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TM<br />
m a g a z i n e volume 1 no. 1<br />
March/April 2012<br />
ART<br />
Commentary<br />
<strong>Premier</strong>
m a g a z i n e<br />
TM<br />
volume 1 no. 1 • march/april 2012<br />
REVOLT is:<br />
PUBLISHED BY:<br />
Public Art Squad Project<br />
PUBLISHER: Scotto Mycklebust, Artist<br />
MANAGING EDITOR: Katie Cercone<br />
MANAGING EDITOR: Tobin Mitnick<br />
CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Scotto Mycklebust<br />
ART & DESIGN DIRECTOR: Joli Latini<br />
ART PHOTOGRAPHER: Mirena Rhee<br />
ADVERTISING CONTACT:<br />
advertise@revoltmagazine.org<br />
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REVOLT OFFICES:<br />
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526 West 26th Street, Suite 511<br />
New York, New York 10001<br />
212.242.1909<br />
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Letter from the Publisher ...<br />
<strong>Revolt</strong> <strong>Magazine</strong> is born today! <strong>Revolt</strong> <strong>Magazine</strong> is an<br />
art publication hand-crafted by a dedicated team of<br />
artists, writers and critical thinkers residing in New<br />
York City. As a forum for free creative exchange, <strong>Revolt</strong><br />
<strong>Magazine</strong> stands behind the formation of a humane,<br />
progressive and artistically expressive society.<br />
<strong>Revolt</strong> <strong>Magazine</strong> draws its inspiration from West<br />
Chelsea based artist Scotto Mycklebust, whose<br />
desire to reflect on the changing contemporary<br />
sociopolitical landscape and rebuke the rigid status<br />
quo fueled the creation of our premier issue. We drew<br />
our inaugural creative matter from an unfinished<br />
magazine cover Mycklebust found in his archived<br />
files (Frontpage, 2003). Adopting the iconic fist of<br />
Mycklebust’s first draft - a cross-cultural symbol of<br />
revolt and a mobilized, creatively conscientious public<br />
- the new cover, christened <strong>Revolt</strong> <strong>Magazine</strong> 2012,<br />
materialized.<br />
Discussion of the arts, particularly in criticism, usually<br />
errs toward conciliation. While this is wonderful in<br />
terms of creating a genial and supportive atmosphere<br />
among critics and patrons, unfortunately it doesn’t<br />
provide any kind of argument for art as a social tool. If<br />
we want visual art to hold an immediately vital place<br />
IN THIS ISSUE:<br />
6 Today’s Fashion<br />
8 The Occupy Aesthetic<br />
11 Eat This Mlack Busic<br />
21 Occupy: The Unlikely Protester<br />
25 Interview - Ultra Violet<br />
28 Anonymous<br />
32 Op Ed - “Occupation: Symbolize”<br />
in our culture, we need to lift it out of its esoteric<br />
confines, out of museums and auction houses, and<br />
place it in the hands of the people that need it most.<br />
In the end, we must turn away from trivial discussion<br />
and turn towards argument, where art is not an elitist<br />
historical tradition but a radical means of showing us<br />
the way forward.<br />
Reflecting back on the global Occupy Wall Street<br />
protests of Fall 2011, we have aimed to address the<br />
aesthetic implications of the movement and become an<br />
arbiter of change at the crossroads of art and<br />
activism. But, just as the protesters of Occupy Wall<br />
Street refuse to accept the confining limits of a specific<br />
platform, so we eschew any specific agenda. Our only<br />
dedication is to belief -- belief in art, belief in progress,<br />
and, most importantly, belief in progress through<br />
art. Through trusting art as a socially effective device,<br />
we can trust society to express itself more intelligently<br />
and constructively.<br />
We hope that you are inspired by our publication and<br />
the explosive, occasionally radical contents herein.<br />
Let it be a catalyst to your own freedom of creative<br />
production. <strong>Revolt</strong> against that which binds you.<br />
Scotto Mycklebust<br />
REVOLT<br />
ARTISTS MUSEUM<br />
MISSION STATEMENT<br />
Through a diverse array of journalistic styles - investigative, academic, interview,<br />
opinion - and stunning visuals, REVOLT <strong>Magazine</strong> aims to ensure that art never loses<br />
its profundity. We urge our readers to join our mission, generating positive social<br />
change through creative production and informed cultural critique.<br />
www.revoltmagazine.org<br />
Copyright & Permissions Info: © copyright 2011 - 2012 <strong>Revolt</strong> <strong>Magazine</strong>. All Rights Reserved. For all<br />
reprints, permissions and questions, please contact 212.242.1909 or by email: info@revoltmagazine.com.<br />
REVOLT<br />
<strong>Magazine</strong> March/February 2012 2
Hôtel<br />
AMERICANO<br />
Chelsea<br />
New York<br />
518 West 27 th Street, New York NY 10001<br />
For booking<br />
hotel-americano.com 212.216.0000
THE<br />
R LIST<br />
SOUND OFF : OWS<br />
ON FACEBOOK...<br />
“So you’re saying adding pepper spray to school cafeteria<br />
pizza won’t make it count for two vegetables servings??”<br />
“The gravey [sic] train for the 1% stop now if you have<br />
the courage to make it happen.”<br />
“Congressional Republicans are the 1% they favor themselves...”<br />
“Since the beginning of the Occupy movement we have watched<br />
as police violence toward the otherwise peaceful protestors<br />
has steadily increased.”<br />
“IT IS TIME TO REGAIN THE WORLD!”<br />
“Occupy: could you be more clever?! ‘Occupy Vancouver leaves<br />
art gallery, moves to courthouse’ across the street!”<br />
ON TWITTER...<br />
SEARCH TERMS: ART + OCCUPY<br />
RESULT: “The heart of this movement is ideas, art, history, sharing.”<br />
http://TheOther99.tv #OWS<br />
SEARCH TERMS: PERFORMANCE ART + CHANGE<br />
RESULT: “But I felt bigger knowing performance art through collaboration<br />
can create change by connecting people with the same message.”<br />
SEARCH TERMS: OCCUPY + ART WORLD<br />
RESULT: “‘Would you laugh if the mainstream art world was punked?’<br />
#occupyartworld”<br />
“In the history of movements for social change, really exciting<br />
things tend to happen when those who are poor or marginalized<br />
and those who are from a different class but are (for whatever<br />
reason) distancing themselves from their class values come together”<br />
THE<br />
GALLERY VIEW<br />
SEARCH TERMS: OCCUPY WALL STREET + SYMBOL<br />
RESULT: “#Occupy Masks ‘licensed by TimeWarner protesters buying &<br />
[sic] helping target of their demonstrations’ abcn.ws/vfOASt<br />
Mouth open, teeth showing (1), Zoe Leonard, 2000. Installation view at Western Bridge, Seattle, 2011. Photo: Scotto Mycklebust, 2011<br />
REVOLT<br />
<strong>Magazine</strong> March/April 2012 4
TODAY’S<br />
FASHION<br />
BY KATIE CERCONE<br />
York city street fashion is a Petri dish of inspiration for<br />
designers all over the world. It’s timeless,’ says Natalia Yovane,<br />
a fine artist from Brooklyn known for her faint purple eye shadow,<br />
‘New<br />
vintage sneaks and killer forehead fringe. In 2011, blackanese<br />
Barbie Nicki Minaj, an artist whose lyrics boast she’s sporting 6-digit sneakers<br />
(not that she looks at the price tag) was the most popular Halloween Costume.<br />
Plurality is in, and fashion – that grimy whip of the governing elite – who gives a<br />
hoot? Your mistress? Medical intuitive? Inner child? Dealer? Who are you – the<br />
girl that loved pajama day in high school?<br />
Truthfully, the very idea of having to write as an authority on street fashion<br />
- (fashion as far as I’m concerned being a four letter word) ‘street,’ meanwhile<br />
infinitely pregnant with politically incorrect slander – threw me for a loop. I<br />
nonetheless hit the block (Soho, Harlem, Bushwick and Midtown respectively)<br />
like a rookie ethnographer.<br />
34th St. Herald Square – women are still wearing Ugg boots? Bushwick –<br />
Aunt Jemima head wraps, Grandpa shades, faded paisley slips…skinny jeans<br />
are a must and skinny jeans make you gay, depending on the demographic.<br />
Wide leg pants occur in two factions, one being the yoga mat toting bright eyed<br />
sort whose flowing linen tribal influenced dubs could house the Bronx zoo, and<br />
the other being those hip hop types that still think tight white boy swag makes<br />
your upwardly mobile ass gay. Gold nameplate anything – ears and knuckles<br />
screaming Christian names, or worse, proclamations like ‘Celibate’ – glinted in<br />
the disturbing November heat from the direction of hipsters and thugs alike.<br />
Slim Hungry of Bushwick, “stays fresh wearing Rugby and Religion with Lebrons<br />
on his feets.” When he plays basketball he, “stays straight with Nike or Adidas<br />
kits, aka the whole package from the headband to the socks.”<br />
Up north, DaViana Wall of Harlem Overheard writes (“Hood Rich” Spring<br />
2010): “People steal from stores and commit all types of crime just in an effort<br />
to look ‘fly’…these hood stars have $1,200 jackets, and still live at home with<br />
mommy. That’s not what’s up.”<br />
Cindy Hinant, a visual artist whose daily trek through Soho makes her a regular<br />
target for amateur blogarazzi stalking women for photo copy, remarks, “Street<br />
fashion has made me both paranoid and vain. Last week I had my photo taken<br />
twice in one day by two different magazines for their street fashion whatever.<br />
Now when I’m wearing something that I think is awesome I’m disappointed not<br />
to be stopped to have my picture taken.” Others such as Veronica Green, whose<br />
daily ride on the L train sends her into mind choruses of “Why? Whyyyyyy????”<br />
wonders, “How these people possibly work in tutus, fishnets, giant onesies and<br />
gold, lame tops?”<br />
Recently at PINTA, the Latin American Art Fair in New York City, while watching<br />
the barrage of skinny pant legs and dainty beveled loafers, a journalist from<br />
Chile whispered in my ear what numerous cultural critics have confirmed as<br />
of late: “Fashion is dead.” Meanwhile, a balding gentlemen looking dapper in<br />
Sinatra-inspired attire explained he had just spent a fortune on a new wardrobe<br />
at a few select “fashion forward” clothing outlets downtown. Rewind. Some<br />
wolves feed their young their own vomit. Fashion is a hostile scrimmage, a<br />
pedigree pooch chasing its own tail. More sizzle than steak. Check it: Whatever<br />
you do, don’t be the one we all love to hate.<br />
REVOLT<br />
<strong>Magazine</strong> March/April 2012 6
Occupy My Painting, Mirena Rhee, 2011
Photo: Mirena Rhee, 2011<br />
the<br />
OCCUPYAESTHETIC<br />
evolution of a movement's visual landscape<br />
BY TOBIN MITNICK<br />
Mike sells tee-shirts depicting anticorruption<br />
messages and variations on<br />
the famous “We are the 99%” slogan.<br />
His face is chapped with the weatherworn<br />
look of so many protesters that have stayed<br />
their ground at Zuccotti Park. “I think the most<br />
interesting thing is this kid who was sitting in a cage.<br />
If a cop were to put him in jail, it doesn’t matter. He’s<br />
put himself in a cage of his own free will.”<br />
As both a member of the growing Occupy Wall<br />
Street movement and a visual artist himself, Mike<br />
has borne witness to a key feature of the blossoming<br />
state of creativity in Zuccotti Park: the goal of<br />
artists and performers seems to be enlightenment,<br />
to awaken those sleeping masses dormant with<br />
apathy. Even in these nascent stages of a historic<br />
event, the visual landscape suggests that personal<br />
interest is a far cry from the chief messages of<br />
community and growth.<br />
OWS is a fascinating experiment in agenda setting.<br />
Though the prevalent message comes across as<br />
inequality in the tax code, and thus a representation<br />
REVOLT<br />
of societal inequality, no primary platform has been<br />
decided upon for the sole reason that it would<br />
deprive the movement of bite. It is OWS’s generality<br />
that is its greatest strength and its wealthiest source<br />
of intimidation and inspiration alike. And, like so<br />
many populist movements in history, the protesters<br />
in Zuccotti park have taken personal expression to<br />
be a critical element in communicating both within<br />
and outside the park limits. Though the arts and<br />
culture section of their website proclaims that, “art<br />
brings joy to the daily life of occupiers” (http://<br />
artsandculture.nycga.net), it is also a vital part of<br />
extending their platform of frustration nation-wide.<br />
It is the protesters’ struggle to produce art that is<br />
visually arresting and affecting without pigeonholing<br />
the movement into narrower aims.<br />
Many occupiers have put their faith in historical<br />
precedent; much as Thomas Nash crushed<br />
Tammany Hall’s notorious veneer of ethics in the<br />
1860s and 70s through his ingenious political<br />
cartoons, protesters have adopted the timehonored<br />
tradition of artistic satire as their own.<br />
Vincent, a professional artist and graphic designer<br />
who has himself created canvases that praise the<br />
energy of OWS, speaks of a particularly sharp-witted<br />
piece, “I saw a nice sketch that a guy had. It was a<br />
reproduction of a pig laying on its side, with six men<br />
sucking on its nipples…it had congress written on<br />
its ass.” This general hostility transcends borders of<br />
political parties—it pinpoints the corruption of the<br />
American governmental system in the system itself.<br />
Sharon, a retired Columbia graduate who is<br />
currently putting her children through multiple<br />
degrees in the arts, dons a similar sketch with a<br />
similar theme: a donkey and an elephant lie next to<br />
each other, exes for eyes. Yet her personal concern<br />
is one of fear for the future of education in the arts.<br />
“My daughter has two degrees and wants a Masters<br />
in illustration from FIT. But what good is it to pay for<br />
another degree if there are no jobs?” Her brand of<br />
visual art is an attempt to combat a terrifying future.<br />
But for all of their belief in the forms of the past,<br />
the occupiers have begun to embrace a relatively<br />
new artistic phenomenon. Much as Mike’s kid in the<br />
cage demonstrated a extroverted devotion to very<br />
<strong>Magazine</strong> March/April 2012 8
personal principles, the performance art in Zuccotti<br />
Park seems to serve a two fold purpose.<br />
The first function is that of inspiration. Much as<br />
they state on their website, the arts and culture<br />
delegation of Occupy Wall Street buoys the daily<br />
mood of the protesters. It is, without a doubt, a<br />
boon to the seriousness of the movement to see the<br />
brazen quality of the surrounding demonstrations of<br />
expression.<br />
But the second way in which performance helps<br />
the movement is the fact that shocking art never<br />
fails to attract media attention. Rosemary, who is<br />
primarily a spectator but nevertheless sympathizes<br />
deeply with the occupiers, mentions a particularly<br />
memorable performance: “There were women<br />
naked and prancing around topless, saying that it<br />
was a form of expression. That to me is some kind<br />
of art they’re making.” Shock art is indispensable<br />
to the movement at large, as it broadcasts the<br />
varying messages of protesters nationwide. Here,<br />
at a historically unique intersection of both the<br />
personal and public realms, performance art fulfills<br />
the height of its immediate potential.<br />
Yet as city ordinances command police<br />
crackdowns of protester activity, free expression<br />
often suffers devastating tolls.<br />
By now, the members of the protester group<br />
so far as to view their various arrests and assaults<br />
by policemen as serving a greater good. When one<br />
member gets beat up or thrown in the back of a<br />
police van, it inevitably becomes a feeding frenzy<br />
for the media, resulting in hundreds of images soon<br />
to be iconic. It is as if they realize their place in<br />
history even as they are living it. They embrace their<br />
media martyrdom, along with all of the performative<br />
aspects inherent in sacrifice.<br />
But while members of Anonymous and artists<br />
scribbling political cartoons exhibit their expression<br />
haphazardly with a sort of creative abandon, there is<br />
a faction within Zuccotti Park that promotes the selfconscious<br />
nature of visual art within the movement.<br />
De La Vega, a graphic designer, holds the<br />
personal belief that the protesters need to be cued<br />
in to the fact that their images are being beamed<br />
out to all corners of America. He displays his<br />
personal platform of anti-fraud and anti-crime with<br />
a crisp professionalism: his sign is made from a<br />
real uncut sheet of one-dollar bills, laminated and<br />
trimmed immaculately. Over top his sign, he has<br />
printed a warning against financial corruption in an<br />
intimidating yet pristine typeface.<br />
If the protesters are to be most effective in<br />
broadcasting their messages, he says, they must<br />
take their art seriously. “The cleaner and more<br />
But though the mood down at Wall Street may be<br />
argumentative, it is only for the sake of dignity. The<br />
protesters want to encourage a movement that is<br />
strong in both its standing and means of expression,<br />
one that can both support the life of the protest<br />
much as art supports society and also effectively<br />
show America that they mean business.<br />
And, while its visual art has yet to approach the full<br />
measure of its potency, the human drama is by far<br />
the most compelling aspect of the visual landscape<br />
at Occupy Wall Street. Though they are still<br />
struggling for new and effective forms of expression,<br />
the authenticity of the movement is breaking down<br />
barriers, providing an atmosphere that is anything<br />
but a performance. As they aspire to create a visual<br />
language of the movement, they have already made<br />
Zuccotti park a place where art can flourish.<br />
As a poet, Michael feels the desperate need<br />
for community. Through art, he says, we find the<br />
“potential to express things poetically”. He finds<br />
visual art as a waystation for solid intra-community<br />
relationships. It’s a way to document “what you’ve<br />
seen, what you think, what you feel”. But, as he is<br />
quick to state, the most inspiring pieces of art in<br />
Zuccotti Park come in the form of genuine interaction,<br />
where community comes before demographic or<br />
financial disparity, “I saw a black thug put a blanket<br />
“shocking art never fails<br />
to attract media attention”<br />
“Anonymous” have achieved limited fame as the Guy<br />
Fawkes-masked occupiers in Zuccotti park. Many of<br />
their league have been anchored here for four weeks<br />
or more, except when the cops drove them out for<br />
fourteen days. As far as the masks go, the personal<br />
style is cribbed from that of the hacker-group, also<br />
called “Anonymous”. Though the hacker group has<br />
expressed support for the movement at-large, the<br />
protester groups seems to be acting autonomously,<br />
not connected directly to the international hacking<br />
institution.<br />
As a reactionary group, “Anonymous” believes in<br />
the visual statement of anonymity in order to achieve<br />
a sort of social enlightenment—perhaps, if we can<br />
see each other as equally persecuted by corporate<br />
institutions, we can perceive a greater need for<br />
redress of grievances. Yet, though their movement<br />
rotates agendas day-to-day, they find themselves<br />
in an expressive dilemma due to their masks: “It<br />
gives us misrepresentation I think. They think we’re<br />
terrorists. People here are afraid to talk to us. We’re<br />
really nice guys.” Many of their ranks have had<br />
violent run-ins with police, endured beatings, and<br />
even been issued felony charges for their behavior.<br />
But even though they battle over identity and<br />
territoriality with the cops, they affirm their stalwart<br />
dedication to the spirit of change, “I’m here to<br />
protest, and I’m here to get the word out.” They go<br />
constructive your message is, the more editors<br />
will like that.” He adds that positive messages<br />
are much more effective than cynicism, “There’s<br />
a lack of cleancut messaging. It gets cluttered<br />
with ugly signs and angry messages. No one wants<br />
to hear anger”.<br />
on a white guy while he was sleeping, and it was just<br />
a beautiful thing. Art comes in many forms, but the<br />
art of life is the most momentous and memorable.”<br />
While they may grapple with funneling their<br />
frustrations into creative projects, the protesters<br />
have no difficulty finding commonality in their cause.<br />
Photo: Mirena Rhee, 2011<br />
9
Golden Gate Park, Scotto Mycklebust, 2011
EAT THIS<br />
MLACK<br />
BUSIC SPIRITUALITY&HIP HOP<br />
80's Baby speaks on Wankstarism , goddess archetypes, and the musical fetish<br />
BY KATIE CERCONE<br />
spirituality of hip hop,’ comes<br />
from a complicated and at times<br />
contradictory constellation of<br />
terms. Through an interdisciplinary<br />
‘The<br />
inquiry I have developed what I<br />
affectionately term a derelict cosmogony of the<br />
spiritualism of hip hop via the embodied freedom<br />
encompassed in its interdynamic gestures of power,<br />
symbolism, triple metaphor, dance and song as<br />
metalanguage. 1<br />
Through the phantasmagoric ‘veil’ of my own<br />
distorted magnitude, I’ll posit hip hop as an<br />
expressive, holistic and activating collective form of<br />
liberatory spiritualism. Numerous cultural theorists<br />
have illustrated how we live in a culture of avoidance<br />
and escape. Collective experience has purportedly<br />
been reduced to simultaneous private experiences<br />
distributed across the field of a highly dispersed<br />
media culture in which passive consumers enjoy<br />
leisure time like sleep. 1 But the genius of music,<br />
like sensuality, is that it traverses the body. Hip<br />
hop as an immersive microclimate hemorrhages<br />
psycho-pedagogy. We can conceive of hip hop in all<br />
its incantations as a dynamic form of esotericism<br />
or neo-Jungian ‘cultural dreaming’ in which the<br />
authors, coauthors and fans of the genre use<br />
powerful symbols and lingering sounds that engage<br />
body, mind and group soul. 2<br />
Historically avant-garde practice has entailed an<br />
interculturalism of appropriation that always relies<br />
on white hegemony as its veritable backbone. 3 Any<br />
foray into the territory of race – the fashionable<br />
mantle of the hip hop industry (industry as opposed<br />
to hip hop community) - must address the issue<br />
of sexual fetish. Appropriation as ‘border crossing’<br />
speaks to issues of the ownership of cultural<br />
property. The aestheticized ‘objectified’ other<br />
as intimate source of pleasure/desire/fear is a<br />
reoccurring trope art historically which has served<br />
to denigrate oppressed groups, particularly racial<br />
minorities, gays and women.<br />
As scholar bell hooks notes, ‘young white<br />
consumers utilize black vernacular popular culture<br />
to disrupt bourgeois values.’ Calling out Madonna,<br />
widely known for her appropriation of gay and<br />
black subcultures, hooks asserts the queen of the<br />
sexual revolution cashes in by ‘mirroring the role<br />
of plantation overseer in a slave based economy.’<br />
She further states that this moment is indicative<br />
of sociocultural climate in which ‘white people<br />
and the rest of us are being asked by the<br />
marketplace to let our prejudices and xenophobia<br />
(fear of difference) go, and happily ‘eat the other.’ 4<br />
My work interrogates hooks’ explosive ‘moment’<br />
as the abysmal residue of capitalist commodity<br />
fetishism, an illusive, psychosexual chimera.<br />
As expressed by cultural theorist Norman Kelley,<br />
black music exists in a neo-colonial relationship with<br />
the $12 billion music industry. In classic neo-colonial<br />
style, black inner cities act as ‘raw cites of cultural<br />
Katie Cercone, ‘Grind 4 Da Shine’ Video Sculpture, 2011.<br />
production’ whereby conditions (low per capita<br />
income, high birth rate, economic dependence on<br />
external markets, labor as major export) resemble<br />
a third world country and produce a ‘product’ –<br />
hip hop – that is sold back to the ‘motherland’ (in<br />
this case suburbs teeming with bored white youth<br />
bloated by privilege). As Mos Def echoes, ‘Old white<br />
men is runnin’ this rap shit.’ Despite the fanfare<br />
of industry moguls like Jay Z and Lil Wayne, there<br />
are in fact no blacks in top executive positions at<br />
the companies that parent successful black owned<br />
companies. 5<br />
It’s also disconcerting to note how the money<br />
earning potential of hip hop is largely reliant on an<br />
industry produced image of black ghetto life which<br />
serves to buttress the prison industrial complex,<br />
a contemporary ‘leviathan’ of racial inequality<br />
maintained through a ferocious combination<br />
of government law, private corporations, police<br />
terrorism and racist cultural attitudes. 6 The constant<br />
turn to ’ghetto blackness’ as a model of ‘authenticity’<br />
and hipness in rap music 7 limits ‘blackness’ to ‘a<br />
primal connection to sex and violence, a big penis<br />
and relief from the onus of upward mobility.’ 8<br />
As scholar Tricia Rose notes, ‘hip hop merely<br />
displays in phantasmagorical form the cultural logic<br />
of late capitalism.’ 9 Hip hop is a multi-billion dollar<br />
industry and vital creative enterprise of the African<br />
diasporic community (where is houstatlantavegas<br />
located approximately?) the germinating stage<br />
1.<br />
Metalanguage n; The structure of signs and correspondences that only symbolism and myth make it possible to conserve and transmit (from Cultural Dreaming by Erik Davis)<br />
11
SPIRITUALITY<br />
& HIP HOP continued...<br />
of which occurred in the aftermath of 1977’s<br />
devastating New York City black out. While the<br />
Times reading set was gaping at hallowing images<br />
of the desolate looted Bronx as if the borough were<br />
the city’s dangling excoriated appendage, black<br />
youth were congregating in the streets to dance,<br />
brag, paint, swagger and rhyme as a practice in<br />
collectivity and spontaneous reciprocity. They were<br />
creatively repurposing boxy electronics left dusty<br />
by outsourced industries that once put food on<br />
their family’s tables. Says Rose, rap videos satisfy<br />
‘poor young black people’s profound need to have<br />
their territories acknowledged, recognized and<br />
celebrated,’ as they converge around the ‘local<br />
posse, crew or support system.’ 10 Fusing the racially<br />
disparate post-industrial conditions of urbanity with<br />
the sensate fury of the African drum which once<br />
called the community to war – hip hop, like spiritual<br />
practice, is a matrix concerned with territory,<br />
belonging and identity.<br />
I was born in 1984 at the very moment hip hop<br />
erupted as an overwhelmingly lucrative genre with<br />
MTV to cement its aesthetic as a hip style. White<br />
youth of my generation consume this music in a<br />
fashion 20 th century German musicologist Theodor<br />
Adorno termed ‘culinary’ appreciation. We thereby<br />
feed exclusively on the music’s, ‘Certain over<br />
sweet sounds and colors… like musical cookies or<br />
candies.’ Music, the art form possessing the most<br />
efficient means of accessing the pleasure receptors<br />
in the subconscious brain, when manufactured<br />
purely as an ‘object of exchange,’ serves as ‘a<br />
reservoir of a secondary, infantile satisfactions<br />
and magical authority.’ Whereas real art in<br />
music is the ‘transcription of historical suffering,’<br />
Adorno condones produced music for insisting<br />
that its listeners are ‘forced to passive sensual<br />
and emotional acceptance of predigested yet<br />
disconnected qualities, whereas those qualities at<br />
the same time become mummified and magicized.’ 11<br />
My interest in hip hop culture drinks at the<br />
trough of my neuroses. It forever pays homage<br />
to the tripartite pleasures of my bulimic youth in<br />
suburban California. My first car, my first taste of<br />
Wild 94.9 and 106.1 Kmel Jamz on subwoofers,<br />
my flight from anorexia into bulimia – these three<br />
instances together culminated in an unmitigated<br />
feeling of sensory overload, danger and freedom.<br />
The ‘fantasy’ of a perfect love union set forth in the<br />
musical lyrics doomed to cold oscillation just as the<br />
repeated abuse of food persisted only as a lucid and<br />
shameful false transgression.<br />
Lil Wayne was my first consciously spiritual<br />
experience with hip hop. Weezy loved candy. Weezy<br />
got high, drank syzzurp, ate candy, ate pussy, ate<br />
beats. Weezy legally postponed his imprisonment<br />
to undergo eight urgently needed root canals and<br />
my father was an orthodontist. Weezy sang about<br />
‘Ice Cream Paint Jobs’ and ‘Young Money.’ To the<br />
artist Mya in her hit Lock U Down, the subject of<br />
many a personal flash fantasy, Weezy sings ‘got a<br />
sweet tooth, Miss Caramel, I need 3 scoops.’ Weezy<br />
coughed, growled, heaved. Weezy’s style is part<br />
of a few subgenres. One being a slower, southernderived<br />
approach in which the artist drags out<br />
vowels and leaves breathy spaces, as if ‘hot air’<br />
lives in the rhymes. 12 The other being ‘swag,’ an<br />
abbreviation of swagger - the evocation of style<br />
“Weezy...represented the purity of recklessness,<br />
youth, and abuse of power hinging on one’s<br />
ability to overspend, to binge -- to reinscribe the<br />
law at the very moment one breaks it.”<br />
and guts, also connected to the African tradition<br />
of boasting or bragging - considered a non-genre<br />
or meta-genre in which artists engage in excessive<br />
bragging about their ‘swag,’ (money, cars and<br />
clothes). Swag not only has a triple function (genre,<br />
action, baggage), it also serves to illustrate the way<br />
in which ‘swag’ style as the parody of a die-hard<br />
materialist culture means swag objects function<br />
in my hip hop spiritualist cosmogony as a type of<br />
‘occult bric-a-brac,’ 13 an economy of excess which<br />
cleanses meanings by metaphorical loops.<br />
Weezy Baby – the lyrics, the locks, the lawlessness<br />
Katie Cercone, ‘Grind 4 Da Shine’ Video Sculpture, 2011.<br />
REVOLT<br />
<strong>Magazine</strong> March/April 2012 12
and constant spinning out into pleasure – cranked<br />
up my transcendental limits. Weezy appealed to<br />
me in so much that he represented the purity of<br />
recklessness, youth, and abuse of power hinging on<br />
one’s ability to overspend, to binge – to reinscribe<br />
the law at the very moment one breaks it. Lil Wayne<br />
was the epitome of the prosthetic boyfriend I had<br />
experienced through the surrogate of music and<br />
food since adolescence.<br />
Remarks Slovenian continental philosopher and<br />
critical theorist Slavoj Žižek, ‘The singing voice at it<br />
most elementary [is] the embodiment of ‘surplusenjoyment’…the<br />
paradoxical ‘pleasure in pain.’ 14<br />
Singing raises vibrations in the body. Popular music<br />
entails a partisanship based on a private, sensual<br />
contract. ‘Surplus-enjoyment’ in the purest sense<br />
here is the return of the energy invested in the fetish,<br />
the invocation of a spiritual longing for connection<br />
to a distant, majestic and mysterious force. It is<br />
epitomized in the bulimic’s privileged relationship<br />
to capitalism’s compulsory over-consumption<br />
and endlessly deferred gratification. What Žižek<br />
suggests here is that desire can essentially be<br />
boiled down to the thinking human’s unique ability<br />
to create a law that is a defense against the body’s<br />
full expression of jouissance.<br />
The hunger to repeatedly ‘eat the other’ (and<br />
his ‘distant danger’) is one and the same with the<br />
desire to break the self-imposed dietetic rules. This<br />
concept is one Adorno fleshes out in a problematic<br />
passage of Current of Music on the development<br />
of Jazz: ‘Even if the girl enjoys unconsciously the<br />
idea of making herself prey of a strong colored<br />
fellow, she certainly also wants unconsciously to<br />
punish herself for the crime of her imagination…<br />
for the unlawful pleasure which she wants to give<br />
and to deny herself at the same time.’ 15 It is the<br />
typical Romantic gesture in which one ‘Elevates the<br />
longing as such, at the expense of the object one<br />
longs for.’ 16<br />
Neurosis is perhaps both a generative creative<br />
condition as much as a ‘luxury problem’ of the<br />
rich typically treated with anti-depressant or antianxiety<br />
medications. It often manifests in the form<br />
of obsessive compulsive behaviors and eating<br />
disorders and its historical predecessors would be<br />
neurasthenia and hysteria. Commodity fetishism<br />
has crystallized our imaginations into dominions<br />
where anxiety and ecstasy are twins, whereby the<br />
market and its depotentiated subjects are forced<br />
always and only to ‘reproduce by way of borrowing<br />
from the future.’ 17 Our culinary and fetishistic<br />
communion with the Other while listening follows<br />
the basic Laconian ontology in which the ‘field of<br />
reality has to be ‘sutured’ with a supplement’ and<br />
what is elevated as a positive entity is in reality a<br />
‘negative magnitude.’<br />
According to Susan Sontag, illness as a metaphor<br />
or ‘trope’ of the self is considered an outgrowth of<br />
the Romantic period in art and poetry. In her text<br />
Illness as Metaphor, Sontag outlines the history of<br />
illness as ‘fashion’ – melancholy was the disease<br />
of 19 th Century Romantics. Insanity, associated<br />
with ‘superior sensitivity,’ and hailed as the conduit<br />
of spiritual feelings and ‘critical’ discontent was<br />
claimed by the 20 th Century Modernists. She notes<br />
the 19 th century physician Bichat who called health<br />
the ‘silence of organs’ and illness ‘their revolt.’ 18<br />
Exploring the sensuality of spirituality entails that<br />
organs have their ‘revolt’ against the mandates of a<br />
structured society. The ‘pleasure’ of listening holds<br />
a consuming transcendent potential - a glittering<br />
alchemy that occurs at the moment when the<br />
subaltern speaks in the visual, when the symbol is<br />
transgressed and all the energy falsely invested in<br />
cognitive distance provides an explosive gateway<br />
into the infinite.<br />
“Pop culture is a<br />
vital source of<br />
gender pedagogy”<br />
Hip hop culture as appropriated by white hipsters<br />
may disrupt bourgeois values, but as a d.i.y. tradition<br />
of black underprivileged youths it is an undoubtedly<br />
ideological act of insubordination traced back to<br />
the ritual singing and dancing of slaves and what<br />
theorist Fred Moten identifies as the root of the<br />
black radical tradition: ‘The commodity whose<br />
speech sound embodies the critique of value, of<br />
private property, of the sign.’ 19 According to Marx,<br />
the commodity who speaks is an impossibility. The<br />
slave who enacted verbal insubordination in various<br />
forms – screaming, grunting, singing – defied his<br />
objecthood through unmediated experiential and<br />
vibratory collective action causing spatio-temporal<br />
dislocation. A singer at work is no longer at work. He<br />
is no longer bound to the structure of time defining<br />
his bindedness.<br />
Fred Moten pinpoints this moment of dislocation<br />
as the ‘generative break,’ at the root of the black<br />
radical tradition, a space ‘wherein action becomes<br />
possible, one in which it is our duty to linger in the<br />
name of the ensemble and its performance.’ 20<br />
Again, this calls to mind bodily activation in the<br />
form of dance, song and bodily expression as a<br />
revolutionary practice undoing the divisive laws<br />
of language, capitalism, commodity, and perhaps<br />
most important, time as a definitive distinction:<br />
labor or leisure. As if epitomizing this temporal<br />
freedom, says rapper Nas during the intro to N.Y.<br />
State of Mind (released on the 1994 Illmatic album,<br />
what has been called one of the greatest hip hop<br />
albums of all time) ‘Black is time.’<br />
In yet another, particularly poignant articulation of<br />
the power of hip hop, Birdman, Lil Wayne’s industry<br />
father figure rhymes,<br />
“We grind for the shine nigga gettin’ big money.<br />
Got a fleet tossin’ chicken nigga get cake” 21<br />
In a quick succession of speech lasting merely<br />
a few seconds, Birdman had burned through<br />
several double and triple metaphors, speaking to<br />
racism, masculinity, power, luxury, ownership, God,<br />
radical rebellion, food, sexuality and abundance.<br />
Black cultural theorists and feminists have rightly<br />
referred to African-Americans as the first postmoderns<br />
marked by a pluralistic or shifting notion<br />
of self. Remarks artist Lorraine O’Grady of the<br />
West’s monotheism in respect to African-American<br />
holistic folk wisdom, in which ‘Self revolves about<br />
a series of variable centers, such as sex and food<br />
(Hail Weezy); family and community; and a spiritual<br />
life composed sometimes of God or the gods, at<br />
others of esthetics or style.’ She goes on to say<br />
the ‘discontinuities of our experience as black<br />
slaves in a white world have caused us to construct<br />
subjectivities able to negotiate between centers<br />
that, at least, are double.’ 22<br />
Hip hop’s multitudinous meaning in language is<br />
an important indictor of the power of black postmodern<br />
subjectivity. The use of slang and triple<br />
metaphor as an expressive medium is an important<br />
element of the spirituality of hip hop. Take for<br />
instance the word ‘Swag,’ a term very quickly<br />
acquiring a permanent space in the American<br />
vernacular. Swag is noun, verb, musical metagenre.<br />
Swag is a symbol branded all over the backs<br />
of youth in Atlanta, a major center of hip hop in<br />
which the most popular tattoos of 2010 included<br />
musical notes, stars and moneybags. Atlanta Braves<br />
player A. Juney of Rich Kids even went so far as to<br />
get a Gucci Bag tattooed on his neck. 23<br />
Trap occupies similar territory to Swag. It is a<br />
southern rapper’s word for a place where drugs are<br />
sold, a verb (to sell drugs) and a subgenre of music:<br />
unsmiling dudes rapping in first person about the<br />
drug trade. Snap, another slang term, has a laundry<br />
list of meanings, (among them: a sexual nap, a bowl<br />
of weed packed for a single hit and the expression<br />
“SAME HERE!”) and is also subgenre of hip hop<br />
utilizing slow beats characterized by the finger snap<br />
effect in place of the snare drum. Snap music has<br />
controversially been called the ‘death of hip hop.’<br />
Crunk, a word which is literally a conflation of<br />
‘drunk’ and ‘crazy’ also moonlights as a popular<br />
genre of rap, named because the music is said to<br />
make you crunk. 24 All margins are dangerous. The<br />
music is powerful because it represents a collective<br />
space of unconscious, instant, unmediated vibratory<br />
action upon the psyche, brain and organ systems. It<br />
works in the break of the workday, in the break of<br />
the verb, noun, pronoun. In the break of the pitch:<br />
recall how T-Pain converted the city of Atlanta to<br />
13
auto-tune pitch correction software, so that most<br />
of the hip hop world, professional and amateur,<br />
now makes music sliding around rather than on its<br />
notes. 25 To quote Moten, ‘The radical materiality and<br />
syntax that animate black performances indicates a<br />
freedom drive.’ 26<br />
Along the French Psychoanalytic school of<br />
feminism philosopher Hélène Cixous developed<br />
Écriture feminine to interrogate language as a<br />
libidinal economy of expenditure and loss. Writing<br />
in 1975 she imagines new cultural subjects as,<br />
‘Persons-detached, persons-thought, persons born<br />
of the unconscious, and in each desert, suddenly<br />
animated, a springing forth of self that we did<br />
not know about – our women, our monsters, our<br />
jackals, our Arabs, our fellow creatures, our fears…a<br />
crystallized network of my ultrasubjectivities. I is<br />
this matter, personal, exuberant, lively masculine,<br />
feminine, or other in which I delights me and<br />
distresses me.’ 27 Cixous here exploits the binary<br />
self-other to denote a universal and self-reflexive<br />
desire to see and be seen. She urges us to break<br />
our differences over our backs.<br />
Écriture feminine, like hip hop, suggests a new,<br />
freely sensual and aggressively volatile economy.<br />
Cixous’ multiple inscriptions of desire meet Moten’s<br />
‘dispersive sensuality’ as we read hip hop’s triple<br />
and quadruple metaphors without the cloak of<br />
academic feminism and the binary terms it has used<br />
mostly to demonize the genre: subject/object, male/<br />
female, power/submission, dick/vag… Coming from<br />
a strictly academic feminist background, I’m tired of<br />
enacting the same closed slogans, the circumscribed<br />
agendas and consolidation of terms always leading<br />
back to the same predictable questions…feminism<br />
must look beyond the ‘penetrative gaze’ into the<br />
‘break’ into linguistic discontinuity. Does this put<br />
feminism and radical political aesthetic reason on<br />
a shaky intellectual edifice? It knocks the edifice<br />
on its backside and shouts ‘Yeeeeeeaaaw!’ from its<br />
perch at the edge of the abyss.<br />
Pop Culture is a vital source of gender pedagogy.<br />
Even the most commercial, formula-driven music<br />
videos feature bodies and gestures, the enactment<br />
of which proceed beyond decorative value. In the<br />
popular artist Ciara’s video Ride, her dance is<br />
comprised of a squatting posture closely resembling<br />
the yogic asana known as Goddess. Asanas (yogic<br />
postures) are ritualistic gestures that balance or<br />
enhance our state of consciousness. Goddess<br />
pose stimulates the uro-genital, respiratory and<br />
cardiovascular systems. Interspersed with other<br />
gladiatorial gestures of sports and combat are erotic<br />
2 nd chakra gyrations, making Ciara’s body proper an<br />
undeniable symbol of divine female sensuality and<br />
strength.<br />
Leonard Schlain, notable for his bestseller The<br />
Alphabet and the Goddess, notes that Goddess<br />
worship and female power depend on the ubiquity<br />
of female archetypal images. A Laparoscopic<br />
surgeon from Northern California, Schlain contends<br />
that the shift from matriarchal to patriarchal society<br />
corresponds to the introduction of written language<br />
and the subsequent cultural shift from right brain to<br />
left brain dominated thinking and comprehension.<br />
In Schlain’s lights, hip hop as a contemporary form<br />
of worship appeals to the non-verbal right brain<br />
which is responsible for the comprehension of the<br />
language of cries, gestures, grimaces, cuddling,<br />
suckling, touching and body stance. Hip hop, to use<br />
Schlain’s terminology is a veritable ‘kaleidoscopic<br />
religious event’ involving all the senses experienced<br />
in a collective state of Dionysian madness. Schlain’s<br />
final and most profound point is that ironically,<br />
modern advancements in technology have made a<br />
huge cultural turn back to the image, particularly in<br />
terms of the internet. 28<br />
With thousands of individuals across the globe<br />
downloading music and watching music videos<br />
online, not to mention taking these sounds and<br />
images with them wherever they go via their<br />
ipod/pad/phone – hip hop emerges as not only a<br />
collective form of worship but a free and ubiquitous,<br />
multi-sensory spiritual holism. Rather than conceive<br />
internet-age image reception as merely an act of<br />
alienated, passive consumption weighed against<br />
some lost dream of utopian community, let us<br />
situate musical fetishism in terms of its relationship<br />
to powerful pre-linguistic devotional practices<br />
involving idols, animal totems, images of female<br />
deities and nature.<br />
Irvin Morazan, Performance in St. Cecelia’s Chapel, 2010<br />
Article References:<br />
1<br />
‘Dispersion’ Seth Price, free online, www.distributedhistory.com/Dispersion2008.pdf<br />
2<br />
Cultural Dreaming, Erik Davis on Esotericism, online, http://marygreer.wordpress.<br />
com/2010/09/20/cultural-dreaming%E2%80%94erik-davis-on-esotericism/<br />
3<br />
In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Fred Moten, Minneapolis:<br />
University of Minnesota Press, 2003, p. 32<br />
4<br />
bell hooks, ibid, p. 63,143,18<br />
5<br />
Norman Kelley, The Political Economy of Black Music, , Black<br />
Renaissance/ Renaissance Noire, Summer 1999<br />
6<br />
M.K. Asante, Jr. Its Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation,<br />
New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008, p. 129<br />
7<br />
Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America,<br />
Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994<br />
8<br />
John Leland Hip: The History, New York, Harper Perennial, 2004<br />
9<br />
Rose, ibid<br />
10<br />
Rose, ibid, p. 10, 11<br />
11<br />
Adorno Current of Music, New Jersey: Blackwell Publishers, 2009 p. 296, 20, 25, 160<br />
12<br />
Kelefa Sanneh, Hip Hop History: The Rise & Fall of Deep Voices in ATLANTA<br />
Photographs by Michael Schmelling San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2010<br />
13<br />
Erik Davis, ibid<br />
14<br />
Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, 2009, p. 58<br />
15<br />
Adorno ibid p.434<br />
16<br />
Slavoj Žižek, ibid, p. 251<br />
17<br />
Slavoj Žižek, ibid, p. 251, 58, xiv<br />
18<br />
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, New York: Picador,<br />
1977, p. 28, 44<br />
19<br />
Fred Moten, ibid p. 78, 12<br />
20<br />
Fred Moten, ibid p. 99<br />
21<br />
from Birdman Feat. Lil Wayne, “Always Strapped,” 2009, Cash Money Records<br />
22<br />
Lorraine O-Grady, Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity, in The Feminism<br />
and Visual Culture Reader Amelia Jones (ed), New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 182<br />
23<br />
Kelefa Sanneh, in ATLANTA, ibid<br />
24<br />
Kelefa Sanneh, in ATLANTA, ibid<br />
25<br />
Kelefa Sanneh, in ATLANTA, ibid<br />
26<br />
Fred Moten, ibid p. 7<br />
27<br />
Hélène Cixous “Sorties” in La jeune née [The Newly Born Woman] 1975 in<br />
New French Feminisms: An Anthology, Edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron,<br />
University of Massachusetts Press, 1980 p. 97<br />
28<br />
Leonard Schlain, The Alphabet and the Goddess p. 7, 19, 79<br />
REVOLT<br />
<strong>Magazine</strong> March/April 2012 14
OCCUPY<br />
REVOLT<br />
<strong>Magazine</strong> March/April 2012
AMERICA<br />
PHOTOS BY MIRENA RHEE & SCOTTO MYCKLEBUST
m a g a z i n e volume 1 no. 1<br />
March/April 2012<br />
TM
ART<br />
Commentary<br />
<strong>Premier</strong>
REVOLT <strong>Magazine</strong> March/April 2012<br />
Venus, Scotto Mycklebust, 1988
OCCUPY:<br />
THE UNLIKELY PROTESTER<br />
Photo: Scotto Mycklebust, 2011<br />
a surprising start to occupy: des moines<br />
BY BENJAMIN RUISCH<br />
Before Occupy Wall Street, I’d been to my<br />
fair share of marches and rallies. I’d<br />
signed petitions. I’d even donated a few<br />
dollars here and there, but in my years of<br />
medium-to-low political involvement in NYC, I’d not<br />
seen anything like what was happening in that little<br />
park. What they had was a real movement. And like<br />
any ‘real movement’ in its nascent stages, it was all<br />
over the place. Yet these protestors actually had<br />
something to say (most of them). And they were<br />
talking about politics in a way that I had never heard.<br />
But it was with mixed feelings that I left Zuccotti<br />
Park/Liberty Plaza on the day of my first visit. The<br />
excitement I felt at the discovery of this unexpected<br />
well of political action was forced to contend with the<br />
deeply inculcated conviction that “that kind of thing”<br />
could never work; that politics were not, in fact, for<br />
everyone. Yet in spite of my initial reservations, I<br />
soon was hooked.<br />
My involvement, though, should come as little<br />
surprise. As a white, unemployed undergrad at<br />
a liberal public university in New York City, I was<br />
an obvious candidate to get swept up in the<br />
Occupy Wall Street frenzy. But it’s not of my<br />
involvement in OWS that I intend to write. The story<br />
I am going to tell takes place in a distant land - far,<br />
far away from Wall Street.<br />
It is, in fact, 1,109 miles from Zuccotti Park to Des<br />
Moines - place of my birth, that even years after I<br />
renounced it for the big city, still renders me a recipient<br />
of condescending chuckles and pitying looks any<br />
time I dare admit my provenance. Des Moines<br />
lies smack in the center of Iowa, a state where you<br />
can carry a .45 into any bar or get gay-married in<br />
any courthouse. Or both. A state that, despite<br />
its peculiarities, has always served as a sort of<br />
barometer for this country – what it’s like “out<br />
there” (this is the part where New Yorkers gesture<br />
vaguely to the west). And my father, lifelong resident<br />
of this fine state, is as good a face as any for the<br />
conservative values that dictate life in America’s<br />
heartland.<br />
As a fifty-three year-old Mortgage Loan Officer<br />
with distinctive salt-and-pepper hair, my father is the<br />
kind of protestor that Fox News would have a difficult<br />
time writing off as just another one of the stoner<br />
hippies or impressionable youths often posited<br />
as the prime proponents of Occupy Wall Street.<br />
A sworn Republican with a respectable job working<br />
for a Big Bank (one of OWS’s most reviled), he<br />
hardly seems a good fit for the grassroots political<br />
activist scene.<br />
Born in a small town to a large family in northeastern<br />
Iowa, he was the kind of born-and-bred Midwestern<br />
boy who could milk a cow before he could detassel<br />
(google it), and could detassel before he could<br />
walk. But when he wasn’t milking or detassling or<br />
walking - to school, in the snow, with no shoes, uphill<br />
both ways, as I understand it - he spent his youth,<br />
like all Iowans, in a succession of corn dog-eating<br />
contests, tractor pulls and pig-judging competitions.<br />
But unlike most Iowans, he eventually left that dusty<br />
town into which he was born, saddling up one day<br />
and riding out into the great unknown. And it wasn’t<br />
long until he found what he was searching for: a<br />
slightly bigger Iowa town.<br />
He soon settled down, got himself a wife and<br />
made his debut in the exciting world of mortgage<br />
loans, where he spent the next couple of decades.<br />
But those years of toil in that dark, neglected corner<br />
of the local bank were not in vain, for the old man<br />
eventually pulled himself up by his own bootstraps<br />
and straight into the American dream, having saved<br />
up enough money to start his own business doing…<br />
whatever it is a Mortgage Loan Officer does.<br />
Dr. Mortgage, he was called, and his cheesy<br />
commercials filled the airwaves and made me the<br />
laughingstock of all my friends. But while he was out<br />
“prescribing healthy home loans,” others weren’t<br />
holding themselves to the same golden standard.<br />
When the housing bubble burst, he lost it all; people<br />
21
stopped buying houses and he stopped getting a<br />
paycheck. He lost his business and, soon after, like<br />
so many Americans, he declared bankruptcy and<br />
lost his home.<br />
In short, the doctor was out.<br />
My father, though, never seemed to feel the sting<br />
of the irony of his situation: that Dr. Mortgage, who,<br />
in his bigger-than-life-size cardboard cutouts, always<br />
appeared in lab coat and stethoscope carrying a<br />
tiny model house, had lost his own. Instead, like<br />
a good Midwesterner, he simply went on believing<br />
that ‘that’s just the way things are.’<br />
We’ve always been careful to avoid talking<br />
politics, he and I, as we’ve never quite seen eye-toeye<br />
on the matter, but when the old man called me<br />
up on Oct. 8th, he quickly made it clear that this<br />
conversation wouldn’t be limited to tomatoes, or<br />
migration patterns of North American waterfowl,<br />
or any of our other usual, comfortable topics of<br />
discussion.<br />
“Son,” he said, “I’m setting up shop on<br />
Capitol Hill.”<br />
And that he did. He spent that first night alone<br />
on the vast expanse of grass that slopes down from<br />
the beautiful, gold-leafed capitol building, but within<br />
twenty-four hours over 300 people had joined this<br />
gray-muzzled lone wolf, and, just like that, Occupy<br />
Des Moines was born.<br />
Though the cops had been able to ignore a<br />
single old man in a small, weathered tent, they<br />
could not so easily overlook the crowd of hundreds<br />
now besmirching the hill. Though doubtless<br />
unfamiliar with such civil disobedience, local police<br />
responded swiftly. The Canine Unit was activated,<br />
the mace was deployed (and, surely, dusted off) and<br />
protestors were carted the few short blocks from the<br />
capitol to the jail. In less than an hour, the incipient<br />
Occupy Des Moines Movement was decisively<br />
dispersed. Yet despite this forceful eviction, those<br />
stubborn Midwesterners appeared again the next<br />
day, and this time, perhaps fearing a second wave of<br />
bad press, the mayor acquiesced to their presence.<br />
Since this victory, Occupy Des Moines has<br />
remained more or less undisturbed by police forces.<br />
Unlike those in Zuccotti, recently removed at Mayor<br />
Bloomberg’s request, occupiers at Des Moines’<br />
“People’s Park,” as they’re calling it, have leveraged<br />
a pretty sweet deal. They’re presently gearing up for<br />
those long, cold Iowa-winter nights - amassing food,<br />
tents and generators in an effort to prepare the<br />
camp for “Occupy the Caucus” (recently endorsed<br />
by politically-conscious hacker group Anonymous),<br />
which seeks to draw occupiers from all over the<br />
country so that they may make their voices heard<br />
at Iowa’s Republican caucuses, the first in the<br />
electoral season.<br />
And all of it started with one Midwestern<br />
Mortgage Loan Officer who finally realized he had<br />
something to be angry about.<br />
Of course, the easiest criticism of OWS has<br />
always been that ‘they don’t know what they want.’<br />
Perhaps, though, this should be counted as among<br />
the movement’s greatest strengths, for amidst the<br />
maelstrom of individual frustrations and general<br />
fed-up-edness arises a space for genuine political<br />
discourse in which all can participate - a space in<br />
which a salt-and-pepper (ex?)Republican can be<br />
right there at general assembly with his twentysomething<br />
liberal son.<br />
OWS isn’t a party or a platform, but a whole<br />
new approach to democracy, unique in that it<br />
foregrounds not that which could divide us, but that<br />
around which we can unite - a desire to reshape our<br />
world through real, direct political action. And, yeah,<br />
it’s messy, but maybe it’s the catalyst by which this<br />
‘for the people, by the people’ rhetoric we’ve been<br />
tossing around for a couple hundred years may<br />
finally begin to be realized.<br />
It is a conversation that many have been<br />
waiting to have - whether they’ve realized it or not -<br />
and even though Zuccotti has now been swept clean,<br />
ol’ Bloomberg was too late, for this conversation<br />
had already moved far beyond the park, and now is<br />
instead taking place in dining rooms and dive bars,<br />
on street corners and subway cars, and even at the<br />
farthest reaches of the globe: Iowa.<br />
REVOLT <strong>Magazine</strong> March/April 2012 22
Silhouette, Scotto Mycklebust, 1988
ULTRA VIOLET<br />
INTERVIEW<br />
Photo:<br />
Ultra Violet<br />
BY KATIE CERCONE<br />
universe is right but the earth is<br />
not right” were the first words out<br />
of artist Ultra Violet’s mouth. I meet<br />
“The<br />
her at her studio in the West Chelsea<br />
Arts District. When I walk in she’s fiddling with a<br />
measuring tape on a purple mannequin filled with<br />
hand written percentages. She’s wearing violet head<br />
to toe and a gold rhinestone pin that reads ULTRA<br />
VIOLET. She speaks eloquently and has a radiant<br />
glow rivaling her many colorful works in neon.<br />
We covered it all. Satan (she’s a Christian),<br />
Welfare (she’s against it), Censorship (“We should<br />
be free, we are not free”), Obama (he’s a “puppet”),<br />
Quantum Theory (Ultra’s smart), Tino Sehgal (she<br />
loved This Progress) and “those people” down at<br />
Occupy Wall Street where Ms. Ultra, now in her late<br />
seventies, recently exhibited in a group show that<br />
suffered a police barricade.<br />
“We live in a very decadent era and art is for the<br />
majority decadent, meaningless and void. We live<br />
in a very secular era. Formerly artists had a sacred<br />
function,” she reported when I asked about the<br />
influence of Spirituality in her work knowing both<br />
her and Warhol attended church. After consuming<br />
her book Famous for 15 Minutes: My Years With<br />
Andy Warhol, which includes a SURVIVORS section<br />
detailing the laundry list of dangerously glorified<br />
artists gone due to drug overdoses, violent deaths<br />
and the A.I.D.S. virus, it’s comforting to know Ultra<br />
is the near to last standing member of our country’s<br />
wild Revolution of Sex, Drugs, Art & Rock ‘n’ Roll. In<br />
her book she calls Warhol “the Spiritual Father of<br />
A.I.D.S.” and writes, “Andy [liked] high people: they<br />
are animated and uninhibited in front of the camera.<br />
They will do anything for fun and they don’t have to<br />
be paid. Just give them drinks, drugs, doughnuts<br />
and approval.” Today Ultra’s current conclusions<br />
have a messianic quality: “I believe we are spiritual<br />
beings and we have to feed the body and the soul.”<br />
When I ask her to compare the OWS movement<br />
to the cultural upheaval of the sixties she says, “The<br />
sixties were very different because it was a time of<br />
great post-war prosperity in the United States.” She<br />
exemplifies Warhol as a type of cultural herald, “He<br />
presented the American Dream and you know the<br />
American Dream is the dollar sign and fame. Even<br />
the Campbell’s soup can: We will never go hungry.<br />
The housewife will open the can with an electrical<br />
can opener and manicured nails. An instant dinner<br />
that by the way is deadly, but anyway, that’s another<br />
thing.”<br />
In the wake of her series on 9/11 she is working<br />
on a current work called 99%. “I created this<br />
mannequin which is a work in progress. On the<br />
forehead it says 99%. I thought that the whole<br />
mannequin should be covered with quotes dealing<br />
Mirena Rhee, 2011<br />
with percentage.” I turn to the mannequin as she<br />
reads aloud her favorite, “I am 1% smart, and its<br />
signed Steve Jobs.” Other quotes span a wild range:<br />
China, her siblings (her sister is “69% sexy”) and a<br />
few provocative truisms.<br />
Of the late Valerie Solanas, who she discusses<br />
in her book and about whom she wrote a New<br />
York <strong>Magazine</strong> article when Warhol died, Ultra<br />
remarks that though both Solanas and her S.C.U.M.<br />
Manifesto were (in haughty French accented<br />
English) “demented,” Solanas nonetheless did<br />
“Have a point. Woman have been oppressed forever<br />
and ever. Men and women have never been on the<br />
same level and that’s a tragedy. It all stems from the<br />
Original Sin.” From there she pulls out a large-scale<br />
print of a pistol-phallus fusion she made as a diptych<br />
with a text-based work she reads to me aloud. She<br />
concludes our discussion of the Feminism issue<br />
with, “!s a new era dawning where we will beat our<br />
swords into plowshares and men and women will be<br />
together in exultation?” Go Ultra.<br />
When I ask Ultra about fame - keep in mind this<br />
is a woman that played muse to Salvador Dali and<br />
mistress to Edward Rushcha, recorded art rock<br />
albums, starred in Hollywood films and spent her<br />
youth rejecting her upper class French Catholic<br />
upbringing for New York nightlife, lunches with Yoko<br />
Ono and David Bowie, breakfasted each morning<br />
25
Caravaggio, 1604
Photo: Mirena Rhee, 2011<br />
with Andy Warhol perusing the Times for photos of<br />
each other at last night’s party – she very matter of<br />
factly reports that the most famous people of all time<br />
according to the Guinness Book of World Records<br />
are Jesus, Buddha and the Queen of England in that<br />
order. “Fame is somewhat legitimate. People want<br />
to be God. People want to be remembered. People<br />
want to live in eternity,” says Ultra. She adds, “We<br />
live in a fame era. You know in art they’re selling<br />
much more a name than a good work.”<br />
Eventually, 9/11 comes up, a subject Ultra is<br />
often linked to because of her well-known IXXI series<br />
recently acquired by the 9/11 Memorial Museum.<br />
Pointing to a diverse range of works in pen and<br />
ink, paint and even small scale violet camouflage<br />
patterned miniatures (prototypes for the Museum<br />
gift shop she recently touted to Miami Basel) Ultra<br />
explains, “An artist is someone that feels more than<br />
other people. Though I did not lose anyone I know<br />
on that day I felt more than a lot of other people<br />
and I wanted to do something.” After volunteering<br />
for some time with the Salvation Army help efforts,<br />
Ultra began to make 9/11 artworks and has been<br />
for over ten years now. She also does a 9/11<br />
performance where she reads a poem under an<br />
umbrella with a World Trade Center on top and<br />
cries each time. She chose the palindrome IXXI<br />
for its accessibility to all, noting what a sensitive<br />
subject it is and just how difficult the construction<br />
of the Memorial has been given the veto power<br />
of the grieving families. “Nobody can object to this,”<br />
says Ultra.<br />
“My father used to tell me stop being Joan of<br />
Arc, that was my fixation. I think the planet is in<br />
trouble and art should have a mission. Art should<br />
be edifying.” She brings up Tino Sehgal’s This<br />
Progress exhibition at the Guggenheim a second<br />
time and recalls how delightful it was to see a<br />
bunch of people interacting with one another.<br />
She mentions how deeply touched she was by the<br />
work Christo executed in Central Park and<br />
the hundreds of thousands of people he brought<br />
together – some fell in love, some got married,<br />
some had children. “Art should be healing, that’s my<br />
point. Healing. Yep.”<br />
Before I go Ultra slyly pulls out a stack of works<br />
on canvas featuring Mickey Mouse as the winged<br />
heavenly messenger Mickaelangelo. She explains,<br />
“Mickey Mouse is the last known archetype, his<br />
ears are parabolic.<br />
Photo: Mirena Rhee, 2011<br />
27
ANONYMOUS<br />
Portrait of Shakespeare: Martin Droeshout, 1623, Occupy photo: Scotto Mycklebust, 2011<br />
Politics in Art? Or is it the other way around ?<br />
BY TOBIN MITNICK<br />
W<br />
ith the release of the new film,<br />
“Anonymous”, Roland Emmerich<br />
has surely posited himself as one of<br />
the most undesirable pedagogues<br />
in the world. His film crams the immeasurably<br />
broad scope of the work of William Shakespeare<br />
into a single realm: the political. While perpetrating<br />
crimes against history only perhaps surpassed by<br />
the delusional deniers of the Holocaust, Emmerich<br />
goes so far as to attribute all of Shakespeare’s<br />
plays and writings to a worldly aristocrat. The film<br />
then takes as its plot various convoluted avenues of<br />
the political and the performative, gliding with ease<br />
from the bedchamber of Queen Elizabeth to the<br />
murderous streets and houses of ill-repute common<br />
in Renaissance England.<br />
While most reviews of the movie seem to hit the<br />
nail directly on its head (great acting and spectacle,<br />
preposterous filmmaking and screenwriting), let’s<br />
examine Emmerich’s desperate need to view<br />
Shakespeare’s work as political: in the movie,<br />
Edward De Vere (the substitute Shakespeare)<br />
takes as his aesthetic motto the following: “All art is<br />
political. The rest is just decoration.”<br />
What Emmerich has failed to take into account<br />
is the fact that art needn’t always be a source of<br />
power. Anyone can read contemporaneous politics<br />
into the work of William Shakespeare; as a popular<br />
REVOLT<br />
<strong>Magazine</strong> March/April 2012<br />
method of enthralling his audience with topical<br />
references, it was a way to make the work on stage<br />
seem more immediate and fresh. To write a lively and<br />
delicious play is different from writing one with the<br />
express purpose of provoking a bunch of impetuous<br />
groundlings to topple parliament (spoiler alert!<br />
Whoops, too late?). However, though Emmerich’s<br />
brand of politics is desperately searching, he<br />
nevertheless succeeds in veiling manipulation with<br />
beauty.<br />
Fast forward to 2011 (the actual 2011). Occupy<br />
Wall Street rages in the streets, its aims fabulously<br />
political and progressive. What could be as pure<br />
an example of social demonstration as that? What<br />
could be more of a piece with the micro-political?<br />
But as we observe the Occupy Wall Street<br />
protests, with their organized communities,<br />
community-based morality, and dedication<br />
to various principles, we are reminded of art<br />
itself: something organized that conforms to<br />
various principles, but is essentially made to<br />
express oneself, and thereby contribute the<br />
intricacies of personal perception to the progressive<br />
force of humanity.<br />
The miracle of art is that it comes from nothing<br />
in a simple act of creation. In a way, Occupy Wall<br />
Street is a performative piece practiced by many<br />
people at the same time. And, in fact, if one were to<br />
gaze upon the landscape of multicolored tents that<br />
crowd the grassy outposts in cities nationwide, the<br />
sight is nothing less than a flag of solidarity, many<br />
colors acting for one voice.<br />
Here we can pull an Emmerich easily enough:<br />
we can paint the rugged politics of the movement<br />
with a layer of beauty. Perhaps it is even intelligent<br />
to do so. The movement is at once politically and<br />
aesthetically active; a living, breathing work of art.<br />
If we can observe the movement on many<br />
levels, we can understand the extensive nature of<br />
its complexity.<br />
To find art in politics and politics in art is<br />
sometimes a futile gesture. It becomes something<br />
masturbatory, that benefits only the examining<br />
party for its own amusement. Yet even the most<br />
artistically and historically gauche venture results in<br />
some pretty accomplished performances. For that, I<br />
partially forgive Mr. Emmerich.<br />
But today, when it is tempting to view the Occupy<br />
Wall Street movement as a grungy bunch of<br />
protesters protesting for the sake of protest, let us<br />
find the art in their efforts. To see the art in social<br />
movement is to see the beauty of the movement<br />
itself. And, in doing so, we see a noble form in a<br />
noble cause.<br />
28
Jimi Hendrix Memorial, Scotto Mycklebust, 2011<br />
REVOLT<br />
<strong>Magazine</strong> March/April 2012
IF 6 WAS 9<br />
White-collar conservatives flashing down the street<br />
Pointing their plastic finger at me.<br />
They’re hoping soon my kind will drop and die,<br />
But I’m gonna wave my freak flag high . . . HIGH!<br />
Hah, hah<br />
Falling mountains just don’t fall on me<br />
Point on mister Businessman,<br />
You can’t dress like me.<br />
Nobody know what I’m talking about<br />
I’ve got my own life to live<br />
I’m the one that’s gonna have to die<br />
When it’s time for me to die<br />
So let me live my life the way I want to.<br />
FREEDOM<br />
“Freedom, Freedom<br />
Give it to me<br />
That’s what I want now<br />
Freedom, Freedom<br />
Give it to me<br />
That’s what I need now<br />
Freedom, Freedom<br />
Give it to me<br />
To Live<br />
Freedom, Freedom<br />
Give it to me<br />
So I can give”<br />
Yeah . . .<br />
Sing on brother,<br />
Play on brother . . .<br />
“If it was up to me, there wouldn’t be no<br />
such thing as<br />
the establishment.”<br />
“When the power of love overcomes<br />
the love of power, the<br />
world will know peace.”<br />
“Excuse me<br />
while I kiss<br />
the sky.”<br />
-jimi hendrix...<br />
photo: Scotto Mycklebust, 2011
OPERATION:<br />
SYMBOLIZE<br />
does ows need a solidifying image?<br />
OP-ED BY TOBIN MITNICK<br />
With November 14th’s uprooting of<br />
the protesters at Zuccotti Park, the<br />
symbolic heart of the Occupy Wall<br />
Street movement, many have feared<br />
that the movement will collapse, unable to function<br />
without a designated geographical center.<br />
But, as any history buff will tell you, this is utter<br />
nonsense. As Keith Olbermann has been quick to<br />
point out (as he always seems to be), Bloomberg’s<br />
inane decision to sanitize the park of both camp<br />
and crowd will certainly come to be a driving catalyst<br />
in the frustrations voiced by the occupiers—a<br />
collective point of rebellion. This has proven true at<br />
numerous turning points in American History; the<br />
Boston Massacre and Kent State are but two events<br />
that have expedited the course of modern American<br />
culture and politics.<br />
Yet if we are to pretend that things will simply<br />
unfold without some sort of unity around a spirit<br />
of change, it will be a pathetic drooping of our<br />
eyes to the shattered pieces of Zuccotti’s once<br />
promising beginnings.<br />
Ideologically, the way forward is an open book.<br />
Only consensus, the chosen democratic principle<br />
of the movement, can be the deciding factor in<br />
establishing a platform in the future, if there is to<br />
be one. But there is a key piece missing from the<br />
movement. While Zuccotti park was filled with<br />
complex appropriations of poetry and painting,<br />
upside-down American flags and Brechtian typefaces<br />
that conjured social reaction, the Occupiers<br />
have never given us a symbol to rally around—<br />
something that, without having to explain the<br />
intricacies and myriad agendas of the movement,<br />
we can wear around our necks or poster on our<br />
walls or stick on our bumpers or project onto CNN<br />
and around the world. And, seeing this symbol, we<br />
can believe in something larger than ourselves.<br />
It was a strange and wonderful sensation to<br />
see Shepard Fairey’s green, red, and black rendering<br />
of Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential<br />
election. Something tender rose in my throat, a<br />
sentiment of pride in America that, as a 21 year-old<br />
college student, I had never known. Though those<br />
dreams are gone and dead, replaced by the raw<br />
reality of partisan politics and economic disaster,<br />
one cannot deny their power.<br />
Shepard Fairey’s recent attempt to personify the<br />
Occupy Wall Street movement, however, fails to<br />
reach the heights of profundity and simplicity that<br />
his 2008 rendering did. The now infamous<br />
cartoonified face of Guy Fawkes takes the place<br />
of Obama’s hopeful mug, with a message not nearly<br />
as concise or pithy as “HOPE”: “Mr. President, we<br />
HOPE you’re on our side”. Unfortunately, Fairey<br />
has placed his faith in the political scheme again,<br />
attempting to resurrect any lingering dreams of<br />
Obama’s messianic 2008 campaign. Not only does<br />
he naively contend that the President alone can<br />
solve the myriad problems of social inequality that<br />
the movement targets, but Fairey also puts forth<br />
his message in a context no less than threatening.<br />
Sorry, but if you’re going to align the face of a terrorist<br />
(regardless of the numerous connotations of the<br />
face itself symbolically or otherwise, Guy Fawkes<br />
was, in fact, a failed terrorist who attempted to level<br />
the entirety of England’s government in 1605) with<br />
a message no less sinister in its bearing, you cannot<br />
assume that a progressive movement will embrace<br />
the face of a would-be assassin paired with words<br />
that ring sadly nostalgic at best.<br />
Let’s look at a more successful symbol:<br />
The peace sign popularized by the social events<br />
of the 1960s has its origins in the British nuclear<br />
disarmament movement. A man holds two flags in<br />
a downward V, then sprawled vertically, one at his<br />
feet, the other above his head, making the letters<br />
“ND” in semaphore. What has more unvoiced awe<br />
than the beauty of its simplicity? Because of its<br />
inherent aesthetic ease and accessibility, the peace<br />
sign has decked both bedrooms and boardrooms in<br />
the United States and Europe and around the world.<br />
“Occupiers have never<br />
given us a symbol to<br />
rally around—something<br />
that... we can wear<br />
around our necks or<br />
poster on our walls...”<br />
Its reproductive felicity makes it readily postable<br />
and producible, furthering the face and ideals of<br />
any peaceful movement without words and with no<br />
explanation needed.<br />
One might ask, “but how can someone design<br />
something that incorporates the barrage of ideals<br />
within Occupy Wall Street?” I would answer that<br />
just as “peace” designates the cessation of war,<br />
the union of all peoples, a general spirit of embrace,<br />
and innumerable other principles, so the redress of<br />
the tax code, elimination of corporate domination,<br />
educational affordability, and related themes can all<br />
fall under one banner: progress.<br />
To all graphic designers, artists, and progressive<br />
thinkers, we are in desperate need for progression’s<br />
creation in symbol at this very moment in history.<br />
REVOLT <strong>Magazine</strong> March/April 2012 32
THE<br />
PROFESSIONALIZATION<br />
of the artist<br />
In a recent article in the The Guardian, Art<br />
Group’s Kit Friend, “explains why an arts degree<br />
really is worth less than the paper it’s written<br />
on.” Headed, “The creative industries need to<br />
focus on talent rather than free labor,” the article<br />
discusses the extended period of unpaid work in<br />
the future for graduates of the arts. She remarks,<br />
“Factor in the actual cost of the education to date<br />
and the average creative doesn’t just fail to benefit<br />
fiscally from years of training, their livelihoods will<br />
actually be damaged by it.”<br />
Just six months ago, an industrious adrenaline<br />
junkie toiling away to the tune of $110,000<br />
REVOLT<br />
educational debt in my poorly ventilated, vermin<br />
infested graduate art studio in Chelsea, I was<br />
hesitant to believe this type of doomsayer hogwash.<br />
I was busy saving the world in yoga teacher’s training<br />
($4,000), eating organic meals on credit I’d pay back<br />
in double to Nelnet, flirting with hallucinogenics and<br />
listening to Lil Wayne, over choruses of star-studded<br />
SVA faculty members singing, “You’re a genius!”<br />
Today I have three freelance writing jobs, teach yoga<br />
for no pay (quote from a prospective employer: “If<br />
I threw a rock in Brooklyn, I’d hit a yoga teacher”),<br />
have been fired from my last 6 service industry<br />
gigs (I’m a Yelp! Celebrity), and have a bank account<br />
that just hit rock bottom. Sometimes I work for a<br />
wage equal to or less than the amount that I<br />
made scooping ice cream at the age of fifteen in<br />
the suburbs.<br />
Says Kit Friend, “Right now the first criterion for<br />
participation in the arts is an ability to work for free.<br />
Imagine how competitive our sector would be if the<br />
criterion was talent.” I’m a professional because I<br />
have a terminal degree in my field from a prestigious<br />
school. I refuse to believe that you have to exploit<br />
someone else in order to earn a living in 2012.<br />
Could this be the naïve and misguided fantasy of a<br />
California dreamer? Is money worth the paper it’s<br />
written on anymore? Good news is I still make art.<br />
<strong>Magazine</strong> March/April 2012 34
New York One Way (New York series), Mirena Rhee, 2011