 --> 01:12:33.633
And that, to my mind, is
one of the biggest shifts.

01:12:53.607 --> 01:12:56.420
- Well I think we pumped
the blood back in.

01:12:56.420 --> 01:12:59.470
There was color field painting,

01:12:59.470 --> 01:13:01.023
and there was minimal art.

01:13:01.940 --> 01:13:03.750
Color field painting was so boring,

01:13:03.750 --> 01:13:07.073
I really wanted to be a
maximilist not a minimilist.

01:13:08.300 --> 01:13:09.713
- [Interviewer] What\'s a maximilist?

01:13:09.713 --> 01:13:11.863
- A maximilist, you
put a lot of things in.

01:13:13.271 --> 01:13:15.533
(laughs) It\'s lot of stuff.

01:13:16.570 --> 01:13:18.820
Instead of walking in
and looking at a painting

01:13:18.820 --> 01:13:23.200
that had two marks and
saying \"Wow, look at that\",

01:13:23.200 --> 01:13:25.460
and turning around and walking away,

01:13:25.460 --> 01:13:27.250
I wanted the paintings
to have a beginning,

01:13:27.250 --> 01:13:29.100
a middle, and end, a resolution,

01:13:29.100 --> 01:13:31.980
a dramatic part, a sad part, a happy part.

01:13:31.980 --> 01:13:34.623
I wanted one painting to contain

01:13:34.623 --> 01:13:38.723
many, many different emotions
and feelings and ideas.

01:13:41.080 --> 01:13:43.290
Well I made political paintings.

01:13:43.290 --> 01:13:45.710
I made Resurrection, the 27-foot

01:13:45.710 --> 01:13:48.530
painting about violence against women.

01:13:48.530 --> 01:13:50.760
I collected hundreds
and hundreds of articles

01:13:50.760 --> 01:13:52.010
from local newspapers when I

01:13:52.010 --> 01:13:53.610
traveled all around the country.

01:13:56.130 --> 01:13:57.970
Then I made a list in the painting

01:13:59.286 --> 01:14:01.023
it was everything that happened

01:14:01.023 --> 01:14:02.423
to each of these people with their names.

01:14:04.590 --> 01:14:09.273
The narrative of rape,
and then resurrection,

01:14:09.273 --> 01:14:12.023
resolution at the end somehow.

01:14:14.310 --> 01:14:16.640
But I really did wanna change the way

01:14:16.640 --> 01:14:20.733
things were for women in the
world and in the art world.

01:14:24.373 --> 01:14:25.480
- [Young Female Voiceover]
Ever since the girl became

01:14:25.480 --> 01:14:27.340
a woman, she and her father have

01:14:27.340 --> 01:14:29.283
tried to remain on friendly terms.

01:14:30.180 --> 01:14:33.063
They write each other often,
and see each other rarely.

01:14:34.030 --> 01:14:36.515
They even exchange birthday
and Christmas presents,

01:14:36.515 --> 01:14:38.440
although the woman doesn\'t send any

01:14:38.440 --> 01:14:40.793
to his third wife, or their two daughters.

01:14:42.000 --> 01:14:44.350
- Pretty much all my work has been

01:14:44.350 --> 01:14:46.510
in some way very personal.

01:14:46.510 --> 01:14:50.240
I think that is entirely because I am

01:14:50.240 --> 01:14:53.570
a feminist artist and so
the personal is political.

01:14:53.570 --> 01:14:55.453
Just get in there and figure it out.

01:14:59.157 --> 01:15:01.490
I think the hardest thing for me

01:15:01.490 --> 01:15:03.890
in becoming a filmmaker as a woman

01:15:03.890 --> 01:15:08.890
was that in the late \'70s and
early \'80s it was unusual.

01:15:09.430 --> 01:15:12.030
There were great women
filmmakers working at the time,

01:15:12.030 --> 01:15:16.060
Margarethe von Trotta, Anna
Svarda and Barbara Coppel.

01:15:16.060 --> 01:15:19.150
It wasn\'t, I wasn\'t the
first woman filmmaker.

01:15:19.150 --> 01:15:23.900
That\'s me and Mirenere, and Dave Lee.

01:15:23.900 --> 01:15:27.260
But, going out into the world meant

01:15:27.260 --> 01:15:30.330
dealing constantly with technicians,

01:15:30.330 --> 01:15:33.010
equipment rental places, labs,

01:15:33.010 --> 01:15:34.770
that weren\'t used to dealing with women.

01:15:34.770 --> 01:15:36.960
And every time I went
into one of those places,

01:15:36.960 --> 01:15:39.744
I had to think ahead, okay just be as

01:15:39.744 --> 01:15:42.610
firm and clear as you possibly can,

01:15:42.610 --> 01:15:44.220
and don\'t take no for an answer,

01:15:44.220 --> 01:15:46.400
and don\'t take any shit from them.

01:15:46.400 --> 01:15:50.507
With 30 years of feminism, it still is

01:15:50.507 --> 01:15:53.480
a very bad situation for women filmmakers.

01:15:53.480 --> 01:15:54.780
I think you have to go into every

01:15:54.780 --> 01:15:56.770
situation assuming the
worst, assuming that

01:15:56.770 --> 01:15:58.380
that person is not gonna respect you

01:15:58.380 --> 01:16:00.478
because you\'re a woman, and always assume

01:16:00.478 --> 01:16:03.233
that you have to prove
yourself better than men.

01:16:04.210 --> 01:16:06.371
Oh yeah, we have Title IX, everybody

01:16:06.371 --> 01:16:08.510
gets to play soccer now, but the reality

01:16:08.510 --> 01:16:11.521
is that women are still
seen differently than men,

01:16:11.521 --> 01:16:14.468
and our stories are still considered to be

01:16:14.468 --> 01:16:17.440
particular for the women\'s channel,

01:16:17.440 --> 01:16:18.790
and men\'s stories are universal

01:16:18.790 --> 01:16:20.433
even though they\'re not.

01:16:21.580 --> 01:16:24.230
And in Film Comment, there was an article

01:16:24.230 --> 01:16:26.993
by Paul Schroeder about a film cannon.

01:16:28.960 --> 01:16:32.923
60 films, not a single one by a woman.

01:16:35.040 --> 01:16:37.540
- Right from the very beginning, we

01:16:37.540 --> 01:16:42.540
re-attempted to expand on
the very idea of feminism.

01:16:44.230 --> 01:16:48.030
We had the lesbian issue
as part of the original

01:16:48.030 --> 01:16:50.570
four issues that we were going to do,

01:16:50.570 --> 01:16:53.250
we had the great goddess,
and of course later on

01:16:53.250 --> 01:16:56.220
other things came to pass
such as the third world

01:16:56.220 --> 01:16:59.823
women issue, the women and violence issue.

01:17:01.107 --> 01:17:02.890
It was absolutely essential to talk

01:17:02.890 --> 01:17:05.294
about those things and to bring them up

01:17:05.294 --> 01:17:08.480
into the consciousness
of the entire society,

01:17:08.480 --> 01:17:12.530
not just ourselves, before
other things could happen.

01:17:12.530 --> 01:17:16.600
- I think the girls don\'t
want to call themselves

01:17:16.600 --> 01:17:19.120
feminists, and don\'t want to have any

01:17:19.120 --> 01:17:24.120
association with feminism because
they fear for their lives.

01:17:25.710 --> 01:17:30.710
So it is fear, the fear
of the violence that is

01:17:30.880 --> 01:17:35.880
heightened in our society to a
level unknown, and therefore,

01:17:36.500 --> 01:17:39.150
the young girls, they don\'t know this

01:17:39.150 --> 01:17:41.470
consciously, but they know they

01:17:41.470 --> 01:17:43.717
have to be pretty to be protected.

01:17:44.678 --> 01:17:47.053
It is a protection.

01:17:47.053 --> 01:17:50.315
It is pure protection against violence,

01:17:50.315 --> 01:17:53.430
and the don\'t know it, and
they don\'t wish to know it.

01:17:53.430 --> 01:17:55.783
Because knowing it is dangerous.

01:17:57.230 --> 01:17:58.580
- [Joan] By the end of the \'70s,

01:17:58.580 --> 01:18:00.160
I remember seeing the first big

01:18:00.160 --> 01:18:02.640
batch of posters for slasher films.

01:18:02.640 --> 01:18:06.020
We\'d been on the verge
of making our personal,

01:18:06.020 --> 01:18:08.620
symbolic, and independent victories into

01:18:08.620 --> 01:18:10.582
laws that would change the system

01:18:10.582 --> 01:18:13.750
and guarantee solid answers to Freud\'s

01:18:13.750 --> 01:18:17.030
ridiculous question,
\"What do women want?\".

01:18:18.090 --> 01:18:21.560
Pay equity, medical privacy, the remaking

01:18:21.560 --> 01:18:23.950
of work to allow for the reproduction of

01:18:23.950 --> 01:18:26.780
the species in a more reasonable way.

01:18:26.780 --> 01:18:30.630
We nearly made it, but
the system, men\'s system,

01:18:30.630 --> 01:18:32.920
felt challenged in it\'s board rooms

01:18:32.920 --> 01:18:35.942
and in its very bedrooms, it hit back.

01:18:35.942 --> 01:18:38.220
- Every once and a while I\'m shocked at

01:18:38.220 --> 01:18:41.060
where we\'ve ended up from
where we started out.

01:18:41.060 --> 01:18:44.417
It\'s so complicated, here we were part of

01:18:44.417 --> 01:18:49.156
something still this 20th
century ideal of revolution.

01:18:49.156 --> 01:18:54.156
And revolution has turned
out to be a tricky thing,

01:18:54.200 --> 01:18:57.500
and it\'s not so easily embraced.

01:18:57.500 --> 01:19:00.310
And there are so many things that are so

01:19:00.310 --> 01:19:04.250
frightening and difficult in this period

01:19:04.250 --> 01:19:08.500
of time, and I could see that it would be

01:19:08.500 --> 01:19:13.100
very easy to retreat to the safe position.

01:19:13.100 --> 01:19:15.842
- Being a feminist is
such a dirty word today.

01:19:15.842 --> 01:19:18.640
Nevermind, I\'m going too far. Go.

01:19:18.640 --> 01:19:21.963
- Well it\'s always been a
sort of subversive word,

01:19:21.963 --> 01:19:26.010
but it\'s become sort of a smutty word.

01:19:26.010 --> 01:19:28.400
It\'s not exactly dirty, but a lot

01:19:28.400 --> 01:19:30.542
of people don\'t want to say, \"You bet I\'m

01:19:30.542 --> 01:19:33.330
a feminist, why do you even ask?\"

01:19:33.330 --> 01:19:35.310
- In a way you have to tell girls

01:19:35.310 --> 01:19:36.980
you\'re the same, you\'re equal, you can do

01:19:36.980 --> 01:19:39.153
anything you want to
do, but the problem is

01:19:39.153 --> 01:19:42.730
that girls have to know that
men don\'t really think that.

01:19:42.730 --> 01:19:45.380
- It\'s very hard for me,
I know a lot of wonderful

01:19:45.380 --> 01:19:49.127
young women who seem to be
feminists without asking them

01:19:49.127 --> 01:19:51.210
\"Are you a feminist?\", I
would say here\'s a strong,

01:19:51.210 --> 01:19:54.560
independent woman who\'s living her life

01:19:54.560 --> 01:19:56.750
and isn\'t that wonderful and so forth,

01:19:56.750 --> 01:19:59.279
but I have an awful feeling
that if I asked them if

01:19:59.279 --> 01:20:00.580
they were feminists that some
of them wouldn\'t say yes.

01:20:00.580 --> 01:20:02.500
- [Joan] And a lot of young
women I know think that

01:20:02.500 --> 01:20:04.170
if you identify as a feminist that

01:20:04.170 --> 01:20:05.690
you\'ll be seen as a victim.

01:20:05.690 --> 01:20:07.030
- But that doesn\'t make you a victim,

01:20:07.030 --> 01:20:10.279
that makes you a fighter,
victims are people

01:20:10.279 --> 01:20:12.510
who don\'t do anything about it.

01:20:12.510 --> 01:20:14.552
- Well, one of the things
that Lucy said which

01:20:14.552 --> 01:20:19.552
was very touching is that
when young women don\'t

01:20:20.150 --> 01:20:23.460
want to call themselves
feminists, we get insulted.

01:20:23.460 --> 01:20:28.123
We worked so hard for
that title and that right.

01:20:30.150 --> 01:20:32.100
- Once you are a feminist, it\'s hard to

01:20:33.452 --> 01:20:34.790
sort of suddenly say
you\'re not one anymore.

01:20:34.790 --> 01:20:36.830
You can\'t give someone the look

01:20:36.830 --> 01:20:39.600
I\'m-a-feminist-and-you-are-too anymore.

01:20:39.600 --> 01:20:42.240
- I think it\'s not cool
to be a feminist anymore,

01:20:42.240 --> 01:20:45.093
that\'s all, but I don\'t care
about cool \'cuz I\'m old.

01:20:47.390 --> 01:20:52.390
I don\'t have to be cool
now, it\'s not required.

01:20:52.610 --> 01:20:55.120
- I find that most women of our generation

01:20:55.120 --> 01:20:59.140
who are doing work that they
want to be doing in their lives

01:20:59.140 --> 01:21:01.900
they\'re all feminists, and they all have

01:21:01.900 --> 01:21:05.220
gone through this soul-searching period

01:21:05.220 --> 01:21:08.680
in their lives where they really came to

01:21:08.680 --> 01:21:12.190
terms with their position as a woman

01:21:12.190 --> 01:21:15.690
in whatever field they\'re in,
and did something about it.

01:21:15.690 --> 01:21:18.470
And it\'s a hard thing to do, you

01:21:18.470 --> 01:21:20.309
need a lot of support to do it.

01:21:20.309 --> 01:21:23.950
That was the glory of
Heresies, we were all there

01:21:23.950 --> 01:21:27.300
for each other, we were like this team.

01:21:27.300 --> 01:21:30.070
And it gave us tremendous power

01:21:30.070 --> 01:21:32.093
in the rest of our lives.

01:21:37.570 --> 01:21:41.410
- In 1970 when I came to visit Lucia,

01:21:41.410 --> 01:21:44.513
this was very remote from the town.

01:21:46.060 --> 01:21:48.350
My grandmother was from Andalusia,

01:21:48.350 --> 01:21:51.220
she was very moved when I told her that

01:21:51.220 --> 01:21:53.243
I had discovered this wonderful place.

01:21:54.890 --> 01:21:56.950
I was considering getting a piece of land,

01:21:56.950 --> 01:21:59.320
but I didn\'t have the resources to do it,

01:21:59.320 --> 01:22:01.320
and then she said, well, I\'ll give you

01:22:01.320 --> 01:22:03.943
the money so you can go back for me.

01:22:05.250 --> 01:22:07.110
And at that point, it became clear

01:22:07.110 --> 01:22:11.190
that any developer that would
buy it would just build it up.

01:22:11.190 --> 01:22:14.470
It was very sad to imagine that happening

01:22:14.470 --> 01:22:16.323
to this incredible piece of land.

01:22:17.320 --> 01:22:20.033
So, I decided to build it myself.

01:22:21.520 --> 01:22:26.520
In a sense, this is also a
piece of utopian thinking.

01:22:27.790 --> 01:22:31.350
Maybe a little bit
closer to the traditional

01:22:31.350 --> 01:22:33.840
meaning in that I\'m trying to create a

01:22:33.840 --> 01:22:35.590
congenial community of neighbors,

01:22:35.590 --> 01:22:39.500
but also in that it
will stand as a critique

01:22:39.500 --> 01:22:43.483
of the typical way of doing
development in this part.

01:22:44.980 --> 01:22:48.310
- [Joan] You\'re conquering
this huge piece of rock.

01:22:48.310 --> 01:22:51.390
- The idea was not so much to conquer it,

01:22:51.390 --> 01:22:53.333
I guess, as to accommodate to it.

01:23:07.680 --> 01:23:11.910
- I just always felt
very, very, very lucky

01:23:11.910 --> 01:23:13.940
to have sort of emerged as an artist

01:23:13.940 --> 01:23:15.933
at that moment in the women\'s movement.

01:23:17.430 --> 01:23:19.160
It was just a stroke of total luck,

01:23:19.160 --> 01:23:21.490
and I thank my lucky stars
every day of my life,

01:23:21.490 --> 01:23:25.953
because I know how hard it was
for women previous to that.

01:23:30.960 --> 01:23:35.166
And so we had the momentum,
we have the optimism,

01:23:35.166 --> 01:23:38.250
we had the energy, we had the numbers,

01:23:39.870 --> 01:23:44.233
it was just the most
exciting thing to be part of.

01:23:46.670 --> 01:23:50.140
I had been collecting for some years

01:23:50.140 --> 01:23:53.170
U.S. Government tactical pilotage charts.

01:23:53.170 --> 01:23:55.150
And somehow this came together as

01:23:55.150 --> 01:23:56.853
being a piece about aerial war.

01:23:58.760 --> 01:24:01.710
There are 24 sections,
and they\'re all places

01:24:01.710 --> 01:24:04.853
that the U.S. bombed
between 1945 and 2000.

01:24:06.170 --> 01:24:09.070
These are places that
suffered the same trauma.

01:24:09.070 --> 01:24:10.953
The trauma of U.S. bombardment.

01:24:15.650 --> 01:24:17.960
I\'ve been involved in the peace movement,

01:24:17.960 --> 01:24:20.970
and it\'s all women, not only in America,

01:24:20.970 --> 01:24:23.633
world wide the peace movement is women.

01:24:25.690 --> 01:24:26.963
It\'s very moving to me.

01:24:31.730 --> 01:24:33.810
- When I was in college,
one of the professors,

01:24:33.810 --> 01:24:36.290
I think it was the Art History professor

01:24:36.290 --> 01:24:38.790
who taught the Art Since 1960 class,

01:24:38.790 --> 01:24:41.270
she had thrown out a bunch of stuff, and I

01:24:41.270 --> 01:24:42.603
was just always around the studios

01:24:42.603 --> 01:24:44.693
just all the time, scavenging.

01:24:45.752 --> 01:24:47.715
(all laugh)

01:24:47.715 --> 01:24:48.617
And I found a whole
collection of old Heresies.

01:24:51.415 --> 01:24:54.240
That was when I first found Heresies,

01:24:54.240 --> 01:24:57.786
in the fucking trash,
and I still have them.

01:24:57.786 --> 01:25:02.260
- Looking for young feminists,
I found more than a few,

01:25:02.260 --> 01:25:05.530
and I was thrilled to be
introduced to L.T.T.R.

01:25:05.530 --> 01:25:09.250
- This is issue four, it\'s
called Do You Wish to Direct Me?

01:25:09.250 --> 01:25:11.910
- A contemporary women\'s
collective, they produce

01:25:11.910 --> 01:25:14.180
their own magazine, ambitious in

01:25:14.180 --> 01:25:17.102
both style and content, focused on gender.

01:25:17.102 --> 01:25:21.760
Around it, they\'ve
created a network of shows

01:25:21.760 --> 01:25:24.790
and bands and parties and joint projects.

01:25:24.790 --> 01:25:26.513
A gender-conscious community.

01:25:27.800 --> 01:25:30.109
- My advice is to seek out people

01:25:30.109 --> 01:25:33.270
with whom you have kindred spirits.

01:25:33.270 --> 01:25:34.640
Because that\'s what we did, that

01:25:34.640 --> 01:25:36.453
was our advice to ourselves.

01:25:37.540 --> 01:25:40.210
And I think that also
you should keep yourself

01:25:40.210 --> 01:25:43.610
keen as a sharp blade,
you have to be real sharp

01:25:43.610 --> 01:25:45.823
to move in this world that we all live in.

01:25:47.370 --> 01:25:49.890
You have to be quite clear that between

01:25:51.223 --> 01:25:52.340
all the negatives there\'s actually some

01:25:53.423 --> 01:25:54.630
sort of interesting
space, and if you find it,

01:25:54.630 --> 01:25:56.380
and push your way through it,

01:25:56.380 --> 01:25:59.230
you\'ll find a way to create
the thing that you\'re after.

01:25:59.230 --> 01:26:02.580
- You need to organize
with other people, period.

01:26:02.580 --> 01:26:04.680
Because you will be just isolated

01:26:04.680 --> 01:26:07.190
and alone if you don\'t do it.

01:26:07.190 --> 01:26:09.889
- I just think you have
to maintain optimism.

01:26:09.889 --> 01:26:13.340
If we didn\'t think we were
gonna take over the world,

01:26:13.340 --> 01:26:15.293
how could we have started Heresies?

01:26:16.260 --> 01:26:17.390
If we didn\'t really believe that

01:26:17.390 --> 01:26:19.780
we had something to say, we wouldn\'t

01:26:19.780 --> 01:26:20.870
have been able to do that.

01:26:20.870 --> 01:26:23.362
And I think that\'s the
critical thing, is to

01:26:23.362 --> 01:26:25.680
really struggle to get out there

01:26:25.680 --> 01:26:27.723
what you think and what you believe.

01:26:29.890 --> 01:26:31.810
- Yet a woman, in the oval office,

01:26:31.810 --> 01:26:35.233
most powerful person in the
world, what\'s the downside?

01:26:36.190 --> 01:26:38.856
- You mean besides the P.M.S.
and the mood swings, right?

01:26:38.856 --> 01:26:40.710
(screaming and thunder rumbling)

01:26:40.710 --> 01:26:43.430
- When we talk about the
second wave feminism,

01:26:43.430 --> 01:26:45.030
it\'s also as if it\'s
something that\'s meant

01:26:45.030 --> 01:26:47.770
to have a beginning and an end.

01:26:47.770 --> 01:26:50.500
And at the end of it,
then you can look back

01:26:50.500 --> 01:26:53.368
and say, \"Okay, what did we accomplish?

01:26:53.368 --> 01:26:56.367
\"What should we do, what is the agenda

01:26:56.367 --> 01:26:59.410
\"for the third wave feminism and so on?\"

01:26:59.410 --> 01:27:02.150
I don\'t think that it
ever ended, but I think

01:27:02.150 --> 01:27:05.555
that 30 years later, or 35 years later,

01:27:05.555 --> 01:27:09.440
the very same issues
that we were dealing with

01:27:09.440 --> 01:27:12.283
exist in some part of the world.

01:27:13.470 --> 01:27:15.380
- Of course you keep
fighting, because it\'s

01:27:15.380 --> 01:27:18.050
what we believe in, it\'s
why we came together,

01:27:18.050 --> 01:27:21.027
and even after how many
years that we were together,

01:27:21.027 --> 01:27:26.027
we all still are in
concert with our values.

01:27:26.060 --> 01:27:27.210
It\'s remarkable.

01:27:27.210 --> 01:27:28.930
- I think that is one of the things

01:27:28.930 --> 01:27:32.480
that went wrong since
the \'70s, that people

01:27:32.480 --> 01:27:35.550
were separated from one
another and the feeling

01:27:35.550 --> 01:27:39.570
of collective movement,
the feeling of togetherness

01:27:39.570 --> 01:27:43.242
was lost in the \'80s, so all this gift

01:27:43.242 --> 01:27:47.655
that we received is time to pass it on.

01:27:47.655 --> 01:27:51.440
I think that\'s what we\'re
collectively doing now.

01:27:51.440 --> 01:27:53.920
That\'s why we\'re sitting here together,

01:27:53.920 --> 01:27:58.870
because when we transmit
the gift, the gift is

01:27:58.870 --> 01:28:01.130
as if it were life force itself.

01:28:01.130 --> 01:28:04.728
It gets strong and it
needs to be passed on

01:28:04.728 --> 01:28:08.960
because truly the young girls have been

01:28:08.960 --> 01:28:12.410
prevented from having access to

01:28:12.410 --> 01:28:15.020
that same energy that we had.

01:28:15.020 --> 01:28:18.990
This collective energy
of women\'s togetherness

01:28:19.910 --> 01:28:22.063
which is something very specific.

01:28:22.940 --> 01:28:24.943
- [Joan] The thing that most thoroughly

01:28:24.943 --> 01:28:26.957
blew my mind about our
journey to find the Heretics

01:28:26.957 --> 01:28:30.060
was the way that we had
picked up our conversations,

01:28:30.060 --> 01:28:33.100
the intensity of them,
as if we were in them

01:28:33.100 --> 01:28:36.703
not 30 or 35 years ago,
but the night before.

01:28:37.630 --> 01:28:39.780
- I just loved our get
togethers it was a fabulous

01:28:39.780 --> 01:28:41.790
group of women we sat and we talked

01:28:41.790 --> 01:28:45.640
and we were intense we were serious.

01:28:45.640 --> 01:28:47.010
- And that was the beginning for me,

01:28:47.010 --> 01:28:48.330
of actually meeting with women.

01:28:48.330 --> 01:28:50.183
Who ever heard of meeting with women?

01:28:52.310 --> 01:28:56.830
- Friendship, companionship,
common cause, and really,

01:28:56.830 --> 01:29:01.390
hopefulness that we thought
we could change things,

01:29:01.390 --> 01:29:02.343
and in fact we did.

01:29:03.457 --> 01:29:05.940
- [May] I, and my friends,

01:29:05.940 --> 01:29:08.670
we made the world better for women.

01:29:08.670 --> 01:29:10.780
We fought for what we believed in,

01:29:10.780 --> 01:29:12.960
and we put it in our art!

01:29:12.960 --> 01:29:15.550
And I can\'t understand how
you can do anything else.

01:29:15.550 --> 01:29:18.720
- We tried to reach out, we
tried to really be inclusive,

01:29:18.720 --> 01:29:21.453
we really tried to
understand other viewpoints.

01:29:24.257 --> 01:29:26.250
- [Joan] The histories of our feelings

01:29:26.250 --> 01:29:29.740
were long and deep, by accident and luck,

01:29:29.740 --> 01:29:31.790
we had shared a moment of our lives that

01:29:31.790 --> 01:29:35.220
made all the difference
in how we would live them.

01:29:35.220 --> 01:29:38.150
- I think it\'s so much a part
of me, I can\'t separate it.

01:29:38.150 --> 01:29:40.660
In other words, that experience gave me

01:29:40.660 --> 01:29:43.123
the courage the confidence to be who I am.

01:29:44.090 --> 01:29:48.000
- It\'s not the cranky,
it\'s not even the analytic

01:29:48.000 --> 01:29:52.263
aspects of feminism,
it\'s the for-life part.

01:29:54.530 --> 01:29:57.303
- Muy bien! Whoa, three o\'clock!

01:30:00.450 --> 01:30:01.719
- Brava?

01:30:01.719 --> 01:30:03.017
- [Interviewer] Brava.

01:30:03.017 --> 01:30:04.540
- Okay.

01:30:04.540 --> 01:30:07.220
(cheersign)

01:30:07.220 --> 01:30:09.590
- It was important that women work,

01:30:09.590 --> 01:30:12.180
and were incredibly influential,

01:30:12.180 --> 01:30:17.040
but I think simultaneously,
or a nanosecond later,

01:30:17.040 --> 01:30:20.520
what we had contributed was co-opted.

01:30:20.520 --> 01:30:23.667
- There are times when movements and when

01:30:23.667 --> 01:30:28.450
certain kinds of social change can happen,

01:30:28.450 --> 01:30:30.920
and when the time is
right for it to happen.

01:30:30.920 --> 01:30:35.330
It\'s probably due pretty
soon any day now, I hope.

01:30:35.330 --> 01:30:37.253
- How can anybody retire?

01:30:40.940 --> 01:30:42.420
- [Joan] As we moved along our journey,

01:30:42.420 --> 01:30:44.700
we kept examining the mystery.

01:30:44.700 --> 01:30:46.040
Had our piece of the movement

01:30:46.040 --> 01:30:48.513
produced meaningful and lasting effects?

01:30:49.350 --> 01:30:51.117
At some point, someone
asked me if Crescent

01:30:51.117 --> 01:30:53.720
and Lily had been my students.

01:30:53.720 --> 01:30:57.130
Yes, I\'ve been teaching for over 30 years.

01:30:57.130 --> 01:31:00.860
There was a big part of our
answer, right in front of us.

01:31:00.860 --> 01:31:03.960
These capable young women, ably handling

01:31:03.960 --> 01:31:07.050
the complexities of
multiple-location shoots.

01:31:07.050 --> 01:31:09.803
It had gone full circle, so there.

01:31:10.960 --> 01:31:15.450
- I asked my gardener
what to name my garden,

01:31:15.450 --> 01:31:17.417
and she said \"The Journey\".

01:31:18.870 --> 01:31:21.054
- [Joan] What will catalyze the

01:31:21.054 --> 01:31:22.430
steps of these future women?

01:31:22.430 --> 01:31:25.020
We agree that we don\'t know, but we leave

01:31:25.020 --> 01:31:28.670
our stories for them, to cast
our lights across the path.

01:31:30.927 --> 01:31:33.344
(rock music)