in this issue - Revolt Magazine

m a g a z i n e
TM
volume 1 no. 3 • 2013
REVOLT is:
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Silv, Lena Vazifdar
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Letter from the Publisher ...
It’s been a bit of a long haul getting this
issue printed, but as 2013 dawns and we’re
bringing you another action packed issue full of the
political art, social commentary and current events
you crave, we’re proud to say REVOLT Magazine
is still independent and grassroots. With most of
the Chelsea art world looking more like a sunken
treasure ship post-Sandy and in print publishing
quickly becoming an anachronism, we’re still
barreling ahead to bring REVOLT readers up to date
information on the contemporary issues that affect
us all in today’s rapidly changing world.
In this issue you’ll find candid photos and
news from the frontlines of Occupy Museums and
Occupy Berlin – two ongoing artist led movements
for social change that are as controversial and
renegade as they are awe-inspiring and heartfelt.
In addition to our regular fare of gallery, literary
and film reviews, you’ll also find a special interview
with the acclaimed artist Thomas Lanigan Schmidt
IN THIS ISSUE:
6 The Gallery Review
12 Top 10 NYC Artists Now
14 The Martial Artist
20 Occupy Berlin
26 Berlin Biennial
29 The Literary View
30 Cinema Review
33 Pleasure is Political
37 Gypsies, Hustlers and Russian Sex
40 The Revolt Takes Boston
41 George Clinton
42 The Aesthetic of Funk
47 Tribute to Mark Wiener
(check out his retrospective ‘Tender Love Among the
Junk’ up at PS1 Moma through April 1st). On pg. 14
studly Tanto Bin Everett, ‘The Martial Artist’ talks
with Revolt about using Martial Arts to combat police
brutality against blacks. A George Clinton tribute
and a feature on fiber artist and community activist
Xenobia Bailey’s ‘Aesthetic of Funk’ round out the
issue towards the back.
Still hungry for more? Interested in
contributing creative writing, visuals or poetry to the
next issue of Revolt? Interested in contributing funds
to keep this badass indie mag afloat!? We need
each and everyone of our loyal Revolt readership in
whatever ways large and small you can offer your
support. Check the website for more details on how
to donate money, time or your creative work to our
next issue.
Scotto Mycklebust
REVOLT
ARTISTS MUSEUM
www.revoltmagazine.org
REVOLT
Magazine Number 3, 2013
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.
Copyright & Permissions Info: © copyright 2011, 2012, 2013 Revolt Magazine. All Rights Reserved. For all
reprints, permissions and questions, please contact 212.242.1909 or by email: info@revoltmagazine.com.
2

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

R LIST
HURRICANE SANDY hit the West Chelsea Art
Artists and Art Galleries Hard BY SCOTTO MYCKLEBUST
THE
The storm surge rose from the West Side Highway to engulf the street level galleries and basements with wall to wall water and flooding that damaged
everything in its path. From small independent spaces to blue chip galleries, everything from the very art hanging on the walls to the art inventory in basement
storage was drowned in salt water and destroyed. Many galleries had just finished installing their show for the first of the month opening exhibitions. Along with
the West Chelsea art galleries, Hurricane Sandy displaced many artists out of their studios and destroyed years of work.
Photos by Scotto Mycklebust, Hurricane Sandy destroys West Chelsea Art District Galleries, West Chelsea Art District, NYC, November 2, 2012
REVOLT
Magazine Number 3, 2013
4

THE
GALLERY
VIEW
BY ROB REED
ALICE NEEL
Late Portraits & Still Lifes
May 4 - June 23, 2012
David Zwirner Gallery
525 West 19th Street NY, NY
Portrait and still-life painting are not the first two
genres that come to mind when thinking about
Modern art. They speak of domesticity, quiet privacy,
and sentimentality, which are out of sync with the
public declarations, events, and upheavals of the
20th century. Yet the need to document life, as it is
lived face-to-face, is persistent; and painting from
direct observation is a sure way to get that right.
Alice Neel (1900-1984) painted portraits of those
around her – family, friends, poets, psychologists,
students – for sixty years. Impervious to art world
trends and movements, her empathetic eye was
relentlessly fixed on the people standing or sitting
just a few feet from her easel.
Neel started her portraits with a contour drawing
sketched in dark, often cobalt blue, paint. This
outlining and framing-in of shapes is speedy and
efficient with no recourse to traditional measuring
techniques that bring too much of the inessential.
Her searching lines are attentive to the undulating
forms they represent and assert themselves to
the point of occasional awkwardness. A wrist may
appear elongated, or a leg strangely foreshortened.
This is how the world looks when you approach it
from the eye rather than the concepts of medical
anatomy and three-dimensional perspective.
Honesty to sight is part of what makes Neel's work
so timelessly fresh and appealing.
"Late Portraits & Still Lifes" features work from the
last two decades of Neel's life (1964-1983), most
pieces being made in the artist's kitchen or living
room on the Upper West Side. Among the sitters are
actor Hugh Howard, postured with some skepticism,
dishwasher David Sokola sprawling over a leather
chair, and Hartley, her son, cross-legged and staring
into warm light, the distance. Still lifes, flowers
on a tabletop or pots, plates, and pitchers, are
perspectively altered to show flat color in the planes.
In "Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian," 1978, the couple
– Brian (Buczak), flannel shirt open and left arm
around the back of Hendricks' chair – contently meet
the viewer's gaze. A bowl containing an avocado and
pairs of bananas eroticizes the event. The greens
of the avocado, and in Hendricks' sweater, and
wall behind the couple, harmonize while receding
in tone and saturation, then set in counterpoint to
the reds and oranges in the flannel shirt and across
the table edge that penetrates the lower half of the
picture plane.
Alice Neel painted the 20th century richly and
obliquely through her willing subjects. Engaging with
people is both an end in itself and a way to access
worlds beyond our personal experience. The flowers
and unpopulated breakfast tables stare back at us
as metaphorical mirrors offering moments in our
own reflection.
Alice Neel, Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian, 1978, Oil on canvas, 44 x 34 inches, 111.8 x 86.4 cm, © The Estate of Alice Neel
Photos courtesy David Zwirner, New York
REVOLT
Magazine Number 3, 2013 6

Painting in Space: An exhibition to benefit CCS Bard, Curated by Tom Eccles and Johanna Burton, Luhring Augustine, New York, June 22 – August 17, 2012, Photographer: Farzad Owrang
Courtesy of the artists and Luhring Augustine, New York.
PAINTING IN SPACE
June 22 - August 17, 2012
Luhring Augustine Gallery
531 West 24th Street NY, NY
There are many refreshing things about "Painting
in Space" at Luhring Augustine Gallery. First among
them is the absence of any overwrought curatorial
statement that might take a visually exciting show
such as this into boring cerebral territory. The title
is clipped from Rosalind Krauss and that's the only
hat tip theory gets here. The rest is color, material,
and space.
This exhibition benefits the Center for Curatorial
Studies at Bard College and features 25 international
artists that include Olafur Eliasson, Liam Gillick,
Glenn Ligon, Tony Ousler, Josh Smith, Mark di Suvero,
and Andrea Zittel. Upon entering the main space,
the two most immediately striking features are the
corner-to-corner roll of orange carpet that supports
Rachel Harrison's multi-media sculpture at one end
and the 17 feet high by 27 feet wide fabrication of
a coat hanger, bent as if overused, hanging from
above. While Mark Handforth's "Blue Hanger," 2011
playfully dominates the show, it doesn't distract.
What next strikes the eye is Martin Creed's red-onwhite
lattice-like paint stripes covering the entire
South wall ("Work No. 1416," 2012), echoed quietly
in his small green X shapes descending on a small
foot-tall canvas ("Work No. 1417," 2012).
Amy Sillman's compositional wit in "Untitled," 2012,
where an anthropomorphic armature animates
a lemon yellow ground, is contrasted with Josh
Smith's "Untitled," 2008, where layers of brown and
black paint descend into smeary indifference. Both
paintings exude verve but in opposing directions.
Rio-based artist Tunga haunts the show with an
ominous aura from the back room. "La Mouche,"
2007 is a near-12-foot tall sculpture organized
around a vertical brass pole supporting a
rodded mesh curtain and two black woven ropes
volumetrically swollen midway down like a gorged
python. Dismembered large fly wings made of
shaped metal bars slant in from the floor diagonally
towards the middle. A three-paned folding screen
with vertical lamps on each end hugs the interior
space as if protecting some sacred energy outside
the bounds of language.
SVEN LUKIN
May 24 -June 30, 2012
Gary Snyder Gallery
529 West 20th Street 10th NY, NY
The name Sven Lukin doesn't usually appear next to
Donald Judd's and Frank Stella's, but in the heyday
of 1960s abstraction it did. The artist had solo
exhibitions at Betty Parsons Gallery, Martha Jackson
Gallery, and four more at Pace Gallery, in addition
to participating in numerous museum shows such
as the Guggenheim's 1964 "The Shaped Canvas."
Yet for reasons unexplained, Lukin severed ties with
Pace Gallery in 1972 and refused to show again in
a commercial venue. With the exception of his solo
exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
in 1978, the artist's work has gone largely unseen
until Gary Snyder Gallery, now representing him,
presented a survey in 2010.
In this second exhibition, from May 24 - June 30,
the gallery presented six large works from Lukin's
early period along with new work, made over the last
fourteen years, never seen.
My first time seeing this artist's work was online.
Not knowing the name or dates, I was immediately
struck by the hard-edged work's formal power,
spatial invention, smart use of color, and sense of
command that stands in contrast to the diffidence
(or "Casualism") of so much current abstraction.

Sven Lukin, Piano Lesson, 1968, Enamel on masonite and
wood construction, 108 x 79 x 5 inches, Photos courtesy
of Gary Snyder Gallery
I knew a gallery visit was due. "San Diego," 1966,
like most works in the show, is a painting-sculpture
hybrid made of acrylic, canvas and wood. Flat
against the wall a 6ft x 6ft gray stretched canvas
establishes the work's status as otherwise
traditional painting, while at the lower half two large
constructed elements protrude outward another
6ft, hovering inches above the floor, establishing
the work's status as sculpture. Two tones of flat
gray serve as a painted ground while wide winding
bands of yellow and orange edge the contours of
each volume, cleverly fusing the two and threedimensions.
Lukin's deft investigations of space are better
appreciated while knowing he was briefly a student
at University of Pennsylvania's School of Architecture
and attended lectures by Louis Kahn. The famous
architect's aesthetic of monumentality finds its way
into Likin's playful experimentation of space and
form brightened by a 1960s Pop color palette.
"Cheek to Cheek," 1963 is a most subtle, reduced,
but sensual early work. Two plush red, bisected
spherical shapes near touching in the middle create
a vertical shaft of white negative space. Stretched
over a centered vertical plank, the canvas softly
protrudes at the top and bottom, a seductively
physical counterpoint to the two painted forms.
Newer work, made anywhere from 2002-2012,
takes on two seemingly divergent approaches.
Four styrofoam-based multi-media paintings,
variegated in surface and charged color, feel like
a chaotic house party with their wild streaks and
dots housed within elements of depicted space
connoting floors, walls, or ceilings. In contrast to the
early hard-edged constructions, the gallery's back
room presents work unexpectedly organic – brown
burlap stretched over lengths of small tree limbs
adorn lines of color serving as supporting accents.
Their natural irregularity of shape and earthly tone
gives the work a primitive spirituality, as if sacred
objects serving an animistic faith.
BY KATIE CERCONE
POST CODE CRIMINALS
Septemeber 13 - October 20, 2012
Rush Arts Gallery
526 West 26th Street, Suite 311 NY, NY
Philanthropy is the New Black: POSTCODE
Criminals Exhibition at Rush Arts
Fortunately for some, it doesn’t take much more
than a trust fund, a thesaurus and a nice pair of
kicks to make it in the Art World these days. I just
don’t find much of that half-baked white dude
nostalgia shit very stirring. Every once in a while
if you can wade through the runway models and
neo-quacks, Chelsea turns up something fresh as
a rose. September 13-October 20 at the Rush Arts
Gallery, a branch of the Rush Philanthropic Arts
Foundation, artists Dread Scott and Joann Kushner
have teamed up for an exhibition showcasing their
public practice work with at-risk youth ages 14-22
in East New York, Brooklyn and Liverpool, England.
Based on workshops the artists led independently
in their regions, the exhibition presents a ‘virtual’
conversation about the impact of police tactics
such as Stop & Frisk and Zero Tolerance, the latter
having migrated via NY police chief William Bratton
to the UK through Officer Ray Mallon in 1996.
The show’s title, “POSTCODE,” refers to the way
in which communities of youth where Scott and
Kushner worked in Brownsville and Liverpool are
criminalized based on the zip code (‘postcode’ in
REVOLT
Magazine Number 3, 2012 8
8

‘Stop’ Multi-channel video installation, Dread Scott, 2012. Photos courtesy of Rush Art Gallery
Brit speak) where they live. Says the Press Release
at RUSH, “Youth on either side of the Atlantic have
been drawn into an unusual symmetry by police
and governmental forces.”
According to Scott, as many as 93% of residents
were stopped and frisked in a single year in
Brownsville where the artist presented his Art
photography workshop at Man UP! Inc., an
organization started by former gang-bangers and
community religious figures in the wake of another
youth’s tragic death and the 2004 black male
unemployment report. A safe space for community
dialogue, MAN Up! provides housing, job
development programs and after school curricula
to distressed residents. As part of a weekly sixmonth
workshop, Scott encouraged youth to take
photos of their daily life with camera phones,
highlighting the overwhelming and inhumane
presence of police in their neighborhood and its
brutal impact. In snapshots from both Kushner and
Scott’s students we see barbed wire fences and
‘Keep Out Danger’ signs mounted on the turf these
youth call home.
Says Kushner of her workshop in Liverpool, much
of the climate of police activity reflects a fear
of crime rather than a reality. In her series, she
instructed youth to use photography, poetry and
collage. Acronyms referencing police presence add
a foreboding air to the finished work, for instance,
the collage ASBO Baby refers to an “Anti-social
behavior Order.” FTM stands for “Fuck the Matrix,”
a centralized police division developed to target areas
with knife or gun violence responsible for much
of the stop and search activity. Meanwhile, traditional
Renaissance inspired photography portraits
confront the parallel history of institutionalized
racism and classism in the Fine Arts (a series to be
added to the National Museum Liverpool's collection
of contemporary urban culture).
During the course of the coinciding workshops,
youth were set up to share thoughts via Facebook
and Skype. Dread Scott’s multi-channel projection
Stop, an installation in the back room of Postcode,
confronts the viewer with life size youth of both
regions having a ‘virtual conversation’ across the
Atlantic about how often they are stopped and
searched by police officers. For many, they are
searched 2-3 times a week – in every cavity. If
they’re lucky enough to walk away they may do so
with major bruises or broken ribs.
Amber's collage, 2012. Photos courtesy of Rush Art Gallery
The opening on September 13th in Chelsea coincided
with the Stop Mass Incarceration Network’s
5-Borough action against the NYPD “Blow
the Whistle on Stop and Frisk Day,” for which the
Network handed out 20,500 bright orange and
yellow whistles with the message “No one will be
stopped-and-frisked in silence.” Says Cornel West,
co-initiator of the Blow campaign, “We are blowing
the whistle on stop-and-frisk because we love our
young people in this city, and especially those who
are victimized by this racist and unconstitutional
practice, disproportionately black and brown young
brothers and sisters, but we love all of them.”
In the wake of social media and cell phone
cameras playing a causal role in the Revolutions
of Egypt and Tunisia, and the subsequent uproar
in England that sent youth to prison for sharing
and tweeting words like ‘riot’ on the web, the
implications of Postcode’s poignant, crosscontinental
approach to social justice as an art
form pulls its weight. Says Dread Scott, who views
the NYPD as an occupying army mandating a New
Jim Crow neo-slavery existence for youth of color
in impoverished areas, “I want to talk about the
big questions confronting humanity…what’s real.”
While most of Chelsea is still batting at 487 ego
trips a season, our Nation is clocking in the highest
documented incarceration rate in the world. At
Rush Arts, they’re committed to not just showing
political work, but have a multi-tiered organization
set up to fund teaching artists workshops in
underserved communities of color. While Kushner
obtained funds rather easily through the UK’s
Children in Need and National Museum, here in
America – where the race issue has played out in
bloody warfare since our country was born - we
have scarce arts funding for works of such political
nature. Rush Arts, who boasts o.g. hip hop mogul
Russell Simmons as chairman and co-founder,
is championing on the 5th element, what Afrika
Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation calls “Knowledge of Self
in the Community.” It’s making Philanthropy, with
the help of bold players like Scott and Kushner, the
new Black.

Linda DiGusta, 2012
REVOLT
Magazine Number 3, 2013 10

TOP 10 NYC
!#$%12456!@#
ARTISTS NOW
Nancy Azara
B. 1939 in Brooklyn, NY
Nancy Azara knows exactly why she became an artist, "Being a visual artist in particular gives me the ability to translate from
an uncharted territory instead of from the usual language of words.” Making sculpture with wood, Azara also makes rubbings
from the wood and collages on paper and mylar. Says Azara, “I love to carve into wood because it is a collaboration between
myself and the tree.” She is currently working on a 10 x 10 ft. high wooden sculpture called The Jacket, which has an ancient
red leaf pattern as its central focus. She also has in mind to gild with aluminum leaf and carve a piece of wood from a tree that
was probably sliced by lightening and has a remarkable swelling like a mountain in its center. A veteran in her field, Nancy was
co-founder of the New York Feminist Art Institute, a holistic women’s Art institution that existed from 1979-1990.
www.nancyazara.com
Edwin Bethea
B. 1983 in Philadelphia, PA
Edwin Bethea is a Brooklyn-based mixed media artist that typically works in oil paint, charcoal, and conte. Edwin knew he was
destined to become an artist from a very young age. He’s interested in the way in which art can be “created, destroyed, and
trafficked” in a manner that “does not abide by the current confines of the stereotypical institutions we've created.” Edwin
works as an artist assistant for Robert Longo “Who is fucking amazing!” Edwin's greatest artistic challenge? “Continuing
through a career/life in which I’m constantly striving to understand myself and an ever changing environment.” Edwin had a
solo show this past November in Brooklyn, which consisted of mostly drawings. Check out his website for details!
www.edwinbethea.com
Ivy Castellanos
B. 1985 in Park Rapids, Minnesota
Ivy Castellanos is a performative sculptor with an athletic and musical background. She works with a variety of materials she
finds on the street, making a mold and cast of each to repurpose them within her sculptural work. “Rhythm and motion are very
important for the construction of both my sculpture and performance work.” For Ivy, the body is sculpture and sculpture is the
body. Absurdity and power are elements in her work along with sentiment. Ivy performs frequently in the Brooklyn area and is
affiliated with the Panoply Performance Lab. Ivy is also currently director at IV Soldiers Gallery at 184 Noll St. in Bushwick. As
director she is interested in highlighting Performance as medium and is currently in the process of creating an archive of Bushwick
Performance Artists.
www.ivycastellanos.com
Robert Dick
B. 1950 in New York City
Photo credit: Anibal Pella
Robert Dick was born at the very center of the 20th century minus 4 days. He fell in love with music as a child and that love
only broaded and deepened. Rob became an artist because he couldn’t see himself as anything else. His chosen medium?
Sound, primarily sound coming through flutes of various sizes. “I have developed an approach to acoustic performance in which
I treat the flute as a human powered synthesizer, with a wide open approach to sonority, often creating simultaneous, multiple
layers of sound.” His work is a personal exploration of emotions and ideas, based on the belief that “limitations and preconceptions
of what music and the flute should or could sound like are meaningless.” Collaboration with other creative musicians
and artists is extremely important to his work. What is his biggest challenge? “The endless search for the next moment of big
inspiration.” He’s currently writing a book of small pieces for flute using a telescoping flute mouthpiece he invented called the
Glissando Headjoint®. He’s meanwhile composing a piece for himself as soloist with an amplified chamber group on strings
and percussion, which is tentatively titled “Time Wants a Skeleton.”
www.robertdick.net
Prince Harvey
B. 1990 in Los Angeles, CA
REVOLT
Prince Harvey spent the first 13 years of his life in Dominica, where his parents are from. He’s always been a performer and a
writer. He became an artist because “I wanna be a part of changing the world I live in. One day we're gonna be the old people,
and I wanna be able to look back and say we made this. I just wanna fuck shit up - by the time our kids are our age they'll wanna
change everything we did, so I wanna really give them a challenge.” The majority of his ideas come from taking long walks.
Often he’ll record a hum pattern or beatbox on his iPhone ‘Notes’ app or Voice Memo application which will eventually become
a fullblown song. Why is he making art? “I want people to live through my experiences of alienation, heartache, pleasure and
dedication.” Prince Harvey is currently working on a full acapella hip hop album, titled "Boom" as well as a street performance
project titled BoomBoxBoy. “I definitely want to increase my network of collaborators. I write a lot of songs that I feel would be
better suited for other artists, so I want to expand in that direction also.”
http://soundcloud.com/princeharvey
Magazine Number 3, 2013 12

Adehla Lee
B. 1983 in Pusan, South Korea
Adehla Lee made her first painting in preschool and has purely loved the medium ever since. Although she works with painting
and installation, she considers her true medium “color.” What does she make work about? “I like to find an aesthetic beauty
behind realistic tragedy. I felt such a thrill when I saw the Korean traditional coffins… covered by various neon colors and beautiful
decorations.”
What are her artistic challenges? “Myself. I am not an easy person. I am very picky, selfish, and lazy. I have to deal with me all
the time while I am working.” But I doubt that lazy bit! She’s also interested in getting into video and animation. Meet Adehla
Lee – her fashion sense is almost as awesome as her Art!
www.adehlalee.com
Hiroshi Schafer
B. 1981 (actually 1971) in Tokyo, Japan
Photo credit: Chito Yoshida
Toshi’s grandfather was a secret agent for the Japanese Air Force. He tried to force Toshi to become an air force pilot, but Toshi
“become a smart artist instead.” Toshi’s chosen mediums are performance, video, workshops, props, costumes, music and
Toshi himself. His work, which he makes at his studio and in secret at his day job is about “The invisible but unrecoverable
connections between individuals, engaging the viewer to consider the nature of our relationships, to overcome barriers and to
undertake an empathetic exchange with the artist and everyone else.” Ultimately, Toshi attempts to “tickle a profound truth”
out of human beings. Toshi is currently working on “Paper Drama,” a sad story about a Fisherman set to music in collaboration
with Matthew Silver. After that he’s doing another sad story set to music with puppets. If you don’t know Toshi you should, he’s
rapidly becoming a Brooklyn staple!
http://hiroshishafer.com
Maria Jose Duran Steinman B. 1982 in Santiago,
Chile
Maria Jose Duran Steinman works in 3-D sculpture and installation loosely related to notions of affection, comfort, protection
and home. It’s also about how her body responds to the sensuality of the fibers and for the viewer, touching with the eyes. MJD
become an artist “Because of fear, I guess. There were things or subjects that I couldn’t communicate verbally. Born and raised
under Catholicism and as a young girl being part of a very extreme Catholic sect I developed conflicts around what the human
body means for our society.” MJD just finished a project called El Descubrimiento de America (The Discovery of America) for
which she built music boxes/small scenarios that depict building a home in a foreign land, which she showed this past October
at Local Project in Long Island City. She also has a rad curatorial initiative called The Tree Nomadic which involves collaborating
with other artists in public space. For Tree Nomadic MJD is planning a series of public interventions with stone alphabets spelling
out quotes from different authors places throughout the city. Next year she’ll have a solo show at Soho20 Gallery. Damn
girl! MJD is painting the town red.
www.mjdurans.com
Jessica Stoller
B. 1981, in Royal Oak, Michigan
“It was never an active decision to declare myself an Artist with an capital A,” says Stoller. She always gravitated towards the
arts, and focused on working three dimensionally pretty early on. Developing an affinity for ceramics in high school, she has
more or less used ceramics in her work throughout the years. In the last few years she’s been working primarily with porcelain.
“I am interested in using clay as a vehicle to explore issues of idealized beauty, vanity and the subjugation of the female body,
using porcelain as my primary media, a material inextricably linked to desire, secrecy and commodification.” She spent July in
Woodstock, NY at a residency in Byrdcliffe, a historic arts community nestled in the woods with a fully equipped ceramics studio.
Does she have artistic challenges? “There are a lot of challenges…” At the end of the day she says the essential challenge
is “Staying true to my convictions, voice and integrity.”
http://jessicamstoller.com
Kay Turner
B. 1948 in Detroit, Michigan
Photo credit: Benno Klandt
Since childhood Kay Turner has felt “A vital source of inspiration at work in me and through me.” What she calls “the gift of my
queerness,” Turner’s work crosses genres including music (singing and songwriting), writing, book design and collage, curating
and performance. From 1985-1995 Kay was the leader and songwriter for “Girls in the Nose,” a punk and funk lesbian rock
band. Her Art intersects with her work as a folklorist and 40 year long commitment to feminist, lesbian, and queer politics. “It
allows me to work in the territory of women’s histories and women’s lives but with a twist—folklore’s simultaneous interest in
tradition and change, community and marginality. I am interested in examining, rethinking, and re-presenting women’s legacies,
especially those that resist or interrupt dominance and refuse normative assimilation.” Her Rock Band’s 1994 hit “Breast
Exam” for example, marries Rock with radical self-care, the lyrics inviting women to “take control of your health and give yourself
a breast exam.” Currently, she’s gearing up to promote her new book Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms (Wayne
State University Press, 2012), which interprets the Grimms’ fairy tales through the lens of queer theory. She’s also curating an
upcoming show about rethinking the witch figure, All hail the hag!
www.brooklynartscouncil.org/documents/233

THE
MARTIAL
ARTIST
REVOLT Magazine interviews Tanto Bin Everett about Fear, Police Brutality
and where Occupy Wall St. Failed
BY KATIE CERCONE
Tanto Bin Everett is not your usual Martial Artist.
A 36-year-old Alexandria Virginia born American
Veteran, Tanto is of African American and Native
American origin. He’s tall, broad shouldered, has
awesome long dread locks and wears a medicine
bag around his neck. But that’s just on the surface
of things. What’s beneath the glowing facade?
Tanto is a pillar of the community, a real Spiritual
Warrior and a man of great wisdom.
Tanto encountered Martial Arts at a very
young age as a philosophy of life handed down
through his elders. His coming of age involved
learning a Native American fighting style endemic
to the Shenandoah Valley where he was born and
raised. It’s very much tied to a warrior way of life
that espouses Native American culture. Being as
close to the earth as possible is central, “Animals
as most Americans mean it is actually a foreign
concept to my people. We believe Brother Bear
can teach you a lot.” Likewise for sister squirrel,
brother squirrel, brother fox, sister fish, mother
hawk, says Tanto. For Southeastern mountain
folk like himself, Native American Martial Arts
is as simple as chopping wood. Chopping wood
prepared Tanto for a fighting move called the axe
handle hand. Picking up bales of hay prepared
him to one day be able to pick a man up off the
ground.
But I thought Native American culture and
the Martial Arts don’t necessarily go together?
“That’s amazing that you say that because
Native Americans have some of the greatest
Martial Arts there are in the world.” According to
Tanto, modern military warfare in the United States
is a direct descendent of Native American Martial
Arts. Andrew Jackson for example, our American
president most noted for his military campaigns
– earned the acclaim that got him into the White
House as a soldier aping Martial Arts from the
Natives who showed him how to defeat an enemy.
REVOLT
Magazine Number 3, 2013
Just 15 men and Jackson destroyed the creeks
of North Carolina. “The Native Americans showed
him how to sneak up river, cut the opponent’s
canoes so they wouldn’t have anywhere to run
and attack five men from the front, five men from
the back. Genius strategy.” Tanto explains how
to this day we still call the military squawk box a
‘smoke signal’ after the Native American derived
first official long distance information-sharing
device.
And all those Hipsters running around
with their heads shaved on one side? Tanto tells
me this comes from the Powhatan tribe. It’s for
the side that the person used the bow and arrow
on. It prevented you from yanking your hair out
as you launched arrows while running around
terrain. “That too was a Martial Art.”
In fact, without going into a history lesson
– yet - “Nobody just rolled over and died” when
the white colonists rolled up to rape and pillage
the Native people and their earth. Says Tanto
“America” as we know it today “is the consequence
of [Europeans] having a couple hundred million
more people and disease resistance that they
could dump into the country… further exacerbating
the genocide and disease campaign.”
When it comes to the way of the warrior,
Tanto’s cross-cultural roots run deep. Native
American influence is only one component of
Tanto’s artistry. A Mixed Martial Arts (MMA)
fighter initially, Tanto also comes from a family
of many boxers. When he was younger, amongst
his many uncles and cousins Tanto learned
something called ‘slap fighting,’ similar to boxing
but executed with an open rather than enclosed
fist. “Also referred to as either ‘jailhouse rock’ or
‘the 52s’ it’s primarily something taught to young
men when they go to jail or prison the first time…”
As recreation?
Hold Up. Yes, I just asked that. Because
I’m not a neutral scribe. Although two generations
back my relatives – of Irish and Italian descent
– were degraded, as Tanto says, called the
“European Negro,” I grew up with white privilege,
the wake of my Father’s American Dream, wealth,
innocence and all the ignorance a sheltered,
segregated suburban community could afford.
Which is a lot of ignorance. I-G-N-O-R-E-ance. When
Reagan slashed $63 billion in social spending
between 1982-83, the two years proceeding the
crack era and my birth in 1984, my Father went
on getting richer and piling more and more pearly
nosed Barbies and pink ruffley numbers under my
Christmas tree. Meanwhile, the Black American
ghetto was flooded with crack and had its basic
needs like food and family stability pulled right
out from under it. (1)
I’m interested in Tanto’s story because as
a yoga instructor, I’m invested in Consciousness.
I also tend to find the general yoga community
in New York somewhat of a claustrophobiainducing,
self-involved, white and commercial
entrepreneurial set. No offense yogis, it’s just a
hard truth that the only way we could possibly
scrape by a living in this field is to teach yoga
to wealthy persons who can pay for $80 private
lessons or access big studios that have turned
Yoga into a corporate brand. Yikes.
A few months ago I went to a yoga
retreat upstate with a friendly group of white,
upper-middle class women. Over a wholesome
communal meal, a few ladies started talking
about how safe they felt in Bedstuy where they
had recently relocated. The draconian notion that
every ghetto is a dangerous terrain where poor
and disenfranchised people of color lurk on street
corners to maim, rob and rape white women –
was clearly implied. The age-old reality prevailed:
White woman moves into historically black
neighborhood, continues to turn a blind eye to the
poverty, subjugation and outright violence (done
to BLACK PEOPLE). Continues to get off on the
14

American danger fetish, meanwhile avoids any real
danger and has a good smug chuckle about how
safe she feels and how much money she’s saving
on rent. Meanwhile, most of my Black male friends
that lived through the 90s have something relatively
close to PTSD from the crack era’s bloody fallout.
Many grew up with no parents at all.
What makes a person white? Is it the
neighborhood they grew up in? How safe they feel?
Or is it that somewhere along their ancestral line
someone got greedy and snipped the family roots.
Popped out perfect little daughters that were more
afraid of consuming a sandwich then their parents
dying. (2) I learned the white way that fear is relative.
“I’d rather pay for my kids to go to college then
someone else’s” was how my Father justified being
a fiscal Republican. And I did go to college. Twice.
Two degrees in social justice disciplines and gobs
of books by Third World Women of Color Feminists
and Hip Hop Praxis and plenty of Black boyfriends
later – I just still don’t get it, I may never get it, not
enough. Which is why I asked Tanto,
As recreation?
“No, as defense. People get killed in prison
just as frequently and often more fervently then
they do on the street. It’s a very dangerous place
to be.” Tanto recalls stories from his uncles and
cousins on Rutgers Island. His mom even served
5 years. Prison is one of those places where it
serves you to learn a Martial Art like what they call
‘the Shank,’ another term for knife fighting using
a sharpened toothbrush in the place of a knife,
which descends from slavery. “There were many
warriors that were taken in during slavery who kept
their fighting arts. If you didn’t necessarily look too
different from everyone around you, it gave you a
way of defending yourself.” Tanto explains another
popular style passed down through slaves which is
now being reimagined and retaught called ‘Shackle
hands’ or ‘Kinetic Hands’.
Shackle hands is an art that revolves around
keeping the hands close together and using the
motions of the hands in that way to block, punch,
blow and hit. Tanto explains that it’s designed for a
man in shackles to be able to defend himself against
the whip. If you’re familiar with kinetic hands you
can stop the whip from anywhere that it can be
thrown and defend yourself in a serious way. “All of
this unbeknownst has been passed down through
the prison system.”
After learning the ways of the Native
American and African American fighter, Tanto went
on to study other forms of Martial Arts including
Kung Fu, Aikido, Muay Thai, Brazilian Jujitsu and
Japanese Jujitsu. In the U.S. military Tanto learned
military and marine core self defense as well as
something called S.CA.R.S. What’s he doing these
days?
“I’ve tried my best not to be an instructor in
any capacity. What I do teach is what I see a need
for. If I see a geeky kid that just wants to be left
alone and can’t really defend himself I’ll teach him
how to defend himself. How to use his hands.”
For Tanto, Martial Arts is as much about
the actual fighting as it is the Philosophy behind
it. “Fighting requires you to get over yourself
immediately. It’s a matter of learning to function
beyond your fear.” Most everything Tanto talked
about boiled down to the fact that as human beings
we have the choice to operate from subconscious
reactive fear or clear compassionate consciousness.
Martial Arts, like yoga, teaches consciousness.
“Fear is something that affects everything
inside of us and everything that we do unless
we’re aware of it. There’s pathos behind the fear
we develop. Because of that fear we operate from
a subconscious place. We overreact, under react,
lock up…fear takes you out of the moment at hand.”
Today, many Americans live in fear everyday due to
yellow and orange Terror Alerts. Meanwhile, African
Americans deal with terror on a daily basis. Their
terror is not potential, or media generated. It is
historical and systemic.
Societal fear of Black people, especially
black males – bolstered by faulty media
depictions, corrupt law, religious authority, covert
institutionalized racism and blatant racialized
hatred - has shaped the life and times in Tanto’s
community since our country came to be. Wrote
Norman Mailer in his much lauded work The White
Negro (1957), “Since the Negro knows more about
the ugliness and danger of life than the White, it is
probable that if the Negro can win his equality, he
will possess a potential superiority, a superiority so
feared that fear itself has become the underground
drama of domestic politics.” Mailer concludes that
racial equality would “tear a profound shift” in the
“moral imagination of every white alive.”
And yet as with many popular academics,
Mailer’s message concludes more or less with a
potent, doomsayer revelation about the outcome
of deep-seeded American Societal ills - “What the
liberal cannot bear to admit is the hatred beneath
the skin of a society so unjust that the amount of
collective violence buried in the people is perhaps
incapable of being contained.” Where are we, half a
century later? In a way I feel like we’ve reached that
place, that post-modern, fractured, shifted and torn
moral imaginary were Race as a construct is both
more and less limiting to individuals on a given daily
basis. And yet at what point will privileged liberals
see beyond the exhilaration of radical prose into
the material reality of the collective violence of the
State toward which they are fashionably privy but
unmoved to change?
I quoted Mailer because his words very
clearly correlate with Tanto’s philosophy. The
“underground drama of American Politics” boils
down to fear, and yet, it sure ain’t the ivory tower
of academism that’s going to conquer our collective
fears and whatever perverse mechanism(s) we’ve
developed to hold onto them.
“The beautiful thing about life is that when
you put death and fear in its proper place you can
enjoy every minute that you’re here even more,”
says Tanto. Being conscious is recognizing that fear
is “Nothing more than a suggestion made by your
subconscious.” Being fearless is being conscious.
Tanto defines consciousness as “full and absolute
faith in oneself to use the full capacity of your being
to process and absorb the world around you. Live
through the world of your senses rather than through
the confines of your own thoughts.” He goes on to
say, “And through that consciousness you grow. You
find sweetness. If you stay still the storm passes
over you and you’re stronger for having endured it.”
This is right around were Martial Arts starts
to sound a lot like yoga, and in many ways it is. Tanto
reminds me that yoga is a Martial Art in so much
that it was originally developed for warriors and
dignitaries.
“We’re all perfectly developed and evolved
fighting machines whether we like to admit it or not.
We are the end result of a primate beginning to hunt
- his failing and actually succeeding enough times
to evolve to this point where we are. We’re actually
designed to get into the rough and tumble of it. We’re
actually designed to chase down a mammoth, put a
spear in its side and bring it down… for lunch.”
What letting go of fear and cultivating
pure consciousness does for the Spiritual Warrior
is that it enables “instant data recognition from
past experience.” This transfers into outwitting an
opponent with little or no effort. And that’s just
one piece of it, “There are a lot of different types
and forms of consciousness that we still don’t
understand.”
And what about the notion of energy as we
think about it in Yoga or moving meditations like Tai
Chi? How does energy factor into the Martial Arts?
“We all emit large amounts of energy on a
regular basis, byproduct largely of the static caused
by the liquid bodies and the antigens constantly
moving through our body’s venous system. This
energy itself it not shielded in anyway, in fact
human beings generate an inherent magnetic
signature. We’re strong enough on any given day
just in our blood stream alone… then add to that
neuron activity, which is like a thousand single watt
batteries firing off at any given second. We also
absorb energy from the sun and can detect the
energy of another Being at any time.”
Martial Arts concerns itself with the routing
and constructive use of that energy. Energy in Kung
Fu is explained in terms of the Chakras (Seven
energetic centers from the base of the spine to the
crown) like in yoga. Different Martial Arts approach
energy in different ways. In Judo, it’s all about
taking the energy that your opponent is giving off.
“You don’t fight them, they fight themselves. They’re
fighting where their energy is going you just route it.
You learn how to channel the flow of your opponent.
There are martial arts that teach you how to become
stronger with every blow that you receive.”
Okay so, to recap. Fear takes you out of your
body and into your head.
“Yes, fear takes you to a part of your mind
that’s not observant and for a moment because
of fear you are literally psychologically delusional.
Sometimes with people their fight or flight response
is to just shut down and escape through their head.
It’s like a possum reaction. Go flaccid and blank
eyed and out of it - that's fear.”

Fear brings us back to the original reason
I wanted to interview Tanto for REVOLT, specifically
fear in relationship to police brutality and the fact
that he’s teaching young Black males involved
with the Occupy Wall St. movement Martial Arts
techniques to help them protect themselves from
the cops. Not that a lot of Black males have dared
set foot into Occupy Wall Street. Explains Tanto,
“The reason why African Americans will never get
involved in Occupy Wall St. is because it was a solid
FUCK YOU to Black people.”
When exactly did America allow
corporations to rule our public policy? “The first
corporate decision in American that infringed on
civil rights was the Constitution. All men are created
equal…and yet they made African Americans 3/5
of a human being,” explains Tanto. Slavery was
the first corporation and has (legally!) existed in a
myriad of covert forms since. If you even look closely
at the nickel we still use today as currency, you’ll
see a SLAVE PLANTATION (Thomas Jefferson’s
Monticello) depicted in elegant detail. “Despite
all these great moral platitudes that our founding
fathers spit out…they went and made 32% of the
population immediately 3/5 of a human being.
We’ve always had that problem. We did that in the
beginning because of money and the economy.
Slavery was a big part of our economy. We still use
that system.” And it’s true, when you consider just
how many Black and Latino males are locked up
each year for non-violent crime. Their manpower
supports a whole system of neo-slavery in which
prison inmates make toys, furniture and high-end
Victoria Secret lingerie - for just pennies an hour.
“Under slavery they left you alone because
somebody owned you – you were damaging
someone’s property.” Just following slavery,
Tanto says, “People bought houses, we got land
we started farming and trying to compete in the
economy. At least under Jim Crow with segregation
we were allowed to. No one would sell us anything
- which was awesome. Because we could make
things and sell them to ourselves. We built several
cities. In 1921 Tulsa Oklahoma had two cities.
There was regular Tulsa and there was Black Tulsa.
Black Tulsa was booming, they had Black Wall St.
and famous financial institutions. It was a selfsubsistence
city. Then one day all on the word of a
white woman saying that she was raped by a Black
man, they burned that entire town down and killed
hundreds of innocent people. I don’t really believe
the newspaper accounts I believe the historical
accounts of people who survived – and they say
it was somewhere more like 200-300 people
were killed where the newspaper accounts say oh
something like 10 people were killed. They killed an
entire city. Then there was Rosewood Florida, 1923,
exact same situation, exact same thing.”
Today profit remains the bottom line of our
increasingly corporatized government. Capitalism
employs a divide and conquer tactic whereby most
Americans are so busy getting their own they have
lost grasp of the reality at hand. William Sales Jr.,
Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Seton
Hall University, remarks, “Oppression is not merely
imposed by force. It is most firmly instituted when
those in power have established their self-serving
ideas as the ‘common sense’ of the society…
Individuals or groups among the oppressed who
attempt to establish a different definition of social
problems or a different frame of reference for the
debate are defined as illegitimate or dangerous.
They often find themselves under physical as well
as intellectual attack.” (3)
At the end of the day, what does the average
American profit?
“It’s all about money. It has always been
all about money. One way or another to keep us
supplying labor - free labor - since slavery. Slavery
has technically not ended in America at all it’s just
changed its face. That’s our failure to recognize
that when people say free market what they mean
by that is slavery. That’s all the free market has ever
been. That was the model of the East India trading
company. Sell it for the maximum profit that you can
get for it but pay nothing for getting it.” And what’s the
binding agent? Fear. Tanto remarks, “Studies have
shown that when the average person turns around
to encounter a Black man a spike in adrenaline is
released into the body. Harvard has recently done a
study determining children as young as six years old
had already learned a similar fear response.”
As absurd as it is considering how White
people have only captured, enslaved, tortured,
murdered, denigrated, exploited, neglected and
imprisoned Black people for centuries, White people
remain deeply afraid of Blacks. Meanwhile, Black
people are protecting their asses abroad. “America’s
dirty secret as much as it loves African Americans
is that it is mortally afraid of our men and acts it
out in every way. We’re usually a sizable portion of
the military. After World War II in particular African
Americans make up 30-40% of the military.” And
for white America, “Nothing is more frightening to
them than African Americans with training. People
forget how after World War II there were American
soldiers who were hung and lynched for showing up
in uniform with rifles. We had just got done fighting
the Nazis and we came back here to a people way
worse.”
Tanto explains that a major way that our
society has justified its mistreatment of African
Americans post-Civil Rights era has been done
legally by the police force via the War On Drugs. The
first campaign against African American cocaine
use went into place in the 1930s, a time when 90%
of African Americans in America had never seen or
been in contact with cocaine.
“We’d already discovered the herb in Africa
and loved it… we’re already leaning towards using
something herbal because we’re from an agrarian
society with preceding roots in earth based ritual
societal cultures that use everything around them
as medicine.” Marijuana, yes, but cocaine? That
was the rich white man’s poison.
The U.S. Commission of Civil Rights states
that Africa-Americans constitute 14% of the drugusing
population, 35% of drug arrests, 55% of
drug convictions, and 75% of all prison admissions
related to drug offenses. Even the LA Times
concludes, “Although it is clear that whites sell most
of the nation’s cocaine and account for 80% of its
consumers, it is Blacks and other minorities who
continue to fill up America’s courtrooms and
jails.” (4) In Tanto’s words, “We have a war on drugs
that does not go after the people that are committing
the crime.” On a correlate note, George Gerbner,
former dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s
Annenberg School for Communication, reports
“[It’s] impossible to run an election campaign
without advocating more jails, harsher punishment,
more executions, all the things that never worked
to reduce crime but have always worked to get
votes…it’s driven largely, although not exclusively,
by television-cultivated insecurity.” (5) Researchers
at the University of Michigan have sited that the
number of whites shown on TV using cocaine in
1985 dropped 60% while the number of Blacks
using cocaine increased 60%. (6)
We’re in an age of absolute information
overload and great poverty of wisdom. We’re in an
age were Spectacular images – like the ‘dark Face’
of crime - have effectively colonized our psyches
to the tune of multi-billion dollar entertainment
industries and passive consumption. As Tanto says,
seeing reality clearly – that is, what’s right in front
of you, here and now – may be the only way to pull
the weeds of white supremacy that are choking us
all limp.
When Tanto was growing up in Virginia
he was subject to a police tactic called ‘Jump
Out’ where cops would jump out of cars 5 or 6
deep and tackle Tanto and his childhood friends.
They broke his mother’s best friend’s leg and at
least once knocked a woman holding a baby over
and almost gave the baby a concussion. And this
happens all over greater New York City too. I’ve seen
the unmarked cars and I’ve known someone – a
Black male someone – who gets ‘jumped out’ on,
chased down with guns by plain clothes officers and
searched illegally.
When Tanto worked as a bartender several
years back in Greenpoint, the cops would follow him
home from work. “I’d be walking down the street
they’d always slow down right next to me and I’d
have to wave and say ‘Good morning fellows, just a
bartender going home...’ jokingly but, it helps.”
Tanto recalls a time when New York City law
was particularly brutal, “10 years back during the
Rockefeller drug law era in NYC if me and you were
standing here right now and a cop walked up - you
had a kilo of cocaine in your pocket and I had a $5
crack rock in my pocket - who do you think would
get more time? If it were your first offense you’d
be out within a week or two maybe on probation.
Despite it being my first offense I would probably
be doing 5-10 years. Crack is something that’s
made from cocaine, and yet the penalties are up to
18,000 times higher per volume.”
Tanto explains this system has more or less
been in place since Richard Nixon said to the NRA:
“You have to face the fact that the whole problem
is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system
that recognizes this all while not appearing to.” (7)
Says Tanto, “If it’s not racist explain to me why a guy
who rapes a child may do 2-3 years with a little bit
of parole and then he goes on a watch list whereas
REVOLT
Magazine Number 3, 2013 16

a guy who’s selling crack to feed his kids is thus
locked up for the next 25 years.”
And these are cases where the police officer
calmly followed the racist letter of the Law. When
they do shoot – they don’t stop. Tanto explains that
you rarely hear of an African American dying from a
police officer shooting him ten times. “You hear 51
shots. 48 bullets. Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times.
A friend of mine in Richmond Virginia was shot 41
times by the police.”
That’s the amount of shots or bullet wounds?
“That’s the amount of bullets found in the
individual. Sean Bell had 51 bullets in his body.
There were only 4 cops. All four of them if they
had glock 16s - 17 shots each - would have had to
have reloaded with the exception of one. So three
of them reloaded.” And these officers opening
wildfire on young Black men are supposedly, as
Tanto informs me, Officers of the Peace. Says Tanto,
“They are supposed to be walking around making
sure nothing is happening to people.”
Take the Stop & Frisk campaign for
example, about which the New York Civil Liberties
Union reports, “The Department’s own reports
on its stop-and-frisk activity confirm what many
people in communities of color across the city have
long known: The police are stopping hundreds of
thousands of law abiding New Yorkers every year,
and the vast majority are Black and Latino.” (8)
Nearly 9 out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers
have been completely innocent. Meanwhile, white
kids – like James Holmes of the recent Colorado
Movie Theater shooting rampage - are taking open
fire on innocent civilians around the nation lazily.
Tanto recounts the story of Allen Reggie, 33, a
white male from South Carolina who attempted
to take the subway to Times Square armed with
a loaded Intratec Luger Tec-9 machine gun and a
Smith and Wesson 45 last January and only got
caught because he hopped the turnstile. Tanto
points out that a large part of the problem in New
York City is that the majority of cops don’t live in the
neighborhood they serve. They don’t know who is
supposed to be there and who is not.
Fortunately, the ACLU is also nipping at
the heels of police brutality with new stealthy
surveillance technology. You may have heard of the
ACLU developed OpenWatch Project, which provides
apps for Android and iOS that record audiovisual
media and immediately upload it to the OpenWatch
server. Through this app, you can record police
activity while it looks like your phone is turned off.
To download the apps, go to http://openwatch.net/
apps/
To recap: White people violate black people,
for centuries. White people fear the repercussions
and fuel one powerful, opiating myth: Black men
are dangerous, violent and indestructible. Recall
a 2003 50 Cent on the cover of Rolling Stone
proudly displaying 9 bullet wound scars while the
PR mavens announce his new album marks ‘the
year hip hop returned to the streets.’ Village Voice
writer Ta-Nehisi Coates calls this fanfare “crack era
nostalgia taken to the extreme” and says that in
reality, “murder rates in the Black community have
been dropping since the mid-nineties…the streets
that gangsta rappers claim as their source are no
longer as angry as they are sad…gangsta rap should
be dead by now…and yet it still lumbers across the
landscape of pop, shouting, ‘I’m Real.’” (9)
The Hip Hop Nation, like previous youth
movements for Black solidarity, has also been
subject to Federal surveillance and censorship. (10)
Noted Hip Hop Journalist Dream Hampton
wrote a touching article about rap supa star Tupac
Shakur, son of Afenia Shakur. Ms. Shakur, who was
imprisoned when she was pregnant with Tupac, was
a member of Panther 21, a New York Faction of the
Black Panthers accused of a conspiracy to blow up
the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Writes Hampton
of Tupac’s childhood, “those years underground,
aboveground, the years when his disillusioned
mother began smoking crack – is as much a part of
his legacy as the Black leather jackets and clenched
fists.”
Her article, titled ‘Hell-Raiser’ from Tupac’s
hit Hell Razor (lyrics go “Mama raised a hell razor”)
reports on a night in 1993 when Tupac witnessed
two white off-duty cops harassing a Black male in
a car in front of him. The cops, brothers Mark and
Scott Whitwell, were drunk and carrying a gun they
had stolen from the room at the precinct where
confiscated weapons are held. “There’s nothing in
Tupac’s personality that would have allowed him
to be passive to this kind of attack,” says Hampton
calling the night Tupac shot non-fatally the white
Whitwell brothers, “Full of mythic potential: Black
knight slays cracker dragons (centuries old) who
emerge in the night, fangs bared. In the South no
less! It’s the kind of community work we all dream
of doing.” Her conclusion? “Shooting another Black
man post-crack-era requires little courage…We
talk a good game when it comes to the white devil,
but rare is the brotha (or organization) who even
imagines physical confrontation with the oppressor.
Let alone acts on it. It is in this way that Tupac’s
actions…are so utterly fearless” (11) Hampton’s
portrait of Tupac offers another poignant entry point
into Tanto’s revelations about America racism and
fear. Hampton’s words are chilling and powerful,
and contend to the deep-seated, separate but equal
reservoirs of Fear bolstering the American racial
divide.
Tanto’s older brother passed away during
the drug war, and Martial Arts has helped him deal
with the anger and fear that’s come up for him
around that. “I probably would have been one of the
guys that stayed in my neighborhood and died way
too young,” says Tanto, although it’s hard to believe
that if you could see him now. As I said, he’s a big
man on Brooklyn turf – and he uses his charisma
and social prowess for good. He’s a teacher, and in
a place like Bushwick that’s rapidly gentrifying, he
has plenty of encounters in which he can confront
young white liberals with their own acculturated
ignorance. He can’t go to a party without some
European or European American walking up to him
and asking for drugs. One time he literally spent
twenty minutes arguing with a fellow, repeatedly
telling him “No, I don’t know what you are talking
about.” Whitey did not want to hear otherwise. Says
Tanto, “White people have all but abandoned African
Americans to deal with this shit. But they do more
drugs than us. They never go to jail. It’s hilarious.”
Unfortunately, it’s not only whiny European
hipsters that Tanto must contend with. “I’m a large
African American, which scares cops to death.
Every time a cop walks up to me they walk with
their hand six inches away from their weapon.”
Tanto’s even had to point this out to police officers,
asking “You’re encroaching on me at the ready, why
is that?” Knowing military parlance helps. Tanto’s
Martial Arts training allows him to stay calm and
collected under this kind of high stakes encounter,
and it’s an art he’s looking to pass on. “The worst
thing you can do to a person that lives in a populace
you are working to protect is communicate physically
in your body language – I fear you. And not only I
fear you but I will use brutal or excessive or mortal
force to contain you. A lot of African American men
get themselves in a lot of trouble just reacting to the
fear that the cop has when he walks up to them.
They don’t know how to respond to it or what to say
to that cop at that moment. They have every right to
be afraid.”
Tanto also feels safe knowing The Scientific
Combat Reactionary System
S.C.A.R.S., which incorporates disarmament moves.
“It allows me to be a lot more comfortable and I can
speak more clearly. The tone of my voice says to
them that I’m not a threat.”
And we repeat, who is the threat? Sharod,
age 22, although gainfully employed as a bike
messenger, can’t even take a nap in the park on
a summer day without getting ticketed because of
his skin color. I know because my white ass has
pretty much napped in the park all summer long
and I’ve never been bothered while Sharod has
gotten stopped, ticketed and/or jailed once a week
since I’ve known him. And he’s still punk as fuck.
One of the few Black men active in Occupy from
its inception, he refuses to comment other than
to say (in hindsight) “It Sucked. There were no real
demands.”
Sharod, who also practices Kung Fu, is
actually how I met Tanto. Tanto taught Sharod how
when a cop stops you you should always ask to move
in front of the car where the surveillance camera is.
Says Tanto, “Especially now while we have Occupy
Wall St. there are a lot of people that don’t know
how to properly fall out of a cop’s hands without
giving that cop an excuse to beat him.”
He continues, “When cops want you out
of an area they put in a plant - someone to cause
agitation.” A small uproar of violence and all it takes
is one move in the wrong direction, to a cop, “You
are now resisting arrest and what he’s physically
capable of doing to you to get you under control at
that point maximizes.” What Tanto teaches young
men is how to maneuver in such a way that the body
stays flaccid. “If you’re not doing anything to him
and he’s just grabbing all over you, it turns into you
being harassed by an officer.”
Although Occupy really seems to have hit a
nerve amongst an American populace in the midst
of an unprecedented economic decline and near
erosion of the American Middle Class, for many Black

Americans, shelter, safety and steady employment
were never given. Says Tanto, “In the sixties it was the
Black Panthers, these were educated young African
Americans willing to step up and do something for
their culture after seeing the Civil Rights movement
get bulwarked and stalled and their leaders killed.”
Much like in the case of Occupy, “The kids took
charge.” Founded in Oakland, California in 1966,
The Black Panther Party openly avowed its legacy
to Malcolm X. Just prior to this period, amidst the
revolutionary upsurge of Malcolm’s Organization
of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) American president
J. Edgar Hoover previewed his COINTELPRO
(counterintelligence) program to disrupt the OAAU
coalition building efforts. Meanwhile the FBI
carried out extensive surveillance of the Civil Rights
movements and its offshoots through its Communist
Infiltration Program, COMINFIL. (12) What ultimately
became of Civil Rights? A lot of dead Black leaders,
a new spin on Slavery, uber-time racially-motivate
Fears and a few party favors for white women and
gays who got swept up in the radical flux.
Tanto recommends Jonathan Metzl’s book
The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became
a Black Disease, which tells the story of how during
the Civil Rights era Schizophrenia became the
diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to Black
protestors due to lingering racial anxieties in the
medical industry. He also recommends The New Jim
Crow by Michelle Alexander and a PBS documentary
called Slavery By Another Name.
How much of your brain is being held
hostage by fear? What comes next? Says Tanto,
“There is a billion dollar industry behind keeping
Black people locked up…who else are we going to
lock up?” It was only a matter of decades before
counterintelligence to disband Black unity became
an affront to all Americans’ 1st amendment rights
during the War on Terror.
Ultimately, Tanto believes we all really do
truly and deeply want the same things. Before we
finish I ask if he has a vision for a better world and he
responds, “The only way through to consciousness is
over fear. When you experience fear psychologically
what you’re going through is like a little man with
an ice pick poking at your fucking face whenever
someone mentions race, economy, law, LGBT rights,
gender…if it’s big enough to affect a portion of the
community it’s big enough to effect yours as well
because you might actually know or be related to or
eventually be one of those people. I want people to
get stronger. According to everyone else I’m pretty
goddamned capable and strong so if I can help
people realize one thing it’s just that – YOU HAVE
NOTHING TO FEAR.”
1 Margaret Burnham, “The Great Society Didn’t’ Fail,”
The Nation, July 1989, p. 123
2 Surveys show young girls are more afraid of becoming
fat than they are of cancer, nuclear war or losing their
parents. Lisa Berzins, Dying to be thin: the prevention of
eating disorders and the role of federal policy. American
Psychological Association co-sponsored congressional
briefing, Nov. 1997
3 William Sales Jr., From Civil Rights to Black Liberation:
Malcom X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity,
Boston: South End Press, 1994, p. 43
4 M.K. Asante, Jr. It’s Bigger than Hip Hop: The Rise
of the Post-Hip Hop Generation, New York: St. Martin’s
Griffin, 2008, p. 136
5 M.K. Asante, Jr., ibid p. 142
6 M.K. Asante, Jr., ibid p. 143
7 DRUG WAR FACTS, Mother’s Against Teen Violence,
http://www.matvinc.org/drugwarfacts.html
8 Stop and Frisk Campaign: About the Issue, NYCLU,
http://www.nyclu.org/issues/racial-justice/stop-andfrisk-practices
9 Ta-Nehisi Coates, Keepin’ It Unreal: $Elling The Myth
Of BlacK Male Violen¢E, Long Past Its Expiration Date,
Village Voice, June 3, 2003
10 Biggie & Tupac, 108 min feature length documentary,
Nick Bloomfield and Stephen Kirkham, United Kingdom,
Release Date: May 24, 2002
11 Dream Hampton, “HELL-RAISER” The Source
September 1994
12 Williams Sales Jr. ibid p. 139, 154
REVOLT
Magazine Number 3, 2013 18

Write On..., L. A. Marler, 2012

Photo by Scotto Mycklebust, Occupy Museum, Berlin Biennale, KM Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, June 2012
OCCUPY Berlin
OCCUPY MUSEUM MOVEMENT
BY LENA VAZIFDAR
On a once abandoned Bushwick, Brooklyn
street corner filled with empty warehouses, an artist
enclave is emerging. New York City’s art scene
is undergoing a transformation and Bushwick’s
burgeoning art scene is one to watch with events
such as Bushwick Open Studios and galleries,
bars and restaurants popping up in once barren
alleyways. The hip-factor of the hood is growing, but
it still remains gritty. Some would call it a current
New York hot spot but there are still remnants to
its past and much to be discovered. Compared to
Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s self-proclaimed hippest
enclave, Bushwick could be considered its less
developed sibling.
Off of Bushwicks’ Morgan stop is Momenta
Art, where the Occupy Museums group has taken
over shop for a month. The clean, urban loft space
is a fitting scene for a group well known for its antiestablishment
motif.
Momenta, which is an artist run institution
that promotes the work of emerging and
underrepresented artists, approached Occupy
Museums to work on a project with them. Now OM
has been exhibiting at Momenta Art this past month
REVOLT
Magazine Number 3, 2013
and opening dialogue to those that want to come in
and discuss the latest happenings in the movement.
Inside the stark white room hangs a life-size
piñata of New York’s Mayor Bloomberg. The walls
are covered with ideas examining debt and broken
economies. One wall, covered with cardboard pieces
invites individuals to write the amount of debt they
are in and showcase it to the world, or at least to
anyone who’s at Momenta that day. I grabbed a felt
marker, wrote out mine, and taped it to the wall. The
numbers stared back at me appearing even larger
than I hoped when written with the hand that owes
it. My stomach dropped.
The Occupy Museum movement emerged
from the Occupy Wallstreet movement and is
founded on the ideology that the disparity between
America’s 1 percent and the 99 percent is too large
a margin. Occupy Wallstreet’s slogan, “We are the
99 percent” is very much what Occupy Museums
remains about and the group is made up of a bunch
of passionate artists who are fighting for equality
within the art world and against the elitism that
seemingly comes hand in hand with museums.
I interviewed some of the group last spring
to find out about the movement and their beliefs.
What I found back then was a group of well meaning,
never-say-die spirited individuals. However, at the
same time, they were disjointed and didn’t seem to
have a group consensus towards any sort of plan to
make their goals move forward, rather it seemed,
they made a lot of noise and gained attention during
protests at museums like MoMa and big art events
like the Whitney Biennial.
When I spoke to them under the ominous,
albeit comical, shadow of Mayor Bloomberg’s
piñata at Momenta, the group seemed a little less
disjointed, a bit more realistic and more ready
to speak about the bigger picture of the Occupy
Museum movement. The group recently went to
Berlin to participate in the Berlin Biennial, where
the curators themselves invited the group to come,
tickets paid—a testament to the fact that perhaps
they are making waves in the art community.
Even still, the group mentioned that the
invitation itself somewhat went against what they
believe in as a group. “When we were confronted by
the offer it was a challenge to decide if it was a good
20

or bad thing. In fact it made us a little nervous and
we spoke with the curators a lot until we decided
it was an interesting challenge,” says Tal Berry, an
OM member. “Our hope was to somehow use the
opportunity to learn and to connect to other people
and other activists around the world.”
At the Biennial the group participated in a
number of events and the Biennial as a whole was
focused on political action.
“They said we aren’t interested in how the
art looks but how the art does,” added Tal about the
Biennial.
In Berlin, the group focused on a number
of different actions including a ceremony at the
Pergamont Altar—a giant relief sculpture from
Ancient Greece. The group says on their website that
the altar is a representation of power for the USSR
and Germany and symbolizes the displacement of
culture by the elite.
The Pergamont Altar action has obvious
theatrical elements behind it, and at first glance is
somewhat confusing to what the purpose actually
was. To gain attention? To act as artists in some sort
of a live performance? Perhaps. And perhaps it didn’t
change much or bring them closer to any sort of
goal, but it most definitely gained attention. Occupy
Museum’s website says about the Pergamont altar,
“We are here to question and confront the issue of
colonization and misappropriation of art and cultural
heritage. We stand in solidarity with the Turkish
population in Berlin suffering from gentrification.
We will use the alter to bless victory for horizontality,
sharing, and non-ownership.”
They also continued to do actions at Deuche
Bank and Deuche Guggeheim. For the group,
Berlin changed things and interplayed the dynamic
and hesitance they already have working hand in
hand with institutions and museums, when they
inherently believe they are the ones doing wrong.
Noah Fischer, another OM member, often credited
for being the ringleader of the group said, “Berlin
was a big experience for us and to take the idea of
working with an institution--that ice was broken.”
As an imported American Occupy Wallstreet
group taking action in Berlin, there was much
pressure towards the group and what they were
fighting for, especially since the Occupy Wallstreet
movement was one that was heard worldwide
and had gained widespread international media
attention. Though there were a number of groups
in attendance at Berlin, for Occupy Museum the
experience was an opportunity to have a global
reach. It was also an interesting experience for the
group to bring forth their views on the disparity of
the 99 percent and the 1 percent on a global scale,
not just America. For maybe the first time the group
truly had an international audience, showcasing
that it isn’t just an American problem but one that is
widespread.
Working with an institution in Berlin became
a platform for working hand-in-hand with Momenta.
“One of the things working with Momenta is that
we are still feeling out what are the boundaries.
Where does Momenta end and where does occupy
begin? Are we holding hands? Or are they giving us
a platform,” said Imani Brown, another OM member.
After Occupy Wallstreet, Momenta
approached Occupy Museums, even before they left
for Berlin. In return, Occupy Museums was able to
utilize Momenta’s Bushwick gallery space to have
discussions, and spin off their eclectic interactive
exhibits on the walls.
What are the next steps for Occupy
Museums? It’s hard to say as the group members
themselves seem to be trying to figure that out.
Momenta is a turning point for the group and
pushing them to discuss the goals ahead and
educate the public about what they are fighting for
in a non alienating setting. At Momenta OM also
hosts events where people can join and further the
conversation of what it means to be a part of the 99
percent and fight against hierarchical systems in the
art world—a fight the group is finding out, is tough to
crack.
What is beautiful and harmonious about
Occupy Museum is their solidarity and spirit—one
that proves apathy doesn’t necessarily have to be a
characteristic of our generation. The movement gives
those involved a reason to stop being complacent
and be a part of something bigger. OM is constantly
asking questions that may never truly be answered
with clarity, but they are always discussed. Everyday
passed and every new action, the group is raising
awareness and showing New York and beyond that
some things are worth fighting for.
Photo by Scotto Mycklebust, Occupy Museum, Berlin Biennale demonstration at the Pergamon Museum, Berlin, June 2012

OCCUPY Berlin
PHOTOS BY SCOTTO MYCKLEBUST
REVOLT
Magazine Number 3, 2013

the Berlin Biennale

Berlin
BIENNIAL
The
Revolution
Preoccupied with Cooption
BY TAL BEERY
“I think you should leave,” she said quietly, shaking
her head.
I was expecting her to say that, having heard it so
many times before from art-savvy activist friends
visiting the “Occupy Biennale,” an Occupy movement
camp organized by the 7th Berlin Biennial. I was
living there for two weeks as one of twelve members
of Occupy Museums, an affinity group in Occupy
Wall Street combating the corrupting influence of
finance on culture. Our actions in major institutions
and journalists’ stormy love affair with OWS had got
us lots of press that winter, and so, our plane tickets
to Berlin, purchased by the curators of a fancy
European art show.
They had invited us and other Occupy groups to use
the cavernous ground floor of their KW Institute
for Contemporary Art as a living and organizing
venue. What resulted was a shocking cacophony of
canvas tents, overlapping stencils, random political
slogans, banners galore, lists and so many leaflets:
an Occupy theme park. Although interesting lectures
and discussions were held, architecturally, it was a
sunken pit, a fishbowl. Visitors -- many of them art
world aristocrats -- stood on an elevated viewing
platform to observe occupiers go about their
activism. We called it “The Human Zoo.” It reduced
our activism to some punk protest fashion; here,
urgent action was just an aesthetic, marginalized
and cheapened.
The setting was further complicated by a curatorial
frame based on head curator Artur Zmijewski’s
desire to display only effective political action, and
not “art” per se. Despite this aim, it seemed to be
a venue for the passive contemplation of the active
aesthetic. Zmijewski, an internationally renowned
artist in his own right, has a reputation for using
people as marionettes and creating ethically and
politically ambiguous scenarios. It seemed we
agreed unwittingly to play a role in his latest piece,
an Occupy time capsule and tomb that historicized
and deactivated the movement. Checkmate: we
were coopted.
At least, this is how it appeared to some visitors, and
especially to the many critics who published vitriolic
denouncements of the show. As I experienced it,
REVOLT
Magazine Number 3, 2013
Occupy Museums saw things differently. Focused
on the opportunities available to us, we embarked
on a fascinating and ambitious project to coopt the
BB7 instead, to use its influence and resources to
promote our vision of a more just culture. Taken
together, our actions there offer a set of tactics that
activists in the art world can use to assert influence
when working with or within institutions.
*******
From its first days, OWS sought to inspire a cultural
shift. The urgency of its message combined with
the aesthetic consistency of its tactics – including
cardboard signs, camping tents, the human
microphone, and hand signals for the consensus
process – popularized the movement and helped
it spread to almost every major city in the United
States and Europe. Many arts and culture groups
quickly formed within OWS, each with distinct goals
and methods – from puppetry and performance to
research and posters. Occupy process in itself was
artful, and in OWS, art became a hammer for fixing
We decided to use
the opportunity to
explore alternative
visions for museums
that could further
the interests
of the 99%.
the world. Artists also flocked to OWS to address
unethical trends affecting the New York art world.
Today the 1% manipulate and leverage culture, and
art is just another way the rich get richer: a tax shelter,
a good investment. Wealthy board members openly
abuse positions at publicly funded museums to
boost the values of private holdings. Auction houses
report record profits while denying workers basic
benefits. Hoards of young artists arrive in New York
with massive student debt to find few opportunities
for employment. OWS connected between art world
trends and those affecting other sectors, effectively
plugging art into a broader context. And, yet again,
art was being summoned in its effective mode, in
service of the social good.
The art world, ironically, loves that stuff. While some
art professionals were sympathetic to our claims,
still more were excited by OWS’s timeliness, by
how “contemporary” and “edgy” it was. Soon OWS
arts groups like ours began receiving invitations to
lecture and exhibit.
With activists working within their frame, an
institution can appear hip, democratic, or even
radical without taking any significant steps toward
change, neutralizing the threat a message poses.
This is the traditional path to cooption and when
we were invited to the Berlin Biennial (BB7),
we were preoccupied with this possibility. Until
then, Occupy Museums had been an outsider,
occupying institutions with general assemblies and
demonstrations; accepting this invitation would be
our first time sanctioned by a potential target. But
accepting it also meant that we could meet with
Occupy activists from throughout Europe, learn
about German arts funding models, and experiment
with new tactics. Refusing the invitation may not
have registered as a meaningful public statement.
We decided to use the opportunity to explore
alternative visions for museums that could further
the interests of the 99%.
Early conversations with BB7’s associate curator
Joanna Warsza made that seem easy. Warsza
assured us that they would provide a platform to
strengthen our message and promote eye-level
interactions with the public. We (perhaps naively)
even wrote a proposal for an experimental museum
of the future. But on arrival, we felt duped. The
occupiers who had been organizing the space over
the previous eight weeks didn’t fully appreciate the
complexity of their predicament and engineered
an environment that could never contend with the
objectifying gaze of the average art world spectator.
In there we were confined to a context that didn’t
work for us. Since we were already there we could
either quit or fight back – so why quit? As I saw it, on
that first day the goal became clear: we would need
to quickly claim our agency in our relationship with
26

this institution.
In light of this, Occupy Museums first focused on
external targets with our new European partners.
That way we could physically leave the exhibition’s
frame and engage with the world as an international
group of Occupy activists, doing what we do best,
in the streets. We connected with European art
world activists and exchanged notes. We limited our
presence at the KW to the occasional banner inviting
the public to actions and planning meetings in the
courtyard. Our action at Deutsche Bank’s Deutsche
Guggenheim denounced the world’s largest
corporate art collection and the many ways the bank
invests in work and then artificially inflates its price,
doling prizes and exhibitions to appreciate the value
of its holdings. We impersonated a student group
and held a ceremony on the altar at the Pergamon
Museum, calling attention to the troubling history
of colonialism and war that resulted in Germany’s
acquisition of antiquities. Each action seemed to
end in a long negotiation with German police.
In just two weeks we did six such actions, thanks in
large part to our amazing new partners from Spain
and Germany. The KW courtyard was our base of
operations. We began to see these actions as a way
of challenging the curator’s apparent neutrality, and
we invited Zmijewski to participate in our actions
and take an explicit stance in his official capacity in
support of our message. To our surprise, he showed
up, actively participated in discussions and helped
document the actions.
Over time we learned to turn our attention inward
and put pressure on the institution from within.
We organized a meeting with all the staff where
workers could openly or anonymously share their
grievances. The crowded discussion exposed below
minimum-wage salaries of some staff and we
examined the budget to determine equitable pay
demands. Structural and staffing issues were raised
in their first open, horizontal meeting, facilitated by
members of Occupy Museums. As a result, guards
working the next biennial will be paid two Euros
more per hour than they were at this one, a 33%
raise.
Inspired by our meeting with the KW staff, we
published a proposal to the curators calling for
the BB7 and the KW to adopt a horizontal, nonhierarchical
organizational structure. Since a
democratic culture needs democratic cultural
institutions, the curators and the director would
be replaced by working groups operating within
an Occupy-inspired consensus-based approach.
Zmijewski himself seemed bored of the Occupy
encampment, with its fairly obvious hypocrisy, and
he became a kind of collaborator. After a short
negotiation, we consensed on the proposal and
moved forward immediately, organizing assemblies
and working groups. We wrote joint press releases
and used the BB7’s website and press contacts. We
met regularly with staff to aid the transition. For the
next two weeks, the BB7 was occupied. The process
to a full structural transition needed more time
than that, but this period allowed us to experiment
with new tactics to challenge the corporate logic of
cultural institutions.
And yet, although we produced some meaningful
actions and learned new techniques, some still
claim we were coopted and that our involvement in
the BB7 was damaging to the movement.
The short-term implementation of a horizontal
structure at the KW could have been merely
aesthetic, a parody of the goal and discredited
the process more than supported it. Even the
unfinished nature of this process could support a
narrative that discredits collectivist movements.
By failing to transition fully to a non-hierarchical
structure, the process could stoke concerns that it
is inherently impossible or unrealistic. Perhaps also
the gaze of the spectator in any exhibition context
objectifies the movement and those who claim to
represent it, separating the viewer from the viewed
and alienating the observer from the active function
of the object. In the gallery, the urgency of a political
message can be lost to quiet contemplation, stripped
of its contemporary context, sentimentalized and
belittled.
This specter of cooption, an obstacle for our
Illustration by Tal Beery
message, also posed a significant internal challenge.
Some members were worried that our positions
as activists would further our careers as artists
– in effect we would be using a public movement
for private gain – enacting what we supposedly
critiqued. Since many artists in the United States
struggle to make art and live in a system pumped
on competition, relationships within the art world
become primarily instrumental. Art world activists in
OWS strove to be a bit more honest than that, and
some thought we should fight for political goals first.
While critiquing those people artists traditionally
want to impress, suspicions of impure motivations
influenced our working relationships, and drove
wedges between us.
*******
These critiques of our work in Berlin make it seem
that the primary impetus for the BB7, in search of
Zmijewski’s “applied social arts,” is right on. The art
object today is, more often than not, passive in its
relationship to the spectator, who consumes what
he wants and goes home to Facebook. Even pieces
that are relational or socially engaged are framed
within some notion of “art experience” and are
sectioned off. A recent Occupy Arts and Labor slogan,
“Art Killed My Dreams,” seems entirely absurd
because today, art itself struggles to do anything
at all. Art here is hardly defined as some display of
human creativity, but by its relationship to the “art
world,” the mess of professionals and institutions
paid by the “art market.” When defined this way,
art can barely perform an activist function. Despite
similarities in method and content, urgent political
messages by artists are commonly neutralized and
then consumed by a market-driven cultural industry.
Zmijewski’s vision for the BB7 promoted a contrary
notion of art as activism, as socially engaged and
politically effective. According to him, the real art
happened for instance, outside the Pergamon
Museum in our prolonged negotiation with the
police, or in our tense negotiation to secure more
budget transparency at the KW. In a moment filled
with potential, the resolution was always unclear
and always inevitable.
It would seem that what Zmijewski wanted to see
at the BB7 was real change happening now, on a
structural level, in honest service to some vision of a
better world. To argue with this idea is to start down
the terribly tedious path of “What is Art?” which also
misses the point. As I see it, Zmijewski recognizes
that the arts can develop a vital toolset. Climate
change, economic collapse, etc. etc. etc., the Polar
Bears – either we make drastic change now or
change happens upon us much worse a little later.
The arts can fight for human survival.
With their resources and influence, institutions
can be involved in exploring and implementing
structural change. Institutions are crucial allies,
and activists can coopt them. We can work within
institutions to expose boundaries and frames, and
invite those in powerful roles to participate directly
in actions and dialogue when it suits movement
goals. Activists within arts institutions should
negotiate their terms of agreement to push the tacit
approval implied by an invitation towards explicit
support, either in public statements or in resource
sharing. When making requests, a rejection can help
identify an institution’s political stance. Recording
and publicizing responses can encourage open
dialogue and expose the limitations and pressures
of our current system. The gallery’s aestheticizing
influence can undermine urgent speech, but
effective tactics can be developed to subvert the
role of the exhibition hall and use it to invite and
mobilize the public to join actions outside its walls.
The fear of cooption should never justify inaction
and we must work within and outside institutions
to weaken the role of the market in the arts and
in our culture. In Occupy Museums, I believe we
self-consciously do activism within the art world,
and not “art” (so defined) within the activism
world, but these distinctions should be examined,
tested, and sometimes pushed. We should
encourage a democratic culture by demanding
democratically managed cultural institutions. In an
age of overwhelming market dominance, we must
ask whether and how our culture reflects and is
limited by capitalist ideologies. Institutions can be
openly involved in these conversations, and the
activist situated within or employed by them has
opportunities to expose what someone outside does
not. We can be forward thinking and adaptive. Let’s
make every mistake and move forward together.

Hair drawing, Cheryl Gross, 2011
REVOLT
Magazine Number 3, 2013
28

THE
LITERARY
VIEW
JOE REMEMBERED:
The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard
BY DAN CALLAHAN
Photos courtesy of Library of America
Joe Brainard was famous
in the 1960s and ‘70s
for making collages. He
once had a showing of
1500 small works in one
gallery, and his productivity
was stimulated by the
amphetamines he was
taking as he worked all
through the day and night
to produce his artworks,
many of them tiny, most of
them lush, playful, sensual.
There came a certain point when all that speed
made him worry a bit for his sanity, and so he gave
up the pills and mostly gave up making art around
the late ‘70s, confining himself to work made purely
for love, for friends. Brainard’s great gift was for
friendship.
This gift is proved by the outpouring of love
in print from his artist and writer friends since his
death from AIDS-related complications in 1994.
Edmund White titled a 1997 essay on Brainard “Saint
Joe,” and compared him to Dostoyevsky’s Prince
Myshkin. He has been described as a miraculously
kind man doing his best to pay tribute to and glorify
a largely unkind world, and his collages have had
recent successful exhibitions in New York and
elsewhere, but what he himself modestly called “my
only major work” is I Remember, a beguiling short
book of memories, running to around 130 pages,
all of them called forth in short lines that begin with
that calming phrase, “I remember…”
We could all write our own version of
Brainard’s I Remember, and the form he found for
that book has been used in writing workshops for
many years now, but as Paul Auster writes in his
introduction to the new Library of America volume
The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, not many
of us could keep such a book clear of egoist scoresettling,
anger or resentment. Brainard wanted
his writing to be as honest and unadorned as
possible. In I Remember, he focuses a lot on brand
names and pop culture and specifics of a 1950s
Midwestern upbringing, so that the book will mean
a great deal more to Baby Boomers than it ever can
to Generation X or Y, but the open, almost prattling
tone of I Remember inevitably leads us into our own
memories. By focusing so intensely yet gently on
the specifics of his own youth, Brainard achieves
something universal, something for everyone, one
life and childhood standing in for all, or most, lives
and childhoods.
Brainard was gay, and he’s candid about
that in I Remember, but he is never tortured about
it. It was just a part of his life. At one point he writes,
“The only thing that ever bothered me about being
queer was that I thought maybe people wouldn’t like
me if they knew.” That desire to be liked animates the
writing collected here in this new Brainard volume,
which is edited by his close friend Ron Padgett.
The book begins with I Remember, which is one of
the most readable and re-readable of all books, an
opening out of a world and a sensibility that delights
in sharing private and often unflattering thoughts.
And that’s the paradox of Brainard as a writer. He
wanted to be liked, and he wanted to reach out
and love people, and for him this involved a basic
humility and frankness. He never builds himself up
and protects himself, as almost all writers do. He
lets you into his insecurities and dopey thoughts, but
he makes them seem natural and charming. Shyly,
he confessed in an interview that he wanted to look
like James Dean, and in one of his diary pieces,
he wishes he had “a giant cock.” He also wanted
to paint as well as his idol, Willem de Kooning.
Perceiving himself as having fallen short of that de
Kooning standard was part of why he gave up on
visual art making.
Some of the diary entries in this Brainard
collection run on too long; lovable and guileless as
he is as a writer, there comes a point when I didn’t
need to know what he had for breakfast in 1972 and
what he had for breakfast in 1973, and how many
Pepsi-Colas he consumed (what a Pepsi drinker he
was!). But there are some hilariously funny oneliners
in an extended piece called “The Friendly
Way,” and there are also some delightful drawings
and comic book panels included. This is a book
to dip into and enjoy at your leisure on a summer
evening; it’s a mistake, I think, to read it through
cover-to-cover, like drinking too many Pepsis in a
row. But the idea of Joe Brainard as a person and
an artist, as expressed through his own writing and
the writing of his friends, is such a romantic and
goofball and sexy idea that more of him is still better
than less. He offers less a “body of work” and more
a suggestion of how to live with more vulnerability,
less ego and the hope that you might just look like
James Dean at some point, if only for a moment, as
seen through the eyes of someone who loves you.

THE
CINEMA
VIEW
CASTA A Pilgrimage to Lourdes?
Marine Abramovic: The Artist is Present
BY DAN CALLAHAN
From March 14th to May 31st, 2010, the socalled
“grandmother of performance art,” Marina
Abramovic, held court at The Museum of Modern
Art, sitting in a chair for seven hours daily. Visitors
were invited to sit opposite her and stare into her
eyes. The crowds were manageable at first, but as
time went on, Abramovic’s theatrical endurance
test became a sensation, seemingly the place to
be for the adventurous and creative in Manhattan.
There were lines around the block, people waiting
to get in to see her for twelve hours at a time, and
Photo by Marco Anelli © 2010
in the press there was a constant stream of tidbits
about the performance and about the nudity of her
fellow young performers, who had been trained by
Abramovic to recreate some of her earlier pieces.
What did it all mean? Whatever you wanted it to.
REVOLT
Magazine Number 3, 2013
A new documentary on Abramovic and her seminal
MoMa show, presents her as she prepares for this
career-capping event. A physically striking woman of
Serbian extraction, Abramovic was brought up in a
military fashion by her mother, who had served as an
army major. Throughout her twenties, when she was
putting on life-and-limb threatening performance
pieces, Abramovic was expected to be home to her
mother by 10 o’clock at night. Psychologically, her
work clearly comes from a mixture of this strict military
background coupled with the religious feeling
of her grandmother, to whom Abramovic was close.
After the MoMa show, Abramovic told an interviewer
that her audience at the museum seemed to view
their encounter with her as some kind of religious
experience, as if they were visiting Lourdes. Many of
them wept. Almost all of them were credulous and
respectful.
This polite late-career MoMa event is a far cry from
Abramovic’s most dangerous performance piece
of the 1970s, “Rhythm 0,” in which she passively
offered up her body for six hours to her audience
along with seventy-two objects, including a gun
with one bullet, to do with as they pleased. At first,
the audience was timid. As time went on, though,
they became more aggressive, until one man actually
pointed the gun at her head and another man
took the gun away from him. “I felt really violated,”
Abramovic said. “What I learned is that…if you leave
it up to the audience, they can kill you.”
During most of the late 1970s and ‘80s, Abramovic
collaborated with the artist Ulay, living with him out
of a truck and doing their performances of co-dependence
and endurance all over Europe. Abramovic is
described by one of her co-workers in this documentary
as “hardcore,” and in her early years with Ulay,
she made her entire life and her love for him a work
of uncompromising art, or reaching toward art. Even
their 1988 break-up was artful, as they separately
walked across the Great Wall of China for months
and then definitively split when they finally reached
each other in the middle. On her own after letting go
of Ulay, Abramovic admits in this documentary that
she felt “fat, forty and unloved,” and so she took
steps to become a more theatrical, visually glamorous
presence and seductive force until finally she
made her splashy, mainstream impact at MoMa.
Director Matthew Akers captures the charm and
candor of Abramovic without making any firm judgments
on her or her work. Akers films her reunion
with Ulay, after a long period where the former couple
did not speak, in a way that captures Ulay’s own
candor about his ambivalence over Abramovic’s
success and his sly hope that they might get back
together. Clearly they are two-of-a-kind still, expert
hucksters and show people of high art, and Ulay
comes across like a rival and a gleeful betrayer of
confidences, maybe because he knows that that
will be the most colorful pose for the film. He is the
first person to sit opposite Abramovic at MoMa, and
when she opens her eyes and sees him, she is briefly
overcome and then takes his hands in hers before
sending him off.
Abramovic in her work deals almost exclusively in
tests of will. In her earlier career, she was outright
masochistic in her use of knives and fire against her
own body, but now she has settled for the test of
non-mobility for lengthy periods of time. After meeting
with illusionist David Blaine, Abramovic suggests
to her art dealer Sean Kelly that she work with Blaine
on a piece, but Kelly shoots this idea down in no uncertain
terms. What Blaine does involves the will,
too, but he is marked as “entertainment,” whereas
Abramovic is “art,” and Kelly is canny enough to
insist on a distinction between the two, even if the
basis of Abramovic’s work has always been at least
partly theatrical.
Surely that test of her audience in her piece “Rhythm
0” was too much, too hardcore, but still, it’s a little
sad when a dangerous artist like Abramovic is domesticated
and protected as a grand old lady of
performance at a venue like MoMa. At one point on
her last day of the performance there, a young girl
quickly took off her dress before trying to sit down
opposite Abramovic. The girl was swiftly shuffled
away by the security guards, and she said later that
she didn’t realize she was breaking a rule. She just
wanted to be as vulnerable as possible, she says,
when looking into Abramovic’s eyes.
Couldn’t her nudity have been allowed? Isn’t the
audience part of this performance, and can’t they
bring what they want to it as long as Abramovic’s
safety isn’t in question? The girl didn’t pull out a gun.
She took off her dress, and she looked beautiful. It’s
a gesture that the younger Abramovic might have
embraced, but instead, she herself said afterward
that she was most impressed with a man who had
sat opposite her all day, all seven hours. “The others
in line grew angry and aggressive,” Abramovic
gleefully reported, “but then they realized that the
waiting was also part of the performance.”
30

THE
VIEW
CINEMA
It's Alive!: Universal 100
at Film Forum
BY DAN CALLAHAN
As the second longest running, continually operating
film studio (Gaumont is the first), Universal Studios
is still best known for its early horror films like
Frankenstein and Dracula (both 1931), but over the
course of one hundred years in business the studio
has put out a wide variety of movies, some of which
are on view in Film Forum’s July/August celebration
of the studio’s centenary.
It all began as the brainchild of dry goods
salesman Carl Laemmle, who saw what business the
nickelodeons were doing at the turn of the twentieth
century and bought some for himself. By 1910,
he had created the first real movie star names by
promoting Florence Lawrence and King Baggot, and
by 1912 he had incorporated his holdings as The
Universal Film Manufacturing Company. Laemmle
was always a cautious businessman, paying for his
Photo courtesy of Universal Studios
films out of his own pocket and never taking on debt.
In the 20s, his company laid down the foundation
for the horror genre with two films starring Lon
Chaney, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and
The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and Chaney was
meant to star in Universal’s Dracula, but after his
death the role went to Bela Lugosi, who had played
The Count on stage. In 1928, Laemmle made his
son Carl, Jr. the head of the studio as a twentyfirst
birthday present. Universal was very much a
family affair, so much so that seventy of Laemmle’s
relatives were on the payroll at one point. The writer
Ogden Nash, amused by this flagrant nepotism,
composed a short verse about it: “Uncle Carl
Laemmle/Has a very large faemmle.”
In the 1930s, Universal continued to put
out classic horror films like The Mummy (1932)
and The Invisible Man (1933), but they also made
quite a dent in the woman’s picture genre with the
soap operas of John Stahl, sober, intense weepers
like Back Street (1932), Imitation of Life (1934) and
Magnificent Obsession (1935). Those last two films
were remade in the 1950s by Universal house auteur
Douglas Sirk, who fashioned pop masterpieces from
them.
In the 1940s, Universal was home base to
another major émigré director, Robert Siodmak,
many of whose films for the studio will play on
Thursday nights at Film Forum. Siodmak began
modestly, making something impressive out of
the genre assignment Son of Dracula (1943) and
managing not to giggle when asked to direct the
ineffable Maria Montez in the camp classic Cobra
Woman (1943), but his patience paid off with a
steady stream of fine films in the film noir genre like
The Killers (1946) and harder-to-classify movies like
The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry and Christmas
Holiday (both 1945).
Universal in the 1950s and ‘60s churned
out a lot of sub-par efforts for their stable of
bargain-basement contract players, but often
enough a masterpiece would emerge from the
assembly line, like Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil
(1958), or Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).
By the late ‘60s, Universal had moved most of its
resources to television, where a young director
named Steven Spielberg got his first opportunities
under the mentorship of a studio executive named
Sid Sheinberg. Most of Spielberg’s early films are
for Universal, from the talent display of Duel (1971),
which first debuted on TV, to massive hits like Jaws
(1975) and E.T. (1982).
All of these big films are playing in the Film
Forum retrospective, but the real find for lovers
of rare gems is a double bill of two movies by the
neglected Paul Fejos, the pitch-perfect Lonesome
(1928), one of the finest and most touching of all
movie love stories, and Broadway (1929), a key
early sound movie (also rare and worth catching is
Clarence Brown’s The Goose Woman (1925), a drama
starring Louise Dresser). For sheer entertainment
value, nothing can beat Universal films like My
Man Godfrey (1936), a classic screwball comedy,
or Destry Rides Again (1939), an energetic comic
western that rejuvenated the career of Marlene
Dietrich. At first glance, Universal’s division between
horror and women’s pictures, between thrill rides
and emotional weepies, seems a bit uneasy, but
it was the mark of an ever-cautious studio always
ready to meet the demands of drastically different
audiences.

REVOLT Magazine Number 3, 2013 32

Pleasure is Political:
Interview with
Abiola and Damali Abrams
BY KATIE CERCONE
Abiola Abrams, Kiss & Tell TV
Abiola Abrams with No H8 Campaign tattoo
Sisters Abiola and Damali Abrams
are two Queens born Guyanese-
American artists whose creative
output approaches the diaristic
impulse from a Transnational/Hip
Hop Feminist framework. Working
in their own distinctive fields - Abiola is a writer,
filmmaker and media personality and Damali a
visual artist – the two together are pounding out a
contemporary rhetoric of Radical Self-Acceptance
that is rhinestone and glitter studded, fiercely
intellectual and accessible by design. Both offer
media literacy as a type of seductive therapy for
women, especially women of color. Both are media
makers talking about Black Love, self-actualization,
faith, health and wellness informed by their shared
“Pleasure is Political” critique of culture. Abiola, as
seen on BET, NBC, MTV and VH1 has turned her
media personality into a web-empire. AbiolaTV is an
inspirational go-to space where a myriad of sources
such as The Passionista Playbook, Kiss n’ Tell TV and
The Bombshell Academy give women the courage to
start bein’ about it. Abiola wrote the popular Hip Hop
novel Dare and directed the award winning erotica
film Afrodite Superstar. Damali, a visual artist whose
video series Self-Help TV is now broadcasting on
NYC Cable Access Television, has been of significant
impact in the Fine Arts for her refreshing approach
to remix culture and ‘The Personal is Political’
stance with respect to women of color and the
media. Damali is also part of the Artist Collective
tArt. Recently, I had the opportunity to interview
both Abiola and Damali about their work and the
African Diasporic tradition from which it comes.
KC: Abiola, Can you talk about your interest
in Contemporary Goddess Archetypes in
relationship to the cultural memory of African
folk wisdom, myth and ritual in Hip Hop?
AA: My first real piece was a theater work called
“Goddess City,” which was greatly influenced by
Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have
Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf.”
I was interested in telling my personal story and
those of young women around me, especially young
women of the African Diaspora. These ancient
goddess archetypes just started to pop out in my
work. I grew up in Queens New York as a child of
the hip hop generation and for me hip hop was a
way I found commonality with the people around
me. There were no other people from Guyana in
our neighborhood and we were kind of ostracized
for our family being foreign, even though I was born
here. When I was a teenager I was a rapper. It’s the
first way that I could express myself publicly and tell
stories about the environment around me. To me
it’s very important that everything I do is interactive
because the African culture that I come from is very
much call and response. For me it’s all about the
talk back it’s all about communicating a kind of
community meaning. I’ve been involved with a lot
of different groups from theater groups to music
performance to whatever and people always try
to be very exclusionary about whatever it is. I see
hip hop as a point of inclusion. For instance last
month I was on a panel with Reg E. Gaines who is
a very amazing hip hop icon, he wrote a hip hop
theater piece on Broadway in the 90’s. For him hip
hop theater is not authentic if it does not appeal to
what he felt when he was growing up in the Bronx,
that sense of danger, being robbed and fearing for
his life and you know guns and all that. I felt really
troubled by that and I spoke about it on the panel. I
feel like my experience is just as valid and I wasn’t
in the Bronx and there weren’t guns and you know
drugs or whatever it is but that doesn’t make my
experience with hip hop any less real or less valid.
KC: And what about the healing Goddess Power
workshops and “Goddess Factory” show at Rush Arts?
AA: What was really exciting about “The Goddess
Factory” show was that I had Damali and two other
women interacting with the audience dressed as
Goddesses walking around giving out condoms
and chocolate. There’s a saying that we teach what
we need to learn and so it’s always been about
empowerment. As I researched different schools of
empowerment I aimed to share that with the people
around me. It started out with these Goddess
meetings I had at my house with groups of women.
That grew into larger groups and then I’d start to
get invited to speak at colleges and universities.
It became a kind of healing work. For example my
film “Knives in My Throat” is a documentary online
following a year in the life of an African American
woman dealing with bipolar disorder. It also has a
hip hop theme. I go to a school or university and I
show the film and then have a discussion around
it after about women, mental illness, stigma, art
therapy and healthy healing. I’m also doing a meet

up online for this film so we can talk about black
women and mental illness on Twitter. Whether it’s
five, fifty or a hundred women remains to be seen but
it’s exciting that we can have these conversations
online and make it more accessible. In my film
“Ophelia’s Opera” each character speaks their
mind in hip hop verse, it’s about women dealing
with physical abuse. “Aphrodite Superstar” is an
erotica film. Damali helped me write the script. It’s
about sexuality and reclaiming what is sexy against
the media version of sexy. My latest project is “The
Bombshell Academy” a series of 30 video blogs.
It’s like a 30-day self-improvement course online.
KC: Damali, how did Self Help TV come about?
DA: I started Self-Help TV in grad school. I had
been doing mostly collage before and was moving
into video. My work was always about identity and
healing and transformation. In grad school I felt
lost a lot of the time and reached for what was
familiar to me. I grew up watching a lot of television
and reading a lot of self-help books so I felt like
those two things were a good grounding for all
of the new things that I was learning about art.
KC: Can you talk about your Self Help TV project
in relationship to Hip Hop and the way that it has
codified or embodied gestures of power and defined
a sense of territory/belonging for Black American
youth and now youth worldwide? DA: Hip Hop started
with young people in the socially and economically
depressed Bronx creating their own instead of
waiting for gatekeepers. They had no access to
gatekeepers so they reworked what was available
- used their mouths as instruments, used their
parents’ records as instruments, used subway cars
as canvases, created their own forms of dance and
acrobatics without formal training.....Self-Help TV is
definitely in that same spirit. It started from the idea
that television is the most powerful brainwasher...
what if its powers were used for good? What would
I want to see on TV? Like the origins of Hip Hop,
it came from the spirit that the gatekeepers are
not going to allow someone like me to create the
programming I want to see so I created it on my
own (with collaborators, of course) and showed
it wherever I could - art exhibits, the internet, and
now on cable access TV. My friends and family have
participated in Self-Help TV from the beginning
and my partner Sean “Shadagga” Ferdinand has
collaborated with me on all of my Self-Help TV videos.
media, oral history, boasting and bragging, call and
response. DA: I don’t often write raps but I like to rap
because confidence is built into the genre. When I
start rapping, I am instantly performing a level of
confidence that I don’t necessarily feel in everyday
life. For Baby It Couldn’t Have Been You That I
Feared, I wanted to talk about media portrayals
of the Black Woman. I made it for an exhibit at
MOCADA called Ain’t I a Woman, curated by Kimberli
Gant. This tale of African American womanhood is
told through the media’s own words, using found
footage, and my own words in the song. I wanted to
show what the media is saying about me as a Black
woman vs. how I see myself. The clips tell a story of
Black men as un-dateable losers in a roundabout
way. They also say that Black women are asking
too much if we want to have success and great
relationships. By showing these clips back to back
I hope to show their absurdity and blatant racism.
KC: I’ve really enjoyed some of the videos you’ve
done together especially those on Women in Hip
Hop and Art and the Prison Industrial Complex. How
influential is your sister’s work to your own, how have
you grown and challenged each other as artists?
DA: Abiola’s work has been very influential on mine
for my whole life because we grew up together in
the same house. She is a few years older than
me so she’s always been ahead of me and
I’ve always learned how to do things from her
and my older brother, as well as my parents.
AA: I think Damali and I are each other’s biggest
fans. She is like my favorite artist and I am so
excited to see what she does but when we spend
comes out in our work. I saw her this morning and
we were talking about how my dad made pancakes.
KC: Can you speak a little bit about Art and
the Prison Industrial Complex, do you have
any advice for young artists that would like to
engage with some of these issues in their work
and what might be an effective approach?
DA: This is such an important issue for people of
color, as well as society as a whole. But with the
astronomical rates of Black and Latinos in prison in
this country, it’s very personal to us- it’s our brothers
and sisters, neighbors, friends, parents, relatives,
significant others and ourselves getting caught up
in the system. We need more art about this. I hope
to do more in the future. My only advice would be
follow your muse. If you feel called to do it, do it.
AA: My approach has always been come from the
personal. For the video we did about the prison
industrial complex we were both experiencing
having a family member in prison and we went
to go visit him even though we grew up saying “I
would never go visit anyone in prison.” In this case
it was a younger family member that we adore so
we went to the jail for him. It was a really painful
experience. I guess the best way to express it is
that you know my dad went to great schools I went
to great schools, Damali went to great schools,
my mom is educated and our brother is a brilliant
person. And despite that we were still unable to help
this younger family member and it was very painful
to see him go down this sort of stereotypical Black
KC: Damali, What was it like playing a Goddess
in Abiola’s “Goddess Factory” and helping write
“Aphrodite Superstar?” DA: Goddess Factory at
Rush Gallery was fun. It was a stretch for me to have
to memorize lines and interact with the audience so
it was a great experience. Different from my usual
work. Nice to think of myself as a Goddess too.
Aphrodite Superstar was so much fun too. I loved
seeing all of our ideas come to life onscreen and I
like being able to say that I worked on an erotic film.
KC: Damali Can you talk a little bit about ‘Baby It
Couldn’t Have Been You That I Feared,’ as a sort
of counter-narrative to mainstream media? Also
anything you want to say about your ethics here
and use of sampling, rap, d.i.y., remix culture, new
REVOLT
Damai Abrams in front of “Baby It Couldn't Have Been You That I Feared” at Arts @ Renaissance for the exhibit tART Year 8,
2011. Photo credit stefpix@gmail.com
time together like here at my mom’s house we just
spend the time as sisters. Our work ends up having
that same quality because we’ve grown up in the
same family and we’ve had all of the same issues
but we don’t sit around necessarily talking about
them or collaborating in that way. I guess what
I mean is we don’t bond around our work if that
makes sense we bond around our lives and then that
male path. The whole experience was very much
culture shock. First we were like you know how
come it’s all women and girls in line to get in? And
we realized it’s because all the men are in prison.
You know it’s all Black and Latino girls and you
know when you’re visiting someone in prison the
guards kind of treat you like a prisoner. We got
there and they said you can’t take your cell phone
Magazine Number 3, 2013 34

in and luckily a guard recognized me because
at the time I was hosting a show on BET and the
guard was kind enough to hold our phones for us.
Other people who didn’t have that option were
burying their phones underground before they
entered the prison. My advice to any young artist
speaking as a writer, artist, filmmaker and media
personality is come from the personal. Speak
from your experiences. We all go and get these
fancy degrees and want to address these topics
but I think the more personal that you can make it
strangely the more universal it becomes. Someone
else might watch it and they may enter the story
from a different place but they can enter the story
from the power that comes from wanting to tell
part of where a personal experience comes from.
AfroDite Superstar cover, a film by Abiola Abrams aka Venus
Hottentot with help from Damali Abrams
KC: Damali Can you talk about working in the
Artist Collective tART, what led you to want to
make collaborative work, how is it in practice and
what have you learned? DA: tART is an amazing
group. I joined shortly after grad school when I
was feeling this void, needing to talk about my
work with other artists and hear other artists talk
about their work. I missed critiques and dialogue
about work as it’s being made. Collaborations are
so crucial to me right now because my practice is
deeply personal and so isolating. I’m a borderline
hermit/agoraphobe. It helps so much to work with
someone else and get out of my own head. It is a
great way to learn and grow as an artist/person.
KC: Abiola I’ve noticed that you’ve been able to sort
of flow freely through independent and mainstream
media throughout your career, is it as easy as you
make it look? Can you talk a little bit about the choices
you’ve made in terms of the distribution of your work?
AA: It’s interesting because I always feel like I am
supposed to choose… you know the indie people feel
like if you’re doing mainstream stuff you’re selling
out and the mainstream people feel like the indie
stuff that you are doing is irrelevant. And again for
me it’s always about trying to find what’s authentic.
If you’re an independent artist then eventually your
work will become your one voice and one work and
that’s what the goal is. The mainstream stuff is how
I’m able to pay my bills and the indie stuff is how
I’m able to get that full autonomy of expression.
KC: Have you ever had to censor yourself when
working with a corporate sponsor and how welcoming
have these entities been in general of your activist
leanings? Did you have any reservations about
participating in the No H8 campaign, for instance,
worrying about alienating a certain fan base that
wasn’t as open? Being that your work is quite
radical for the mainstream, have you encountered
resistance and how has it shaped you as an artist?
AA: I do, it’s challenging and I have alienated people
I’m sure. When I was part of the No H8 campaign
people sent me horrible hate mail but for me things
like that are a no brainer. It seems ridiculous to me
that as a child of immigrants, as a Black woman,
that I would not fight for someone else’s civil rights.
I don’t feel like I have a choice. I’ve definitely lost
work or been passed over for things because of
that. It’s not always easy because we have to live
and pay our bills and figure out ways to support
ourselves. For example when I directed Aphrodite
Superstar I was at BET at the time so I directed
it under a pseudonym because it’s an erotic film.
One of the things that I did that was a huge crash
and burn was after I was on BET I was offered
to go on the reality TV show “Tough Love.” I was
like this will be cool because I’ll get a paycheck
and I’ll go undercover as an artist and a journalist
to expose reality TV blah blah blah. There’s an
Audre Lorde saying that goes, “You can’t use the
master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house,”
and well it’s ultimately their show so they are
going to edit it however they want. I can go home
and write about it on my little blog or whatever
but it’s like a David and Goliath kind of situation.
KC: Abiola can you talk a little bit about
personal appearance and style as a spiritual
principle? As feminists we uphold a lot of
contradictory messages. How does your work
with contemporary Goddess Archetypes relate
to feminist ideologies around the beauty myth,
conspicuous consumption and materialism?
AA: I love to wear my hair natural on Monday and
love myself and then l wear a wig or a weave or
whatever on Tuesday. For me it’s all dress. I go by
the RuPaul statement that we are born naked and
all the rest is drag. It is an interesting contradiction
this notion of for instance the “Lipstick Feminist”
or whatever who supposedly cares about clothes
and fashion and misses the bigger issues. It’s
a place where I just have to go with what makes
me personally happy. There’s a saying that “the
Personal is Political” and I believe that 100%
but I believe it doesn’t work taking the political
and trying to make it personal. You have to
take your personal and find your politics. It’s not
about whatever particular movement tells you how
you should look because it totally is oppressive…
you know women should wear this or should not
wear that… if they wear these things you know
they are bowing down to patriarchy! Those are the
ways that feminists become equally as oppressive.
KC: Who have been your role models?
Damali Abrams, “Autobiography of a Year” video installation
at A.I.R. Gallery, 2011
DA: In addition to my sister Abiola, my brother Kinso,
my parents and my friends. The people around me
have always been brilliant and really creative. Also,
Michael Jackson, Mary J. Blige, Spike Lee, Maya
Angelou, Toni Morrison, Oprah.....the list is endless.
AA: Definitely Eve Ensler, Miranda July, Candida
Royale, Oprah, Madonna. I love the artist
Wangechi Mutu. There is a blogger named the
Pioneer Woman who is this woman living in the
woods and homeschooling her kids. I’m a huge
Martha Stewart fan. I love her with all of the
contradiction that that is and the way that she
was able to take ‘homekeeping’ and traditional
women’s arts that people would normally dismiss
and build a billion dollar empire. That’s amazing
to me I love that: Women Who Build Empires.

Amor Vincit Omnia "Love Conquers All"
Caravaggio, Amor Vincit Omnia, 1602
REVOLT
Magazine Number 3, 2013
36

Gypsies, Hustlers,
and Russian Sex in
the Superlative:
AN INTERVIEW WITH TOMMY LANIGAN SCHMIDT
BY KATIE CERCONE
A
good friend of mine once told me
that it was okay that I only always
talked about my boyfriends because
it was “How I talked about myself.”
On another occasion a friend said,
“You should really cross out every
man’s name in your journal and write
Myself.” It’s true, and it’s why I consider Tommy
Lanigan Schmidt – his glitzy lasagna pans and gay
ephemera saran wrap sequined mini cathedrals,
what one critic called a pseudo-Byzantine Funk-
Pop vision - a kindred spirit. Lanigan Schmidt shook
the art by its monogrammed panties upside-down,
before it spit him back out like the best of us. He’s
the first to tell you that the tin foil rat sculptures he
made when he was a homeless gay youth living in
the West village of the Stonewall Riot days (this man
ran with Jack Smith, inventor of body glitter when it
was crushed glass) will sell for loads. Loads of what?
He’s pro-Art as life and anti-Art World to the max.
“This is who I was in love with since I was
16 this is Francis. He’s like the Godfather, my
student Za Za says ‘You’re obsessed with him!’
Not really it’s just part of my memory formations.
‘Obsession!’ I love it when people say things like
that.” TLS said this while holding up a photo of
his first boyfriend, which he keeps at bedside,
all this before the interview had even begun.
TLS is one to act a bit coquettish, originally
giving me a bit of a runaround when I requested an
interview. Feeling it out over the phone, he meanwhile
dropped some gems that had me eager to hear
more, “The art world loves intellectual things that
can be perceived as visceral” and rather ominously,
“Make the art you love or it will bite you in the heart.”
He must have been hinting at something when he
whispered over the phone, “Youtube is on the border
of being solipsistically alone and out everywhere all
at once.” As I would later learn, my night at Tommy’s
place in Hells Kitchen would be more like a gay-ass
slumber party than an interview. Except instead
of b-rate horror flicks we’d watch the Inter-tube. I
didn’t prepare any questions, because as I recall
from having taken his class at SVA, the molasses
speech dripping out of Tommy’s mouth (we’re
talking mid century Italian-American Brooklynite
collar fashions and Bieber hearsay) is always and
only brilliant, startling and Romantic with a capital R.
Why the capital R? What does the late
18th Century shift in consciousness that broke
the backbone of European thought have to do
with Youtube and Boyfriends? Well to give a brief
history ala Hugh Honour’s Romanticism (1979),
Romanticism is the notion that love, like art, is the
pursuit of an ideal we approach but never attain this
side of the grave. Romantics, who often depicted
lovers as doomed or dying, followed the “mysterious
way” inward through fixation upon a remote,
perfected ideal. With the church moved under a
cloud, God no longer an emotional necessity and
materialism gaining speed, the whole world in
“primal flux” becomes a screen for the projection
of deferred religiosity and spiritual rebirth.
Thomas Lanigan Schmidt, Syphilitic Rat, 1970, Aluminum
foil, rhinestones, hot glue, pins, 3 x 12 1/2 x 3 inches. Photo
courtesy Pavel Zoubok Gallery
Flash forward to 2012, I arrive at Tommy’s place to
find that Art literally covers the entire apartment;
what his artistic experimentation has reduced to
one long corridor fit for short, thin and spry folk.
When we finally squeezed through the maze of
dusty treasures stacked floor to ceiling – ducking
under his saran wrap and tinfoil hanging bangles,
digging through piles of boyband sweatshirts and
stopping along the way so TLS could pantomime
with a Barbie-shaped shampoo bottle - we nudged
in together on Tommy’s smaller than a twin size bed
adjacent to a laptop and a vintage b&w television
positioned on two staggered prop tables. Using
both as his visual aid, TLS proceeded to for the
next hour and a half trace the fall of communism
in Russia through a study of the ritual and
symbolism of Russian daily life, all punctuated by
lively profanity and percussive exclamations like
“tinkle tink” and “BING!” We also talked a lot about
gypsies, hustlers, and Russian parenthetical sex.
Video 1: Working Class Russian Video
Wedding After Capitalism. A familiar scene of a
couple getting down in a backyard patio floods
the screen as Tommy narrates, “I think he’s a
professional because he has a kind of fixed smile,
he kind of like knows what he’s doing. She’s getting
humped.” I watch curiously and ask Tommy if he’s
been having wedding fantasies. “No no I just like
stuff that is about sex because I’m gay. Gay people
have to take care of the…sexual things, okay?” And
then continues, “Americans tend to be puritans. I
like cultures that are not puritanical because they
have a different sophistication about sexual things.”
Video 2: Traditional Hopak at a
Contemporary Russian Wedding in New Jersey.
“This is actually the dance that represents the
consummation of the marriage but no one says
that, it’s kind of like parenthetically about sex.” A
hired troop of men and women in matching tights
and oddly shaped hats dance and flip about in a
church basement. “I love this peasant stuff because
it’s really wild. I think this was done at the turning
point because this was a paid group but when I was
a boy this was done in New Jersey by like regular
people. But that dance you’d break your legs
doing it. So all over Russia now they’re just hiring
a stripper.” Fixed smile dude of video one unveiled.
Video 3: Ripped Russian Hustla Works out in
his Back Yard. “Oh here is Mr. Sexy. Actually Mr. Sexy
is good with space.” TLS goes on to explain how this
man’s a perfect example of how art “just naturally
happens” and why Americans are so hypocritical
about their economy. Without tearing his eyes off
the screen he elaborates, “You see if Americans
are going to talk about their whole country falling
apart because of the economy they’re going to have
to start paying attention to working class people
sometime. This is a working class person and he
has his own culture that’s considered garbage by
most middle class people.” The hustler is doing his
push up dance as Tommy continues, “He’s easy on
the eye. I just like when other people don’t speak
English. The music comes out when someone is
speaking a language you don’t understand and
you understand like 1 out of every 100 words,
it’s music, for real, because it just like bounces
and beats and bounces and beats.” I ask Tommy
how many times he has watched this video. “Oh
probably like a million times. I have to watch it like
at least 20 times to figure out if it’s good enough
to keep watching. Fuck you don’t do that!!! (to tv)”
At this point he turns on the b&w TV behind
the laptop and tunes into Mother Mary Angelica
of the Annunciation, an American Roman Catholic
nun who founded the Eternal Word Television
Network. “Oh I can’t stand her she’s a ultra
conservative. She’s against gay marriage and
abortion. There, she’s better with no sound. Would
you freak out if you saw a dead body in a coffin?
White people when they die are the color of frozen
turkeys.” With a silent Mary Angelica as backdrop…
Video 4: Contemporary Russian Funeral
Ceremony. Tommy explains as an indoor scene
with an open coffin comes into view, “I just like it
because it’s art about life that doesn’t have to do
with the art world. It’s kind of like a Pietà, Italian
Pietàs are based on this.” I watch as a female
relative hovers over the body of the deceased
screaming laboriously. “Yes yes the screaming is
part of it. She’s probably like the grandmother and
notice how she’s held in by the other relatives so

Gypsies, Hustlers, and Russian Sex in the Superlative:
continued...
Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Placemat (Scriptorium), 2006.
Mixed-media collage, 14 1/2 X 18 1/2 inches. Photo
courtesy Pavel Zoubok Gallery
she can kind of go wild. The pace of the band gives
her a sense of the attitude around her and how wild
she can cry.” Tommy is constantly pointing out tiny
things that I’m missing and their significance, he’s
roving the screen with his eyes critiquing its formal
and symbolic structure. “That might be a convention
in these companies,” he comments on occasion.
Because these aren’t home videos they are produced
by a Russian funeral industry. “The mother’s going
to throw away money. You get the metaphor - sort of
what to do with it now? Because what people forget
in a place like the United States is that metaphors
come before their interpretations. Symbols are
not clear in this because they are real, they are a
fluid part. Better than art world stuff. They’re not
just people sublimating passion into fashion.”
Video 4: Rural Russian Peasant Funeral Video.
As we peep at the supra-continental lachrymose
sentimentality Tommy’s very careful about
observing religious references and contextualizing
them within the history of Communist Russia. “Now
there’s an interesting little detail up there, a Russian
cross that wouldn’t have been there back in the
Stalin days. It wouldn’t have been allowed. These
things are so full of history if you know how to read
them. Most people don’t care to know how to read
them but they’re very rich.” He points to the scarf
the deceased women wears, “The communist party
realized there were more people being baptized
then there were in the communist party because
of this type of shroud. No one would admit they
were going to church but there was a kind of shroud
church going folk wore, see what she’s got on, in a
sort of block print? How many of those were sold
told them that the communist party wasn’t working.”
Video 5: Americanized Russian Teenagers
Doing Consumption American Style. “Now this
is so American, she’s sad so she’s gorging on
donuts. There’s something about that. Russians
didn’t used to have boxes of donuts.” Scene two,
also at the donut shop, while Tommy delivers his
synopses, “The woman that went out into the big
world of glamour and she’s coming back to see
the donut woman but she’s disdainful of the donut
watch this I love it. Watch how she asks for this
donut like ‘I’ll try your plebian food, but (cough!)’
Think of the convulsions Russia's gone through in
like twenty years. It’s gone from being a communist
country with a planned economy to like a crazy
mafia capitalist country, with star culture and all
that stuff that goes with that territory. And fashion
magazines.” Cut to the mall, the soundtrack fades
into Glamorous by Fergie. Tommy continues, “All the
young people stuff the music is American pop. All
the cemetery stuff the music was from American
movies. American culture is like that – it just works
for people. AHHH! You gotta see the Igumenjas!!”
REVOLT
Magazine Number 3, 2013
Video 6: The Igumenjas aka Russian
Nun in Charge of a Woman's Monastery. Enter a
menacing woman with a domineering cone shaped
hat. Tommy doesn’t miss a beat, “She’s wearing
that see through black thing so her cross is more
mysterious then she’s got that gnomish black hat
on. The next picture of her is kind of like a Warhol.”
Equally menacing male priest enters the scene.
“See how the music’s swelling? Because he’s the
one who advises them on their spirituality. The
music and the timing is just right with the fuckedup-ness.
It really is a great piece of fucked up art.”
The music shifts again, signaling danger as Tommy
adlibs, “Blood? Wine? Something went awry here.”
Video 7: François Sagat aka Famous Gay
Prostitute with Tattoo covering his Head. “We’re not
going to watch that. He’s a famous gay prostitute.
Want to see a famous gay prostitute? He’s my favorite
porn star. He’s international. Yes he’s the one with the
tattoo on his head. There he is.” There he is!
François Sagat
Video 8: François Sagat Priest Baptizing
a Baby. Title is self-explanatory. Or not? Tommy
chimes in, “Oh! Here’s a François Sagat priest
baptizing a baby. See he looks exactly like him but
it’s not. What is that I hate these ads why do they
subject us to this!? It’s supposed to jump right into
what we want. See the priest doing the baptizing
of the baby is very François Sagat. They’re enough
alike, they’re not though. It’s not the same person.
They’re just from the same part of the world.”
Video 9: High School Choir in Velvet Suits
Singing Counterpoint Arrangement. We both
agree it’s awful. “Americans see this as a great
accomplishment. Americans make strange choices
to keep people from making art. Counterpoint
is one of them. I bet they all hate music now.”
Video 10: American Gypsies from New
Jersey. Who knew? Lots of dude bro Jersey types
wearing crew collars and cargo shorts sitting around
in their kitchen singing traditional gypsy songs. It’s
exactly the counterpoint choir music. I ask how they
can still be gypsies if they live in a home in New
Jersey and Tommy explains that the house doesn’t
even look lived in. “This is something that goes way
back forever to the Middle Ages. That’s how they
survived back then to avoid getting killed by the king.”
Video 11: The Gypsies Through the
White Girl’s Eyes aka Barf scene From Drag Me
to Hell. Tommy is getting excited, “The gypsies
become a presence of the Other as sex-crazed
and hideous through her eyes. Look at that man
he looks like he’s hung like a horse these people
are crazy what is that awful magic they are doing
oh no I’m a white girl I can’t stand it! Oh!” Then
the green eyed corpse pukes in the white girl’s
Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Placemat (Augustine, Student at
Carthage), 2006. Mixed-media collage, 13 1/2 X 17 3/4
inchescourtesy Pavel Zoubok Galler
mouth as Tommy concludes, “This is actually
shown in China as an example of bad capitalists.”
Video 12: Russian Gypsy Parade. Lots of
girls in ruffles and heavy eye makeup. Everyone
is flowing out into the street and moving their
body freely in time to the music. Tommy looks
on with some kind of strange awe, “This world
outlasts everything. I mean Whitney Biennials
will come and go, this will keep on going.”
Video 13: Sketchy Full Immersion Russian
Orthodox Baby Baptism. Tommy explains how hard
the video was for him to find. “A total immersion
baby baptism is even rare for Russian Orthodox. I
think they might have lost a few. This is probably
in a church that was used as a warehouse. All
the churches were closed for like seventy years.
Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt,"Non Sol Invictus sed via scintillare
est sanguinis mei (Not the invincible sun, but the way of
sparkle is my blood)," 2001. Foil, plastic wrap, vinyl, pipe
cleaner, holographic tape, Britney Spears, aluminum cans,
wire, ink, wood and staples. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of
the artist and Pavel Zoubok Gallery
The nutsy thing in Russian was that they realized
when communism fell that the only people that
go into the church are working class, which you
know that’s who communism is supposed to be
for.” He continues as we watch the baby dunked
under water three times, “It’s an amazing art
form, like physiologically the baby must feel like it’s
drowning. So when it comes up into the middle of
this brocade and that becomes like a good memory
in the middle of thinking it’s a bad memory.” TLS
on love, art and memory formation. The End.
38

REVOLT
takes
BOSTON
artSEEN
COLUMN
BY SUZANNE SCHULTZ
Art is trending in Boston, responding to global
fads and exploring their local relevance. With
nearly the whole city experiencing a creative
Renaissance in the interrelated realms of Art,
Food and Fashion... Revolt took Boston too see
what the city had to offer.
GALLERY 601
Photography Matt McKee
Apprehension of Change
The Sweet Shrapnel series germinated after flipping
through a magazine celebrating the art of advertising.
One page featured an ad with a lemon in its imagery,
another was a beauty shot of a handgrenade.
FORUM, 755 Boylston Street is presenting Painter
Dmitri Valone's PERCEPTION till February 28. The work is
not just about looking, but remembering and revisiting to
see something new.
Neiman Marcus, 5 Copley Place, Boston is featuring
the art of Judith Shah, Dmitri Valone, Peter Glebo, Ethan
Gaston, Tracy Girdler and Joseph Pulitano. Fashion and Art
play Muse to each other, through January 30.
The Liberty Hotel, 215 Charles Street. Tuesdays are
Gallery night in this jailhouse turned hotel February 19.
Photographer Graham Waiting will be in the main salon
6-8 p.m. with his show Constrained by Liberty.
ALL ASIA, 334 Mass Ave., Cambridge Don’t miss
CNC Indie Music Marathon January 31, 6-9:30 p.m. www.
allasiabar.com
Johnny Ds, 17 Holland Ave., Somerville presents
Hayes Carl February 8 at 7:30 p.m.. Carl connects with
music lovers of all genresTickets are $17 in advance, $20
day of show. www.johnnyds.com
Middle East, 472 Mass Ave., Cambridge features
Big Dipper February 27 p.m., Downstairs. They are back to
do it again in 2013.
Check out the Art & Music programming on BNN
TV. LIVE STREAM www.BNNTV.org click What’s happening
now! Check out THE TERRIFICS on MONDAY, JANUARY 28,
6-7 p.m. with Steve George and Rich Cesarini on piano,
acoustic, guitar, ukulele ,mandolin, accordion and vocals.
Artist ETHAN GASTON, February 4, 6-7 p.m. Abstract
painter and sketch artist shares his vision of the world
through his art
DONNA DODSON, March 25th 6-7, p.m. Donna’s
sulptures explore feminine beauty and evoke humor,
playfullness, as well as grace, power and emotional
stength.
For more listings go to www.itsallaboutarts.com
Suzanne Schultz is founder/CEO of Canvas Fine arts in
Boston, and co-host of BNN TV's ITS ALL ABOUT ARTS
Show, suzanne@canvasfinearts.com
I brushed past both pages on my way to another article,
barely registering the images. Five minutes later, the
grenade and lemon had fused in my subconsious and
I was on my way to the grocery store to start the creative
process.
The series is not meant to be anti- or pro- anything. It
is a representation of my own apprehensions of the
effects we have on the world we exist in, move through
and change on purpose and accidentally.
With our movement is our potential for amazingly
beneficial effects and tragically horrible results. Often
from the same human generated event.
We are at a cross roads, as we always have been.
Nature has grown up around us, despite us, in spite of
us, and, even, because of us. Our metaphorical fuse
has formed it and given it structure, even as it finds its
own way around our best intentions.
Sweet Shrapnels bright colors and simple shapes are
a juxtaposition of the chaotic “natural” state over the
ordered state that is attempted by the hand of man. It
is printed on polished aluminum and presented without
a frame, but ready to hang.
If the pin is pulled, it will destroy the fruit. But, the fruit
is only the transportation system for the seed, which is
designed to be distributed, often violently, to propagate
new life. Matt McKee will be showing this series at Arts
Project Sotogrande Spain in 2013.
162 Boylston Street, 6th floor
Boston, MA 02116
617. 470.1889
Saturday 11-4 or by appointment
www.gallery601boston.com
Peppah Spray!
Banana Slap!
Peppah Spray!
REVOLT
Magazine Number 3, 2013
40

George Clinton
and
aka Dr. Funkenstein
Economics
Photo by William Thoren
George Clinton aka
Mr Wiggles the Worm, Lollipop Man, The Grandest Wizard and Atomic Dawg
Baba Supreme is an American icon and one of the foremost innovators of
Funk music. He was the principal architect of the large ensemble known as
P-Funk and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997.
The infinite intelligence within you know the answers
Its nature is to respond to your thoughts…
You rise as high as your dominant aspiration
You descend to the level of your lowest concept of yourself
Free your mind and your ass will follow
The kingdom of heaven is within
― Funkadelic, “Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts” (1974)
of FUNKADELIA to counteract the inane, infantile antics of those pimpatory,
sapless stooges and exploitive ecdysiasts of evil. FUNKADELIA IS UPON
THEE!"
― Liner notes, Funkadelic’s Cosmic Slop, 1973
‘The Funk is its own reward’
BY KATIE CERCONE
― P-Funk mantra
“Put a glide in your stride, a dip in yo' hip and come on up to the mothership”
― George Clinton
“I didn’t really believe in religion until I took acid” ― George Clinton
"I recall, when I left a little town in North Carolina, I tried to escape this
music. I said it was for the old country folks. I went to New York, got slick, got
my hair made (heh-heh- heh-heh), I was cool. I was cool. But I had no groove,
no groove. I had no groove. But now, fly on baby...Dig...Can you feel that
baby? It's called Funkadelic music. It will blow your funky mind."
―"Mommy, What's A Funkadelic?" Funkadelic, 1969
"What is soul?
I don't know! Huh! Uh!
Soul is a hamhock in your cornflakes"
―"What Is Soul" Funkadelic, 1969
"Should there be some who would choose to ignore this maladroided
message of doom, I further proclaim it to be the right of the noble followers
Photo by William Thoren

The Aesthetic
of Funk:
An Intergenerational Dialogue Spotlighting Fiber Artist and
Cultural Activist Xenobia Bailey
BY KATIE CERCONE
It must be time for humans to get back
in touch with ancient knowledge (1)
― George Clinton
When I began writing about the Spirituality
of Hip Hop, it was mostly based on a hunch. At the
time I was washing down yoga teacher’s training
with gangsta rap – High on my shining skull breath
in the morning and down dirty drowning in Snoop
as I biked to class on the winds of false adrenaline,
bass and the American sex fetish. I was beginning
to see easy transitions between yoga poses, booty
grinding and break dancing. Downward Dogg was
sissy bounce. Pussy poppin on a hand stand was
a lot like pulling a root lock during Sirshasana.
Archetypes of African myth and ritual on the
steroids of global digital interface and Ancient
Hindu Transcendentalism sold under the guise of
eternal youth and beauty meant Hip Hop and Yoga
were surely the collective pseudo-religions of my
generation.
All was golden. The only thing that scared
me was the one white voice on my iPod “Battery
low.” I just didn’t know how much I was drinking
the Kool Aid.
As bell hooks put it, “The overall impact
of the postmodern condition is that many other
folks now share with black folks a sense of deep
alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense
of grounding." (2) Bass is grounding. Hip Hop and
Yoga both take us back to this notion of territory,
the clan. Both are fundamentally about Earth and
Sky awareness.
Then one day I met fiber artist and
cultural activist Xenobia Bailey, whose creative
practice concerning The Aesthetic of Funk merges
the disciplines of industrial design and social
change. We were both speakers on a panel about
Intergeneration Feminist Dialogue at the College
Art Association conference in LA last Spring. After
hearing Bailey talk about her work around the
Aesthetic of Funk, dropping words like ‘Cosmic
REVOLT
Elders,’ ‘Tribe Vibe,’ and ‘Sister Paradise’ (3)
(Bailey’s Superhero Alter Ego) I pounced on her
afterward to introduce myself.
Several weeks later I met Xenobia at her
studio in Harlem to get into the nitty gritty. This
article, what is meant to be a profile of Bailey with
respect to my own interest in ‘The Spirituality of
Hip Hop’ is based on our conversation and draws
heavily from Ricky Vincent’s book FUNK: The
Music, The People and the Rhythm of THE ONE
(1996).
When I made my trek up to Harlem to visit
Xenobia, I had very little context regarding the Funk
(musical predecessor of Hip Hop), and through
much of our conversation I felt almost as if we were
speaking separate languages. This made perfect
sense when I later learned that Funk music was
an intergalactic psychedelic mythology of antiassimilationist
African Diasporic peoples faced with
the tripartite horrors of institutionalized racism,
economic disenfranchisement and ghettoization.
Considering how I’m a white female of a privileged
class, most of what I’ve learned about black culture
is from boyfriends and books.
I first imbibed the nectar of Hip Hop via
white washed ‘urban contemporary’ corporate
radio stations. After TLC before the death of the
female MC. Or perhaps put better, “Discussin’
corporate radio - Hot This, Jammin That, Q
This, Blazin’ That – is like debating the pros and
cons of rape. (4) For Xenobia, her interest in
Black Music is about transatlantic Africa Cultural
memory as creative enterprise, “Art is to me
is like a psychological encyclopedia, it’s a way
of becoming visible.” (5) Bailey explained how
the creative process was her conscious and
unconscious connection to her African Roots.
Her primary medium recounts traditional African
aesthetic expressions accounting for a cultural
landscape wherein textiles were long the object of
massive transcontinental trading networks and a
cultural marker of Africa’s artistic heritage. (6) For
communities of African descent, art is utilitarian:
dance initiates adulthood, masks channel spirit,
clothing conveys status, and the drum talks. (7)
Says Bailey of her exhibition (Re)Posessed at the
King Arts Complex in Ohio, “Inspired by my African
American 20th Century experience and created to
meditate on the loss of identity, home, history, and
culture, I use the inspiration of African American
mythology, popular funk, jazz and soul music and
contemporary urban folklore to materialize utopia
in the Aesthetic of Funk.” (8)
Having received her degree in Industrial
Design for mass production from Pratt University in
1977, Bailey learned very early on that she’d have
to carve out a new cultural space for her work. “I
didn’t go into that field as a profession because of
my strong African Aesthetic. I really liked getting
into the African storytelling, songs and fables.
Within that tradition there’s a lot of futuristic
elements to the aesthetic. I have something that
I want to resolve and that affects the work. It’s
almost like a talisman or amulet, a magic wand, or
magic carpet.”
The honoring and strategic disavowal of
African cosmological values such as myth and
ritual is a prominent feature of African American
cultural production since Modernism. Part of a
strategy to “merge social, political and artistic
values in a frontal assault on access to the fruits
of white society,” Black urban intellectuals “driven
by the individualist impulse” of the Modern age
conformed to or adopted in part a Western secular
and scientific approach to art and music. (9) For
instance, Scott Joplin's early Modern folk opera
Treemonisha was one of the first black operas
to receive widespread crossover recognition in
part because of its rejection of African myth and
ritual in favor of Enlightenment style individual
determinism. Treemonisha’s poetic armature was
the polarization of education and light against
superstition and darkness played out in the title
character receiving schooling in a white woman’s
Magazine Number 3, 2013 42

home. Later on as the Civil Rights and Black Power
movement caused important psychological shifts
within the Diaspora, Afro-centrism became no
longer at odds with Intellectualist pursuits in Music
and Arts by the late sixties and seventies. By the
end of the eighties, you’d see prominent Black
Artist’s such as Spike Lee celebrating the Afroaesthetic
and inviting artists such as Bailey, whose
designs appeared in his 1989 film Do The Right
Thing, to join his efforts.
Bailey’s work, based on West African
symbolism, ritual and the neo-tribal consciousness
of Funk music, takes the form of energizing surface
designs in contrasting colors and linear patterns
or spiraling crochet mandalas. Handmade wall
hangings, floor coverings, soft furnishings and
meditation stations comprise Bailey’s “Crochet
Arts-of-Jubilation.” As process and product they are
artifacts that bear witness to “Re-Possessing the
Ever-lasting, Ever-flowing, Sustaining Spirit of the
Aesthetic of Funk, and the abilities of this under
cultivated aesthetic to enhance daily life of the
Super-Natural Nature of Everyday People.” Bailey
also calls it “Paradise Reconstruction.” Often, she
works from recycled materials to maintain her
ethic of “Deliverance into the self-sustainable.”
As an expression of Inspiration-vibration African
Vernacular folk art Xenobia fashions domestic
altars, thrones of power and Priestess collateral
out of recycled fashion magazines, newspaper,
cardboard boxes, glitter & glue, Scotch Tape,
imagination and patience. She also goes out into
the community, for instance her “Deep Green
Recycled Arts of Adornment Workshop” two
summers ago at the Studio Museum in Harlem
where she taught hundreds of visitors how to make
recycled newspaper flowers. Sounds divine, so
much that you might be thinking – could this relate
any less to Hip Hop? And what the fonk is Funk?
If you really want to know STOP READING
NOW. GET UP. AND GET DOWN. In fact, “The more
one thinks about it, the harder it is to get the feel
of FUNK. It’s just done.” (10) Funk is a prism of
Black consciousness with a furious jam factor.
Funk is soundly rooted in African cosmology and
the notion that people are created in harmony with
the rhythms of nature and that free expression is
tantamount to spiritual and mental health. Funk
was a return to the collective, spontaneous and
organic ideals of the African Ensemble in the
face of technology pushing popular music toward
formulaic artificiality. Funk is comfortable with and
celebrates sex and the body. It is a rejection of the
Western tradition’s formality, pretense, and selfrepression.
(11)
Since Bessie Smith sang Need a Little
Sugar in My Bowl, the earliest Black commercially
recorded music has relied on euphemisms of sex
that bolster the Racist and Sexist rhetoric of a
white patriarchal capitalist economy still ensconced
in a Puritanical fear of The Dark Continent –
women, people of color, sexuality and nature.
Nobel Prize winning novelist Tony Morrison echoes
this sentiment in a passage from The Bluest Eye
looking at ‘white’ Americans. Ricky Vincent borrows
Morrison’s passage to help support his conception
of the Funk:
"They learn…How to behave. The careful
development of thrift, patience, high morals, and
good manners. In short, how to get rid of the
funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passion, the
funkiness of nature, the funkiness of a wide range
of human emotion. Wherever it erupts, this funk,
they wipe it away; where it crests, they dissolve it,
wherever it drips, flowers or clings, they find it and
fight it until it dies. They fight this battle all the way
to the grave." (12)
Photo of Xenobia Bailey, courtesy of the artist
When my Mom was in Junior High in the
sixties she made friends with some black boys
in the Jazz dept. of the neighboring high school
and invited them to play at the school dance. My
mother was the Class President at the time. During
the dance, the Jazz music the guests were playing
was so danceable people started storming the
stage and going so hard the event was shut down.
It wasn’t the The Rite of Spring (13) or anything,
but it did cause my mom to be expelled temporarily
from school upon which her father sat her down
to say “We’re not racist, but we don’t want to see
you with that black boy again.” My Mother, being
freed from the fate of her Mother (8 Catholic
babies, alcoholism and an absent, unfaithful mate)
by a 2nd Wave Feminist Movement that springboarded
off the Black Civil Rights energy and yet
disproportionately effected middle class women
with white privilege, went on later in life to become
a sound healer. And yet unfortunately, it’s that
"We’re not Racist", but mentality that continues
to pervade the American cultural arena, a chief
source of Hip Hop’s money-garnering potential and
public controversy.
Recall Michelle Obama getting major heat
for inviting the rapper Common (You know, the
one that drops rhymes like “There is a light that
shines special for you and Me”) to read poetry at
the White House. (14) Meanwhile, white blonde
Barbie breath Aussie rapper Iggy Azalea is the first
female MC included in XXL Magazine’s Freshman
Class round-up, another indication of an economy
in which blackness is feared and marketed through
non-white bodies. Says Hip Hop journalist Akiba
Solomon, “That wasn’t a Hip Hop decision, it was
a marketing decision.” Solomon says they call
it going for the “Drama Jugular,” which doesn’t
excuse the duplicitous subtext: “What’s the only
thing better than a black girl with a big ass?
A white girl with a big ass.” (15) Youth these
days – many of a racially mixed background -
have a remarkably different understanding of the
construct of Race, both its hyperreal limits and
infinite permutations carried out through lived
experience.
Artist Lorraine O-Grady, an advocate of
“Miscegenated thinking,” makes an interesting
point with regards to the career of Michael
Jackson, whom she dubs “The last real Modernist.”
In O’Grady’s lights, Modernists strive to become
God in order to make Make art with God. “Michael
Jackson believed he could unite the whole world
with music, the most God-like vision of an artist.”
She names Thriller as the perfect crossover album
and explains how “Michael changed his body to
embody the whole world” and succeeded as a
Universal Figure until his attempts literally ate
him alive. The world was both incredibly willing
and unready to support his vision. (16) Today
we see the appeal of Hip Hop rivaling that of
Michael Jackson, but we also see Hip Hop stars
maintaining a communal support system through
the establishment of crews and parent companies,
whereas Michael was forced to go at it alone –
trapped by the Modernist cult of individual genius.
As it turns out, Xenobia had some pretty
interesting things to say about Hip Hop, and she’s
not your typical naysaying elder either, she’s
just Funky. For instance she says, “The Hip Hop
aesthetic is the style of the working class. It takes
sneakers, hoodies and jeans to the max. It’s like
the Rococo of the twenty-first century.”

Xenobia Bailey, Aesthetics of Funk, Northwest African American Museum © 2011 Robert Waderen
She admires the genre in that, “Hip Hop is singing
the blues, and they’re getting paid. The genius
of Hip Hop is black owned companies.” She also
set the record straight on Hip Hop’s origins, “Hip
Hop comes out of funk, which is an aesthetic of
a displaced people. It relies on African cultural
memory that has been put to use to serve an urban
population of blacks in resistance to assimilation.”
We talked a lot about how Hip Hop and Funk are
both therapeutic and holistic mediums - they are
regenerative – meaning, says Bailey, “More comes
out of them than what goes in.”
And yet, members of the Funk generation
have made righteous pleas for a contemporary
Black art that is serious, not “Chocolate coated,
freaked out and habit-forming.” (17) Pimping the
pleasure principle is par for the course these days
leaving the consumers of music, to paraphrase
George Clinton “Fat, horny and strung out.” (18) So
how did we go from a Bessie Smith’s A Little Sugar
to James Brown’s Cakes to Lil Wayne’s L-l-l-ick
Like a Lollipop… Make that ass jump like schzerp
schzerp?
Rap music came into the world as
“Syncopated speaking over a funk beat.” (19)
Anyone that is serious about Hip Hop knows
the genre’s origins well. Says Hip Hop journalist
Touré, “It all began with a few parties. Jams in
New York City Parks thrown by DJs like Kool Herc,
Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa…
the police not far away, waiting for just the right
moment to shut it down.” The music? “James
Brown, Sly Stone, Funkadelic, and anything with a
stone cold bass and drum rhythm you could rhyme
over – breathing meaning and substance and soul
into our bodies. It gave life. It was God.” (20)
REVOLT
In Ricky Vincent’s lights, The Hip Hop
World is actually the “fifth funk dynasty.” Clearly,
it’s the first Black dynasty to seriously get paper.
In fact, most early nineties rappers rose to fame
sampling Funk. You might recall Dr. Dre’s threemillion
selling LP The Chronic featuring Snoop
Doggy Dogg. The Chronic title song remixes The
Parliament’s ‘P-Funk make my Funk the P-Funk’
replacing ‘funk’ with ‘shit’ and ‘P-funk’ with
chronic.” (21) “Most of the ‘greatest hits’ of the
Funk era have been stripped of all usable parts
like an abandoned car,” (22) which means most
Funk artists were not recognized or compensated
adequately for their contributions to the cannon of
American Music. If the Funk classics haven’t been
stripped and rebooted under the corporate rap
banners of titties, ass, drugz and gunz they’ve been
mass marketed as compilation and tribute albums
which are boring “hit parades” denying the Funk’s
political consciousness and spiritual beliefs. (23)
Which is exactly why the work Xenobia
Bailey is doing is so critical. Let’s break summa
dis down. Bailey is speaking the language of
Black Vernacular Folk Wisdom and considers
herself a “Cultural Rehabilitator.” Her human-size
installations uplift and inspire while belying the
African American aesthetic as a quintessential part
of American daily life. She is also speaking a very
West-Coast language. Like Jimi Hendrix, Xenobia
Bailey was born in Seattle. Being a West-Coaster
myself, today I can jive on the utopian, mystical
treasures of the Aesthetic of Funk. Although it’s
a message that just a few years back, knee deep
in the New York Ego-trip, would have made me
anxious and cynical. Running on false adrenaline is
like spending your savings; and I’ve bottomed
out enough times now to take an interest in
Groundedness. Hip Hop’s appeal relies on the
communicability of trauma. Black Music is the type
of medicine that gives you a lot of what you want
and even more of what you need. It revs you up
as it anchors you to the beat, the bass, the drum
as mythic communication channel and “symbol
of primordial sound, and vehicle for the word,
for tradition and for magic.” (24) There’s actually
saying, “You have to root to fly.”
Bailey recalled the American Civil War and
the way that it resulted in inevitable stalemate:
“Both sides had been trained in the same
methods, neither knew the way of the true warrior.”
As a former student of Industrial Design, Bailey
is interested in Funk music and its relationship
to urban and rural development. She identifies
less as an artist and more as a cultural innovator
whose products – from Funky Fly Crowns to urban
tea ceremonies to the line of post-consumer
material based paper mache furniture she’s
planned to construct this summer - are utilitarian
and functional. Her colorful areas for meditation,
alters and other operational items are geared for
a revolution in consciousness. She also plans to
eventually offer the Aesthetic of Funk as an online
curriculum for constituents around the world. She’d
like to see the Aesthetic of Funk Industrialized into
a holistic community model for the rejuvenation of
the working class.
She’s also not above play, magic and
fantasy – it’s Funky. During our conversation
Bailey recalled one day years ago when she was
out walking along Park Avenue and noticed all the
women around her had beautiful fur coats on. She
didn’t have a coat that was nice at the time, so she
Magazine Number 3, 2013 44

Sistah Paradise, Photo courtesy of the artist
decided to make one for herself. The handmade
one-of-a-kind coat Bailey made soon became
the target of many uproarious compliments from
passersby on the street and was years later
purchased by the Museum of Art & Design in New
York City.
When I asked Bailey about her relationship
to female icons and archetypes of African
mythology, she explained that although she has
studied some African folklore outright and made
work in that vein – for instance her piece about the
mythic African woman whose cooking stopped a
War - she is just as invested in the extraordinary
everyday woman and girls of her Seattle and New
York City communities. Most of her designs are
less an expression honoring an ancient deity than
a blue print of her higher self: Xenobia the urban
African American woman resisting assimilation and
filtering a profound, perhaps semi-conscious or
even ‘imagined’ cultural memory into Art. Bailey’s
alter ego Sister Paradise recalls the custom of
adopting a knickname many fans of George
Clinton’s P-Funk engaged in.
The Parliaments or P-Funk (short for
‘Pure Funk) were a fifty plus ensemble of rotating
members. What some have even termed an ‘Afro
Alien Diaspora,’ P-Funk was more than just music.
As articulated by Michael O-Neal in ‘The P-funk
Aesthetic’ P-Funk contributed to the positive
identity formation of blacks: Sir Nose and Starchild,
and Dr. Funkenstein, as animated (as opposed
to real) superheroes, give black children a sense
of animation in their own likeness that previously
they have been denied – especially by the media.
These superheroes offer them a mythic sense of
possibility.
Since slavery the notion of Black liberation
had been framed by Christian theology and what
Tamara Winfrey Harris is calling ‘Respectability
Politics,’ a platform which adopts the manners
and morality of the dominant culture in an effort
to aggressively derail negative views of blackness.
Respectability politics calls Erykah Badu “trash
with great hair” for having 3 kids and “a growing list
of baby daddies” and celebrates Beyonce because
she (in the word of P Diddy’s son Justin Combs)
“dated, married, THEN got pregnant…ladies
take notes.” (25) P-Funk, like many non-Western
philosophies, centered around a notion of ‘cosmic
oneness’ which defied the divisive binaries of
Western ideology such as virgin/jezebel, dark/light,
spiritual/secular, intellect/intuition. (26) In P-funk
as in African folk wisdom, the sexual being and the
spiritual being coincide. The P-Funk’s elaborate
fantasyscapes drew a generation of urban youth
into their postindustrial black urban folklore.
Church-based funk chants, ritualism, mantras,
symbolic stage props and gospel like invocations
elevated popular music out of this world.
Clinton’s P-Funk put the African American
ethic at the center of the universe while
P-Funk’s "One Nation Under A Groove" banner
communicated to millions worldwide how Funk was
a ‘life force’ comparable to other Eastern concepts
such as Ra in Egypt, Kundalini in India and Chi in
China. (27) Black African music bridges the mind
and the body through rhythms. According to UC
Professor Roy Thomas, in many African languages
"no distinction is made between music and
dance.” (28) In effect, African cultural rituals
incorporating melody and movement embody
relationships of “interdependence and reciprocity”
of the human and spiritual realms. (29) With
respect to its offspring Hip Hop, M.K Asante Jr.
asserts that the word ‘Hip’ actually comes from
‘Hipi’ a term of the African Wolof Language (spoken
in Senegal, Gambia and Mauritania) which means
literally to be enlightened or to open one’s eyes
and see. (30)
P-Funk, perhaps one of the most
successful attempts to fuse the secular and the
sacred through popular music for the masses,
has performed live for over five decades now,
meanwhile acts of industry copyright fraud, theft,
and intellectual injustice have left many of its
members with very little capital to speak of while
generations of rappers to follow have sampled
their music and reaped great rewards. Well into his
seventies, George Clinton continues to perform and
in addition to his most recent legal actions against
corrupt business practices of music industry
mega-players he has been working together with
congressmen, elected officials and lawyers in a
full-scale effort to avenge and “[Emancipate]
himself and other African-American musical artists
from a history of unfair bargaining and a culture of
exploitation." (31)
A recent crowd-sourcing venture to raise
$50,000 for the restoration and preservation of
original P-Funk recordings and the repair of the
family recording studio offered items such as a
P-Funk Mega Mix Download, a call or voicemail
from George and a private concert with your set list
as bonuses for $5, $300 and $25,000 donations.
The righteous campaign by its end had surpassed
its goal bringing in $50,419.
Fishbone, a band whose horn-driven, bassheavy
punk-funk fusion sound influenced the Red

Photo courtesy of the artist
Hot Chili Peppers and No Doubt, have slipped into
a similar situation of financial decline while they’re
white predecessors - Gwen Stefani in particular –
continue to take the nation by storm. In
the Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler documentary
Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone, we see
an all powerful blond Stefani praising the band
profusely and calling out Angelo Moore (Fishbone
frontman) as her greatest “style inspiration.”
Meanwhile, Angelo Moore, well into his late forties,
is evicted and moves back in with his Mother. The
film recounts the legacy of Fishbone as having
emerged out of the late 1970’s desegregation
laws mandated in L.A. that resulted in a number
of black inner city kids being bussed to the white
suburbs to attend school. Fishbone formed and
quickly dove into the white dominated punk scene
and enchanted audiences across the nation for
decades.
The film recalls their story and includes
interviews with a number of prominent forces in
the music scene. Says rapper Ice T in Sunshine
“Fishbone just caught all of LA off-guard. The
gangbangers would be lookin’ at em like, who
are these crazy motherfuckers?” Often, Fishbone
played for mostly white audiences. Says Angelo
Moore recounting the response he’d get from the
black community, “We ain’t trying to hit that stringy
haired white music.” Says Fishbone keyboardist
Chris Dowd, “We stylistically went so many places
because we wanted to unify everybody.” At the end
of the day they were still, as George Clinton put
it, “Too black for white people, too white for white
people, too white for black people.”
Despite the confusing response of listeners
and Columbia records – where music was still
segregated into departments by race when the
band was signed in the 80s, Fishbone prevailed
– through the crack epidemic, the growth of the
prison industrial complex, the Rodney King Riots
and the escalation of black-on-black violence, gang
warfare and police brutality. As evidenced in
Sunshine, the band is to this day still
recognized by many in the field as one of the best
live acts and most influential bands ever to exist.
Remarks Eugene Hatz of Gogol Bordello echoing
the roots emphasis of the Funk genre, “The white
imagination of America is just much more blind
and doesn’t have roots, the longevity and the
history. [Fishbone] drew on sources that were
to vast for the common mind.” Like P-Funk and
Xenobia, Fishbone resisted assimilation. Also like
Xenobia, Fishbone was called upon by Spike Lee to
appear in a film (Sunless Saturday, 1991).
Ultimately what these three projects
provide is an anti-assimilationist counter narrative
that challenges the confines of regulatory
blackness, ghettocentricity and respectability
politics alike. They also confront mainstream
narratives about art which constantly appropriate
Black creativity without giving proper credit and
compensation where it’s due. As discussed in
Everyday Sunshine, Fishbone’s achievements may
hinge on the fact that many of its members were
(post-desegregation) sheltered from some of the
crueler realities of the enforced Black ghettos. In
the film band member Dirty Walt (vocals/trombone)
recalls how uncanny it was when he met Angelo
Moore who had grown up in the suburbs and was
“devoid of hood sense…He’d be smilin’ all the
damn time you just can’t come to the hood smilin’
all the damn time.
Unfortunately, coming of age dawns darkly
for most. It’s still the case that all innovations
in music – most of which have been by black
projects – will still be deflated and vacuum sealed
into bubblegum pop scented thin/Blonde/white/
female-fronted Mall noise. What Xenobia Bailey’s
‘Aesthetic of Funk’ project provides is an expansive
tracing of the trajectory of conscious cultural
innovators like Fishbone and P-Funk, building on
their vision and making it tangible, communal
and real. It also encourages the young folk, myself
included, to ‘unplug’ long enough to confront the
origins and significance of the meat and bones
of popular consumption; ultimately encouraging
counter-consumption, (re)assemblage, recycling
and non-linear holistic ways of acting in the cultural
sphere.
1 George Clinton, foreword, FUNK: The Music, The People and
the Rhythm of THE ONE, Rickey Vincent, New York: St. Martin’s
Griffin, 1996, p. xv
2 bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” Postmodern Culture,
Vol. 1, No. 1, September 1990
3 Xenobia Bailey, “Paradise in Her Hands: Blasts of Inspiration,
the Activation of Creative Flow, and the Discovery of the
Wonder-Worlds of Fiber,” paper delivered during ‘Necessary
Positions’: Intergenerational Collaboration in Feminist Art
and Activism, Maria Elena Buszek, moderator. CAA Annual
Conference, LA Convention Center, February 22, 2012.
4 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. 259
5 Xenobia Bailey, Museum of Art & Design Video blog, May 15,
2011, http://madmuseum.org/content/artist-xenobia-bailey
6 Synopsis for the group exhibition featuring Bailey “The
Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End,”
September 30, 2008–March 22, 2009 at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, NY http://goldwaterlibrary.typepad.
com/rgl/2008/09/the-essential-art-of-african-textiles-designwithout-end-opens-september-30.html
7 Eisa Nefertari Ulen: They’re Not Talking About Me, Home
Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology
Gwendolyn D. Pough, Elaine Richardson, Aisha Durham,
Rachel Raimist, eds., 2007
8 Xenobia Bailey, (Re)Possessed catalog, The King Arts
Complex, Columbus, Ohio, 2008
9 Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music, New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 134
10 George Clinton in FUNK, ibid p. xiii
11 Ricky Vincent, FUNK: The Music, The People and the
Rhythm of THE ONE, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996, p. 5
12 Tony Morrison quoted in Ricky Vincent, FUNK, ibid, p. 5
13 The Rite of Spring was a ballet with music by Igor
Stravinsky which premièred in Paris on May 29, 1913 causing
the most famous riot of classical music in history.
14 Jason Linkins, “Outrage Flares As Michelle Obama Invites
Common To White House To Read Poetry,” Huffington Post,
May 10, 2011
15 Akiba Solomon, Nice With Hers, Panel at the Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY. May 2,
2012
16 Lorraine O’Grady in conversation with Kellie Jones, “Portrait
of an Artist: Lorraine O’Grady,” PERFORMA event, April 25,
2012, NYU Campus
17 Ricky Vincent, FUNK, ibid, p. 165
18 Ricky Vincent, FUNK, ibid, p. 274
19 David Toop quoted in Ricky Vincent, FUNK, ibid, p. 9
20 Touré, The Hip Hop Nation in And it Can’t Stop: The Best
American Hip Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years, Raquel
Cepeda, ed. New York: Faber and Faber Inc.,
2004, pg. 276
21 Ricky Vincent, FUNK, ibid, p. 241
22 Ricky Vincent, FUNK, ibid, p. 9
23 Ricky Vincent, FUNK, ibid, p. 27
24 Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols (1971) quoted in The Power
of Black Music, ibid p. 225
25 Tamara Winfrey Harris, No Disrespect: Black Women and
the Burden of Respectability, Bitch Magazine, Summer 2012,
pg. 33
26 Ricky Vincent, FUNK, ibid, p. 258
27 Ricky Vincent, FUNK, ibid, p. 262
28 Ricky Vincent, FUNK, ibid, p. 36
29 Richards, Let the Circle be Unbroken: The Implications of
Spirituality in the African Diaspora (1980) quoted in
The Power of Black Music ibid, p. 20
30 M.K Asante Jr., ibid p. 250
31 Howard Mann quoted in “FUNKIN’ Right! George Clinton
Takes Action,” PR Web: Online Visability from Vocus, December
8, 2011
REVOLT Magazine Number 3, 2013 46

Tribute to
Mark Wiener
1951-2012
http://mwienerarts.com
By Randee Silv
Captivated. I can't stop staring at Mark
Wiener's paintings. I can't stop trying to dissect each
piece. Dense narratives of events keep emerging
into visibility. I'm determined to uncover what it is
that keeps me continually looking, intrigued, never
bored. They're like puzzles, mazes, detective novels
as my eyes seek focus to find just the right spot
to enter, to jump the fence, to journey among the
streets of these translucent, multifaceted surfaces.
It's as if he's painted everything known, felt, seen,
every step we've traveled.
Instantly I'm drawn to the immediacy of his
palette, his cleverly diverse strokes, the juxtaposed
spheres floating, grounding with imperfect grids,
pours, drips, erasures, tensions finding balance
with one another. As I witness these markings, the
recollections triggered, recalled, I search for traced
remnants left behind by salvaged objects, their
imprints randomly scattered but never lost.
How can you not be tempted to follow these
trails, the simple ones, the challenging ones, the
marks captured beneath graphite substrate as the
ink paint entwines with acrylic throws, charcoal
dust, to observe the slowness, the speed as water
dries, shades of black reclaimed? How can you not
hear the silences, the explosions, the depths of
stories told, aging and renewing, always curious,
always questioning?
Mesmerized. Instances amid instances
enduring, sustaining attention, regrouping my
thoughts. Lines of elegant fluidity, reflective
moments in between occurrences, reoccurrences,
syncopations. My gaze deepens in dialogue with
these communities of ideas. There's something so
resilient, so true, alive. An urban landscape, an
open field, a sense of place.
Photos by: Giandomenica Becchio
Painting, Mark Wiener, (1) Untitled,
Wed, July 26, 3:11:56 pm, 22" x 30", mixed media on paper, 2011