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m a g a z i n e volume 1 no. 1
March/April 2012
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Commentary
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volume 1 no. 1 • march/april 2012
REVOLT is:
PUBLISHED BY:
Public Art Squad Project
PUBLISHER: Scotto Mycklebust, Artist
MANAGING EDITOR: Katie Cercone
MANAGING EDITOR: Tobin Mitnick
CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Scotto Mycklebust
ART & DESIGN DIRECTOR: Joli Latini
ART PHOTOGRAPHER: Mirena Rhee
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Letter from the Publisher ...
Revolt Magazine is born today! Revolt Magazine is an
art publication hand-crafted by a dedicated team of
artists, writers and critical thinkers residing in New
York City. As a forum for free creative exchange, Revolt
Magazine stands behind the formation of a humane,
progressive and artistically expressive society.
Revolt Magazine draws its inspiration from West
Chelsea based artist Scotto Mycklebust, whose
desire to reflect on the changing contemporary
sociopolitical landscape and rebuke the rigid status
quo fueled the creation of our premier issue. We drew
our inaugural creative matter from an unfinished
magazine cover Mycklebust found in his archived
files (Frontpage, 2003). Adopting the iconic fist of
Mycklebust’s first draft - a cross-cultural symbol of
revolt and a mobilized, creatively conscientious public
- the new cover, christened Revolt Magazine 2012,
materialized.
Discussion of the arts, particularly in criticism, usually
errs toward conciliation. While this is wonderful in
terms of creating a genial and supportive atmosphere
among critics and patrons, unfortunately it doesn’t
provide any kind of argument for art as a social tool. If
we want visual art to hold an immediately vital place
IN THIS ISSUE:
6 Today’s Fashion
8 The Occupy Aesthetic
11 Eat This Mlack Busic
21 Occupy: The Unlikely Protester
25 Interview - Ultra Violet
28 Anonymous
32 Op Ed - “Occupation: Symbolize”
in our culture, we need to lift it out of its esoteric
confines, out of museums and auction houses, and
place it in the hands of the people that need it most.
In the end, we must turn away from trivial discussion
and turn towards argument, where art is not an elitist
historical tradition but a radical means of showing us
the way forward.
Reflecting back on the global Occupy Wall Street
protests of Fall 2011, we have aimed to address the
aesthetic implications of the movement and become an
arbiter of change at the crossroads of art and
activism. But, just as the protesters of Occupy Wall
Street refuse to accept the confining limits of a specific
platform, so we eschew any specific agenda. Our only
dedication is to belief -- belief in art, belief in progress,
and, most importantly, belief in progress through
art. Through trusting art as a socially effective device,
we can trust society to express itself more intelligently
and constructively.
We hope that you are inspired by our publication and
the explosive, occasionally radical contents herein.
Let it be a catalyst to your own freedom of creative
production. Revolt against that which binds you.
Scotto Mycklebust
REVOLT
ARTISTS MUSEUM
MISSION STATEMENT
Through a diverse array of journalistic styles - investigative, academic, interview,
opinion - and stunning visuals, REVOLT Magazine aims to ensure that art never loses
its profundity. We urge our readers to join our mission, generating positive social
change through creative production and informed cultural critique.
www.revoltmagazine.org
Copyright & Permissions Info: © copyright 2011 - 2012 Revolt Magazine. All Rights Reserved. For all
reprints, permissions and questions, please contact 212.242.1909 or by email: info@revoltmagazine.com.
REVOLT
Magazine March/February 2012 2

Hôtel
AMERICANO
Chelsea
New York
518 West 27 th Street, New York NY 10001
For booking
hotel-americano.com 212.216.0000

THE
R LIST
SOUND OFF : OWS
ON FACEBOOK...
“So you’re saying adding pepper spray to school cafeteria
pizza won’t make it count for two vegetables servings??”
“The gravey [sic] train for the 1% stop now if you have
the courage to make it happen.”
“Congressional Republicans are the 1% they favor themselves...”
“Since the beginning of the Occupy movement we have watched
as police violence toward the otherwise peaceful protestors
has steadily increased.”
“IT IS TIME TO REGAIN THE WORLD!”
“Occupy: could you be more clever?! ‘Occupy Vancouver leaves
art gallery, moves to courthouse’ across the street!”
ON TWITTER...
SEARCH TERMS: ART + OCCUPY
RESULT: “The heart of this movement is ideas, art, history, sharing.”
http://TheOther99.tv #OWS
SEARCH TERMS: PERFORMANCE ART + CHANGE
RESULT: “But I felt bigger knowing performance art through collaboration
can create change by connecting people with the same message.”
SEARCH TERMS: OCCUPY + ART WORLD
RESULT: “‘Would you laugh if the mainstream art world was punked?’
#occupyartworld”
“In the history of movements for social change, really exciting
things tend to happen when those who are poor or marginalized
and those who are from a different class but are (for whatever
reason) distancing themselves from their class values come together”
THE
GALLERY VIEW
SEARCH TERMS: OCCUPY WALL STREET + SYMBOL
RESULT: “#Occupy Masks ‘licensed by TimeWarner protesters buying &
[sic] helping target of their demonstrations’ abcn.ws/vfOASt
Mouth open, teeth showing (1), Zoe Leonard, 2000. Installation view at Western Bridge, Seattle, 2011. Photo: Scotto Mycklebust, 2011
REVOLT
Magazine March/April 2012 4

TODAY’S
FASHION
BY KATIE CERCONE
York city street fashion is a Petri dish of inspiration for
designers all over the world. It’s timeless,’ says Natalia Yovane,
a fine artist from Brooklyn known for her faint purple eye shadow,
‘New
vintage sneaks and killer forehead fringe. In 2011, blackanese
Barbie Nicki Minaj, an artist whose lyrics boast she’s sporting 6-digit sneakers
(not that she looks at the price tag) was the most popular Halloween Costume.
Plurality is in, and fashion – that grimy whip of the governing elite – who gives a
hoot? Your mistress? Medical intuitive? Inner child? Dealer? Who are you – the
girl that loved pajama day in high school?
Truthfully, the very idea of having to write as an authority on street fashion
- (fashion as far as I’m concerned being a four letter word) ‘street,’ meanwhile
infinitely pregnant with politically incorrect slander – threw me for a loop. I
nonetheless hit the block (Soho, Harlem, Bushwick and Midtown respectively)
like a rookie ethnographer.
34th St. Herald Square – women are still wearing Ugg boots? Bushwick –
Aunt Jemima head wraps, Grandpa shades, faded paisley slips…skinny jeans
are a must and skinny jeans make you gay, depending on the demographic.
Wide leg pants occur in two factions, one being the yoga mat toting bright eyed
sort whose flowing linen tribal influenced dubs could house the Bronx zoo, and
the other being those hip hop types that still think tight white boy swag makes
your upwardly mobile ass gay. Gold nameplate anything – ears and knuckles
screaming Christian names, or worse, proclamations like ‘Celibate’ – glinted in
the disturbing November heat from the direction of hipsters and thugs alike.
Slim Hungry of Bushwick, “stays fresh wearing Rugby and Religion with Lebrons
on his feets.” When he plays basketball he, “stays straight with Nike or Adidas
kits, aka the whole package from the headband to the socks.”
Up north, DaViana Wall of Harlem Overheard writes (“Hood Rich” Spring
2010): “People steal from stores and commit all types of crime just in an effort
to look ‘fly’…these hood stars have $1,200 jackets, and still live at home with
mommy. That’s not what’s up.”
Cindy Hinant, a visual artist whose daily trek through Soho makes her a regular
target for amateur blogarazzi stalking women for photo copy, remarks, “Street
fashion has made me both paranoid and vain. Last week I had my photo taken
twice in one day by two different magazines for their street fashion whatever.
Now when I’m wearing something that I think is awesome I’m disappointed not
to be stopped to have my picture taken.” Others such as Veronica Green, whose
daily ride on the L train sends her into mind choruses of “Why? Whyyyyyy????”
wonders, “How these people possibly work in tutus, fishnets, giant onesies and
gold, lame tops?”
Recently at PINTA, the Latin American Art Fair in New York City, while watching
the barrage of skinny pant legs and dainty beveled loafers, a journalist from
Chile whispered in my ear what numerous cultural critics have confirmed as
of late: “Fashion is dead.” Meanwhile, a balding gentlemen looking dapper in
Sinatra-inspired attire explained he had just spent a fortune on a new wardrobe
at a few select “fashion forward” clothing outlets downtown. Rewind. Some
wolves feed their young their own vomit. Fashion is a hostile scrimmage, a
pedigree pooch chasing its own tail. More sizzle than steak. Check it: Whatever
you do, don’t be the one we all love to hate.
REVOLT
Magazine March/April 2012 6

Occupy My Painting, Mirena Rhee, 2011

Photo: Mirena Rhee, 2011
the
OCCUPYAESTHETIC
evolution of a movement's visual landscape
BY TOBIN MITNICK
Mike sells tee-shirts depicting anticorruption
messages and variations on
the famous “We are the 99%” slogan.
His face is chapped with the weatherworn
look of so many protesters that have stayed
their ground at Zuccotti Park. “I think the most
interesting thing is this kid who was sitting in a cage.
If a cop were to put him in jail, it doesn’t matter. He’s
put himself in a cage of his own free will.”
As both a member of the growing Occupy Wall
Street movement and a visual artist himself, Mike
has borne witness to a key feature of the blossoming
state of creativity in Zuccotti Park: the goal of
artists and performers seems to be enlightenment,
to awaken those sleeping masses dormant with
apathy. Even in these nascent stages of a historic
event, the visual landscape suggests that personal
interest is a far cry from the chief messages of
community and growth.
OWS is a fascinating experiment in agenda setting.
Though the prevalent message comes across as
inequality in the tax code, and thus a representation
REVOLT
of societal inequality, no primary platform has been
decided upon for the sole reason that it would
deprive the movement of bite. It is OWS’s generality
that is its greatest strength and its wealthiest source
of intimidation and inspiration alike. And, like so
many populist movements in history, the protesters
in Zuccotti park have taken personal expression to
be a critical element in communicating both within
and outside the park limits. Though the arts and
culture section of their website proclaims that, “art
brings joy to the daily life of occupiers” (http://
artsandculture.nycga.net), it is also a vital part of
extending their platform of frustration nation-wide.
It is the protesters’ struggle to produce art that is
visually arresting and affecting without pigeonholing
the movement into narrower aims.
Many occupiers have put their faith in historical
precedent; much as Thomas Nash crushed
Tammany Hall’s notorious veneer of ethics in the
1860s and 70s through his ingenious political
cartoons, protesters have adopted the timehonored
tradition of artistic satire as their own.
Vincent, a professional artist and graphic designer
who has himself created canvases that praise the
energy of OWS, speaks of a particularly sharp-witted
piece, “I saw a nice sketch that a guy had. It was a
reproduction of a pig laying on its side, with six men
sucking on its nipples…it had congress written on
its ass.” This general hostility transcends borders of
political parties—it pinpoints the corruption of the
American governmental system in the system itself.
Sharon, a retired Columbia graduate who is
currently putting her children through multiple
degrees in the arts, dons a similar sketch with a
similar theme: a donkey and an elephant lie next to
each other, exes for eyes. Yet her personal concern
is one of fear for the future of education in the arts.
“My daughter has two degrees and wants a Masters
in illustration from FIT. But what good is it to pay for
another degree if there are no jobs?” Her brand of
visual art is an attempt to combat a terrifying future.
But for all of their belief in the forms of the past,
the occupiers have begun to embrace a relatively
new artistic phenomenon. Much as Mike’s kid in the
cage demonstrated a extroverted devotion to very
Magazine March/April 2012 8

personal principles, the performance art in Zuccotti
Park seems to serve a two fold purpose.
The first function is that of inspiration. Much as
they state on their website, the arts and culture
delegation of Occupy Wall Street buoys the daily
mood of the protesters. It is, without a doubt, a
boon to the seriousness of the movement to see the
brazen quality of the surrounding demonstrations of
expression.
But the second way in which performance helps
the movement is the fact that shocking art never
fails to attract media attention. Rosemary, who is
primarily a spectator but nevertheless sympathizes
deeply with the occupiers, mentions a particularly
memorable performance: “There were women
naked and prancing around topless, saying that it
was a form of expression. That to me is some kind
of art they’re making.” Shock art is indispensable
to the movement at large, as it broadcasts the
varying messages of protesters nationwide. Here,
at a historically unique intersection of both the
personal and public realms, performance art fulfills
the height of its immediate potential.
Yet as city ordinances command police
crackdowns of protester activity, free expression
often suffers devastating tolls.
By now, the members of the protester group
so far as to view their various arrests and assaults
by policemen as serving a greater good. When one
member gets beat up or thrown in the back of a
police van, it inevitably becomes a feeding frenzy
for the media, resulting in hundreds of images soon
to be iconic. It is as if they realize their place in
history even as they are living it. They embrace their
media martyrdom, along with all of the performative
aspects inherent in sacrifice.
But while members of Anonymous and artists
scribbling political cartoons exhibit their expression
haphazardly with a sort of creative abandon, there is
a faction within Zuccotti Park that promotes the selfconscious
nature of visual art within the movement.
De La Vega, a graphic designer, holds the
personal belief that the protesters need to be cued
in to the fact that their images are being beamed
out to all corners of America. He displays his
personal platform of anti-fraud and anti-crime with
a crisp professionalism: his sign is made from a
real uncut sheet of one-dollar bills, laminated and
trimmed immaculately. Over top his sign, he has
printed a warning against financial corruption in an
intimidating yet pristine typeface.
If the protesters are to be most effective in
broadcasting their messages, he says, they must
take their art seriously. “The cleaner and more
But though the mood down at Wall Street may be
argumentative, it is only for the sake of dignity. The
protesters want to encourage a movement that is
strong in both its standing and means of expression,
one that can both support the life of the protest
much as art supports society and also effectively
show America that they mean business.
And, while its visual art has yet to approach the full
measure of its potency, the human drama is by far
the most compelling aspect of the visual landscape
at Occupy Wall Street. Though they are still
struggling for new and effective forms of expression,
the authenticity of the movement is breaking down
barriers, providing an atmosphere that is anything
but a performance. As they aspire to create a visual
language of the movement, they have already made
Zuccotti park a place where art can flourish.
As a poet, Michael feels the desperate need
for community. Through art, he says, we find the
“potential to express things poetically”. He finds
visual art as a waystation for solid intra-community
relationships. It’s a way to document “what you’ve
seen, what you think, what you feel”. But, as he is
quick to state, the most inspiring pieces of art in
Zuccotti Park come in the form of genuine interaction,
where community comes before demographic or
financial disparity, “I saw a black thug put a blanket
“shocking art never fails
to attract media attention”
“Anonymous” have achieved limited fame as the Guy
Fawkes-masked occupiers in Zuccotti park. Many of
their league have been anchored here for four weeks
or more, except when the cops drove them out for
fourteen days. As far as the masks go, the personal
style is cribbed from that of the hacker-group, also
called “Anonymous”. Though the hacker group has
expressed support for the movement at-large, the
protester groups seems to be acting autonomously,
not connected directly to the international hacking
institution.
As a reactionary group, “Anonymous” believes in
the visual statement of anonymity in order to achieve
a sort of social enlightenment—perhaps, if we can
see each other as equally persecuted by corporate
institutions, we can perceive a greater need for
redress of grievances. Yet, though their movement
rotates agendas day-to-day, they find themselves
in an expressive dilemma due to their masks: “It
gives us misrepresentation I think. They think we’re
terrorists. People here are afraid to talk to us. We’re
really nice guys.” Many of their ranks have had
violent run-ins with police, endured beatings, and
even been issued felony charges for their behavior.
But even though they battle over identity and
territoriality with the cops, they affirm their stalwart
dedication to the spirit of change, “I’m here to
protest, and I’m here to get the word out.” They go
constructive your message is, the more editors
will like that.” He adds that positive messages
are much more effective than cynicism, “There’s
a lack of cleancut messaging. It gets cluttered
with ugly signs and angry messages. No one wants
to hear anger”.
on a white guy while he was sleeping, and it was just
a beautiful thing. Art comes in many forms, but the
art of life is the most momentous and memorable.”
While they may grapple with funneling their
frustrations into creative projects, the protesters
have no difficulty finding commonality in their cause.
Photo: Mirena Rhee, 2011
9

Golden Gate Park, Scotto Mycklebust, 2011

EAT THIS
MLACK
BUSIC SPIRITUALITY&HIP HOP
80's Baby speaks on Wankstarism , goddess archetypes, and the musical fetish
BY KATIE CERCONE
spirituality of hip hop,’ comes
from a complicated and at times
contradictory constellation of
terms. Through an interdisciplinary
‘The
inquiry I have developed what I
affectionately term a derelict cosmogony of the
spiritualism of hip hop via the embodied freedom
encompassed in its interdynamic gestures of power,
symbolism, triple metaphor, dance and song as
metalanguage. 1
Through the phantasmagoric ‘veil’ of my own
distorted magnitude, I’ll posit hip hop as an
expressive, holistic and activating collective form of
liberatory spiritualism. Numerous cultural theorists
have illustrated how we live in a culture of avoidance
and escape. Collective experience has purportedly
been reduced to simultaneous private experiences
distributed across the field of a highly dispersed
media culture in which passive consumers enjoy
leisure time like sleep. 1 But the genius of music,
like sensuality, is that it traverses the body. Hip
hop as an immersive microclimate hemorrhages
psycho-pedagogy. We can conceive of hip hop in all
its incantations as a dynamic form of esotericism
or neo-Jungian ‘cultural dreaming’ in which the
authors, coauthors and fans of the genre use
powerful symbols and lingering sounds that engage
body, mind and group soul. 2
Historically avant-garde practice has entailed an
interculturalism of appropriation that always relies
on white hegemony as its veritable backbone. 3 Any
foray into the territory of race – the fashionable
mantle of the hip hop industry (industry as opposed
to hip hop community) - must address the issue
of sexual fetish. Appropriation as ‘border crossing’
speaks to issues of the ownership of cultural
property. The aestheticized ‘objectified’ other
as intimate source of pleasure/desire/fear is a
reoccurring trope art historically which has served
to denigrate oppressed groups, particularly racial
minorities, gays and women.
As scholar bell hooks notes, ‘young white
consumers utilize black vernacular popular culture
to disrupt bourgeois values.’ Calling out Madonna,
widely known for her appropriation of gay and
black subcultures, hooks asserts the queen of the
sexual revolution cashes in by ‘mirroring the role
of plantation overseer in a slave based economy.’
She further states that this moment is indicative
of sociocultural climate in which ‘white people
and the rest of us are being asked by the
marketplace to let our prejudices and xenophobia
(fear of difference) go, and happily ‘eat the other.’ 4
My work interrogates hooks’ explosive ‘moment’
as the abysmal residue of capitalist commodity
fetishism, an illusive, psychosexual chimera.
As expressed by cultural theorist Norman Kelley,
black music exists in a neo-colonial relationship with
the $12 billion music industry. In classic neo-colonial
style, black inner cities act as ‘raw cites of cultural
Katie Cercone, ‘Grind 4 Da Shine’ Video Sculpture, 2011.
production’ whereby conditions (low per capita
income, high birth rate, economic dependence on
external markets, labor as major export) resemble
a third world country and produce a ‘product’ –
hip hop – that is sold back to the ‘motherland’ (in
this case suburbs teeming with bored white youth
bloated by privilege). As Mos Def echoes, ‘Old white
men is runnin’ this rap shit.’ Despite the fanfare
of industry moguls like Jay Z and Lil Wayne, there
are in fact no blacks in top executive positions at
the companies that parent successful black owned
companies. 5
It’s also disconcerting to note how the money
earning potential of hip hop is largely reliant on an
industry produced image of black ghetto life which
serves to buttress the prison industrial complex,
a contemporary ‘leviathan’ of racial inequality
maintained through a ferocious combination
of government law, private corporations, police
terrorism and racist cultural attitudes. 6 The constant
turn to ’ghetto blackness’ as a model of ‘authenticity’
and hipness in rap music 7 limits ‘blackness’ to ‘a
primal connection to sex and violence, a big penis
and relief from the onus of upward mobility.’ 8
As scholar Tricia Rose notes, ‘hip hop merely
displays in phantasmagorical form the cultural logic
of late capitalism.’ 9 Hip hop is a multi-billion dollar
industry and vital creative enterprise of the African
diasporic community (where is houstatlantavegas
located approximately?) the germinating stage
1.
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)
11

SPIRITUALITY
& HIP HOP continued...
of which occurred in the aftermath of 1977’s
devastating New York City black out. While the
Times reading set was gaping at hallowing images
of the desolate looted Bronx as if the borough were
the city’s dangling excoriated appendage, black
youth were congregating in the streets to dance,
brag, paint, swagger and rhyme as a practice in
collectivity and spontaneous reciprocity. They were
creatively repurposing boxy electronics left dusty
by outsourced industries that once put food on
their family’s tables. Says Rose, rap videos satisfy
‘poor young black people’s profound need to have
their territories acknowledged, recognized and
celebrated,’ as they converge around the ‘local
posse, crew or support system.’ 10 Fusing the racially
disparate post-industrial conditions of urbanity with
the sensate fury of the African drum which once
called the community to war – hip hop, like spiritual
practice, is a matrix concerned with territory,
belonging and identity.
I was born in 1984 at the very moment hip hop
erupted as an overwhelmingly lucrative genre with
MTV to cement its aesthetic as a hip style. White
youth of my generation consume this music in a
fashion 20 th century German musicologist Theodor
Adorno termed ‘culinary’ appreciation. We thereby
feed exclusively on the music’s, ‘Certain over
sweet sounds and colors… like musical cookies or
candies.’ Music, the art form possessing the most
efficient means of accessing the pleasure receptors
in the subconscious brain, when manufactured
purely as an ‘object of exchange,’ serves as ‘a
reservoir of a secondary, infantile satisfactions
and magical authority.’ Whereas real art in
music is the ‘transcription of historical suffering,’
Adorno condones produced music for insisting
that its listeners are ‘forced to passive sensual
and emotional acceptance of predigested yet
disconnected qualities, whereas those qualities at
the same time become mummified and magicized.’ 11
My interest in hip hop culture drinks at the
trough of my neuroses. It forever pays homage
to the tripartite pleasures of my bulimic youth in
suburban California. My first car, my first taste of
Wild 94.9 and 106.1 Kmel Jamz on subwoofers,
my flight from anorexia into bulimia – these three
instances together culminated in an unmitigated
feeling of sensory overload, danger and freedom.
The ‘fantasy’ of a perfect love union set forth in the
musical lyrics doomed to cold oscillation just as the
repeated abuse of food persisted only as a lucid and
shameful false transgression.
Lil Wayne was my first consciously spiritual
experience with hip hop. Weezy loved candy. Weezy
got high, drank syzzurp, ate candy, ate pussy, ate
beats. Weezy legally postponed his imprisonment
to undergo eight urgently needed root canals and
my father was an orthodontist. Weezy sang about
‘Ice Cream Paint Jobs’ and ‘Young Money.’ To the
artist Mya in her hit Lock U Down, the subject of
many a personal flash fantasy, Weezy sings ‘got a
sweet tooth, Miss Caramel, I need 3 scoops.’ Weezy
coughed, growled, heaved. Weezy’s style is part
of a few subgenres. One being a slower, southernderived
approach in which the artist drags out
vowels and leaves breathy spaces, as if ‘hot air’
lives in the rhymes. 12 The other being ‘swag,’ an
abbreviation of swagger - the evocation of style
“Weezy...represented the purity of recklessness,
youth, and abuse of power hinging on one’s
ability to overspend, to binge -- to reinscribe the
law at the very moment one breaks it.”
and guts, also connected to the African tradition
of boasting or bragging - considered a non-genre
or meta-genre in which artists engage in excessive
bragging about their ‘swag,’ (money, cars and
clothes). Swag not only has a triple function (genre,
action, baggage), it also serves to illustrate the way
in which ‘swag’ style as the parody of a die-hard
materialist culture means swag objects function
in my hip hop spiritualist cosmogony as a type of
‘occult bric-a-brac,’ 13 an economy of excess which
cleanses meanings by metaphorical loops.
Weezy Baby – the lyrics, the locks, the lawlessness
Katie Cercone, ‘Grind 4 Da Shine’ Video Sculpture, 2011.
REVOLT
Magazine March/April 2012 12

and constant spinning out into pleasure – cranked
up my transcendental limits. Weezy appealed to
me in so much that he represented the purity of
recklessness, youth, and abuse of power hinging on
one’s ability to overspend, to binge – to reinscribe
the law at the very moment one breaks it. Lil Wayne
was the epitome of the prosthetic boyfriend I had
experienced through the surrogate of music and
food since adolescence.
Remarks Slovenian continental philosopher and
critical theorist Slavoj Žižek, ‘The singing voice at it
most elementary [is] the embodiment of ‘surplusenjoyment’…the
paradoxical ‘pleasure in pain.’ 14
Singing raises vibrations in the body. Popular music
entails a partisanship based on a private, sensual
contract. ‘Surplus-enjoyment’ in the purest sense
here is the return of the energy invested in the fetish,
the invocation of a spiritual longing for connection
to a distant, majestic and mysterious force. It is
epitomized in the bulimic’s privileged relationship
to capitalism’s compulsory over-consumption
and endlessly deferred gratification. What Žižek
suggests here is that desire can essentially be
boiled down to the thinking human’s unique ability
to create a law that is a defense against the body’s
full expression of jouissance.
The hunger to repeatedly ‘eat the other’ (and
his ‘distant danger’) is one and the same with the
desire to break the self-imposed dietetic rules. This
concept is one Adorno fleshes out in a problematic
passage of Current of Music on the development
of Jazz: ‘Even if the girl enjoys unconsciously the
idea of making herself prey of a strong colored
fellow, she certainly also wants unconsciously to
punish herself for the crime of her imagination…
for the unlawful pleasure which she wants to give
and to deny herself at the same time.’ 15 It is the
typical Romantic gesture in which one ‘Elevates the
longing as such, at the expense of the object one
longs for.’ 16
Neurosis is perhaps both a generative creative
condition as much as a ‘luxury problem’ of the
rich typically treated with anti-depressant or antianxiety
medications. It often manifests in the form
of obsessive compulsive behaviors and eating
disorders and its historical predecessors would be
neurasthenia and hysteria. Commodity fetishism
has crystallized our imaginations into dominions
where anxiety and ecstasy are twins, whereby the
market and its depotentiated subjects are forced
always and only to ‘reproduce by way of borrowing
from the future.’ 17 Our culinary and fetishistic
communion with the Other while listening follows
the basic Laconian ontology in which the ‘field of
reality has to be ‘sutured’ with a supplement’ and
what is elevated as a positive entity is in reality a
‘negative magnitude.’
According to Susan Sontag, illness as a metaphor
or ‘trope’ of the self is considered an outgrowth of
the Romantic period in art and poetry. In her text
Illness as Metaphor, Sontag outlines the history of
illness as ‘fashion’ – melancholy was the disease
of 19 th Century Romantics. Insanity, associated
with ‘superior sensitivity,’ and hailed as the conduit
of spiritual feelings and ‘critical’ discontent was
claimed by the 20 th Century Modernists. She notes
the 19 th century physician Bichat who called health
the ‘silence of organs’ and illness ‘their revolt.’ 18
Exploring the sensuality of spirituality entails that
organs have their ‘revolt’ against the mandates of a
structured society. The ‘pleasure’ of listening holds
a consuming transcendent potential - a glittering
alchemy that occurs at the moment when the
subaltern speaks in the visual, when the symbol is
transgressed and all the energy falsely invested in
cognitive distance provides an explosive gateway
into the infinite.
“Pop culture is a
vital source of
gender pedagogy”
Hip hop culture as appropriated by white hipsters
may disrupt bourgeois values, but as a d.i.y. tradition
of black underprivileged youths it is an undoubtedly
ideological act of insubordination traced back to
the ritual singing and dancing of slaves and what
theorist Fred Moten identifies as the root of the
black radical tradition: ‘The commodity whose
speech sound embodies the critique of value, of
private property, of the sign.’ 19 According to Marx,
the commodity who speaks is an impossibility. The
slave who enacted verbal insubordination in various
forms – screaming, grunting, singing – defied his
objecthood through unmediated experiential and
vibratory collective action causing spatio-temporal
dislocation. A singer at work is no longer at work. He
is no longer bound to the structure of time defining
his bindedness.
Fred Moten pinpoints this moment of dislocation
as the ‘generative break,’ at the root of the black
radical tradition, a space ‘wherein action becomes
possible, one in which it is our duty to linger in the
name of the ensemble and its performance.’ 20
Again, this calls to mind bodily activation in the
form of dance, song and bodily expression as a
revolutionary practice undoing the divisive laws
of language, capitalism, commodity, and perhaps
most important, time as a definitive distinction:
labor or leisure. As if epitomizing this temporal
freedom, says rapper Nas during the intro to N.Y.
State of Mind (released on the 1994 Illmatic album,
what has been called one of the greatest hip hop
albums of all time) ‘Black is time.’
In yet another, particularly poignant articulation of
the power of hip hop, Birdman, Lil Wayne’s industry
father figure rhymes,
“We grind for the shine nigga gettin’ big money.
Got a fleet tossin’ chicken nigga get cake” 21
In a quick succession of speech lasting merely
a few seconds, Birdman had burned through
several double and triple metaphors, speaking to
racism, masculinity, power, luxury, ownership, God,
radical rebellion, food, sexuality and abundance.
Black cultural theorists and feminists have rightly
referred to African-Americans as the first postmoderns
marked by a pluralistic or shifting notion
of self. Remarks artist Lorraine O’Grady of the
West’s monotheism in respect to African-American
holistic folk wisdom, in which ‘Self revolves about
a series of variable centers, such as sex and food
(Hail Weezy); family and community; and a spiritual
life composed sometimes of God or the gods, at
others of esthetics or style.’ She goes on to say
the ‘discontinuities of our experience as black
slaves in a white world have caused us to construct
subjectivities able to negotiate between centers
that, at least, are double.’ 22
Hip hop’s multitudinous meaning in language is
an important indictor of the power of black postmodern
subjectivity. The use of slang and triple
metaphor as an expressive medium is an important
element of the spirituality of hip hop. Take for
instance the word ‘Swag,’ a term very quickly
acquiring a permanent space in the American
vernacular. Swag is noun, verb, musical metagenre.
Swag is a symbol branded all over the backs
of youth in Atlanta, a major center of hip hop in
which the most popular tattoos of 2010 included
musical notes, stars and moneybags. Atlanta Braves
player A. Juney of Rich Kids even went so far as to
get a Gucci Bag tattooed on his neck. 23
Trap occupies similar territory to Swag. It is a
southern rapper’s word for a place where drugs are
sold, a verb (to sell drugs) and a subgenre of music:
unsmiling dudes rapping in first person about the
drug trade. Snap, another slang term, has a laundry
list of meanings, (among them: a sexual nap, a bowl
of weed packed for a single hit and the expression
“SAME HERE!”) and is also subgenre of hip hop
utilizing slow beats characterized by the finger snap
effect in place of the snare drum. Snap music has
controversially been called the ‘death of hip hop.’
Crunk, a word which is literally a conflation of
‘drunk’ and ‘crazy’ also moonlights as a popular
genre of rap, named because the music is said to
make you crunk. 24 All margins are dangerous. The
music is powerful because it represents a collective
space of unconscious, instant, unmediated vibratory
action upon the psyche, brain and organ systems. It
works in the break of the workday, in the break of
the verb, noun, pronoun. In the break of the pitch:
recall how T-Pain converted the city of Atlanta to
13

auto-tune pitch correction software, so that most
of the hip hop world, professional and amateur,
now makes music sliding around rather than on its
notes. 25 To quote Moten, ‘The radical materiality and
syntax that animate black performances indicates a
freedom drive.’ 26
Along the French Psychoanalytic school of
feminism philosopher Hélène Cixous developed
Écriture feminine to interrogate language as a
libidinal economy of expenditure and loss. Writing
in 1975 she imagines new cultural subjects as,
‘Persons-detached, persons-thought, persons born
of the unconscious, and in each desert, suddenly
animated, a springing forth of self that we did
not know about – our women, our monsters, our
jackals, our Arabs, our fellow creatures, our fears…a
crystallized network of my ultrasubjectivities. I is
this matter, personal, exuberant, lively masculine,
feminine, or other in which I delights me and
distresses me.’ 27 Cixous here exploits the binary
self-other to denote a universal and self-reflexive
desire to see and be seen. She urges us to break
our differences over our backs.
Écriture feminine, like hip hop, suggests a new,
freely sensual and aggressively volatile economy.
Cixous’ multiple inscriptions of desire meet Moten’s
‘dispersive sensuality’ as we read hip hop’s triple
and quadruple metaphors without the cloak of
academic feminism and the binary terms it has used
mostly to demonize the genre: subject/object, male/
female, power/submission, dick/vag… Coming from
a strictly academic feminist background, I’m tired of
enacting the same closed slogans, the circumscribed
agendas and consolidation of terms always leading
back to the same predictable questions…feminism
must look beyond the ‘penetrative gaze’ into the
‘break’ into linguistic discontinuity. Does this put
feminism and radical political aesthetic reason on
a shaky intellectual edifice? It knocks the edifice
on its backside and shouts ‘Yeeeeeeaaaw!’ from its
perch at the edge of the abyss.
Pop Culture is a vital source of gender pedagogy.
Even the most commercial, formula-driven music
videos feature bodies and gestures, the enactment
of which proceed beyond decorative value. In the
popular artist Ciara’s video Ride, her dance is
comprised of a squatting posture closely resembling
the yogic asana known as Goddess. Asanas (yogic
postures) are ritualistic gestures that balance or
enhance our state of consciousness. Goddess
pose stimulates the uro-genital, respiratory and
cardiovascular systems. Interspersed with other
gladiatorial gestures of sports and combat are erotic
2 nd chakra gyrations, making Ciara’s body proper an
undeniable symbol of divine female sensuality and
strength.
Leonard Schlain, notable for his bestseller The
Alphabet and the Goddess, notes that Goddess
worship and female power depend on the ubiquity
of female archetypal images. A Laparoscopic
surgeon from Northern California, Schlain contends
that the shift from matriarchal to patriarchal society
corresponds to the introduction of written language
and the subsequent cultural shift from right brain to
left brain dominated thinking and comprehension.
In Schlain’s lights, hip hop as a contemporary form
of worship appeals to the non-verbal right brain
which is responsible for the comprehension of the
language of cries, gestures, grimaces, cuddling,
suckling, touching and body stance. Hip hop, to use
Schlain’s terminology is a veritable ‘kaleidoscopic
religious event’ involving all the senses experienced
in a collective state of Dionysian madness. Schlain’s
final and most profound point is that ironically,
modern advancements in technology have made a
huge cultural turn back to the image, particularly in
terms of the internet. 28
With thousands of individuals across the globe
downloading music and watching music videos
online, not to mention taking these sounds and
images with them wherever they go via their
ipod/pad/phone – hip hop emerges as not only a
collective form of worship but a free and ubiquitous,
multi-sensory spiritual holism. Rather than conceive
internet-age image reception as merely an act of
alienated, passive consumption weighed against
some lost dream of utopian community, let us
situate musical fetishism in terms of its relationship
to powerful pre-linguistic devotional practices
involving idols, animal totems, images of female
deities and nature.
Irvin Morazan, Performance in St. Cecelia’s Chapel, 2010
Article References:
1
‘Dispersion’ Seth Price, free online, www.distributedhistory.com/Dispersion2008.pdf
2
Cultural Dreaming, Erik Davis on Esotericism, online, http://marygreer.wordpress.
com/2010/09/20/cultural-dreaming%E2%80%94erik-davis-on-esotericism/
3
In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Fred Moten, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003, p. 32
4
bell hooks, ibid, p. 63,143,18
5
Norman Kelley, The Political Economy of Black Music, , Black
Renaissance/ Renaissance Noire, Summer 1999
6
M.K. Asante, Jr. Its Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation,
New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008, p. 129
7
Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America,
Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994
8
John Leland Hip: The History, New York, Harper Perennial, 2004
9
Rose, ibid
10
Rose, ibid, p. 10, 11
11
Adorno Current of Music, New Jersey: Blackwell Publishers, 2009 p. 296, 20, 25, 160
12
Kelefa Sanneh, Hip Hop History: The Rise & Fall of Deep Voices in ATLANTA
Photographs by Michael Schmelling San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2010
13
Erik Davis, ibid
14
Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, 2009, p. 58
15
Adorno ibid p.434
16
Slavoj Žižek, ibid, p. 251
17
Slavoj Žižek, ibid, p. 251, 58, xiv
18
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, New York: Picador,
1977, p. 28, 44
19
Fred Moten, ibid p. 78, 12
20
Fred Moten, ibid p. 99
21
from Birdman Feat. Lil Wayne, “Always Strapped,” 2009, Cash Money Records
22
Lorraine O-Grady, Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity, in The Feminism
and Visual Culture Reader Amelia Jones (ed), New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 182
23
Kelefa Sanneh, in ATLANTA, ibid
24
Kelefa Sanneh, in ATLANTA, ibid
25
Kelefa Sanneh, in ATLANTA, ibid
26
Fred Moten, ibid p. 7
27
Hélène Cixous “Sorties” in La jeune née [The Newly Born Woman] 1975 in
New French Feminisms: An Anthology, Edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron,
University of Massachusetts Press, 1980 p. 97
28
Leonard Schlain, The Alphabet and the Goddess p. 7, 19, 79
REVOLT
Magazine March/April 2012 14

OCCUPY
REVOLT
Magazine March/April 2012

AMERICA
PHOTOS BY MIRENA RHEE & SCOTTO MYCKLEBUST

m a g a z i n e volume 1 no. 1
March/April 2012
TM

ART
Commentary
Premier

REVOLT Magazine March/April 2012
Venus, Scotto Mycklebust, 1988

OCCUPY:
THE UNLIKELY PROTESTER
Photo: Scotto Mycklebust, 2011
a surprising start to occupy: des moines
BY BENJAMIN RUISCH
Before Occupy Wall Street, I’d been to my
fair share of marches and rallies. I’d
signed petitions. I’d even donated a few
dollars here and there, but in my years of
medium-to-low political involvement in NYC, I’d not
seen anything like what was happening in that little
park. What they had was a real movement. And like
any ‘real movement’ in its nascent stages, it was all
over the place. Yet these protestors actually had
something to say (most of them). And they were
talking about politics in a way that I had never heard.
But it was with mixed feelings that I left Zuccotti
Park/Liberty Plaza on the day of my first visit. The
excitement I felt at the discovery of this unexpected
well of political action was forced to contend with the
deeply inculcated conviction that “that kind of thing”
could never work; that politics were not, in fact, for
everyone. Yet in spite of my initial reservations, I
soon was hooked.
My involvement, though, should come as little
surprise. As a white, unemployed undergrad at
a liberal public university in New York City, I was
an obvious candidate to get swept up in the
Occupy Wall Street frenzy. But it’s not of my
involvement in OWS that I intend to write. The story
I am going to tell takes place in a distant land - far,
far away from Wall Street.
It is, in fact, 1,109 miles from Zuccotti Park to Des
Moines - place of my birth, that even years after I
renounced it for the big city, still renders me a recipient
of condescending chuckles and pitying looks any
time I dare admit my provenance. Des Moines
lies smack in the center of Iowa, a state where you
can carry a .45 into any bar or get gay-married in
any courthouse. Or both. A state that, despite
its peculiarities, has always served as a sort of
barometer for this country – what it’s like “out
there” (this is the part where New Yorkers gesture
vaguely to the west). And my father, lifelong resident
of this fine state, is as good a face as any for the
conservative values that dictate life in America’s
heartland.
As a fifty-three year-old Mortgage Loan Officer
with distinctive salt-and-pepper hair, my father is the
kind of protestor that Fox News would have a difficult
time writing off as just another one of the stoner
hippies or impressionable youths often posited
as the prime proponents of Occupy Wall Street.
A sworn Republican with a respectable job working
for a Big Bank (one of OWS’s most reviled), he
hardly seems a good fit for the grassroots political
activist scene.
Born in a small town to a large family in northeastern
Iowa, he was the kind of born-and-bred Midwestern
boy who could milk a cow before he could detassel
(google it), and could detassel before he could
walk. But when he wasn’t milking or detassling or
walking - to school, in the snow, with no shoes, uphill
both ways, as I understand it - he spent his youth,
like all Iowans, in a succession of corn dog-eating
contests, tractor pulls and pig-judging competitions.
But unlike most Iowans, he eventually left that dusty
town into which he was born, saddling up one day
and riding out into the great unknown. And it wasn’t
long until he found what he was searching for: a
slightly bigger Iowa town.
He soon settled down, got himself a wife and
made his debut in the exciting world of mortgage
loans, where he spent the next couple of decades.
But those years of toil in that dark, neglected corner
of the local bank were not in vain, for the old man
eventually pulled himself up by his own bootstraps
and straight into the American dream, having saved
up enough money to start his own business doing…
whatever it is a Mortgage Loan Officer does.
Dr. Mortgage, he was called, and his cheesy
commercials filled the airwaves and made me the
laughingstock of all my friends. But while he was out
“prescribing healthy home loans,” others weren’t
holding themselves to the same golden standard.
When the housing bubble burst, he lost it all; people
21

stopped buying houses and he stopped getting a
paycheck. He lost his business and, soon after, like
so many Americans, he declared bankruptcy and
lost his home.
In short, the doctor was out.
My father, though, never seemed to feel the sting
of the irony of his situation: that Dr. Mortgage, who,
in his bigger-than-life-size cardboard cutouts, always
appeared in lab coat and stethoscope carrying a
tiny model house, had lost his own. Instead, like
a good Midwesterner, he simply went on believing
that ‘that’s just the way things are.’
We’ve always been careful to avoid talking
politics, he and I, as we’ve never quite seen eye-toeye
on the matter, but when the old man called me
up on Oct. 8th, he quickly made it clear that this
conversation wouldn’t be limited to tomatoes, or
migration patterns of North American waterfowl,
or any of our other usual, comfortable topics of
discussion.
“Son,” he said, “I’m setting up shop on
Capitol Hill.”
And that he did. He spent that first night alone
on the vast expanse of grass that slopes down from
the beautiful, gold-leafed capitol building, but within
twenty-four hours over 300 people had joined this
gray-muzzled lone wolf, and, just like that, Occupy
Des Moines was born.
Though the cops had been able to ignore a
single old man in a small, weathered tent, they
could not so easily overlook the crowd of hundreds
now besmirching the hill. Though doubtless
unfamiliar with such civil disobedience, local police
responded swiftly. The Canine Unit was activated,
the mace was deployed (and, surely, dusted off) and
protestors were carted the few short blocks from the
capitol to the jail. In less than an hour, the incipient
Occupy Des Moines Movement was decisively
dispersed. Yet despite this forceful eviction, those
stubborn Midwesterners appeared again the next
day, and this time, perhaps fearing a second wave of
bad press, the mayor acquiesced to their presence.
Since this victory, Occupy Des Moines has
remained more or less undisturbed by police forces.
Unlike those in Zuccotti, recently removed at Mayor
Bloomberg’s request, occupiers at Des Moines’
“People’s Park,” as they’re calling it, have leveraged
a pretty sweet deal. They’re presently gearing up for
those long, cold Iowa-winter nights - amassing food,
tents and generators in an effort to prepare the
camp for “Occupy the Caucus” (recently endorsed
by politically-conscious hacker group Anonymous),
which seeks to draw occupiers from all over the
country so that they may make their voices heard
at Iowa’s Republican caucuses, the first in the
electoral season.
And all of it started with one Midwestern
Mortgage Loan Officer who finally realized he had
something to be angry about.
Of course, the easiest criticism of OWS has
always been that ‘they don’t know what they want.’
Perhaps, though, this should be counted as among
the movement’s greatest strengths, for amidst the
maelstrom of individual frustrations and general
fed-up-edness arises a space for genuine political
discourse in which all can participate - a space in
which a salt-and-pepper (ex?)Republican can be
right there at general assembly with his twentysomething
liberal son.
OWS isn’t a party or a platform, but a whole
new approach to democracy, unique in that it
foregrounds not that which could divide us, but that
around which we can unite - a desire to reshape our
world through real, direct political action. And, yeah,
it’s messy, but maybe it’s the catalyst by which this
‘for the people, by the people’ rhetoric we’ve been
tossing around for a couple hundred years may
finally begin to be realized.
It is a conversation that many have been
waiting to have - whether they’ve realized it or not -
and even though Zuccotti has now been swept clean,
ol’ Bloomberg was too late, for this conversation
had already moved far beyond the park, and now is
instead taking place in dining rooms and dive bars,
on street corners and subway cars, and even at the
farthest reaches of the globe: Iowa.
REVOLT Magazine March/April 2012 22

Silhouette, Scotto Mycklebust, 1988

ULTRA VIOLET
INTERVIEW
Photo:
Ultra Violet
BY KATIE CERCONE
universe is right but the earth is
not right” were the first words out
of artist Ultra Violet’s mouth. I meet
“The
her at her studio in the West Chelsea
Arts District. When I walk in she’s fiddling with a
measuring tape on a purple mannequin filled with
hand written percentages. She’s wearing violet head
to toe and a gold rhinestone pin that reads ULTRA
VIOLET. She speaks eloquently and has a radiant
glow rivaling her many colorful works in neon.
We covered it all. Satan (she’s a Christian),
Welfare (she’s against it), Censorship (“We should
be free, we are not free”), Obama (he’s a “puppet”),
Quantum Theory (Ultra’s smart), Tino Sehgal (she
loved This Progress) and “those people” down at
Occupy Wall Street where Ms. Ultra, now in her late
seventies, recently exhibited in a group show that
suffered a police barricade.
“We live in a very decadent era and art is for the
majority decadent, meaningless and void. We live
in a very secular era. Formerly artists had a sacred
function,” she reported when I asked about the
influence of Spirituality in her work knowing both
her and Warhol attended church. After consuming
her book Famous for 15 Minutes: My Years With
Andy Warhol, which includes a SURVIVORS section
detailing the laundry list of dangerously glorified
artists gone due to drug overdoses, violent deaths
and the A.I.D.S. virus, it’s comforting to know Ultra
is the near to last standing member of our country’s
wild Revolution of Sex, Drugs, Art & Rock ‘n’ Roll. In
her book she calls Warhol “the Spiritual Father of
A.I.D.S.” and writes, “Andy [liked] high people: they
are animated and uninhibited in front of the camera.
They will do anything for fun and they don’t have to
be paid. Just give them drinks, drugs, doughnuts
and approval.” Today Ultra’s current conclusions
have a messianic quality: “I believe we are spiritual
beings and we have to feed the body and the soul.”
When I ask her to compare the OWS movement
to the cultural upheaval of the sixties she says, “The
sixties were very different because it was a time of
great post-war prosperity in the United States.” She
exemplifies Warhol as a type of cultural herald, “He
presented the American Dream and you know the
American Dream is the dollar sign and fame. Even
the Campbell’s soup can: We will never go hungry.
The housewife will open the can with an electrical
can opener and manicured nails. An instant dinner
that by the way is deadly, but anyway, that’s another
thing.”
In the wake of her series on 9/11 she is working
on a current work called 99%. “I created this
mannequin which is a work in progress. On the
forehead it says 99%. I thought that the whole
mannequin should be covered with quotes dealing
Mirena Rhee, 2011
with percentage.” I turn to the mannequin as she
reads aloud her favorite, “I am 1% smart, and its
signed Steve Jobs.” Other quotes span a wild range:
China, her siblings (her sister is “69% sexy”) and a
few provocative truisms.
Of the late Valerie Solanas, who she discusses
in her book and about whom she wrote a New
York Magazine article when Warhol died, Ultra
remarks that though both Solanas and her S.C.U.M.
Manifesto were (in haughty French accented
English) “demented,” Solanas nonetheless did
“Have a point. Woman have been oppressed forever
and ever. Men and women have never been on the
same level and that’s a tragedy. It all stems from the
Original Sin.” From there she pulls out a large-scale
print of a pistol-phallus fusion she made as a diptych
with a text-based work she reads to me aloud. She
concludes our discussion of the Feminism issue
with, “!s a new era dawning where we will beat our
swords into plowshares and men and women will be
together in exultation?” Go Ultra.
When I ask Ultra about fame - keep in mind this
is a woman that played muse to Salvador Dali and
mistress to Edward Rushcha, recorded art rock
albums, starred in Hollywood films and spent her
youth rejecting her upper class French Catholic
upbringing for New York nightlife, lunches with Yoko
Ono and David Bowie, breakfasted each morning
25

Caravaggio, 1604

Photo: Mirena Rhee, 2011
with Andy Warhol perusing the Times for photos of
each other at last night’s party – she very matter of
factly reports that the most famous people of all time
according to the Guinness Book of World Records
are Jesus, Buddha and the Queen of England in that
order. “Fame is somewhat legitimate. People want
to be God. People want to be remembered. People
want to live in eternity,” says Ultra. She adds, “We
live in a fame era. You know in art they’re selling
much more a name than a good work.”
Eventually, 9/11 comes up, a subject Ultra is
often linked to because of her well-known IXXI series
recently acquired by the 9/11 Memorial Museum.
Pointing to a diverse range of works in pen and
ink, paint and even small scale violet camouflage
patterned miniatures (prototypes for the Museum
gift shop she recently touted to Miami Basel) Ultra
explains, “An artist is someone that feels more than
other people. Though I did not lose anyone I know
on that day I felt more than a lot of other people
and I wanted to do something.” After volunteering
for some time with the Salvation Army help efforts,
Ultra began to make 9/11 artworks and has been
for over ten years now. She also does a 9/11
performance where she reads a poem under an
umbrella with a World Trade Center on top and
cries each time. She chose the palindrome IXXI
for its accessibility to all, noting what a sensitive
subject it is and just how difficult the construction
of the Memorial has been given the veto power
of the grieving families. “Nobody can object to this,”
says Ultra.
“My father used to tell me stop being Joan of
Arc, that was my fixation. I think the planet is in
trouble and art should have a mission. Art should
be edifying.” She brings up Tino Sehgal’s This
Progress exhibition at the Guggenheim a second
time and recalls how delightful it was to see a
bunch of people interacting with one another.
She mentions how deeply touched she was by the
work Christo executed in Central Park and
the hundreds of thousands of people he brought
together – some fell in love, some got married,
some had children. “Art should be healing, that’s my
point. Healing. Yep.”
Before I go Ultra slyly pulls out a stack of works
on canvas featuring Mickey Mouse as the winged
heavenly messenger Mickaelangelo. She explains,
“Mickey Mouse is the last known archetype, his
ears are parabolic.
Photo: Mirena Rhee, 2011
27

ANONYMOUS
Portrait of Shakespeare: Martin Droeshout, 1623, Occupy photo: Scotto Mycklebust, 2011
Politics in Art? Or is it the other way around ?
BY TOBIN MITNICK
W
ith the release of the new film,
“Anonymous”, Roland Emmerich
has surely posited himself as one of
the most undesirable pedagogues
in the world. His film crams the immeasurably
broad scope of the work of William Shakespeare
into a single realm: the political. While perpetrating
crimes against history only perhaps surpassed by
the delusional deniers of the Holocaust, Emmerich
goes so far as to attribute all of Shakespeare’s
plays and writings to a worldly aristocrat. The film
then takes as its plot various convoluted avenues of
the political and the performative, gliding with ease
from the bedchamber of Queen Elizabeth to the
murderous streets and houses of ill-repute common
in Renaissance England.
While most reviews of the movie seem to hit the
nail directly on its head (great acting and spectacle,
preposterous filmmaking and screenwriting), let’s
examine Emmerich’s desperate need to view
Shakespeare’s work as political: in the movie,
Edward De Vere (the substitute Shakespeare)
takes as his aesthetic motto the following: “All art is
political. The rest is just decoration.”
What Emmerich has failed to take into account
is the fact that art needn’t always be a source of
power. Anyone can read contemporaneous politics
into the work of William Shakespeare; as a popular
REVOLT
Magazine March/April 2012
method of enthralling his audience with topical
references, it was a way to make the work on stage
seem more immediate and fresh. To write a lively and
delicious play is different from writing one with the
express purpose of provoking a bunch of impetuous
groundlings to topple parliament (spoiler alert!
Whoops, too late?). However, though Emmerich’s
brand of politics is desperately searching, he
nevertheless succeeds in veiling manipulation with
beauty.
Fast forward to 2011 (the actual 2011). Occupy
Wall Street rages in the streets, its aims fabulously
political and progressive. What could be as pure
an example of social demonstration as that? What
could be more of a piece with the micro-political?
But as we observe the Occupy Wall Street
protests, with their organized communities,
community-based morality, and dedication
to various principles, we are reminded of art
itself: something organized that conforms to
various principles, but is essentially made to
express oneself, and thereby contribute the
intricacies of personal perception to the progressive
force of humanity.
The miracle of art is that it comes from nothing
in a simple act of creation. In a way, Occupy Wall
Street is a performative piece practiced by many
people at the same time. And, in fact, if one were to
gaze upon the landscape of multicolored tents that
crowd the grassy outposts in cities nationwide, the
sight is nothing less than a flag of solidarity, many
colors acting for one voice.
Here we can pull an Emmerich easily enough:
we can paint the rugged politics of the movement
with a layer of beauty. Perhaps it is even intelligent
to do so. The movement is at once politically and
aesthetically active; a living, breathing work of art.
If we can observe the movement on many
levels, we can understand the extensive nature of
its complexity.
To find art in politics and politics in art is
sometimes a futile gesture. It becomes something
masturbatory, that benefits only the examining
party for its own amusement. Yet even the most
artistically and historically gauche venture results in
some pretty accomplished performances. For that, I
partially forgive Mr. Emmerich.
But today, when it is tempting to view the Occupy
Wall Street movement as a grungy bunch of
protesters protesting for the sake of protest, let us
find the art in their efforts. To see the art in social
movement is to see the beauty of the movement
itself. And, in doing so, we see a noble form in a
noble cause.
28

Jimi Hendrix Memorial, Scotto Mycklebust, 2011
REVOLT
Magazine March/April 2012

IF 6 WAS 9
White-collar conservatives flashing down the street
Pointing their plastic finger at me.
They’re hoping soon my kind will drop and die,
But I’m gonna wave my freak flag high . . . HIGH!
Hah, hah
Falling mountains just don’t fall on me
Point on mister Businessman,
You can’t dress like me.
Nobody know what I’m talking about
I’ve got my own life to live
I’m the one that’s gonna have to die
When it’s time for me to die
So let me live my life the way I want to.
FREEDOM
“Freedom, Freedom
Give it to me
That’s what I want now
Freedom, Freedom
Give it to me
That’s what I need now
Freedom, Freedom
Give it to me
To Live
Freedom, Freedom
Give it to me
So I can give”
Yeah . . .
Sing on brother,
Play on brother . . .
“If it was up to me, there wouldn’t be no
such thing as
the establishment.”
“When the power of love overcomes
the love of power, the
world will know peace.”
“Excuse me
while I kiss
the sky.”
-jimi hendrix...
photo: Scotto Mycklebust, 2011

OPERATION:
SYMBOLIZE
does ows need a solidifying image?
OP-ED BY TOBIN MITNICK
With November 14th’s uprooting of
the protesters at Zuccotti Park, the
symbolic heart of the Occupy Wall
Street movement, many have feared
that the movement will collapse, unable to function
without a designated geographical center.
But, as any history buff will tell you, this is utter
nonsense. As Keith Olbermann has been quick to
point out (as he always seems to be), Bloomberg’s
inane decision to sanitize the park of both camp
and crowd will certainly come to be a driving catalyst
in the frustrations voiced by the occupiers—a
collective point of rebellion. This has proven true at
numerous turning points in American History; the
Boston Massacre and Kent State are but two events
that have expedited the course of modern American
culture and politics.
Yet if we are to pretend that things will simply
unfold without some sort of unity around a spirit
of change, it will be a pathetic drooping of our
eyes to the shattered pieces of Zuccotti’s once
promising beginnings.
Ideologically, the way forward is an open book.
Only consensus, the chosen democratic principle
of the movement, can be the deciding factor in
establishing a platform in the future, if there is to
be one. But there is a key piece missing from the
movement. While Zuccotti park was filled with
complex appropriations of poetry and painting,
upside-down American flags and Brechtian typefaces
that conjured social reaction, the Occupiers
have never given us a symbol to rally around—
something that, without having to explain the
intricacies and myriad agendas of the movement,
we can wear around our necks or poster on our
walls or stick on our bumpers or project onto CNN
and around the world. And, seeing this symbol, we
can believe in something larger than ourselves.
It was a strange and wonderful sensation to
see Shepard Fairey’s green, red, and black rendering
of Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential
election. Something tender rose in my throat, a
sentiment of pride in America that, as a 21 year-old
college student, I had never known. Though those
dreams are gone and dead, replaced by the raw
reality of partisan politics and economic disaster,
one cannot deny their power.
Shepard Fairey’s recent attempt to personify the
Occupy Wall Street movement, however, fails to
reach the heights of profundity and simplicity that
his 2008 rendering did. The now infamous
cartoonified face of Guy Fawkes takes the place
of Obama’s hopeful mug, with a message not nearly
as concise or pithy as “HOPE”: “Mr. President, we
HOPE you’re on our side”. Unfortunately, Fairey
has placed his faith in the political scheme again,
attempting to resurrect any lingering dreams of
Obama’s messianic 2008 campaign. Not only does
he naively contend that the President alone can
solve the myriad problems of social inequality that
the movement targets, but Fairey also puts forth
his message in a context no less than threatening.
Sorry, but if you’re going to align the face of a terrorist
(regardless of the numerous connotations of the
face itself symbolically or otherwise, Guy Fawkes
was, in fact, a failed terrorist who attempted to level
the entirety of England’s government in 1605) with
a message no less sinister in its bearing, you cannot
assume that a progressive movement will embrace
the face of a would-be assassin paired with words
that ring sadly nostalgic at best.
Let’s look at a more successful symbol:
The peace sign popularized by the social events
of the 1960s has its origins in the British nuclear
disarmament movement. A man holds two flags in
a downward V, then sprawled vertically, one at his
feet, the other above his head, making the letters
“ND” in semaphore. What has more unvoiced awe
than the beauty of its simplicity? Because of its
inherent aesthetic ease and accessibility, the peace
sign has decked both bedrooms and boardrooms in
the United States and Europe and around the world.
“Occupiers have never
given us a symbol to
rally around—something
that... we can wear
around our necks or
poster on our walls...”
Its reproductive felicity makes it readily postable
and producible, furthering the face and ideals of
any peaceful movement without words and with no
explanation needed.
One might ask, “but how can someone design
something that incorporates the barrage of ideals
within Occupy Wall Street?” I would answer that
just as “peace” designates the cessation of war,
the union of all peoples, a general spirit of embrace,
and innumerable other principles, so the redress of
the tax code, elimination of corporate domination,
educational affordability, and related themes can all
fall under one banner: progress.
To all graphic designers, artists, and progressive
thinkers, we are in desperate need for progression’s
creation in symbol at this very moment in history.
REVOLT Magazine March/April 2012 32

THE
PROFESSIONALIZATION
of the artist
In a recent article in the The Guardian, Art
Group’s Kit Friend, “explains why an arts degree
really is worth less than the paper it’s written
on.” Headed, “The creative industries need to
focus on talent rather than free labor,” the article
discusses the extended period of unpaid work in
the future for graduates of the arts. She remarks,
“Factor in the actual cost of the education to date
and the average creative doesn’t just fail to benefit
fiscally from years of training, their livelihoods will
actually be damaged by it.”
Just six months ago, an industrious adrenaline
junkie toiling away to the tune of $110,000
REVOLT
educational debt in my poorly ventilated, vermin
infested graduate art studio in Chelsea, I was
hesitant to believe this type of doomsayer hogwash.
I was busy saving the world in yoga teacher’s training
($4,000), eating organic meals on credit I’d pay back
in double to Nelnet, flirting with hallucinogenics and
listening to Lil Wayne, over choruses of star-studded
SVA faculty members singing, “You’re a genius!”
Today I have three freelance writing jobs, teach yoga
for no pay (quote from a prospective employer: “If
I threw a rock in Brooklyn, I’d hit a yoga teacher”),
have been fired from my last 6 service industry
gigs (I’m a Yelp! Celebrity), and have a bank account
that just hit rock bottom. Sometimes I work for a
wage equal to or less than the amount that I
made scooping ice cream at the age of fifteen in
the suburbs.
Says Kit Friend, “Right now the first criterion for
participation in the arts is an ability to work for free.
Imagine how competitive our sector would be if the
criterion was talent.” I’m a professional because I
have a terminal degree in my field from a prestigious
school. I refuse to believe that you have to exploit
someone else in order to earn a living in 2012.
Could this be the naïve and misguided fantasy of a
California dreamer? Is money worth the paper it’s
written on anymore? Good news is I still make art.
Magazine March/April 2012 34

New York One Way (New York series), Mirena Rhee, 2011