Sept. 14, 2024 - Bannon's War Room
47:48
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is what you're fighting for. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, every day you're out there. | |
| What they're doing is blowing people off. | ||
| If you continue to look the other way and shut up, then the oppressors, the authoritarians, get total control and total power. | ||
| Because this is just like in Arizona. | ||
| This is just like in Georgia. | ||
| It's another element that backs them into a corner and shows their lies and misrepresentations. | ||
|
unidentified
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This is why this audience is going to have to get engaged. | |
| As we've told you, this is the fight. | ||
|
unidentified
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All this nonsense, all this spin, they can't handle the truth. | |
| War Room, Battleground. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Today's star, Bonnie. | ||
| This sculpture is not about me. | ||
| I am in service of something way larger than myself. | ||
| At age 19, I quit my job and made a phone call and asked an art school, how do you get into art school? | ||
| And they told me I needed a portfolio. | ||
| I didn't know what a portfolio was. | ||
| So I started from zero. | ||
| Now we're 41 years later. | ||
| This sculpture is about our unlimited potential as human beings. | ||
| There are 38 figures here. | ||
| Each one of those are individual human beings that I sculpted from. | ||
| There are Marines, there are Rangers, there are Navy SEALs that have all suffered physically and mentally. | ||
| But this is only one aspect of our society. | ||
| I am saying art represents who we are. | ||
| Yes, it is a war memorial. | ||
| But there are elements of healing. | ||
| It is about human beings. | ||
| Every single aspect and expression of how we feel, the nobility, the suffering, the sadness, the animalistic charge of a battle scene, it's all there. | ||
| That expression is an expression of truth and light. | ||
| And sculpture does not function in the dark. | ||
| It needs light to illuminate and shine and show its message. | ||
| So, this is the beginning of something that will change the world. | ||
| And I'm not going to be shy about it. | ||
| We are going forward. | ||
| Forward is to charge. | ||
| To change. | ||
| To not accept. | ||
| To proceed. | ||
| So a higher level of consciousness to rise to the occasion. | ||
| Here we go folks. | ||
| I hope you're with me. | ||
| We're with you. | ||
| I'm Sabin Howard. | ||
| Today is September 13th, 2024, in the year of our Lord, and I am the sculptor for the National World War I Memorial. | ||
| Today we will unveil this 60-foot-long, 25-ton, 38-figure composition called A Soldier's Journey. | ||
| And today to interview me is my wife and project manager and novelist, Tracy Howard. | ||
| So let's kick off the show right now, and Tracy's going to be asking me some questions about how we got here today. | ||
| Before we start, I want to dedicate this show to Steve Bannon. | ||
| Steve, we're with you. | ||
| This project is something you understand, and I'm really grateful that you had me on your show to explain it to your public. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I had a front row seat to the entire process of the nine-year marathon of creating, designing, creating, inventing a process, and then finally sculpting the National World War I Memorial, specifically a soldier's journey, which is the sculptural heart. | |
| Initially, I wasn't intending to get so involved, but I ended up as the documentarian and also the project manager for Sabin and his team. | ||
| So, we thought I could ask some good questions, and I'm going to start with a hard question for Sabin. | ||
| I'm going to say, Sabin, what did you learn? | ||
| What did you learn sculpting and making, designing this piece? | ||
| My wife never fails to stump me. | ||
| The biggest takeaway from being on a project for nine years is it was on-the-job training, and the biggest element that I learned is to be in service of something larger than yourself. | ||
| And I learned that from the veterans that posed for me. | ||
| The significance of believing in something and being a part of that, which is basically making a sculpture that represents our country, is a sacred act. | ||
| And there's no way you can do that correctly without believing in the sanctity of the mission. | ||
| What I made is a representation of what this country is and you better come up with something of excellence because... | ||
| There have been a couple examples of memorials recently, like the Eisenhower Memorial, piece of crap. | ||
| MLK Memorial, just ridiculous. | ||
| They're failures, and mediocrity is not the bar that you want to aspire to, especially in this day and age. | ||
| This is the National Mall. | ||
| The National Mall is what we are culturally, and if you don't represent yourself at the highest level of your potentiality as a country, You've failed and so I gave everything I had with Tracy and my crew and the foundry and we today will birth that sculpture and give it rightly so to we the people because that is what this sculpture is for. | ||
| It's for our country and for people that come to see the history of our country. | ||
| So thank you for asking me that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're welcome. | |
| I also wanted to go back to the sculpture and to the parallels in your own life. | ||
| So you call this sculpture, A Soldier's Journey, with an echo of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey. | ||
| And I wanted to ask about your own heroic journey and what How were the parallels? | ||
| How was this your hero's journey? | ||
| Where did you start emotionally at the beginning in 2015 when you first entered the National World War I Memorial Design Competition? | ||
| And where are you today, September 13th, in the Year of Our Lord 2024, when this is going to be unveiled for the public, for the American people? | ||
| So this project came in, in the summer of 2015, and I had a bout with Geary on the Eisenhower Memorial, which didn't proceed to anything but to put the bug in my ear, let's do something of major significance here. | ||
| 2015 comes around, I enter the project, I enter with a Texas architect, and we don't make the final five, but then September, Joseph Weishar calls me, sends me an email, and let's go. | ||
| We win that. | ||
| I knew we were going to win. | ||
| And now we're January 2016, and now a little backstory here. | ||
| I've been in the art world since 1982, an outsider. | ||
| Born Cancelled, that's basically my t-shirt title there. | ||
| I'm doing something completely outside of the art narrative. | ||
| I'm going back to Western civilization as my template. | ||
| I'm looking at the sacredness and the vitality of Greek and Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo's Last Judgment, the David, all art that elevates and speaks about rising to the occasion. | ||
| I'm like, here's my chance. | ||
| I am not going to miss this opportunity. | ||
| Because when you've been like, you know, in the battle, for that many years and you're on the outside and now all of a sudden you have a way to bust through that narrative and get around all the nonsense that is like status quo. | ||
| The academics, the critics, the museums, the galleries, it's all there. | ||
| They got an idea of what art is and it's a pretty lousy idea and I'm not going to go along with it. | ||
| I win the memorial and I got a lot of juice and Boy, was I green at that moment. | ||
| I did not know what I had entered. | ||
| I had to go through a process that was an on-the-job training that truly... I'm a different human being at this point, and we go through this first nine months of iterations. | ||
| I come up with 25 iterations. | ||
| 25 different iterations for the National World War I Memorial under the Supervision of Centennial Commission. | ||
| Mind you, this was, it could have been worse. | ||
| We had Edwin Fountain who liked the Schrady Memorial, the piece in front of the Capitol. | ||
| So, I mean, that's already something positive, but it's not like a pleasant thing when you're going into a room and you're presenting something that you really, you know, worked yourself to the max in the studio, and then you got to go back. | ||
| And I did this 25 times over the next nine months. | ||
| Finally, in November. | ||
| At a Barnes & Noble bookstore down in Union Square in New York City, Edwin goes, okay, do the drawing. | ||
| So, bang, I go off, do a drawing, 700-hour drawing over the next few months, takes me into February now of 2017. | ||
| And I get in front now, first time with Commission of Fine Arts, which is truly, that's an experience I don't want to even talk about, it's so negative. | ||
| And we get to May of that year, and they ask for a sculpture, and I turn to Centennial Commission, who has hired me, and they have no money. | ||
| So here we are, we got a national memorial on the table, and there's no funding. | ||
| So I go out and I raise half a million dollars, and I take that money and I go all the way to New Zealand to wet a workshop, it's a company that did the Lord of the Rings, and had to leave my family, so that was very, very difficult. | ||
| I was there till the following year, where we sent the, it was a 10-foot model, made in resin, of the initial idea for A Soldier's Journey, | ||
| and that model appears at the Centennial Commission office now February of 2018. | ||
| And believe it or not, those bureaucrats running Centennial Commission broke down in tears. | ||
| I did something right, and I went rogue because if I'd stayed around and everybody had come over | ||
| to my studio and put their input into it, we never would have held onto the vision. | ||
| And that was a. | ||
| It was a good decision. | ||
| It was a clear decision to me. | ||
| You've got to go someplace where nobody's going to bother you so you can actually do the work to develop the sculpture. | ||
| And we went from a very flat relief to something that is very high relief, meaning the sculpture is made up of almost figures in the round that are explosive and kinetic and emotional. | ||
| Motion equals emotion. | ||
| And so this sculpture now all of a sudden is juiced. | ||
| Now we go back into the door at CFA. | ||
| CFA is none too happy that I have made something that is classical, humanistic, and for the people. | ||
| It is not for elites, this piece. | ||
| They can like it. | ||
| They don't have to. | ||
| But it's for we, the people. | ||
| And it's sculpture that is understandable by all. | ||
| You do not need a book to get the meaning. | ||
| It's visual art. | ||
| And that's where I was going and boy, we hit a blockade there. | ||
| And that blockade lasted for the next few months as I got ridiculous comments of like, well, why don't you turn the memorial around and we could have a fountain in the front and you could put the figures in the back. | ||
| And, uh, we had a couple moments where I thought I was going to lose it and I just kept fighting through. | ||
| Most stubborn bastard that they were ever going to meet. | ||
| I was not going to give up. | ||
| Well, we get to that final moment, and I'm told we're going to pass. | ||
| And I'm like, why are we going to pass? | ||
| Well, something happened behind closed doors. | ||
| And we pass, and 2019 ushers in. | ||
| I make the five-foot model in the architectural pediment that it sits in, and we pass. | ||
| And the budget's coming in now because Centennial Commission is building this thing on the fly. | ||
| They have gone out and gotten Appropriated the funding for the sculpture to be made, the park has been funded as well, and I encounter, you know, Pangolin Foundry finally, after looking at 40 different foundries in the U.S., and then we begin sculpting in a new Englewood studio in New Jersey. | ||
| Back in August of 2019 and that took us all the way then till 2024, January 2024. | ||
| So how did I change? | ||
| I became someone who believes in the sacred and believes that I have a mission to create an American cultural renaissance. | ||
| And that art is necessary for a country because it can show what is possible. | ||
| And what my art and this monument is for, it's to elevate people and give them an example. | ||
| Of rising to the occasion, of being able to meet the challenges, of being made into something larger than what you were before you entered into something. | ||
| And that's my hero's journey. | ||
| I'm coming out on the other side. | ||
| I created this, but ultimately I want everyone to remember this is not about Sabin Howard today. | ||
| This is about you, the public. | ||
| And that sculpture is for you. | ||
| And I am in service of those veterans that are sculpted on that wall. | ||
| I'm in service of you, the public, that will come and see it and learn the history of our country. | ||
| And have a sense of pride in the art that our country has made. | ||
| At least that's my mission. | ||
| And that sculpture is also something that represents us, like I said before. | ||
| So it better be something of excellence. | ||
| I couldn't have led this project in the beginning, but now it's like I've taken on that mantle, and I had to make decisions that would not necessarily make me friends with everybody. | ||
| But here we are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I have to say, you know, you know, because you know my story, that my dad was in the Navy. | |
| He's a veteran. | ||
| Both my grandfathers fought in World War II. | ||
| My great-grandfather fought in World War I. I have a son-in-law who was a Marine, who is a veteran. | ||
| And I have to say, before you started talking to some of the models from the studio who were veterans, I didn't feel like you really understood that part of me. | ||
| But do you want to talk for the War Room Posse, you know, what you learned from veterans and how that's changed you? | ||
| Well, we got to the midpoint on the sculpture, so we had completed up to the battle scene, and I'd been working with college boys and Broadway actors, and I was starting to get kind of fed up working with these guys that just didn't get it. | ||
| We're coming in for a paycheck, and it's like, they're not in it for the mission, which was like, to be in service of something bigger than themselves. | ||
| Like, you're doing a national monument. | ||
| It's not just a paycheck. | ||
| This is not an everyday job. | ||
| And we get to a place where I'm like, I can't take this anymore. | ||
| So then I called a bunch of veteran organizations and I begin with connecting with a Marine, Ricky Zambrano, and I make him a full-time model. | ||
| So he comes in and the attitude adjustment is just incredible. | ||
| It's like a 360. | ||
| It's like, well, a 180. | ||
| So it's a complete shift of like, how can I help? | ||
| What do I got to do? | ||
| And it's like, hop to, like right away, bang, on time. | ||
|
unidentified
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Can I say something? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| As somebody who's modeled for you and posed in the studio, you know, people don't know, it's hard to hold a pose. | ||
| It's like, you can do it for a couple, like a minute and a half, and then you want to itch your shoulders, scratch your head, you want to wiggle. | ||
| And these Marines, especially, but the Navy, all the guys, Navy SEALs, the Rangers, they would come in, and Sabin would say, get in pose, and they would just hold it, and hold it, and hold it, and not move, I mean, not flicker an eyelash. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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And finally, Sabin would get tired, because usually he's very responsive to the model. | |
| I got burnt out before. | ||
|
unidentified
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The model starts twitching, and Sabin would say, okay, hey, take a break, take five minutes, take ten minutes, go to the bathroom, you know, wiggle around. | |
| But these guys would come in, and they would just hold it. | ||
| I was especially aware of the Marines. | ||
| They will literally not flicker a muscle, but all these veterans would work so hard for you until you got tired. | ||
| Yeah, it was really refreshing. | ||
| And the faces that I sculpted from those sessions are Rangers and Marines and Navy SEALs. | ||
| We did six veterans. | ||
| They all had PTSD of some form or other. | ||
| One of them was like a 23-year veteran, three tours of duty in Iraq. | ||
| They saw some serious stuff. | ||
| Ricky had had a bout of trying a suicide attempt and decided to change his mind and realized that nobody was going to come save him and he just kind of rose up from that and developed an attitude of like, I gotta fix myself because no one's coming. | ||
| And it's this attitude of self-responsibility that began to permeate the studio that we were all responsible for ourselves no matter what Was occurring in our own life on a personal basis. | ||
| We had to just show up and go and I think that brought a whole different determination and values to the creative process that you don't usually have with artists. | ||
| You know, you see artists, no disparagement meant, but they don't show up. | ||
| I mean, I broke my clavicle the next day. | ||
| I was still in there sculpting and it didn't matter. | ||
| It was on me. | ||
| I had to like do what I had to do and I think it's part of the thing is if you have an opportunity to change your life and to do something that makes a difference on such a large scale, you cannot squander the opportunity. | ||
| So the responsibility falls firmly upon yourself to take full accountability of the situation. | ||
| And if something is not working, then you need to just fix it. | ||
| There's no discussion. | ||
| Proceed. | ||
| And the word that became bandied about in the studio was one word. | ||
| One word. | ||
|
unidentified
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Forward. | |
| Forward. | ||
| That's what the word was. | ||
| Actually an allegory for what has to happen at this moment. | ||
| Forward. | ||
| You cannot let the nonsense get in the way. | ||
| The speed bumps get in the way. | ||
| You just have to proceed. | ||
| And we're at that same place right now. | ||
| And I believe Because Steve put me on this show in the beginning, a while back, that truth and light are unstoppable, and the actual ideas behind the memorial of a soldier's journey are about bringing us together. | ||
| They are all Americans. They are neither of, you know, one party or the | ||
| other. They all bled red and they all got sent off to war as Americans. So the | ||
| statement that I'm making with the memorial is united we are unstoppable, but | ||
| fractured we will fall. | ||
| And so this sculpture is about unification of our country under the flag. | ||
| It is the highest point on that sculpture. | ||
| And that's what I learned. | ||
| To take the bull by the horns and take the leadership and now proceed. | ||
| And this sculpture is about doing that. | ||
| And I'm really happy to give this to you guys so that you can see what's possible. | ||
| This is something that you should be proud of. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we were in our attorney's office a couple days ago, and Saban had to sign over the title to the sculpture to the Doughboy Foundation, who's holding it right now, I think, before the National Park Service takes it, but it's in trust for the American people. | |
| And, you know, you and I, we said a prayer, and we had this moment of this being a moment where Saban's giving this amazing gift in service of and in honor of the American people, but | ||
| especially for the veterans who were so inspirational in the | ||
| studio, always working on themselves. Ricky's always reading a book to improve himself. Everyone in the studio | ||
| sort of fell in line with that, that we have to work on ourselves and we have to work on our group, you know, radiating | ||
| outwards. And so one thing I want to ask that maybe only an ass, a wife could ask is, what would you do differently? | ||
| Well, you're asking me what would I do differently. | ||
| I would have fired a lot of people sooner. | ||
| Honestly, I would have just... I was too patient. | ||
| I didn't take on the leadership role fast enough. | ||
| And so I was like, I let a lot of things slide and I gave people the benefit of the doubt. | ||
| And I think that was something that was part of the learning experience that I should have actually stepped up and said, hey, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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You don't think you should have kept giving them the benefit of the doubt? | |
| I think it's time to, when that happens, you need to move. | ||
| And you need to, okay, so I had a sense of how I'm not going to be able to accomplish | ||
| this with the help of these other sculptors if they're not in the studio with me. | ||
| And I wish now that I had fired some of them sooner. | ||
| Because I think the problem was, I was going into it, I was really throwing all my eggs | ||
| into one basket, and they weren't. | ||
| And it was more of like a paycheck for them, and they're coming in and shuffling about | ||
| making their coffee, and it's taking extra time to get to their modeling stand and getting | ||
| set up and slamming. | ||
| And that's, it will never happen again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, when you say sacred, what do you mean? | |
| Can you define sacred? | ||
| When you say this is sacred art, are you talking specifically about God? | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| When I was a 14-year-old, my parents are both PhDs, so I'm the exact opposite of them. | ||
| I have trouble with academics and the nonsense that they have done to destroy Western civilization and our culture. | ||
| So I got to see places like the Medici Tomb in Florence, and even as a rebellious 14-year-old teenager, I walked into that room, and you go into a space that is elevated in its consciousness. | ||
| What do I mean by that? | ||
| You have a dome at the very top, like 85 feet high, with light streaming down, hitting this beautiful—it's called Pietra Serena. | ||
| It's this gray stone that is carved into these intricate Corinthian capitals, with all these gargoyle heads around, with these niches that—shhh! | ||
| Change the visuals so that you feel like you're in a building that's actually alive with energy. | ||
| It's an organism. | ||
| And you cannot be helped but transform on a visceral level. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How does that relate to sacred? | |
| That is the sacred, that you belong to something bigger than yourself. | ||
| Because when you engage with that energy, it elevates you and you realize that you are part of something very large and you are unified within the universe. | ||
| You are not separate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are we responsible to that larger...? | |
| Yes, we are, because the modernists have just taken this idea and created a sense of chaos and alienation, and it happened after World War I. And so this whole idea that we're all in this together was chucked out the window. | ||
| And the sculpture, it's a direct response to that and returns to that previous era. | ||
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unidentified
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| All this nonsense, all this spin, they can't handle the truth. | ||
| War Room Battleground with Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| We're back and I want to talk to you a little bit about what's coming today. | ||
| At 7.19 we will kick off the show at Pershing Park with the unveiling. | ||
| It'll be It's called First Light, and it is the illumination of the sculpture telling the story of the soldier passing through battle and being transformed and then returning home to hand his daughter the helmet. | ||
| Freedom Plaza is the park right across the street, and there'll be a giant jumbotron in case we get overflow. | ||
| I will also be in the park in the morning of the 14th to meet you guys in public and share that sculpture with you. | ||
| That to me is the biggest thing because I'm taking art and putting it in your hands and that is about bringing people together in a place of communication. | ||
| It's unthinkable in places like the New York Times. | ||
| They would never say that. | ||
| I'm really feel responsible to actually the people that come see it. | ||
| It had to be something of tremendous excellence and I want to share that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's the message you want people to get from the sculpture and the humanness of the sculpture? | |
| I grew up in the Vietnam era and I One morning, I had to go pick up the New York Times in the hallway. | ||
| I lived in a big apartment complex. | ||
| It was a four-year-old, five-year-old, and it's probably 68 or 69. | ||
| I don't remember the exact year, but I pick up the newspaper, and there's this black and white picture of this naked Vietnamese girl, and she looks like Munch's scream. | ||
| Her head is, it's sheer agony. | ||
| She's completely naked, and she's running at the photographer, Black and white picture. | ||
| It's very stark. | ||
| It's raw. | ||
| And then on the left side, there are like these two little kids and it's a little girl and a boy and the little girl's | ||
| holding her brother's hand. | ||
|
unidentified
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And they're soldiers bringing up the rear with their guns. | |
| In the background, there is this cloud of War. | ||
| There are these billowing clouds. | ||
| It's not clouds. | ||
| It's explosion clouds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I was very moved. | |
| I'm still moved by that. | ||
| Because there is an evilness about war that is incomprehensible to me. | ||
| I mean, look at how many people have died this year alone because of war. | ||
| And I am here on Steve's show, and I admire Steve tremendously because Steve speaks about the truth. | ||
| The media, the mainstream white bread media, takes information and propagates it to the public in a very sly, deceitful way to pretend it's a virtue to go to war. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| It is something that destroys and has no positive significance. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying something like World War Two. | ||
| That was, we could not stop. | ||
| It had to happen. | ||
| But we're not talking about that. | ||
| We're talking about these never ending wars that are more... These are just making people rich. | ||
| Yes, that are about the industrial complex. | ||
| So now you know where I'm coming from. | ||
| So I was given this project. | ||
| OK, make a war memorial. | ||
| And then what? | ||
| How do you handle that when you don't like the concept of killing people? | ||
| I made something very positive out of something very negative. | ||
| And the act of killing is on that wall. | ||
| There is a dead soldier in a pietà pose. | ||
| There is a cost of war section, and that cost of war section is the most powerful part of the memorial. | ||
| It is by the shell-shocked soldier as he walks directly out at you off of the platform. | ||
| and looks at you the visitor and it was the moment in this bronze movie that is stop it is the only place on the whole wall that those figures are not interconnected and that is the figure that represents the alienation that has happened to our society that is really An offshoot of what happened in World War I and the end of this concept of unity, because all the other figures on the wall are interdigitating, and together they're relational. | ||
| And so I'm going back to that idea that we are all made in God's image. | ||
| And the sculptures that I saw as a 14-year-old are what I am like, taken down in my hard drive | ||
| and playing forward in this piece. | ||
| It's not archeological, it's actually a philosophical statement | ||
| about who we are and the human condition and how we need to be in community and together. | ||
|
unidentified
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What is our responsibility? | |
| What is our task towards the interconnectedness of all things when people have such vicious | ||
| and hostile. | ||
| differing opinions, and I'm putting this in the context that the Christian scriptures say that the enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy, and God is here that we may have life and live it more abundantly. | ||
| So what is our responsibility in the midst of these intense feelings that are completely against each other? | ||
| And how can your art represent that? | ||
| How can you help people? | ||
| My job, my dharma, is to make art. | ||
| Monuments. | ||
| Sculpture for public. | ||
| That is my sector. | ||
| So in my lane, we've had a lot of destruction, which happens to happen during all the election years. | ||
| You know it back in 2020. | ||
| Now we had a whole bunch more in 2024. | ||
| Well, the destruction of monuments or the destruction of culture is a way to destroy history. | ||
| And if history is destroyed, The unification of a community, a culture, and a people or a country is put into jeopardy because a void is made. | ||
| And if a void is made, history can be rewritten. | ||
| There is no way in heck that I could have made this sculpture if I had not studied the history of art and been able to draw from each of those different eras, like the Baroque, style, which has a lot of drama and a lot of movement and is very animated. | ||
| That's Bernini in Rome in the 1600s. | ||
| Or Michelangelo in the High Renaissance in Florence and Rome with pieces that are very much out of the Platonic ideals about solids. | ||
| And there's this sense of form that is everlasting. | ||
| It's timeless. | ||
| And it has this stasis, which fights with movement, and it creates a sense of stress, which is what it means to be alive and human. | ||
| Or even looking back at, like, the Greeks and the Kouros boy and Rodin's piece of Adam walking. | ||
| These are all pieces that were in my mind To make the sculpture. | ||
| And if I didn't have that as my vocabulary, I never could have made something that had such depth. | ||
| They're not referential. | ||
| It's not art about art for itself. | ||
| That's what the art world does. | ||
| It's art used as a way to write a novel. | ||
| Or it's notes used to play a symphony. | ||
| And so I am very attached to history because it's what we have. | ||
| It's what we have been given. | ||
| It's our birthright. | ||
| And so you destroy that and you dehumanize the public and you make everyone's life a little poorer. | ||
| And then you get rid of God and then you replace God with the idea that government is what represents that unifying force. | ||
| It's a horrible idea. | ||
| I mean, how many communist or socialist countries have actually succeeded? | ||
| You want to, like, send me some notes and just share one country that has succeeded? | ||
| So what the hell's going on on our border that they just opened it and then they let all this in? | ||
| It's destructive. | ||
| And there are five billion people that make two dollars or more a day And even if we let in a million people a year, it's not going to make a damn bit of difference. | ||
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And that means that they're trying to take us down. | |
| They're trying to destroy this country. | ||
| I don't know who they is. | ||
|
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I'm an artist. | |
| That's not a cop-out, but I do not have that information. | ||
| I wish I did. | ||
|
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Okay, most artists don't talk like you. | |
| What gives you a different perspective, and how do you have the courage to say it? | ||
| Because most don't. | ||
| I have nothing to lose. | ||
| I'm never going to be picked up by a gallery. | ||
| I'm never going to be picked up by a museum. | ||
| The New York Times, a garbage newspaper that propagates more of this media misinformation, is never going to write a nice comment about me. | ||
| I'm going to speak to truth because the sculpture is about the truth. | ||
| And the problem is that people in general are fed lies and propaganda through the media. | ||
| And fortunately for shows like Steve Bannon's War Room, there's information that actually has some truth. | ||
| And we are on the verge of like not being a country. | ||
| We're not even on the global stage anymore. | ||
| If I ran my business the way the government has run its business, I would be pulled off the jail by my creditors. | ||
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Well, I ran our business. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| This has been amazing. | ||
| I just want to go back to our team inside the studio if you want to just talk about some of the highlights of our team, the people who supported along the way. | ||
| Well, this is a very human project. | ||
| It is not run by machines, computers, cameras. | ||
| It's run by actual people's hands, heart and mind. | ||
| And we had people that actually got the messaging that we were operating from that place, from the human place of making art, By humans for humans. | ||
| And there's no, there's not, there's not a shortcut here. | ||
| And we had a foundry in the UK called Pangolin run by Runway Kingdom, who is the same, who comes from a previous era where the digital is seen as a great tool, but not an end result. | ||
| And so they were all on board and they're, they're, That foundry put together 650 pieces to put that memorial back together. | ||
| So you send them. | ||
| We had to do that during COVID. | ||
| We sent them our sculptures cut up and put into shipping containers and then framed out so they would be safe in the transport. | ||
| And when they opened the doors, they were and then they began molding and transferring the clay into bronze. | ||
| Well, all those pieces had to be put back together and people like Kane in the finishing department, 25 year olds who got trained on this project, who's now 28, acquired leadership roles. | ||
| It's just 200 people at that foundry. | ||
| Every single person at that foundry, the Cotswolds, had something to do with putting that metal back together. | ||
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What about in our studio, in the sculpting, the day-to-day marathon? | |
| In our studio, obviously you were there for every single block that we had to do to stop | ||
| people from coming in so I could keep working and doing the business reports every month | ||
| to the commission because we're being audited all the time to make sure that we're not, | ||
| you know, going the wrong way with the money. | ||
| And we were on time. | ||
| And then Charlie, who came in as a, you know, a young guy and he had to grow a lot to take | ||
| on the responsibility of making something that will last forever and beat mortality. | ||
| And Ricky, the model that we spoke about, and Sarah Mangasar, who was, you know, helped | ||
| with walking our German shepherd. | ||
| And it's incredible. | ||
| And Serena Pack, who was there to do all the paperwork. | ||
| And Jess Artman, Charlie's wife, who even pregnant was sculpting. | ||
| And these are human beings that actually helped produce this sculpture. | ||
| And it's a moment to acknowledge that Community and working towards something to build, to make, to make something of excellence and value for others, not to destroy, to take down. | ||
| And that's what we are fighting. | ||
| And that's why I become so vociferous in terms of like what the government has done in terms of perpetuating wars upon its public, because ultimately we end up paying for it. | ||
| And that money then goes towards things that could have been Going towards things that are positive. | ||
| So that's a big deal. | ||
|
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We can build, we can rebuild our infrastructure, we can create more memorials, we can create school systems that actually teach our children how to read and do math and think about things in a critical way, the tools of critical analysis, or we can pay Raytheon and some of these other places a lot of money and let the politicians get kickbacks, right? | |
| Yeah, I like that. | ||
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But in our studio, you know, if somebody asked them if they've been hard to work for, what would they say? | |
| And do you want to tell everyone what your nickname was? | ||
| Well, my nickname in the studio is Il Duce, which is, you know, from World War II, the Italian dictator. | ||
| Now it's out. | ||
| And basically, Whatever I say goes. | ||
| And I have integrity. | ||
| I have honesty in running my shop. | ||
| And I always give people a chance and a second chance. | ||
| Because to arrive at a higher level in the crafts like sculpture making, there are a lot of mistakes that are made, but you do not repeat mistakes more than once. | ||
| And that is the deal there. | ||
| I believe that the whole idea of constructing and making something, though, has been taken off the map in a way for our country. | ||
| I hope that once this sculpture is unveiled that we can proceed into more memorials and monuments that speak well about our history in a heroic, unifying fashion that does not destroy the fabric of our nation. | ||
| And so that is my aspiration to begin another monument about American exceptionalism and American history in the spring. | ||
| And it is my hope and dream that we move towards rebuilding our country with beauty. | ||
| Beauty is about humanity. | ||
| It's about human beings and not towards this destroying. | ||
| Because it's shocking to see for myself The sculpture in front of the White House being sprayed by the protesters and then no arrests being made. | ||
| That is shocking because if I went out at night and I destroyed a car, Or vandalized public property, I would end up in jail that night. | ||
| So I think we need to really rethink this privileged protesting that is going on, and begin to have some demonstrations against it, and lay the law down. | ||
| Look at laws that make destruction of public property a felony, not a misdemeanor that gets you out in a few hours. | ||
| And I take it as a personal affront, given the fact that those monuments took a lot of education and a lot of training to make. | ||
|
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Beauty, excellence, and the art of skill matter. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Because those things go back to the sacred. | |
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And if you make things of little value and build buildings and architecture that are ugly in their aesthetics, you're actually denigrating humanity because we are deeply affected by what we take in visually. | ||
| That is one of the things that I bring to the table because I grew up in Italy and I was surrounded by the splendor of the Italian Renaissance and there is an elegance and a power to art that I am playing forward and I am doing it in service of we the people Because you are owed sacred art and sacred culture because this country is the only place on the planet that you could do something of this magnitude. | ||
| You can manifest your destiny here, and that's what we are fighting for with the National World War I Monument. | ||
| Thank you everybody for listening today. | ||
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