Rural Identities

Engaging complex social and political issues with those who, to date, have been spoken about,but never had a chance to speak.

Linda Gammell and Sandra Menefee Taylor: Re-picturing Rural Identity/ Spirit/Politics

Taylor: We thought we should tell you a little bit about ourselves, and how and why we would take on a project like this. Linda and I have been working together for about ten years on what is basically rural identity. My reason for staying with a project like this is: this is where I live, this is what I am. My relationship to the land is important to me, and I eat. I grew up rural. We're going to talk about how identity happens in rural America, how people who live there perceive it, and what it's like to be called a flyover.

Gammell: We talked a lot about the flyover, and we talk a lot about why you might be interested in it. You might not have a rural identity. The original project came from us thinking about how we grew up. I grew up in a small town along the Mississippi river, and at that time it was primarily German or Swedish farmers who immigrated to that area several generations ago. So, our identities, even as artists, have always sprung from these so-called roots. The idea of going back and working within these groups of people seemed to be really important to us. Also, we have the background- a lot of you have asked us about this- we've known each other for a really long time and the roots of the project probably came from early feminist work. We worked together in one of the best known feminist galleries. The physical gallery has disbanded, but it continues as the Women's Art Registry in Minnesota. A lot of the idea for collaboration came from that. And we also talked this morning about how maybe it's the fact that we live in Minnesota, which is a very democratic state. I think a lot of times political and social actions comes from this idea that you work together to get something done. We've all been involved in projects like that.

Taylor: Sometimes we talk about, "Well, maybe we shouldn't do this any more." However, I have to tell you this story. Part of the way my work gets financed is from grants. A couple of years ago, I got a grant to continue this work and to start some work dealing with the body. I discovered that our relationships to the body and to the land are pretty similar, in terms of industrial thinking. It has to do with finding and fixing it. I got what's called a leadership grant for the the work that I do. A couple of weeks ago the winners of that grant got together for a retreat, and in introductions to each other, the woman who introduced me said, "And in a couple of weeks she's going to New York University to talk about rural identity." The house came down- everybody laughed. So that's a good reason for me to keep talking and keep doing, because somehow I'm still considered not a part of the rural identity. And I think I am. So we're going to show you... what we have done is started working with rural women because we observe that they were the most invisible. They were only represented in media... going as far back to- some of you might remember- "farmer's daughter" jokes. They're now called "Iowa cheerleader" jokes. "Why did the Iowa-Notre Dame game get cancelled on Friday? They couldn't get the Iowa cheerleaders to quit grazing out on the field." When we started working, we started gathering images.

Gammell: We called them "sightings." We had lots of friends who were helping us. "Noticing," I guess you could call it- noticing things out in the culture- evidence, if you want to use the word "evidence." The slide on the left was sent to us by one of our collaborator's daughters, who lives in Hollywood. She happened to come across the Farmer's Daughter Motel. We call the project the Farmer's Daughters Project: In Her Own Image. It has kind of a dual title. We've been thinking that now we maybe need to change it and broaden it a little bit. But that's how it started out- the Farmer's Daughter Project, kind of taking off on those farmer's daughter jokes. They're still around. There was a Hollywood movie not too long ago about the urban son that visits the rural daughter. The way it's set up is very similar to what we've seen for the last thirty or forty years. I'll read the text, the Arlene Raven text: "The way in which we think of ourselves has everything to do with how our world sees us, and how we can see ourselves successfully acknowledged by that world." It's something that we think is very clear about how identity impacts on a person's ability to respond and act in the world. This work began in about 1989 and it involves several projects. Cheryl was very interested in hearing how the project has evolved. Maybe we could talk about working with women. We had worked with women in the collective. We talked about the idea of being spoken about, and have always felt that women's voices have not been heard. We talked about a lot of the work in high schools and different groups, and I thought what we would do is read you a few words in terms of what "rural" means to other people. In the high schools that we went to we visited some groups and asked them, "What words come up for you when you think about 'rural?'" It went on a continuum, and it was very interesting. First of all, "nothing." If you get in a car and drive from one part of the country to another, it's countryside. Often times you don't see people working, so rural issues are invisible. There's not an image that comes up. But the words that the students talked about were "peaceful", "simple", "simple-minded", "hard work", "empty", "dying", "dying places", and "the places where disasters happen" like plane crashes, rapes, kidnappings, and such. So this is "Greetings From Minnesota," where we're from.

Taylor: This is a fairly new calendar. (slide)

Gammell: It looks like it's from the forties but it was last year.

Taylor: And it's a fairly new advertisement of what we might sell in Minnesota. We just thought we'd acquaint you with work that we were doing before we got together. My principal identity is that of a sculptor or an installation artist. What I was doing before we started working together was still dealing with issues of land. This installation was one of my first works dealing with land and our relationship to it. It was the beginning of the "farm crisis", as we called it. These tablets had the description of land, like "The Southeast Corner of the West Quarter of Meridian, 1982." The photograph in the middle is land printed on top of plaster so it looks like an artifact. On the little shelf underneath it is the other description of land: "We moved here because I wanted to raise my family." So there were two different pieces of language about land. The other one is a series of baskets which incorporate text from the Homeric hymns.

Gammell: I think a lot of our work has to do with a certain kind of history. One of the things that we talked about when we were thinking about presenting, is what are the thematic things that, no matter what we're doing, tend to come through. One of them is history and pre-history, and understanding, respecting and honoring the idea of history. Often times I think this culture is considered ahistorical, in that as a culture we don't honor and bring that forward in a knowing kind of way. We read a lot of things about "place," and the idea of placement. Place is also understanding where you're from, on very many different levels. Often times we work together where we are dealing with the stories of the people and the histories of the people. The two projects- one, earlier on when I was talking about working with other women and the voices of women- the slide on the right comes from a project where I was simply the documentarian. I was the listener and I was kind of the silent voice. It was a project that was a precursor to what Suzanne Lacy was doing in the Crystal Quilt Performance project. The Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota has a think-tank where they try to get people together. It's named after Hubert Humphrey, and there's a whole lot of social and political activity and research associated with it. They were very interested in the idea of older women, and how they lead, what are their leadership qualities and characteristics? They got the women together, and they simply talked about their lives–in the Native American community, how did this woman organize her people and her tribe to make baskets, and to teach them the crafts of using black ash baskets; or whatever it may be–sometimes it was theater, sometimes it was the arts, sometimes it was medicine. They simply talked, and one of the things that was fascinating for me to learn in this process is that they're not leaders in the normal way that we think of leadership, as being hierarchical. They're leaders that are quiet leaders. They just work in their communities, and they get things done. We didn't really do very much but we did produce a videotape of these women speaking about that, and it's used kind of in their training. There were five of us, including a video person, a sociologist and a couple of photographers. One of the things in which these women were really interested in was that we were there to hear their stories. They didn't just want to talk to themselves, but often we were the focus of their stories. There was this interest in speaking to us almost in a tribal sense of passing it down to the people who were recording it, for whatever reason. One of the things that led me to this personally, talking about personal background, is that I was trained to be a journalist. Quickly that did not work out because I was really frustrated by how that system was like in terms of telling a story, and what I viewed as important. They were totally different. The idea of objectivity, I just wasn't interested in that.

Taylor: This is the first work that we did together. We included a historian in this process. We've always used another discipline in our work- an historian, or a sociologist, and this one is with a historian who did oral histories for this project. This was brought about from my own family experience, with the voices of "father," "daughter," and "son." It's about the phenomenon of farm foreclosure, which, represented in media, generally boils down to failing managers and inept people who couldn't manage their finances. There is a lot more to it than that. It has to do with how land prices are established, and changed, having nothing to do with land. It has to do with financial institutions that tell farmers that they couldn't loan them $5,000, they could only loan them $100,000, because you actually should be farming X number of acres. So you become indebted more than you saw your capacity. Then when land prices change, you've become a "bad manager," and you lose the land. What happens in that is it pits family against family, because there's an assumption of personal failure. This is a book called "Landscape of Hope and Despair."

Gammell: What was interesting to me, in my family, my father was a local businessman, and he sat on the bank board. He was the one who would come home and say, "Bad farmer. This person is a bad farmer."

Taylor: This particular piece of land that we chose to focus on also had at one time one of those four-corner towns which usually contains what it takes to support a community, which would be a small store, a school, a church, and if it's a dairy community, a creamery or butter-maker, and that's what this was. Long ago, in the early fifties, that part of the community was wiped out because the economic system changed. We went back and researched the artifacts and started with that story of decline.

Gammell: This is the corner. This is Sandra's father, and kind of a historical marker. Nothing is there any more except the butter-maker's house, that your brother lives in today. On this page, I don't know if you can see that, but it says "father, daughter, son," and they're speaking about their experience. One of the things that we found out is that when Jo did the life histories the versions were very different. The father's version of why he came to farm is very different than the brother's version. Sandra can talk about this a little bit more. And then Sandra's response as an artist and someone who's moved away from the farm was a little bit different. But I might speak about the images, which are not very clear. One of the things that we love about working collaboratively is you just gather stuff. It just kind of happened serendipitously, in a way that makes the project really interesting. If I were to say anything about working collaboratively it is that this way of research is fascinating. It's different than when you have a project laid out the way it's going to be and then you do it the way you planned it; we didn't work that way at all. We said we were going to do this project and then things just showed up. One of the things that showed up was an older farmer who lived next to Sandra's family farm. He had a box with old eight millimeter movies. So we asked him if we could look at them and translated some of the pictures. I don't know if you can see this one, but it's a float from the fifties or sixties; it says "Progress and 4-H Hand in Hand," and there's a missile image. We talked about farmers feeding the world, that the farmer had an obligation to work hand in hand with technology, and there it was visually. Also what was there visually that we talked about in the text was the idea that people worked together. That's very different than what's happening now.

Taylor: It's also part of the change in the economic system, where everyone has a $60,000 machine, instead of "you get the tractor, I get the planter."

This is the structure of the book. We didn't know what the structure would be, but on our many trips back and forth, we saw that on the freeway, the signs of the communities around there implied what it was they had in mind when they settled these communities. Which was hope, freeborn, new rich land, heartland... So we decided that would be the visual of the book. This is sort of a performance book too: the landscape lays out in front of you, and then you pick up the earth to read.

Gammell: The quotations are some of the quotations that we've used in the past, all the way from Chief Joseph to Ellen Goodman to National Geographic. The idea was to try to contextualize the idea of the story of this particular farm. The question that seems to keep coming up in all of our work is "Who are the experts?"

Taylor: It continues as a theme as we move through this way of working. The conflict between doing what you learn, which you need to do with growing things in the earth, and learning what the experts tell you you should do... drugs and pesticides...

Gammell: What we try to do, too, as artists, we talk a lot about trying to use what we know how to do, what our tools are, and then what might be the kinds of images that we all see in the newspapers, and often times it's about disasters, about the floods in East Grand Forks, or it's about the drought. Occasionally there is some really good work that's being done; if you're interested, another really good piece of writing is Breaking Hard Ground, by Diana Hunter–stories of the Minnesota farm advocates. I think what we thought about the farm crisis and a lot of what happens is almost like Manifest Destiny–it's done with, it's gone, it's progress. We try to talk about that as being, well, is it an "either/or" situation?

Taylor: We did the book project, and I got asked by a museum in South Dakota to come and do an installation there. This is when we began talking about, instead of worrying about media images and why they're so lopsided, why don't we go talk directly to rural women? This group of women that I started talking with all had grown up rural but did other things now. They were lawyers, teachers, and doctors. I went and spent a few hours with them- a very short time- to get them to tell me what that experience was like for them. Then I did this installation- I also asked them to take a photograph of what was valuable about that growing up, if there was anything- that installation over there is what came of that. The yellow that you see is all oats, so that there's information coming through your feet when you walk up; there's that interior space, which is all covered with flour, and the photographs that they took, in little gold frames, in that white interior landscape.

Then there's text on these transits here. I'll tell you about one: this was a young woman who is now a lawyer. Her father had been State Representative; and she still cried when she told me that her mother had lived in St. Louis when she was a young woman, and when she told her family that she was marrying a farmer and moving to South Dakota, her father forbade any of the family from ever going to visit this daughter again because she had married so badly. That's the existing prejudice, historical and existing.

More of being spoken about: this is a current line of cards that you can buy, right now. It's called Country Characters. They depict both men and women- these are the women's.

These are a couple ways to sell ideas of rural people. We always ask, what is that man saying to that child? Anybody want to venture that?

Audience: "That's where the parking lot will be."

Taylor: When we show that to a group of farmers, they say, "That's probably what they intended, but that is not possible any more, so it's not the truth at all, that's the stereotype that we still work under." It's a chemical company's annual report. This one is a full page ad for nuclear power, and clean air.

Gammell: What we think of in terms of what we want to talk about is to stay away from nostalgia. The dictionary definition is "a sentimental longing for something in the past." When we look at these very contemporary ads, within a year or two most of them, what we find is that the advertising industry uses country to sell that kind of idea. This is Nordstrom's catalog.

This one on the left is from '94. If you've ever been to Minnesota, you know we have the Mall of America. One of the stores that opened up and is very popular is Farm Toys. The idea is that they would capitalize on those people who have fond memories of growing up on a farm, and they could sell replicas of the machinery that they had used and loved when they were kids.

Taylor: There's all kinds of ways to sell nature; there's an idea of the real thing. Try to remember this cow ad, because we're going to come back to it later when women start talking about what their cows mean.

Gammell: It was a study in black and white.

I think about a year ago. I noticed in the Native American humor show, also the Juan Valdez image came up again. I think it was on a piece of ceramic art.

The one on the left is the workshop process. We did get a grant to do this. We were really fortunate to work with the Minnesota Food Association, a nonprofit organization, a really enlightened one. They really believe that art is one of the vehicles that they would use as an organizing tool. They were helping us to do this, and we got a grant to invite rural women to sit around and tell their stories. This is kind of how we did it. It's a picture of the women sitting.

Taylor: Our idea was, rather than being spoken about and represented by art directors, that it might be our responsibility as artists to go out and speak directly with the women that we were talking about. And that's what we did. Also, maybe we should say at this point, I've never taken a project that I didn't have a relationship to, and I probably wouldn't. Even if there were grants around that said, "We need to hire an artist to work.".. I don't know what... in my own mind, that's how I need to work: I need to have a relationship to the subject matter. I'm working in the health care industry right now, but that's because I have a relationship to it, and I got there through my life rather than an opening. The women who came to our workshop were self-selecting. We just opened up the process to the members of the Food Association and said, "Would you come and talk to us for a day?" What we did was to talk about why would we do this, why are we talking to rural women. We talked about stereotypes, we talked about how images are made, what they say, where they came from, what's the history, making pictures about women and land... and we'll show a little bit of that process. I think our state of reason is that we need to give back when we're working with groups of people. We try to give them some of our ideas.

Gammell: I think that when they talk, we don't intervene a whole lot. One of the things that we really have liked a lot is that they tell stories, and a little bit later you'll see that they brought objects. I made some photographs of them holding the objects. The slide on the left is when we began, and this is, again, how the project shifted. We began working with stereotypes, and then we realized that they were fully aware of their own stereotypes. This is the list of the words that they identified with themselves. We had big pads of paper...

Taylor: They knew they were being talked about like this.

Gammell: "Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning" is one... you can read them. We had lots of them.

Taylor: But they all had bad haircuts and big legs, and things like that. They knew that's how they were represented. Of course they felt powerless to do anything about it.

Gammell: These are some of the places that we held the workshops. Fogg Organic Farms is in Michigan; Michael Fields Institute is in Wisconsin. These are some of the women.

Taylor: We ate really good food.

Gammell: ... and had a lot of fun. We should probably say, too, that I didn't quite understand exactly what the issues about community were, but one of the interesting things we found out- and I really like this the best about this kind of research- is that you make certain assumptions, and then the assumptions are really not what you thought they were going to be. I think you have to pay attention, we felt that we needed to pay attention to that really carefully. The idea of rural women being a monolithic group is the same as if you thought about artists as being a monolithic group- they aren't at all. Some of them- the woman who's sitting on the picnic table ran for governor, she's very politically active...to people who are very very conservative, quite religious, different views. The thing that was very interesting was they found a place where they could come together and talk.

Taylor: She's been in jail for protesting power lines. Patti records her own music and writes it.

This is just a little bit of what we showed them about image-making. We went back in history, again, and showed them a little bit about their history as being female, being represented in relationship to the land, in the realm of the sacred...

Gammell: We, as artists, talked about the images that we've come across in terms of representation of the "rustic." The one on the right slide is Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell. The idea in England from the 1850's onward of representing the rustic in a rural situation was popular. The one on the left is from a whole genre of Italian painting. Some of these paintings were reproduced in tourist brochures trying to get very urban people to come and visit Italy. In the countryside you would also come across young, beautiful Italian farm girls.

Taylor: We did a little bit of art historical talk about women artists re-presenting themselves as actors. Often times in the 1800's, women were not represented as the "do-ers," so we talked a little bit about being a do-er, and being represented as do-ers.

Gammell: We talked about Dorothea Lange, and her American Country Women project. This was a project that she got very little support for. It was sort of her own personal project. She did it over a period of something like fifteen to twenty years. One of the things that was very interesting is that she picked rural women from all over the country. I think she made two portfolios of this project, and at the time of her death only one had been purchased.

Taylor: The reason we put Millet in is, if you've ever read some of John Berger's essays, he mentions Millet as going against the canon of the academy at the time. Using peasants or rural people was not considered the correct subject for the fine art of painting. So we mentioned that part of history, too. These are from the portfolio of American Country Women.

Gammell: This is the kind of text she used, kind of fragmented, so that women were from Nebraska, Utah... western and midwestern states, pretty much. Then she re-photographed them, over time, so occasionally you'd see Mary Ann Savage, when she was alive, and then there was one of her tombstone later; so she followed them again and again. That's the kind of project you hear about now quite a lot, that is people re-photograph to get a larger context; but I think this project is the first one that I knew about.

Taylor: Now we're back to the experts, and re-imaging ourselves. The experts show up a lot, and I probably could back up to that first book. My brother, who lost my father's farm, went to ag school and was sold the idea that bigger was better, and mechanization was better. He lost part of his native wisdom by believing in all the "experts." This slide is a vision of what agriculture should be. It's from the seventies. There is not a human person there. I believe it says somewhere that the farmer is behind his computer. All the land is farmed by that thing that goes back and forth. The city is back in the mountains.

Gammell: And the pesticides are coming off the planes.

Taylor: Yes, the planes- there's no human hand here. We have obliterated all contact.

This is brand new. This is by Dupont... the "forward-thinking.".. "Farmers are businessmen. We have to be. Anybody of any size here is managing over half a million in assets. We're in constant contact with our world through computers, fax, cell phones. The stereotype of the farmer doesn't ring true any more."

Gammell: I think one of the things that we become aware of is a real simplistic thinking that comes through in advertising. Now, the idea is that the farmer needs to use a computer; and actually a lot of the women that we talked to, yes, there's no question about that, absolutely yes. But in terms of making other choices, and how science and business market ideas to farmers.

Taylor: In order not to feel backwards, behind, a stereotype, the impulse is either to believe that or feel foolish.

Now these are pictures from the workshops that we did. In order to start conversation and building the story, we asked each woman who came to bring an object which to them represented what it meant to be rural. I think the idea was that sometimes objects contain ideas which can't be judged, they're just their ideas, and they're ways to start talking and being that no other kind of conversation can. We're going to just click through these portraits. We asked the women themselves to take their objects and hold them in any way that they wanted to. Linda photographed them, and this is some of the text. We'll just read some of the things that they told us during their processes. They don't necessarily relate to the slides. A little performance piece here...

"It's a little amusing to me that everything has cows now, but it's the kind of idealized, cleaned-up version of the country."

Gammell: "I want kids to look at eating in a different way, and try to eat animals that are raised in a way that they're being respected. If they're in a cage, they can't scratch in the dirt, they can't feed themselves, they can't do all those chicken things."

Taylor: "I always wanted to do outside work, and farming. But I really don't want to do the farming that they're doing now, with the big tractors and all of that."

Gammell: "I never understood the phrase 'Thank God It's Friday' because on the farm, working was just what you did."

Taylor: "I feel most fortunate that my children are growing up on the farm. It makes sense. What their parents are doing, they can see the change of seasons, and they can see us caring for the cows."

Gammell: "I am going to show you that you can do sustainable agriculture in which you can have good soil. You've got to have healthy soil, and healthy plants, and healthy human beings. I know from my medical experience that nobody is going to listen to me, but they'll watch over my fence to see what I'm doing."

Taylor: "If you're identified as a stereotype and carry that, you're always in protection mode, rather than in open, caring, thinking, feeling mode."

Gammell: "Farmers never had a voice on television until the herbicide people decided to make this perfect image of the farmer be their mouthpiece."

Taylor: "I think I've had kind of an inferiority complex, and probably my whole family did. We certainly thought we were inferior to the people in the city."

Gammell: "Food that has the same surroundings and breathes air that you breathe, and is grown by you, is a lot healthier. The more you can eat this food, the longer through the year, the healthier you will be, physically and spiritually."

Taylor: I'm going to try and get this cow back. On the last workshop we did, I took along some clay. It just so happened that all the women we were talking to that day were dairy farmers. When I found out, I took along this clay and I gave them each a piece. I said, "While we're talking, would you just make me a cow?" They of course said, "Get out of here! Go on- we're not artists, we don't do that." They made us the most fantastic cows. All I had to do was tell them, "Just tell me what you know about cows." And they just made these wonderful animals. This is one.

Gammell: We gave everybody in that workshop one of those cows.

Taylor: They're the ones you buy in the craft store, and dress up, and stuff like that.

After this workshop process we do these installations. This one was in a museum, in St. Paul. Using, again, the text in the mud- this is all mud, on the wall- I traced the hands of the women that we worked with into this foliage pattern. The walls were painted with three kinds of mud. See the slides back here- these are the same portraits, which are flashing into this table, which contain photographs taken by rural women of what's important to them.

Gammell: One of the ways that we worked collaboratively, is we both collect like crazy. Through the grant we got some money, we gave each of them either a roll of black and white film or we gave them one of those disposable cameras. We gave them a mailer, with stamps on it, and said, "Send us back the undeveloped film, and we'll get them developed." We just sent them home, and said, "Photograph whatever you want to photograph." What happened is that the photographs were reflecting what the conversations were about. It was really amazing to us because we realized that they were talking with one another, and certain issues would come up, and the photographs weren't photographs in the same way that we think about photographs. Like when we go to art school and we learn about composition, or learning about lights and darks and how pictures look. It's all about a symbolic kind of representation. So they would photograph their religious institutions, or the grain elevator, or the idea that the Hardee's was right next to the grain elevator and what that meant. That's what all these little pictures are.

Taylor: Now this is the artist's book that we did from this collection process. It's called The One About The Farmer's Daughter: Stereotypes and Self-Portraits.

Gammell: All the pictures that you saw previously are pretty much in there. It's kind of in the form of a tourist postcard tear-out, so the texts from their conversations are in here. They aren't identified as individuals, but the conversation is going here and there and bringing up different aspects of their lives, sometimes extremely political, sometimes poetic, sometimes very personal. We just let those kind of float. We decided that a lot of times what we like to do is work against the tradition that we know of text-image, where the caption goes underneath and it fits. We decided to cut across that. Sometimes we've gotten modest grants to do this project, and sometimes we haven't. Sometimes the work goes into institutions and sometimes it doesn't. One of the things about our identities as artists is that nobody knows where to put us. We don't really have a name, we're not Gilbert and George.

Taylor: We're thinking of "the Cowgirls."..

Gammell: Yeah, we're thinking of changing that... But you do a book here, an installation there, and then the next question is, "What do you do? Did you do those photographs? You didn't do those photographs, did you, because they don't look like your pictures." Or, in Sandra's case, with the first book, there wasn't any installation, so, "Sandra, what did you do?" There's this idea among artists that we have our media specialties that we do, and there's this division of labor. We talk a lot about trust, and we also talk about how you get along for ten years or so. One of the things that makes us work together is that- maybe these words sound too pretentious -- we have a pretty similar ethical and value system. Our outlook on the world, our views, are more similar than different. There's this sense of trust that when Sandra says, "I don't know, maybe we could think about doing it this way," I think a real good collaboration means that I need to hear that. It changes, and the down side of it is that it's very slow, it's an extremely slow way of working.

Taylor: It's definitely not being attached to an outcome. I want to tell you a little story: the top photograph up there is... she brought a cow magnet and a refrigerator magnet, and a necktie with cows on it, but her story was that she's a teacher in a suburb of Minneapolis. Her school, which is a very urbane school, decided to have a "Dress Like a Farmer Day," and she hit the roof. The rest of the faculty, the principal, etc., said, "Knock it off! Get real, who cares about that stuff, anyway." So what she did was to get out her blue sequined dress, her four-inch heels and her little beaded bag, and she paraded around all day. She said, "I made sure I went to every classroom."

Gammell: It went pretty well, because then the other students would ask, "Well, why is Mrs. White dressed like that?" The question comes up, how does a farmer look?

Taylor: Yeah, what does it mean? Oh, I know: they black out their teeth, and show up in pigtails and overalls.

Gammell: Now we're coming up on the pictures that the women took.

Taylor: These are what they went home and took, then sent back to us.

Gammell: Very often, they would write us letters about what they were thinking about, sometimes poems- a narrative that would go along with it. A lot of times, by having to go make the pictures, they would think about different things, and they would write about them. I think there's one in here of somebody hanging out the clothes. Our reading of that picture might be, "She likes to hang out clothes." But the person who took that picture, her reading of it was that her life was extremely complicated: bringing the kids- a rural life is not what you think in the sense of bringing the kids here and there, working with her husband and all that- but for her it was the thinking time, the meditation time that she needed, so she wrote about that.

We can just go through these kind of quick.

Taylor: This is our doctor. We had a retired physician move back home from Colorado, because her family land had been destroyed by chemicals, and she was making it her mission as a physician to restore the land in the way that she knew how to restore bodies.

Gammell: She had established a laboratory in her house, and she was working in that. She was also one of the first doctors in the Denver area to do work with a safer, more natural child delivery. The doctors watched her, until they were sure that she had something going on, and then they followed her lead in their research.

Taylor: This is Lois hanging up her clothes... and Mary Jo –it's a picture of her office. Most everyone works off the farm. They wanted us to know about their family. Often times, when we talk about the ad of the nuclear power farmer, the dairy farmer... this is a dairy farmer. She represents herself.

This is the last book that we did... this is when we got a very expensive package from Monsanto. When you heard a lot in the media about bovine growth hormone, which is the little injection to make cows' systems work faster to produce more milk faster, quicker, more efficient...

Gammell: Well, except for the person who has to buy the stuff...

Taylor: ... the stories that we got from the women with the cows was a lot different. They talked about their animals and about how awful it was to lose any of them. Things like, "After we sold the cows, John wouldn't go to the barn for two years. He missed them so much. And the cats all left, because they missed the cows." Now that's a different way of speaking than what you're going to hear. We just want to play a little bit of this tape, which goes along with "who are the experts?" These are some "experts" talking about the science of food.

Gammell: We didn't receive the tape directly from Monsanto but an organization that was working with farmers said, "Oh, you might be interested in looking at this." When we were doing another tape, somebody from the University of Minnesota who's interested in other ways from farming and producing food- officially, she probably would not be able to do much with this- but she thought it would be very interesting to us, so she would give us tapes to look at. What would happen is that the circles of people knowing what we did would get larger and larger. People would say, "You might want to do this," or, "Have you thought about this?" and "Have you looked at this?" It was a very organic way of researching.

Taylor: The implication was that–you'll hear from this tape –it's simply a management tool; it isn't anything about the relationship to what you're doing, or the relationship to the animals. I think what Linda was saying was that we get a lot of subversive help from people who, on their own jobs, can't say, "Why don't you talk about this?" Because we're artists, right? "We're not going to get fired!" Sometimes we get into labs and things and take photographs that we can't otherwise.

Gammell: So this is a tape loop that we've edited, and it goes into installations.

Taylor: These are the "experts" saying not to worry.

Tape: .... "We're not in fact adding chemical substances or synthetic substances which the consumer needs to know about."

"What my technology is attempting to do..."

Gammell: This is our favorite guy...

(Tape) "... is to make a better process, if you will. We are attempting to produce disease-free cattle. We would like to produce pigs, as I indicated, with 70% less cholesterol. Chickens which would grow faster; salmon which would grow larger."

"The stakes are high. One use of this technology is food. Imagine a steer growing to market size in half the usual time. A dairy cow resistant to disease. A pig that gives low-fat pork. And imagine your profits if you held the patent on an animal like that."

"The person who has extended that effort is entitled to a reward for that effort. And by some means, patenting, or freed registration... the discovery, if you will, flow back to the inventor, then it's all for not."

"I think years ago the courts made the determination that micro-organisms were patentable subject matter, and anything that was living could be patentable."

"We have the real difference between a certain feeling that there's integrity to the animal species and a sacredness to human life that can not just be exchanged..."

Taylor: O.K., so that's the tape loop. These are some installations slides.

Gammell: This was a show at Parts Photographic gallery in Minneapolis. One of the questions that probably has come up for a lot of you is, "Who is your audience?" This was a very urban space. It's what we used to call an alternative space. It's non-profit. The tape loop was shown as an installation in a corncrib facade, and then people could come and see. The images on the wall were a juxtaposition of the text from the women, and the things that they were holding that they valued about their lives, in a way that was contextualizing their lives rather than saying that being a farmer was a management decision. So we were trying to juxtapose those ways of thinking about land and people who lived in the land.

Taylor: These are the words that we think about when we're dealing with the groups that we do, because it seems to work. It seems that to be able to sit down with artists, talk about what they do, has given them courage to act.

Gammell: She runs a CSA–community supported agriculture. These women were really generous. I'll let Sandra explain community supported agriculture. It is an alternative to the idea of huge farms. People in urban areas are in partnerships with farmers. She came to one of our first workshops, she invited us to come down and tape her. We worked with a number of women in Northfield, Minnesota, "Women In Sustainable Agriculture." They said, after the workshop, which takes all day, "Well, what are we going to do now?" And what they did is really amazing. They made a videotape of their own, they produced photographs of them working, because many of them owned their own farms. One woman had a goat farm, and she produces goat cheese. They got the work shown at the Minnesota State Fair. If you know anything about state fairs, much of that is about nostalgia. The idea of Machinery Hill, which used to be in- Minnesota had one of the largest state fairs in the country- Machinery Hill is all gone now, and it is now the center for technology. They also had a huge performance for their community. (slide) This is them singing, with their children; then they showed the videotape. The exhibition is behind them. They invited everybody in the region; it was an open invitation to come see the work, and listen to storytelling.

Taylor: In other words, they took the project over, and went on to say, "We will be represented." One of the first gatherings we had was to show them that we were still working on their images, and would they like to stay connected with each other.

Gammell: So we had a big party, and we showed them what we were doing. Some women were very politically motivated and wanted to go the political route. Others felt they were more connected to the idea of spirit and spiritually, but still it kind of stirred things up in them. We tried to keep in contact with them as much as possible. We get little notes from them, or we'll see them at different events.

Taylor: We just finished a videotape financed by the Department of Agriculture.

Gammell: Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (S.A.R.E.), a division of the Department of Agriculture.

Taylor: Well, we're feeling really good about that. We made this tape by going out again, and interviewing directly with video women who had decided to make a difference. Sustainable agriculture, as you know, is just a little band on the radar of people saying, "Wait, I think there's something wrong." Community-supported agriculture is an experiment between eaters and producers. What that means is if you are considered the "eater", or the urban person, you would make a contract with a farmer to share part of the cost. In other words, up front, I give you $300 with your promise that you will deliver food to me during the growing season.

Gammell: Probably once a week. There's kind of depot where farmers bring the food, and then there's a distribution system.

Taylor: The last piece of work we've done on this project is making this half-hour video, called "Slow Food, Sustainable Agriculture, and Responsible Eating." It's basically a group of women talking about why they live the way they do, what they believe in, and what they're doing about it. We just got a review that we're so thrilled about, because the reviewer says, "This is such a great tape because the creators don't say anything, they just let these brilliant people talk." We say up front "These are farmers talking." Then you have to keep going through it, and pretty soon somebody will say, "They're all women." So it ruffled some stereotypes in that way, too.

Gammell: It's not a traditional documentary. One of the things that we talked about is changing as we go along. We talked to women in four states in the Midwest and spent some time with them. And one of the things that we had to change was what happens between what we wrote and what we made: the assumptions totally changed in the process. S.A.R.E. had the idea that in this part of the country there would be beef cattle; and in this part there were peach orchards; in this part, it would be something else... it was a very segmented way of looking at it. What we found out is that in this kind of sustainable agriculture system, it didn't matter what kind of food they were producing, it was a system of ethics and values that was the glue that held everything together. So we kind of scratched that idea totally, and scratched the idea that we would have a master narrator tell the story... that's what Sandra was talking about. They're just telling their own stories. One of the things that they tell–supposedly the tape was aimed at other farmers to get them to think about other ways of farming- and what we found out is that these women really had something to tell us, and you, and "eaters." Like Wendell Berry says, "anyone who eats." Urban people. In particular, there's a lot of commitments to ways of producing food that they were interested in sharing their stories because they felt it was important.

Taylor: I'll tell you, sometimes this project is hard to talk about. We did a radio interview one day and the interviewer said, "Well, who is your audience?" Never thinking exactly like that, I came up with this answer, "Well, anyone who's ever loved a woman, or eats."

Gammell: The brilliant answers come later.

Taylor: Once you include eaters, I don't know who couldn't see that.

(Tape) "...to practice, and advocate, a new kind of farming. One that supports rural communities, and safeguards the health and well-being of people and the environment. They call it 'sustainable agriculture.'"

"'Sustainable, to me, means that we are farming with the future in mind. It's moving along a continuum. I don't think we've arrived yet at a sustainable agriculture. And I don't think our agriculture can be sustainable until we get the consumer involved with where their food is coming from."

"We have potluck supper at the church, and I happen to hate carrot sticks. One little boy–my son David was sitting right across from him–a little boy spoke up, he'd taken a carrot, and he said, "Oh, this tastes just like it had been taken out of the ground."

"... the soil. It gives us an understanding for the other world, that's below us, and we don't take it fro granted"

"You'll have kids coming into supermarkets, asking why there's dirt on the potatoes. 'Why did they put them in the ground?'- they didn't understand that they grew in the ground."

"We have defined good farming as 'efficient,' rather than beautiful, just and sustainable. Until we do that, until we have as well articulated a regulatory program around beauty, which says the songbird as much as a role on the farm, because she adds this lovely music, we can't possibly farm without it, we couldn't possibly farm without the butterflies... we would not want to eat food that did not have a butterfly to accompany this great journey."

"We have to somehow make a connection with our children and with the people that live in urban settings. Whether we do that through a program, or through community supported agriculture where people are actively participating in where their food comes from, and they're helping to grow that food, I think that there is a lot of room for more miles to be developed on how to involve the urban person in the growing of their food."

"Our farm is forty acres, and only ten acres is tillable. We knew when we bought it that it wasn't enough land. We've worked it five years, and as soon as the neighboring piece came onto the market we bought it. We're both employed outside of the home. It's very disjointed to me, it just didn't seem to be a whole, at all. And it wasn't enough land, and we knew it wasn't enough land, but we loved the location and wanted to be here."

Taylor: I'm just going to read a closing statement, by Paul Grucoro, who's a writer who writes about land. He says, "The point is that rural children have been educated to believe that opportunity of every kind lies elsewhere, and that the last half of the century's rural experience of failure and decline has been largely due to the incompetence or irrelevance of rural people. That's what we believe."

Audience: I think it was really interesting what you said about a "regulatory program on beauty," what somebody said in the film. That seems to be going all through everything, with art; that we've become addicted to certain kinds of "favorables," like white corn and those kind of things, that's what is considered beautiful. We forget a variety of tastes. I was wondering if you had any further thoughts and how that relates to art and imagery.

Taylor: It has all to do with becoming a monoculture, whether you're eating it or looking at it or being it. That's where, without intervention, we're moving- in agriculture, for instance.

Audience: What kind of intervention? How would that work?

Taylor: Well, I hope that we're an intervention, a part of that. Just the idea of artists working on issues like this and providing space for other people to talk who are only represented in one way... providing that access: I hope that's an intervention.

Gammell: I guess this is the last thing that we've finished. What's interesting to me now is that we don't really know where things go out. It's kind of frustrating, too, because we're not sure who sees it, or what they think. The tape, now, after this review, we've been getting lots of calls to send it out to universities. That feels really good in the sense that we probably know, in some situation like this, somebody's going to be watching it, and then the discussion might happen, such as: "Well, what do you know about your food that comes from this region?" Wendell Berry talks about a "passive consumer," and I think that a lot of this work that we've been doing is about consumption, and deciding how you live. The idea of being an artist that lives a "sustainable" life means making choices that have to do with the whole life, not just the art: you know, the showing in a gallery, getting grants, kind of life.

Audience: The project that you talked about that was "self-selecting"- the women self-selected themselves- were there any women that were from the big, mechanized farms? Did they not want to participate, or were they participating also? Were their comments different, or similar than the smaller farms?

Taylor: We had all kinds. If you saw the whole tape you'd see it goes from forty acres to three thousand. Some people grew up on a farm and inherited ways of doing things. Others made choices at 25, and said, "I want to live this way." Were they any different? We didn't really get into the politics of what makes it different. We stayed with why you're doing this. One of the first reasons we wanted to make this videotape was to provide a forum, because "big" and "little" are fighting. It's an either/or thing: either you're big or you die; or, either you do it truly wholly, or you're bad. We didn't go there, because that's not our arena. We can't solve those problems.

Gammell: I would agree. I mean, we had some that had fairly big farms. I'm thinking of this workshop that we had in Michigan, where we had somebody who had a hog farm. All of the brothers and some of the sisters worked together on that farm. Then, more traditional farms, and then some biodynamic farms in Germany. I felt like in the workshops, because of the questions, the women were fairly willing to listen to each other. I would agree that they didn't get into the knockdown, dragout politics of it.

Taylor: There aren't any easy answers between big and small. There's just a lot of choices in between, and people willing to stand up for the kinds of lives they want to make. Then they have to challenge the economic system, or the experts. Who believes when somebody says, "It will be no problem, if you just buy bovine growth hormone."

Gammell: There's a lot of fear, I think, about pesticides. Just from our own experiences, living in the Midwest, the idea of everything relating to everything else, environmentally, the reality of cancers among younger women... I lived near the Mayo Clinic, and they're doing studies on Midwestern people, because the incidence of cancer, and breast cancer among women, is so high. It might be groundwater contamination and pesticides. A lot of the women who have grown up in farms have severe allergies.

Taylor: The women talk about it later on the tape. I think it's because you have women talking: the men think they're not supposed to talk about this stuff. I mean, it's written somewhere, that when the chemicals come to your place, there are rows and rows of cautions: "Don't do this," "Wash his clothes three times," "Wear gloves," etc. Well, the women are saying, "There's something a little wrong here, if they're worried about me handling the clothes that have been worn to put on the field that grows your food- there's just something wrong with that idea."

Audience: I just wondered if you could define the term "flyover community." Is it, literally, a community that's flown over and forgotten?

Taylor: It's a word used on either coast, about the middle of the country.

Audience: I've never heard of it before.

Taylor: You haven't?

Gammell: I think it's almost an art world term in New York- L.A...

Taylor: ... and the flyovers.

Gammell: Well, partly, it's a really long stretch if you want to drive it. It really is amazing. I've often thought about that our next project could be a little thing that we would put in gas stations that would give the history of all these places.

Taylor: It's part of the reason why we made that one book that looks like postcards. Landscape postcards... you go to the Black Hills and you buy what the Black Hills look like in postcards.

Audience: This is sort of a side question. You had that little subjectively edited tape loop with a lot of experts... which we didn't have the benefit of listening to. I'm wondering, how many of these experts that are selling really fantastic avenues for product-making in the farming industry make their money farming with those processes that they're selling you?

Taylor: They may have investments in the products.

Audience: Yes, I was just wondering if any of them actually are making the profit in the way that they're telling you that you can make it. It's sort of a rhetorical question, because I know they're not farmers. It's just that they're selling you answers that they're not buying into, in a real way. They're just buying into the selling of the answers, to some extent.

Gammell: Yeah, they do, and sometimes we laugh at this, calling it "greed registration." But they're talking about patenting life itself, and that's one of the things that's really scary about what was happening with these so-called experts. There is a group of people within most universities who are trying to find other ways.

Taylor: It's a huge, huge discussion about patenting life forms. The reason we put Vandana Shiva's name in the article is to read... she's Indian. She has an institute in India, and a project called "The Nine Seed Project." What that means is, in original agricultural systems, you might plant nine seeds, to deal with the weather, life, and so on. So that one of those kinds of beans would make it. Now, companies go to other parts of the world- like India, which is why she has this institute- and take this kind of bean, this kind of bean, and this kind of bean, and hybridize it, and sell it back to you: this is the only kind of bean you'll be able to buy soon. That's part of the monoculture. The next level is talking about bio-engineering.

Audience: Just on that particular subject- I've heard some discourse on that whole genetic engineering thing. There's this population in the Pacific Islands, and they have this gene within them that will fight some kind of disease, and there is a group within the governmental structure that is trying to patent that gene. So these folks don't even have the right to their own body, so to speak. I've heard arguments moving in the direction, so that's kind of interesting, too. But what I was going to ask you- a friend and I were talking not long ago, and one of the things that he was saying was that poor white women are probably the least advocated... do you see yourselves–I know that you're talking primarily about the farming community, but do you see yourselves as agents, or advocates, poor white women, in terms of talking about the broader issues that basically oppress them, too, to some extent?

Taylor: I never thought of it in that way. I don't know what to say. It's also about access. If you're talking about poor women, the conversation that we're trying to open up is that producers are saying, "We need to make good food available." Good food is not available to most of us. Healthy food, I should say. We have a slide that we didn't show, which is an ad for ordering food by satellite.

Gammell: It's a 1-800 number. You can order "comfort food," like meatloaf or mashed potatoes and gravy. You dial the 1-800 number and it appears on your doorstep in a kind of thermos, for your evening meal. It doesn't question what kind of preservatives it takes to deliver that. A lot of these women said, "Well, I produce the food, but then how do I get it to you?" I don't know. It seems like we raise the questions, and then what, I don't know.

Audience: I don't know if your work might encompass this, but I was wondering if you touch upon at all the development of that product "olean"?

Taylor: Interesting you should mention it. The ad that we see now for olean is a young farm woman talking about how happy she is to be part of providing such a great product. I think that's a little appropriation, too, because we never heard any talk like that. Never!

Audience: I would like to say that y'all's work is exemplary in the way that you've focused on these issues of these rural women who have made these choice. But as consumers, we can also make choices as well. Even though this food industry and the food distribution system seem so big and daunting, and it seems there's no way to take a little piece out of it and not participate in it- I mean, we all have to eat in some way- but we can make some choices. Even if you live in New York City, there are ways that you can buy food directly from farmers. In most urban settings, there are farmer's markets where you can do that, you can buy organically. More and more, in some stores, because some folks now have realized that there's a profit to be made there, as people begin to make those choices. In addition, if you garden, even, you don't have to buy bio-engineered seeds. You can buy heirloom seeds, that don't necessarily look pretty, but are much more nutritious and more delicious. That sounds like a line there! But we can make choices ourselves. In addition, as citizens, we can lobby our government. We really can do that. Here in the city of New York, even, Giuliani is about to turn over a whole slew of small community gardens to the housing department. There needs to be a groundswell of support to maintain those things, so that they're not turned over to developers. I mean, that's something that we can affect, ourselves. So really, I just wanted to say that we can make choices, as well.

Taylor: We didn't even get into that part of it. I think we keep doing this because it's a small voice that just doesn't get heard. It just doesn't get represented fairly. Like Linda was telling you, when we talk to groups, if they're particularly identified as urban, we ask them to say the words that come up when they hear "rural." And it's: "disaster," "empty," or it's: "bucolic," "nostalgic." There's just very little sense of the people.

Gammell: I'm going to just add something that Jolene Riccard, an artist and photographer, said last year. She goes back every year to the Tuskarora Nation, with her family, they have the corn ceremony. That means that they have to process the seed; the whole family is the caretaker of the seed. It's the original corn seed. But a lot of times the seed from other fields will blow over and pollinate their field, and it will take over because they're genetically engineered to kill out things. So it's very difficult to maintain an original seed that isn't biocreated. I think we should probably quit for now.

Synopsis by Richard McCabe

Over the past ten years, Linda Gammell and Sandra Menefee Taylor have worked together in an effort to give recognition to a segment of American society that is overlooked in the visual arts: Rural women. Their work is fused with social concerns and feminist theory. Their many projects deal with issues that confront rural women in their native state of Minnesota.

Gammell and Taylor's work addresses issues faced by women contained in what they call the "flyover" region of America. "Flyover" refers to the area between New York and Los Angeles where people fly over in transit between the coasts. Through the media of photography, photo books, and video, they provide a forum in which rural women can raise awareness of their plight in relation to the land. These projects are an effort to define their rural identity and to negate stereotypes.

Their photo book The One About The Farmer's Daughter is based on farmer's daughter jokes. This book deals with how rural women see themselves versus the outside worlds preconceived stereotypes. In another book, Sacred into Science, Linda Gammell and Sandra Menefee Taylor pose the question "who are the experts?" This is in relation to the governments insistence on implementing new farming techniques that run counter to tried and true methods employed in agriculture throughout the rural mid-west.

In their video Slow Food, Sustainable Agriculture and Responsible Eating, Gammell and Taylor used interviews with farmers in again exploring the issue of conventional farming practices. In the video, they make a case for community supported agriculture as opposed to other methods imposed from the outside influences, such as corporations and government institutions.

Analysis by Mark Nelson

Artists Linda Gammell and Sandra Menefee Taylor believe that by gathering visual representations and oral histories of the disenfranchised rural women, the resulting work can serve to challenge the stereotypes of these women. Gammell and Taylor feel that by engaging these women in the process of sharing their lives, ideas, fears, and happiness, they can re-empower rural women and open up a dialogue to those outside of their experience.

Can the stereotypes of rural women be negated when we learn the real stories of these women? Is it naive of Gammell and Taylor to assume that art can change peoples ideas and perceptions of rural women? After all, only a select group of people visit museums and galleries.

Taylor responds:

It seem the point of doing public art was to bypass the galleries and museums to reach a larger audience.