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volume 1 no. 4 • 2013
REVOLT is:
PUBLISHED BY:
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PUBLISHER: Scotto Mycklebust, Artist
MANAGING EDITOR: Katie Cercone
CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Scotto Mycklebust
ART & DESIGN: Scotto Mycklebust
ART PHOTOGRAPHER: Scotto Mycklebust
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Dan Callahan,
Linda DiGusta, Laurence Hoffmann, Emily
Kirkpatrick, Rob Reed, Suzanne Schultz,
Randee Silv, Adam Laten Wilson, Lena Vazifdar
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REVOLT
Magazine Number 4, 2013
Letter from the Publisher ...
For the fourth issue of Revolt Magazine we’re
pleased to announce the addition of our new Theatre
View section, where you’ll be able to read up on the
latest approaches to art on the stage. This month’s
Theatre View featured article by Adam Latten Wilson
“Theatre for the Person: Two Perspectives,” explores
theater as a device to promote social change. We’ve
also published a review of folklorist Kay Turner’s
“OTHERWISE: Queer Scholarship into Song.” Going
forward, we’ll include new works from playwrights
in addition to ample reviews and critical theater
dialogue.
Issue 4 also features a new section on Architecture,
kicked off by an interview with the Danish-Czech
contemporary artist-architect Therese Himmer, who
details her recent public work in Russia and talks
about nomadic subjectivity and the semiotics of
space.
For a look at today’s fashion, contributing writer
Emily Kirkpatrick walks us through the ample
closet of the First Lady to explain how and why the
“Media’s Fetishistic Gaze” still relegates powerful
IN THIS ISSUE:
4 Social Activism in Fancy Tones
6 The Gallery Review
8 The Rose Unearthed
12 Top 10 NYC Artists Now
14 The Cult of the First Lady
20 Westbeth Artists' Community Housing
26 Fracking: Drawing the Line
29 Cinema Review
30 The Literary View
32 Theatre View
36 Architecture View
39 The Revolt Takes Boston
40 2 Tha Beat Y'all
44 Swagilish Salomom and TheiLLUZiON
women like Michelle Obama to the shallow periphery
of public discourse.
On the activist front, writer Linda DiGusta details
the fierce and passionate dedication of a growing
number of visual artists dedicated to combating
Fracking.
On the topic of Art and Community Lena Vazifdar
reports on the Westbeth artist community housing
project, which has thrived in Manhattan’s West
Village since 1970.
For our Gallery view section Randee Silv reviews The
Jay Defeo Retrospective at the Whitney. And lastly,
part of her ongoing interdisciplinary inquiry into the
Spirituality of Hip Hop, REVOLT Editor Katie Cercone
publishes a pair of related articles including field
notes from the global Hip Hop Pedagogy movement,
and a roundtable discussion with the REALEST upand-coming
new age hip hop crew TheILLUZiON.
What’s their code?: Love/Faith/Gratitude/Harmony.
Scotto Mycklebust
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

THE
R LIST
Social Activism in fancy Tones
On how celebrities engage to improve contemporary society
BY LAURENCE HOFFMANN
Promoting oneself is commonly accepted, if not
practiced, by people in all strata of society. Individuals
are more and more managing themselves as
brands, a trend put in motion by social media like
Facebook and Twitter, that heightens the need to
make an original mark in a world over-crowded with
competing information. On the business side this
applies to advertisements, which effectively use
celebrities to create instant familiarity through the
immediate recognition of a particular celebrity’s
brand.
Recently self-branding has taken a new turn as
more popular figures have applied their massmarket
appeal to serious social issues. A cursory
list of examples includes Mark Ruffalo and Yoko
Ono with son Sean Lennon opposing fracking
with Artists Against Fracking; Joaquin Phoenix
defending the rights of people and animals together
with -respectively- Amnesty International and
Peta; Leonardo Di Caprio trying to prevent total
degradation of the environment with Live Earth
and Wildlife Conservation Society; Ziggy Marley,
Lady Gaga, Linkin’ Park, BBKing and others making
efforts to bring music education into disadvantaged
public schools with Little Kids Rock; George Clooney
is one of the United Nations Messengers Of Peace
and together with Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don
Cheadle and others has founded Not On Our Watch
to condemn the violations of human rights in Darfur,
Burma, and Zimbabwe; Angelina Jolie is Special
Envoy for the United Nations. These are just a few
of the causes in which some of the most prominent
American stars emerge as “social activists” and in
some cases as “social entrepreneurs”.
For his activities (other than being Walden Smith in
Two and a Half Men and occasionally appearing on
the cover of magazines with old and new flames)
Ashton Kutcher can be considered a “social
entrepreneur”. The business activities of his
company A-Grade are geared towards improvements
in contemporary society.At TechCrunch, an event
that focuses on start-up companies keen to enter
the field of technology development and new media
held in April/May in NYC, Ashton Kutcher explained
the criteria behind the investments of A-Grade and
revealed his critical take on corporations.
Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, and Michael Arrington, TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2013, video stills. Courtesy of Laurence Hoffmann.
With his notorious sardonic language typical to an
“agent provocateur”, he decries the concept of
Big Brother. He warns that societies should prefer
the decentralization of the security system instead
of accepting that one major entity controls the
masses. Ashton proposes that security should be
based on the interaction among individuals. This
critical approach defines an optimistic point of view
on local communities built by the genuine personal
relationships between people. Such conviction
For his eclectic interests and activities, Ashton
belongs -together with all socio-politically engaged
celebrities- to that figure so much in vogue in the
Renaissance, “the Renaissance Man”. In the 15th
and 16th Centuries the reevaluation of the models
from Antiquity took an important step. Artists
and philosophers were called to court (royalty,
aristocracy or new bourgeoisie) to engage into the
political discourse and became spokes persons,
aka ambassadors. What made them “Renaissance
implies a strong criticism towards the general Men” was their versatility in various fields of culture,
opinion that our western (and newly BRIC) societies science, politics and the conviction that societies
are tending towards a more anonymous global could harmonically entail all these aspects. These
system.
societies were literally called Utopia, a term that
today has taken on the connotation of “illusionary
On the practical business level, Ashton focuses and unrealistic”.
on financially supporting and strengthening
technological platforms that enhance social sharing. This lead to an open conclusion: Is social activism
And since interconnectivity is fundamentally an in all its forms a sheer idealistic endeavor or can
element of mutual trust, it is especially through
social media that a stronger connection between
the contribution of mass mediated personae really
reach the masses and help make the change?
individuals can be achieved and local communities
are therefore spontaneously formed.
REVOLT
Magazine Number 4, 2013
4

THE
GALLERY
VIEW
BY ROB REED
AL HELD
Alphabet Paintings
Fedruary 28 - April 20, 2013
Cheim & Read
547 West 25th Street NY, NY
Tension and play were a couple of Al Held's guiding
forces in creating the Alphabet Paintings that Cheim
& Read in Chelsea presents. All made between
1961 and 1967, the monumentally scaled acrylics
on canvas take their queue from letter forms – a
technique for composing and dividing abstracted
space that retains also a sense of visual familiarity
that would otherwise be lost in purely minimalist
works. Typography, here, offers the artist a heuristic
that yields surprising results without ever slipping
into alienating territory.
Held used both serif and sans-serif typefaces,
and in works with letters as titles, he isn't merely
transposing and cropping letter forms. In "The 'I,'" for
example, the white vertical bars flanking the sides
are indeed the spaces created between the capital
letter's top and bottom serif. The white bars are
not true to form, however; they're shortened, and
angled slightly more than 90 degrees, which builds
compositional tension and holds the shapes in.
Thus, the black and white work is strikingly modern
without feeling cold.
Turning to letters themselves, consider that the
quintessentially modern typeface Helvetica – it's
now used by Apple, American Apparel, and even the
MTA subway system – was designed just four years
prior to the earliest painting in this exhibition, "Ivan
the Terrible," 1961. Modern is synonymous with
stripping forms of ornament, and with ornament
goes sentiment. But for all of Held's paring down,
he packs emotion back in with intense color,
compositional skewing, and, at least in the "X"
paintings, thwarting of linear perspective.
In the back exhibition room is "The Yellow X," 1965.
The second largest piece in the exhibition, its content
is true to its title. The power of the yellow hue is
nearly overwhelming as it bounces off the adjacent
walls and fills the room. Lost in some reproductions,
however, is not only the work's scale, but the center
divide where the diptych merges and creates a black
sliver that slices the X rather dramatically.
The Alphabet Paintings prefigure the "abstract
illusionism" developed in Held's later works by
tweaking recognizable shapes. Without all the
overlaps, three-dimensionality, and spatial depth
that dominate the latter-day paintings we more
closely associate with Held, these works have an
eccentric iconicity all their own.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
February 7 - April 6, 2013
Gagosian Gallery
555 West 24th Street NY, NY
It's nearly impossible to respond to the paintings
of Jean-Michel Basquiat unencumbered by what
history has made of him, or even, for that matter,
what he made of himself. Yet the voracity of the
artist's ego and that of the 1980s art market is
essential to appreciating how the artist worked and,
frankly, how much art he was able to make – roughly
1000 paintings and 2000 drawings in the seven
years before his death of a drug overdose at the
age of 27. (Without a stream of collectors, where do
3000 pieces of art go?) This inseparability of man
and market can translate to an irreducibility that
makes either severe criticism of his work or effusive
eulogizing a bit inadequate.
Gagosian Gallery's Chelsea location offers a unique
opportunity to mine Basquiat's oeuvre through over
50 works drawn from private and public collections.
A curatorial theme isn't obvious if it's here. The
exhibition rooms' large sizes, however, create ample
space for incongruities to commingle without much
fuss. And incongruities, disparities, and stream-ofconsciousness
pastiche are what make Basquiat's
art what it is.
Among the metaphors Basquiat assumed for his
persona is the boxer. We've all seen the black
and white posters of Basquiat and Andy Warhol in
boxing gloves, as if ready to spar. The boxer asserts
Basquiat's aggressive rounds with the art world,
and perhaps – at least in the portrait series of
black boxers, including Jack Johnson, Sugar Ray
Robinson, Cassius Clay, etc. – a critique of the art
world's racial makeup (though this he denied).
Al Held (1928 - 2005), IVAN THE TERRIBLE, 1961. Acrylic on canvas 144 x 114 inches 365.8 x 289.6 centimeters CR# He.31324
Photos courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.
REVOLT
The "boxer series" contains some of the most
inventive works, essentially bricolage, seductively
Magazine Number 4, 2013 6

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, Untitled (Two Heads on Gold), 1982, Acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas, 80 x 125 inches, (203.2 x 317.5 cm). Photos courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York.
unusual in appearance and clever in their material
combinations. "Cassius Clay," 1982, is an acrylic
and oil stick on canvas; however, the stretcher is a
found wood pallet which creates rounded edges on
the top and bottom, lifted in the center by the pallet's
vertical stringer. Half sculpture, half painting, these
works have a presence that humorously undermines
modern painting and how "high art" ought to look.
Toward the end of his short life, Basquiat's paintings
began to empty out with a haunting fatigue. "Riding
with Death," 1988, is one of the most poignant. A
man, red, rides the barely joined bones of a crawling
skeleton, perhaps his own, in an empty bronze field.
The metallic sheen gives the work a royal dignity as
if the artist had unwittingly bestowed his own last
rites.
with prismatic projections emitted from the eyes
and lips making diamonds in the painting's center.
The symmetry, simplicity, and complimentary colors
of dark blue and orange make the 26-inch square
piece feel iconic.
Geoff McFetridge's medium-sized painting "12
Dots," 2013, depicts twelve individuals from a
bird's eye view. Their heads, each a black circle,
and bodies with limbs are choreographed in a cool
palette of grays, blues and whites, punctuated by a
red shirt or two. The graphic, almost mechanical,
quality of the composition gives the image a slick
iciness, especially since no eye contact is being
made either inside or outside the painting.
Ryan Schneider's "How Long Have You Known?,"
2013, shares a palette similar to Oinonen's, yet it's
more saturated and high-keyed. A topless woman
sunbathes, only partly shaded by palm leaves,
on a red-and-black striped towel with various
fruits around her. As the towel and fruit appear
atilt, leaning unnaturally forward, the painting's
lower half feels like a Matisse still life. It's a nice
effect, even if the crotch-centric composition (and
exaggerated signature) is a tad heavy handed. At the
same time, overstatement seems to authenticate
contemporaneity these days.
Fifty years ago artist-critic Fairfield Porter reviewed a
MoMA exhibition "exploring recent directions in one
CHICKEN OR BEEF?
March 6 - April 20, 2013
The Hole
312 Bowery, NY, NY
If you're "crossing the pond," as international
travelers phrase it, the flight attendant's question
at mealtime could be "Chicken or beef?" Hence the
title of The Hole's mini-survey exhibition of figure
paintings drawn from artists mostly in Europe
and North America. There's no real premise here.
The press release alludes to connecting threads,
but the pleasure in the show is in the disparity of
approaches to representation sustained by an
evenness in quality.
Several artists are widely known, such as Cecily
Brown, Barnaby Furnas, and Jules de Balincourt. The
latter employs a Rubin vase motif (i.e., two facing
silhouettes that make, by illusion, a center vase)
Xstraction: A survey of new approaches in abstraction, installation view. Photos courtesy The Hole, New York.
One knockout piece is "Unopposite," 2012, by aspect of American painting: the renewed interest
Canadian-based artist Anders Oinonen. Keen in the human figure." A figure painter himself, he
sensibilities of abstraction and figuration arise in quickly pointed out that "[s]ince painters have
equal measure in one large saddened, upwardgazing
face. Painted in bright, fine-tuned pastels to represent a renewed interest in the figure on the
never stopped painting the figure...it could be said
strategically modified with angled planes that part of critics and the audiences rather than among
function like scrims or thin white washes, the sevenfoot-tall
painting appears to genuinely emote, albeit painters." I'd like to think that's still true.
painters. To this extent the critics are following the
in a cartoonish way – which is surprising given how
rigorously abstract its composition is.

BETWEEN DESTINATIONS:
THE ROSE
UNEARTHED
BY RANDEE SILV
After circling through the 4th floor galleries at the
Whitney Museum, I found myself returning to the
same exact spot at Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective
(February 28 - June 2, 2013). It was like being
caught in a visual net as my glance slightly turned
in both directions. I couldn’t move as I stood there
between DeFeo’s seven foot wide hypnotic graphite
on paper, The Eyes (1958), and the monumental,
nearly one ton, The Rose (1958-66), nestled
in the small sanctuary that the museum had
designed to emulate the sunlight as it streamed
into her Fillmore Street studio. DeFeo always felt
that this drawing had something of a “prophetic
or visionary meaning,” and it was through these
eyes that her works to come would be envisioned.
Her desire was that some day these two pieces
would be shown together. I could almost hear them
conversing. Unexpectedly, I was drawn in.
Jay DeFeo was a painter among the ‘50s San
Francisco scene of artists, poets and jazz
musicians. After graduating from the University of
California at Berkeley with a master’s degree, she
was awarded a traveling fellowship that no woman
had yet received. Knowing this, the art department
strategically recommended her as J. DeFeo. She
then spent a year and a half in Europe and North
Africa before settling in Florence for 6 months.
Intrigued by ordinary objects, astronomy, unspoken
subjects, erasures, Italian architecture, jagged
mountain peaks, Asian, African & prehistoric art,
DeFeo dynamically meshes her own rhythms and
forms.
Dorothy Miller, the curator and director of the
Museum of Modern Art, who happened to be out
talent scouting, saw DeFeo’s first one-person
show at the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco. Miller
visited DeFeo’s studio and was hoping to include
The Rose (entitled Deathrose at that time) in the
upcoming 1959 landmark exhibition, Sixteen
Americans (December 16, 1959 - February 17,
1960). Holding out for a showing on the West
Coast, DeFeo hesitated about parting with her
work still in progress. Five other pieces were
chosen, and a reproduction of the unfinished
Deathrose was published in the accompanying
catalogue. DeFeo and her husband, Wally
Hendricks, decided to turn down the plane tickets
bought by MoMA for the opening. Hendricks, who
was also invited to be in the exhibition, was known
for his kinetic assemblages and was co-founder
of The Six Gallery, an underground art gallery and
hang for Beat poets.
“Wally and I didn’t really realize the stature and the
prestige of being included in such a show. I was
really unaware of the situation. It surprises many
people that we were the only people included
in the show who didn’t make the effort to go
back for the opening. The whole show was kind
of a coming-out party, I discovered later. It was
intended to be for galleries in search of new talent.
I was approached by the Stable Gallery through
correspondence, which I turned down.”
New York Times critic, John Canaday wrote “For my
money, these are the sixteen artists most slated for
oblivion.” Included in the show were Jasper Johns,
Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth
Kelly and Frank Stella.
Having found herself on an unplanned journey that
engulfed and obsessed her for eight years, DeFeo
devoted herself intensely to painting, layering,
sculpting, working and reworking Deathrose.
She repeatedly applied thick coats of white oil
paint, using black to minimize the yellowing and
occasionally mixing in mica for sparkle, while
scraping, reapplying, working with thinness and
thickness, allowing paint to dry and carving into
the material with a palette knife. Extending the
painting’s radiating lines from a study photograph
in preparation to enlarge Deathrose, she drew
and painted these extensions directly onto the
supporting wall around the canvas, later removing
her work from its stretcher bars, gluing it to a
larger unprimed canvas and placing it in her front
room bay window. More pigment was intuitively
placed, reformatting the center, shaping hard
edged grooves into smooth ridges and crevasses
highlighting the sun’s rays, emphasizing shadows,
observing proportions, contours, growing thicker
and heavier with each stage as unpredicted
surface textures kept emerging.
Deathrose was extensively photographed in its
many evolving phases. Images circulated even
before its completion. One landed in a 1961
Art in America article, “New Talent U.S.A.” That
same year, the travel magazine Holiday included
Deathrose in a piece “San Francisco: The
Rebels.” DeFeo was the only painter mentioned
and described as “one of San Francisco’s most
successful younger artists.” The photograph of
DeFeo working on Deathrose as she stood on a
stepladder appeared in a 1962 issue of Look.
News of her mammoth sculptured painting began
spreading. Different institutions were thinking
about how they might acquire Deathrose, but
DeFeo had no intention of donating her work.
DeFeo working on what was then titled Deathrose, 1960. Photograph
by Burt Glinn. © Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos.
In 1965, DeFeo and Hendricks ended up being
evicted from their Fillmore studio when the building
was condemned and new owners doubled the rent.
Deathrose measured nearly 12’ x 8’ with depths in
spots deeper than eight inches and had to be cut
away from the studio wall, a crate built around it,
lowered by forklift to a truck below and relocated
to a small room for storage at the Pasadena Art
Museum.
Bruce Conner, friend, filmmaker, interdisciplinary
REVOLT Magazine Number 4, 2013 8

artist, “Father of MTV,” conceptual prankster and
founder of the Rat Bastard Protective Association,
a group of Beat and Funk artists, felt that “This
final form was not ever finished, it had to take
an uncontrolled event to make it stop.” Conner
documented this “transplant” in his 7 minute
film, The White Rose (1967) Jay DeFeo’s Painting
Removed by Angelic Hosts (1967), to the sounds of
Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain.
DeFeo stopped refining it three months later.
Renamed from Deathrose which she thought “just
a little melodramatic,” now to The White Rose,
feeling “ the rose was so much an aspect of life as
of death,” she eventually just went with The Rose,
“the unity with both of those opposite ideas.”
The Rose had its first public showing in 1969 at
the Pasadena Art Museum, traveled to the San
Francisco Museum of Art and was afterwards
installed in the new wing at the San Francisco Art
Institute, where it was bolted to a concrete wall in
the McMillan Conference Room.
“I had done absolutely nothing from the time I
finished The Rose until 1970. I was repairing
my personal life as well as my psyche after the
heavy experience that the painting of The Rose
was. I needed that time to restore some kind of
equilibrium and gain some kind of perspective on
my life’s work and get some feeling of what could
naturally come after that.”
With the emergence of Minimalist and Pop Art
during the ‘60s, not seeing herself as part of the
feminist movement and maybe being too tightly
pegged as a “Beat” artist, DeFeo began feeling as
if the art world had moved on and was showing
little interest in her work. She bought a Hasselblad
camera and immersed herself into photography.
She continued to seek museum placement for
The Rose. By 1972, it was showing signs of
hair line cracks, nicotine grime, scratch marks,
graffiti, coffee stains, loose chunks of paint, with
the canvas sagging from its weight. DeFeo knew
she’d have to find help to cover these now needed
repairs. Conner screened his film, which had
already helped to keep The Rose in the public eye,
for grassroot fundraising campaigns. Events were
organized. DeFeo received a $1,500 National
Endowment grant. News about the The Rose
resurfaced in the San Francisco press as they
covered the story of DeFeo’s restoration efforts.
The museum conservation team started to clean
and repair The Rose, encasing it in a structure
of wax, starch paste, polyvinyl acetate, packing
material, mulberry tissue, cotton sheeting and
plaster reinforced with chicken wire. Money ran
out. A particle board wall was eventually built
in front of it for student exhibitions. The Rose
remained hidden for the next twenty years.
As the art world “rediscovered” DeFeo, her new
work began to see momentum by 1975 with a run
of successful one-person shows that followed.
Curatorial consultant Leah Levy joined her efforts
The Rose, 1958–66, Oil with wood and mica on canvas, 128 7/8 x 92 1/4 x 11 in. (327.3 x 234.3
x 27.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of The Jay DeFeo Trust, Berkeley, CA, and purchase with funds
from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee and the Judith Rothschild Foundation 95.170, © 2012 The Jay
DeFeo Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Photograph by Ben Blackwell.
to find a permanent home for The Rose. DeFeo
took a teaching position at Mills College and
climbed Mount Kenya, a lifelong dream.
The Rose continued to remain an obscure mystery.
After DeFeo’s death in 1989, The Jay DeFeo Trust
was established and the search for a permanent
location for The Rose continued. Would a museum
take the risk of putting out money, not knowing
if the painting was salvageable or not? DeFeo’s
patrons and the “Friends of the Rose” were
committed and determined. They felt deeply
captivated and transformed by The Rose. They
praised her as a true innovator. Her struggle had
now become their own struggle to bring The Rose
back to life.
In 1992, Lisa Phillips, the Whitney Museum’s
curator, contacted the estate about a possible loan
of The Rose for their upcoming exhibition, Beat
obviously in no condition to be shown. The estate
contacted Lisa Lyons at the Lannan Foundation
in Los Angeles for possible conservation support.
J. Patrick Lannan had been an avid collector of
DeFeo’s work and had originally wanted to buy the
unfinished Deathrose, which he had nicknamed
“The Endless Road.” Three small square windows
were cut into the plaster covering, and, to
everyone’s surprise, it hadn’t turned into “slime”
or “goo” or become coated with mold. Two years
later, the Lannan Foundation redirected its mission
away from the acquisition of art.
David Ross, director of the Whitney, told Levy,
“It’s one of the greatest masterpieces of postwar
American art. It had to be rescued.” The Whitney

acquired it and covered all restoration costs. Once
again, The Rose was lowered through a window by
crane onto a flatbed truck, taken to a warehouse
for cleaning, where its air pockets were filled with
epoxy mixed with chopped fiberglass. 1500 pounds
heavier, it was shipped to New York City for the
Beat Culture exhibition, thirty one years after its
eviction from Fillmore street. The public could now
experience The Rose as DeFeo had envisioned it. It
was no longer an art world rumor.
A color reproduction of The Rose landed on the
cover of the March 1996 issue of Art in America.
Bill Berkson’s article, In the Heat of The Rose,
was featured. The Rose traveled to the Walker Art
Center in Minneapolis, the M.H. de Young Memorial
Museum in San Francisco and the Berkeley Art
Museum. The Whitney Museum included The Rose
in its 1999 exhibition, The American Century: Art &
Culture 1900-2000, Part II and in the 2003 Beside
“The Rose”: Selected Works by Jay DeFeo (October
2, 2003 - February 29, 2004.)
Shortly before Jay DeFeo died, she shared this with
Leah Levy: “She is walking through a museum in
her dream, but she is not Jay DeFeo anymore. It
is in a future life, and she has been born again, as
someone else. She wanders through the galleries,
room after room, and comes upon The Rose -
unearthed, unwrapped, repaired. A person is
standing in front of it, studying it intensely. DeFeo
nudges this person and says, “You know, I did
that.”
Courtesy the Conner Family Trust (c) Conner Family Trust.
REVOLT
Magazine Number 4, 2013
10

TOP 10 NYC
!#$%12456!@#
ARTISTS NOW
Andrea Bonin
Born 1986 in Temple, Texas
Andrea Bonin makes sculptures and assemblage using plaster, wax, clay, and found material. Having grown up in a creative
household (her mother a painter and father a musician), Andrea experienced working on projects and expressing herself
artistically as the norm from an early age. Her work deals with domesticity and nostalgia, and is essentially about finding
reverence in the everyday. Her process is very much about experimentation, gesture and material. Right now she is working
on a series of drawings that mimic patterns found in wrapping paper and newspaper advertisements. She’s interested in
the notion of “holiday” and has a growing collection of ornaments, tinsel and old, faded party favors. Going forward, she’s
interested in bringing some expressive and performative elements into her work relating to her former years as a dancer.
www.andreabonin.com
Sean Paul Gallegos
Born 1976 on Earth, North America
For Sean Paul Gallegos being an artist is not a choice, it just is. “The beauty of being an artist at this point in time is the option
to be interdisciplinary,” says an artist who 10 years ago would get schooled that he needed to focus on one medium. “Sculpture
is what sells and is exciting to create, but Performance is still in my heart.” Sean currently works out of his living room. His bath
tub doubles as a slop sink and his queen size bed makes for a nice cutting table or work bench at times. Currently, he’s working
on “Recovering my roots and having the will to challenge what is damaging in this world.” Ultimately through his work he hopes
to open eyes and hearts. He also plans to have fun working, forget about the market and create more reasons to travel.
www.seanpaulgallegos.com
Rebecca Goyette
Born 1992 in Provincetown, Massachusetts
For a long time Rebecca has been drawing, play acting, reading, and nerding out on all things related to art and sex. Her videos
are a balancing act of multiple elements including sculpture, sound, image and performance. Her work relates to her “desire"
to work with others and…fascination with all things tactile/sensory.” Her current body of work focuses on Lobsta Sex, using
lobster mating rituals (in which female lobsters box down a mate and squirt aphrodisiac drugs out of her forehead) as a point of
departure. Her greatest artistic challenge? The “thin membrane between the fantasy world I construct, inhabit and play in with
others and my everyday life. Drama can erupt. Desire is complex.” Her upcoming work explores asexual love between a Blue
Lobsta burlesque singer and a man who dresses in 1600’s Puritan clothing all the time shot in a seaside town in New England.
www.rebogallery.com
Fred Gutzeit
Born 1940 in Cleveland, Ohio
Fred Gutzeit’s elementary school principal told his mother that Fred should have art lessons. Years later he’s a full-fledged
painter working in acrylic on canvas and watercolor on paper. Incorporating digital prints and photography into his painting is
also part of his practice. Fred’s work is about finding the unexpected. Says the artist of his work, “I’d like to take your eyes for a
joyride.” Since 1970, Fred has worked from his studio on the Bowery and currently his greatest challenge is pulling together the
various ideas comprising the last 50 years worth of his sketchbook. He’s currently working through an idea called “SigNature,”
which involves six large paintings and dozens of small watercolors and acrylic panels. He’s also planning to do an outdoor wall
billboard-installation. After that he’ll continue to sort through old sketchbook ideas and work them out in permanent sculptural form.
www.fredgutzeit.com
Phoenix Lindsey-Hall Born 1982 in Athens, Georgia
Involved from a young age with social justice and humanitarian issues, Phoenix’s work encompasses the “poetry that cannot
be expressed through traditional campaign field-work or fundraising pitches.” Building her projects from research and hard
numbers, her work ultimately makes a departure into “obscurity, expression and emotions.” Having worked with photography
for many years, her current work is more sculptural. Themes Phoenix has engaged in her practice include queer iconography,
hate crimes, war and foreclosures. Her most recent body of work, After Kempf, is an exploration of l.g.b.t hate crimes. Using
mixed media - including ceramic, concrete, and found materials - Phoenix transforms everyday objects that have been used as
weapons in specific hate crime cases. Phoenix is currently Artist-in-Residence at Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ.
www.phoenixlindseyhall.com
REVOLT
Magazine Number 4, 2013 12

Duron Jackson
Born in Harlem, New York
Duron Jackson has made art since a very young age and currently works in the medium of sculpture. His work is about a way of
being that's widely misunderstood, and narrowly represented. His greatest artistic challenge? “Saying a lot in the most simple
way.” Working out of his studio in Brooklyn, Duron showed in fours exhibitions last fall including a solo show at the Brooklyn
Museum. Currently, he’s in Salvador da Bahia on a Fulbright Research Fellowship where he’s concurrently doing a residency at
Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia. His plan is to “make art, eat, drink and be merry.”
www.duronjackson.com/home.html
Yuliya Lanina
Born 1973 in Moscow, Russia
When Yuliya first moved to the U.S. she planned to be a musician, but when she could not get access to musical instruments or
musicians, she started drawing instead. Today she does painting, animatronic sculpture, animation and performance. Her work
is about “looking at uncomfortable realities with a wink and a smile.” Having recently relocated to Austin, TX she splits her time
between Austin and New York City and says “Having Internet in my studio,” is her greatest artistic challenge. After two recent
solo shows in New York (Figureworks) and Cleveland (Cleveland Art Institute) she is currently working on a new animation and
mechanical sculptures for her solo exhibitions at the Russian Cultural Center in Houston and W&TW in Austin . She also has a
performance piece in the works.
www.yuliyalanina.com
Jong Oh
Born 1981 in Nouadhibou, Mauritania
Jong Oh is an artist working in sculpture and installation. Constantly exploring the boundaries between “something” and “nothing,”
Jong’s work in a nut shell expresses “philosophical ponderings of the physical space we occupy.” He is currently looking
for a wide space to make an installation of suspended wood sticks and panels. Says Jong, “I want to give the viewer a transforming
spatial experience by simple compositions of lines and planes in space.” For his next series he plans to incorporate
photography as a means of exploring the boundaries of interior and exterior space.
www.ohjong.com
Nell Painter
Born 1942 in Houston, Texas
Nell Painter. Photo by Bryan Thomas.
Although born in Texas, Nell grew up in Oakland and considers it her hometown. After a successful career in academia, Nell
turned to art and currently works in acrylic on canvas, paper, and Yupo (polypropylene paper), composing images on the
computer as well as canvas. Nell’s work is about “seeing people as visual objects” and “the freedom to make visual fictions.”
Nell maintains a big basement studio in the Dietze Building of the Ironbound section of Newark, New Jersey, where she is
working on her current long-term project, Odalisque Atlas (about beauty, sex, and slavery). She also indulges in self-portraits
and abstract drawings as purely formalist exercises. Nell recently appeared in conversation with Kara Walker at the Newark
Public Library.
www.nellpainter.com
Tobaron Waxman
Born in Toronto, Canada
Benjamin Coopersmith and Tobaron
Waxman, "Tashlich" (performance for
photo, 2009.)
Tobaron Waxman is a border crosser. Through performance, photography, video, voice and sound, he interrogates
diasporic experience, contested national borders and the ways in which the State shapes gender. His work
often deals with transgendered bodies, issues of consent, sexual representation, conflict and the queering of
heterosexuality. Informed by his Jewish background, Tobaron’s work explores the trappings of social codes as layers
and historical distortions, the authenticity of gender and embodiment as praxis. Tobaron is interested in “Place”
as a dynamic tension. "The Place" being one of the names of god in Judaism, says the artist “I want the artists I’m
collaborating with and the viewers to experience their citizenship of ‘The Place’ as agents of possibility.” His current
work in process involves Tobaron bringing his own body back into the work as a vocalist based on a curriculum he
has designed for the FTM voice derived from Western and non-Western traditions.
www.tobaron.com

FASHION
Today
The Cult of the First Lady:
The Media’s Festishistic Gaze
BY EMILY KIRKPATRICK
Photo courtesy of The White House.
The First Lady of the United States has always
been a figurehead for America, representative of
the perfect wife and mother. The title of First Lady
comes with no paycheck, no official responsibilities,
and a life lived under almost constant media
scrutiny. According to Carl Sferrazza Anthony’s
REVOLT
Magazine Number 4, 2013
book The Role of the First Lady, “She is, first
and foremost, the hostess of the White House.”
Although most would, in public, vehemently
disagree with that statement, the problem is
that it’s still an ideological truth privately held
by a majority of the population and every media
outlet across America. In the past few decades,
a First Lady’s position and responsibilities have
evolved well beyond the realm of traditional
wifely duties and fashion trendsetting. It’s
now common for First Ladies to be vocal about
their political opinions and pioneers on public
14

initiatives aimed at fixing everyday issues faced by
American citizens, ranging from the environment,
to women’s rights, to illegal drugs. The American
media, however, has failed to keep up with this shift
in emphasis. Publications continue to focus on the
superficial, banal and demeaning over the political
and charitable when discussing our First Lady. The
result of this discourse is a constantly backfiring
attempt to limit the feminine domain and return to
an era of repression, and a sexual stereotype, that
no longer exists.
For this reason, Michelle Obama represents
a perfect storm of political and social media
commentary. As a woman in the public eye, she
inspires a shallow, thoughtless dialog that has
surrounded the feminine sphere for far too long in
this country. Due to the color of her skin, she has
unwittingly unleashed this undercurrent of intense
racism, hatred, and at it’s core, fear, that has been
masquerading through the media under the guise
of political discourse and criticism. Michelle Obama
is by no means the first First Lady to receive such
intense public scrutiny, especially on a physical
and sartorial level. Jacqueline Kennedy Onasis
continues to be remembered to this day for her
contributions to fashion and style, if nothing else.
But when Barack Obama was first inaugurated into
office, the Michelle media frenzy hit a fever pitch
which has sustained itself for the past five years and
will surely remain intact well beyond the completion
of his second term in office. In addition to the
relatively standard trivialization of the First Lady’s
appearance and activities, the comments against
Michelle Obama, specifically, seem to have taken on
a distinctly different tone and bitterness than they
have with First Ladies of the past, such as Laura
Bush or Hillary Clinton.
Of course, other First Ladies have been vilified by
the media and had their public lives intensely, and
inappropriately, put on display. But never before has
a First Lady’s allegiance to her country, the size and
shape of her body, or her day-to-day decisions been
so intensely analyzed and attacked as Mrs. Obama’s.
The problems with the type of language the media
uses when discussing any woman, but in particular
Michelle, are myriad. This type of insensitive,
objectifying discussion undermines the authority
and respect deserving of a woman in her public and
political position, as well as setting back the agenda
of equality, and inviting some remarkably racist, and
completely out-of-line commentary. When people in
political office or on national television speak about
a woman of power, such as Michelle Obama, in this
type of condescending, accusatory language, it
gives the rest of America permission to follow suit.
The claims against Michelle Obama range from
attempting to appropriate the plight of black, single
motherhood into her persona, to anti-patriotism,
elitist spending habits and allegiances with the
Black Power Movement.
As Barack Obama’s term has progressed, the articles
about Michelle Obama have tended to increasingly
feature style over substance. In an article for The
Economist in 2009, Adrian Wooldridge wrote that
most new stories about the first lady, “were almost
entirely devoted to fluff.” Every fashion magazine
and website in America has run at least one piece
on how to attain the First Lady’s amazing wardrobe;
that is if they don’t already have an entire section
dedicated exclusively to her daily outfit choices.
Proving Wooldrige’s point, in 2009, CNN ran a
segment on “How to get Michelle Obama’s toned
arms.” But, as the piece points out, not everyone is
a fan of the First Lady’s muscular biceps. The article
quotes Boston Herald columnist Lauren Beckham
Falcone who wrote to Obama, saying, “It's February.
Going sleeveless in subzero temperature is just
showing off. All due respect." Clearly there was no
respect intended here. Would these same journalists
be ballsy enough to walk up to any shoulder-bearing
stranger on the street and tell them to stop showing
off and cover up? What is it about Michelle Obama’s
husband’s choice in profession that makes her
arms and body a permissible subject of critique on
a national level?
And don’t think the average American woman’s
personal struggle with the First Lady’s bare arms has
diminished with time! Joyce Purnick, in an article for
the New York Times “Style” section in 2012, wrote,
“I HAD expected to keep mum about my problem
with Michelle Obama until after the election, but my
frustration has gotten the better of
Photo courtesy of The White House.
me. I can’t contain it any longer. I refer not to her
politics, but to her arms -- her bare, toned, elegant
arms. Enough!” According to Purnick, the first lady
has made it “unacceptable for women to appear
in public with covered arms.” Because, clearly,
Michelle is not only the first famous woman to ever
wear sleeveless clothing, but also, a dictator of
sleeve lengths for women across America. Purnick
concludes her article by pointing out that Michelle
will turn 49 in January, suggesting, “Could it be time
for her at least to begin to ponder setting a new
fashion trend? Here’s a thought. Maybe she could
take a cue from her husband and, in a bipartisan
gesture, adopt Ann Romney’s preference for elbowlength
sleeves and red taffeta. Or not.” I think the
crucial take away from that sentence is “Or not.”
This quote suggests that woman of a certain age,
specifically, women of a certain age and public
profile, should not be able to dress as they please.
They should be ashamed of their bodies and of
the effect they have on American woman clearly
suffering from body issues of their own. Secondly, it
implies that the most politicized opinion a First Lady
should have is in the realm of fashion (where she
can make a “bipartisan gesture” of her own), while
the heavy thinking and legislature should be left to
her wiser, more powerful husband.
Lucky for all the tabloids, as the buff arms stories
began to grow stale, Obama was inaugurated into
office for his second term, and the First Lady had
some exciting new changes of her own planned.
According to Joselyn Noveck, a writer for the AP,
“the president started it.” She’s referring, of course,
to the media’s new, unbridled obsession with
Michelle Obama’s bangs. According to Noveck,
media outlets around the world are completely
justified in talking exclusively about a First Lady’s
haircut because of a husband’s admiration for his
wife. Obama’s comment was clearly intended as a
joke, considering he referred to the bangs as "the
most significant event of this [inaugural] weekend."
Despite the transparent flippancy of his statement,
this quote was repeatedly taken out of context and
used to justify a whirlwind of bang commentary and
speculation. The Bangs even spawned their own
Twitter account, which sends out thought-provoking
tweets such as, "Just got a text from Hillary Clinton's
side-part.” In a 2012 piece for The Washington Post,
Rahiel Tesfamariam wrote, “Since the beginning of
the president's term, there's been an ever-present
demand to "publicly dissect" [Michelle Obama] and
examine why she dresses the way she dresses, says
what she says, and behaves the way she does.” The
public is not satisfied until each of her decisions has
been broken down and analyzed in order to suss out
and reveal her presumed secret motivations behind
every act. Even down to something as simple as a
choice in hairstyle is suspected to have nefarious or
manipulative motives.
On December 28, 2012 in an article by Cathy Horyn
for The New York Times, Valerie Steele, the director
and chief curator of the Museum at FIT, commented,
“Oddly, fashion, which has tended to be treated
with extreme suspicion in American history, has
not caused political problems for her.” It seems to
me that this is the case because if we can trap a
powerful woman in this shallow discourse, we lessen
the appearance, and thus the threat, of power and
authority in her decision making. By taking the focus
away from her education, her intelligence and her
position of authority, and reducing it to simply what
she wears every day, how muscular her arms are,
and how she styles her hair, she becomes “safe.” If
we reduce her to a 1950s conception of what women
should be and what their pursuits should entail, she
can be viewed as posing no political or intellectual
threat to the overwhelmingly white male patriarchal
government. And the patriarchy is most certainly
intimidated by Michelle Obama, as media and
political pundits prove daily with their increasingly

absurd and misogynistic claims leveled against her.
But men are not the only culprits of perpetuating
this type of discourse, Horyn goes on to quote a
designer who, “observed, with some accuracy, ‘Her
clothes are too tight.’” As though this criticism is
not only of the utmost importance, but also a strike
against her and an indictment of her character.
Even though America has pushed Michelle Obama
to embrace her role as its First Lady fashionista,
she is not even permitted to find respite within this
feminine stereotype. When she plays into the heavily
gendered role she’s been dealt, the criticism is just
as intense and focused as when she was viewed as
her husband’s radical-thinking co-conspirator.
The New Yorker on January 22, 2013 justified
the lack of negative media attention surrounding
Michelle Obama’s pricey clothing (which, in fact,
there has been a substantial amount of critique on),
by saying, “When her husband ran for President in
2008, there were barely veiled insinuations about
whether the role of First Lady was really right for
her—whether she was too angry, or could really
Photo courtesy of The White House.
feel comfortable. (One suspects that a sense of the
pressures on her may explain why she is not taken to
task as much as she might be for the price of these
clothes.)” So, in other words, in the face of massive
amounts of criticism surrounding her aptitude to
simply be married to the President of the United
States, her luxurious fashion expenditures have
been forgiven as an effort to fit in. Horyn’s 2012
New York Times article suggested a very similar
idea, saying, “It’s a funny thing: four years ago she
denied conservatives the chance to vilify her as ‘an
angry black woman’ by taking immense pleasure
in traditional first lady pursuits, like fashion,
entertaining and gardening.” In other words, the only
safe place in politics for intelligent women to prove
themselves as true role models and not be branded
as angry, bitchy, or stubborn shrews, is to retreat
into the shallow, vain realm of the traditionally
feminine. These articles promote the idea that if a
woman is opinionated, politicized or powerful she
automatically, and unquestionably, is asking for
criticism. Traits that are respected and encouraged
in male political candidates, in women, become
egregious trademarks of an overbearing personality
that has overstepped its proper bounds and can only
be tamed by relegating her authority and decision
making into venal pursuits. Even the topics the First
Lady endorses during her husband’s presidency
are meant to be of the simplest, most ethically
uncontroversial nature (although, there are a handful
of First Ladies who have proved exceptions to this
rule). Laura Bush, for example, promoted education,
while Michelle promotes “Let’s Move,” a campaign
devoted to ending childhood obesity in America and
promoting healthy eating habits. However, even this
meager, unquestionably positive health initiative
(a step towards the demure femininity expected of
Mrs. Obama), has not managed to escape the wrath
of politicians and pundits claiming Mrs. Obama is
trying to tell Americans how to raise and what to
feed their children.
Wisconsin Republican congressman Jim
Sensenbrenner very publicly took the First Lady’s
health initiative to task, when he was overheard
at Washington’s Reagan National Airport loudly
criticizing “Let’s Move,” saying, “She lectures us
on eating right while she has a large posterior
herself.” After causing a media sensation with
his rude, insensitive, and plainly inappropriate
remarks, Sensenbrenner (who is not exactly the
paragon of health himself) promised to “send the
first lady an apology.” It’s clear from his statement
that Sensenbrenner’s problems lie not with the
First Lady’s initiatives to promote healthy children,
but rather with her body. This is a fundamentally
misogynist issue many male Republicans seem
to currently be struggling with: the belief that it is
their right to objectify, comment upon and legislate
the female body. The lack of backlash and public
outrage against Sensenbrenner only encourages
such invectives and makes it seem acceptable, even
permissible, to discuss a First Lady’s posterior when
describing her politics. Criticisms that were once
considered taboo, particularly when discussing the
first family, have suddenly been given a no-holds-bar
policy under the Obama administration. It seems
that white politicians and the media have made
the collective decision that electing a black man
into office has lifted a moratorium on the political
incorrectness of full-blown, uncensored racism and
sexism.
Much like Sensenbrenner, in January 2012, a
speaker of the Kansas House, Republican Mike
O’Neal, had to apologize after forwarding an email
around the House which referred to the First Lady
as “Mrs. YoMama.” He claims that he forwarded
the email on without reading it, simply enjoying the
picture of Mrs. Obama side by side with the Grinch
above the caption “Twins separated at birth?” In his
mind, this seemed to excuse the racist slur found
above. In a public statement, O’Neal said that he
found the cartoon amusing because, “I’ve had bad
hair days too.” An unacceptable response to even
more unacceptable behavior. But it’s not just her
physical appearance that has riled a conservative
nation, but also the ease with which she’s accepted,
even embraced, her role as a pop icon and a woman
who wields substantial media power.
The American media has turned Michelle Obama
into a celebrity, a pop culture phenomenon and an
arbiter of style. Yet, at every turn, as she accepts
and utilizes her unique status and position to
promote positive change, she is greeted with
immense backlash, criticizing her for feeding into
the Hollywood machine. When she was invited to
pose for the cover of Vogue in 2008, her advisers
were concerned that she might be seen as “a
fashionista,” a status she assuredly already had
and that has only grown throughout the duration of
her husband’s presidency. To Michelle’s credit, she
made the compelling argument in favor of posing
for the cover, saying that, “there are young black
women across this country, and I want them to see a
black woman on the cover of Vogue.” In the end, the
cover received little notoriety or criticism, unlike her
2013 Oscar appearance where she announced, via
satellite along with Jack Nicholson, the Oscar winner
for Best Picture. The Washington Post claimed that
“attendees and viewers were flabbergasted at the
satellite image of the elegantly dressed, Obama.”
Many accused her of indulging in the frivolities of
stardom and the media criticized her for playing
the role of the Hollywood starlet. An ironic jab at
Michelle, considering these publications are a part
of the same publicity machine that simultaneously
encourage this exact type of celebrity tabloid
coverage surrounding the First Lady, cataloging her
outfits and purchases down to the smallest detail.
The American people and media have cast Michelle
Obama in the role of entertainer and then condemn
her when she chooses to play along.
America has created a no-win situation for the First
Lady. Either she’s a political and intellectual radical
and “angry black woman,” or she is a fashionista
with a spending problem and an over-investment in
frivolous, undignified pursuits. In the 2009 Economist
piece by Wooldridge, he said, “I think if a first lady
were purely decorative in the 21st century, it would
actually look rather odd.” But isn’t that precisely the
position the media is attempting to cast Michelle
Obama in? The media, Obama’s fellow politicians,
even the White House itself has attempted to paint
her as this decorative, fashionable mouthpiece of
“change.” Michelle, much like Hilary before her,
is not the quiet, demure woman behind the man
that is easily silenced or brushed aside. Both are
smart, capable progressive women who seek to use
their political positions as platforms to make real
progress forward. When we limit our discussion of
women in power to their physical appearance and
choice in apparel and hairstyle, we strip them of
their authority and try to re-appropriate them as flat,
antiquated images of womanhood. We are in the
midst of a struggle to redefine the spheres females
are allowed to encompass and wield authority
within, and news sources, by proliferating these
REVOLT
Magazine Number 4, 2013 16

conservative blogger went so far as to suggest
that even if Michelle didn’t vocalize her unpatriotic
sentiments, we all know she was thinking it. In a
post on her right-wing, consistently inflammatory
blog, Schlussel wrote: “The consensus seems to be
that the First Ms. Thang is saying to hubby Barack,
"All of this for a damn flag." (She said this about the
Photo courtesy of The New Yorker.
Photo courtesy of The White House.
stereotypes, are thwarting those efforts at every
turn. Further proving this point, Wooldrige highlights
that the White House is “doing its best to turn
the first lady into a celebrity mother-cum-clotheshorse,”
emphasizing her primary role as mother and
daughter above all else. According to Wooldrige, this
is because, “Hilary Clinton’s determination to act as
a virtual co-president back in 1993 helped to create
a backlash against her husband’s administration. It
also raised uncomfortable questions about power
and accountability. Given America’s continued
neuroses about race, an outspoken black first lady
might have proved to be even more divisive than an
outspoken white one.”
It’s easier to sweep Michelle Obama’s identity as an
intelligent, informed, politicized black female under
the rug, rather than confront head-on these issues of
extreme racism and sexism. In fact, the White House
itself is encouraging this trivialization of her position
and the backwards media stereotypes surrounding
a woman’s proper role in the home. How is the rest
of America meant to be respectful of the First Lady
and honor her intellectual and political successes
when our own government can’t see beyond her role
as child and a child-bearer? The list of complaints
and grievances Michelle Obama has been charged
with, at this point, seems completely exhaustive and
all-encompassing, fully cataloguing every physical
and intellectual perceived transgression. However,
the media, unsatisfied with their endless complaints
thus far, has now moved well beyond the realm of
facts, extending their grievances to include both her
fictionalized beliefs and assumed, although unseen,
behaviors.
Usually news stories cease to exist when the subjects
stop providing material. However, The Washington
Post in a piece from September 13, 2011 proved
that nothing could stop them, when they dispensed
with all attempts at real journalism and based an
entire article around their attempt to read Michelle
Obama’s lips during a ceremony in honor of the
victims of 9/11. The article stated that as police and
firefighters folded the flag, “a skeptical looking Mrs.
Obama leans to her husband and appears to say,
‘all this just for a flag.’ She then purses her lips and
shakes her head slightly as Mr. Obama nods.” This
libelous and fictional account suggests that both
America’s President and First Lady are complicit in
both their disregard for one of our greatest national
tragedies and an iconic American symbol. Typically
in media attacks against a public or political figure,
it’s an unspoken rule, for both litigious and credibility
reasons, that publications stick to recorded audio
of public gaffes. However, in a desperate attempt to
discredit and shame the President and First Lady,
no traditional journalistic rules or integrity seem to
apply any longer. Under the Obama administration,
an insinuated attack, based off an audioless clip
and the accusations of random, unaccredited
bloggers is foundation enough for the media to
run wild with anti-American accusations. Debbie
Schlussel, a radio host, political commentator and
American flag -- you know the one brave men died
for.) Wouldn't be surprised if that's what she said
because we know she hates America and previously
said she wasn't proud of our country until Obama
had a chance to become Prez. Looks like that's what
she said, but I can't tell for sure. I would need a deaf
person or other expert lip reader to confirm. Watch
and see if you agree (like I said, even if she didn't
say exactly that, we know she's thinkin' it).”
This isn’t even the first time it’s been suggested
that Michelle, much like her husband, is thoroughly
unpatriotic and un-American. During a number of his
shows in February 2008, Sean Hannity repeatedly
distorted passages from Michelle’s 1985 Princeton
senior thesis, in which she discussed the effect of
Photo courtesy of The New Yorker.

the Black Power Movement on the attitudes of black
Princeton students during the 70s. Hannity claimed
that she herself held, “the belief that blacks must
join in solidarity to combat a white oppressor.”
Failing to note that the First Lady’s thesis goes on
to say, “One can contrast the mood of the campus
years ago and the level of attachment to Blacks to
that of the present mood on the campus [in 1985]
which is more pro-integrationist.” Hannity posed
a rhetorical question on his program, saying, “She
talked about why African-Americans joined together
at Princeton. Is race going to now be an issue for
them?" The irony of Hannity’s statement is that he
fails to see that it is precisely this type of discourse,
which programs such as his proliferate, that makes
race a serious issue for this presidency every single
day. Not because the Obamas are attempting to
push some radical Black Panther agenda, but
because they are never permitted to forget about
the color of their skin. Much of the right-wing
media’s criticism focuses around the issues of race;
whether they believe the Obama’s to be pandering
to minorities, plotting some sort of black American
revolution, accusing Obama of manipulating the
public with his “coolness” (read: blackness), or
accusing him of lying about his Kenyan origins.
Hannity couldn’t even muster support for his
conspiracy theories amongst his guests, including
Tennessee Republican Congressman Harold Ford
Jr. who replied to Hannity’s line of anti-patriotic
questioning by saying, “If we're looking back to how
spouses of presidential candidates, when they were
students in elementary and junior high and middle
and high school and even college, to determine
whether or not their husband or their spouse
is fit to be president, I think we've sunk to a new
low. Michelle Obama is a model for what anybody
would want their daughter to be. She's smart. Not
only a -- wonderfully capable and accomplished
academically, but she's an incredible mom.”
But, clearly, Michelle Obama was not always viewed
as an ideal role model and mother, certainly by
some of her husband’s right-wing constituents, but,
also, surprisingly, by some left-leaning publications.
During his first presidential campaign, The New
Yorker published a cartoon on their cover portraying
Mrs. Obama with an afro and machine gun giving
Barack a “terrorist fist jab,” implying the radical,
revolutionary Obamas had infiltrated the White
House. However, The New Yorker cover for the
March 16, 2009 issue, a mere year later, shows how
quickly Michelle’s public persona was manipulated
and transformed by the media and spun by the
White House. The 2009 cover shows her walking
the runway in three different stylish outfits. This is
the perfect illustrative example of both the media’s
attempt to mollify or domesticate the image of the
First Lady and the larger dichotomy at hand, which
women in politics must face every day. Either she is
her husband’s co-conspirator, plotting some grand,
black radical takeover of America, or she is the
consummate fashion plate who can’t be bothered
with America’s poor and disenfranchised. As a
woman in the American political limelight, you’re
afforded two possible identities, either that of an
intelligent, shrewd harpie or a vain, thoughtless
socialite. Women’s identities can be condensed
down to these rudimentary understandings, unlike
their male counterparts who are permitted to be as
complex, diverse, and often contradictory as they
like.
Michelle Obama doesn’t fit America’s racial
stereotype of what a black woman should be, so
she’s degraded and insulted and marginalized by
the media until they can find a way to make her fit
into their preconceived notions. We’ve created a
culture surrounding the White House where it’s not
only permissible to say any passing racist or sexist
remark that comes to mind, but it’s all right to gossipmonger,
speculate and fabricate whatever story or
quote is needed in order to support the argument
against a black President and First Lady who were
democratically elected into office. One can’t imagine
these types of lewd and divisive statements being
made about any former president, let alone their
wives. America may have elected their first black
President into office, but we still have an incredibly
long road towards equality, of all kinds, ahead of us.
REVOLT
Magazine Number 4, 2013 18

Gregory Hilton, Marie-Antoinette, 2012

Westbeth Artists' Housing, New York, A205 North Elevation. Arctitectural drawing courtesy of Eileen Marie Lynch Interiors.
WESTBETH
ARTISTS HOUSING
COMMUNITY
BY LENA VAZIFDAR
Westbeth Home to the Arts
Nearly every corner and hallway of Jon D’Orazio’s
studio is stacked with paintings. A series of largescale
iridescent circles on canvas in bright, almost
neon, color schemes are laid on top of each other
in rows and his walls are adorned with abstract
works he painted himself. The space, enclosed
in canvases, gives way to just enough room for a
couch and a coffee table. Jon has lived within the
walls of Manhattan’s Westbeth Home to the Arts
since its opening in 1970.
When it opened its doors nearly 43 years ago
as affordable housing for artists, the area of
Manhattan’s West Village on Bethune and
Washington streets was desolate. Now, posh
mothers and fathers with strollers take long
walks through its tree-lined boulevards. Designer
boutiques and coffee shops selling $5 lattes, pop
up one after the other next to quaint wine bars.
It’s easily one of the most coveted and expensive
areas of Manhattan to reside and Jon has been
there observing its transformation; watching it
go from one phase to the next slowly gentrifying
on every street corner over decades. When Jon
moved in, as a fresh-faced twenty something,
the Westside highway’s piers, which now boast
manicured lawns and bike trails, were just pier
after pier with miles of corrugated metal.
REVOLT
Magazine Number 4, 2013
“It was basically still a dead zone,” said Jon. “The
meat market was active just north of here and it
was scary. You didn’t want to walk around at night.
Washington street, which is really active now,
didn’t have any streetlights, and at night it was just
darkness.”
The meat market Jon speaks of is now the Meat
Packing District, a glitzy area for stiletto wearing
Manhattanites ready for champagne sipping at The
Standard Hotel or The Gansevoort and shopping at
Alexander McQueen and Diane Von Furstenberg.
The Highline, Manhattan’s architectural gem and
over ground park now intersects the area which
was once just meat factories and barren concrete.
There’s hardly a remnant of what it once was.
Westbeth’s building takes up the entire city block.
It used to be home to Bell Laboratories before
it was purchased to become affordable housing
for artists. Bell laboratories was the historic site
where the first talking movie and TV broadcast
was produced. With funding spearheaded by Joan
Davidson of the J.M. Kaplan Foundation and Roger
Stevens of the National Endowment of the Arts,
Westbeth was born.
Richard Meier was commissioned to renovate the
former Bell Laboratories in 1967, before he was
the Richard Meier that many know as the architect
behind large scale modern beauties like the Getty
Center in Los Angeles and the Barcelona Museum
of Contemporary Art. He went on to win the Pritzker
Prize in 1984, which is one of the highest honors
in the field. Meier said in an interview with the
Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation
that the idea of the live/work space was highly
unsual at the time of Westbeth’s creation. New
York City building code did not permit working
and living in the same space and so they had to
change the zoning in order to create something
that never existed before. The building code also
had to be changed to allow for working and living in
the same space.
Architect Richard Kaplan was a friend of Meier’s
and asked him to go with him to meet his father,
Jack Kaplan, as well as Roger Stevens, who was
head of the National Endowment of the Arts.
They walked through the buildings of the Bell
laboratories together to talk about ideas for the
site. Meier quickly became the man behind the
creation and it now stands as a testament to
his early work as well as a historic monument in
New York City. Westbeth was recently put under
consideration to become a landmark under NYC
Landmark laws and it has already been nominated
to the State Registrar of Historic Places and to the
National Registrar of historic Places.
Joan Davidson was also a major player in the
creation of Westbeth. Her father Jack Kaplan
turned the project over to her and it was
20

subsequently her job to plan, organize and run
the project during its beginnings with the help of
developer Dixon Bain.
Now, there are 384-live work spaces filled with
artists from every disciple. There are painters
like Jon and there are writers, playwrights, poets
and sculptors. At one time, photographer Diane
Arbus—known for her black and white photographs
of marginal individuals such as dwarfs, giants and
circus folk—lived there. She committed suicide in
1971 after only a year of residence.
Westbeth’s popularity among artists has been so
high that they closed their residential waiting list
in 2007. Those already on it are looking at a 10-15
year wait to get through. Many artists, who move in,
never move on it seems, leaving less and less room
for younger artists to come in. Jon stays because
he can afford to live in Manhattan in one of its
most coveted areas, not an easy feat for most.
“Today artists can’t afford to live in New York,” said
Jon. “I stay here because I can afford it.”
Steve Neil, the chief executive of Westbeth Corp,
the company that owns Westbeth, said that rent
ranges currently run from $750 -1600 a month
depending on the apartment size. For $750 a
month, artists can live in a studio or a one bedroom
which runs a little more than 400 sq feet—a price
unheard of for nearly anywhere in Manhattan; even
in other, seemingly cheaper boroughs like Brooklyn
and far out in Queens or The Bronx. In the same
neighborhood a studio can easily go for $3,000
a month and that’s on the “reasonable” side of
things.
There’s also units with multiple bedrooms for
families and couples and 77 units reserved for
those under the federal section 8 program. Under
the program, residents pay 30 percent of their
household income and the federal government
makes up for the rest.
To even be considered to live at Westbeth there are
both financial and personal criteria that one must
pass. A family of four would have to be making
between $65,000-75,000 a year, said Steve, and
they have to prove they are working as an artist full
time.
The waiting process is a difficult one and the
turnover isn’t high with residents like Jon and his
counterparts deciding to stay put long-term. Painter
Joan Roberts Garcia has been living in the building
since 2000 and was on the wait list for eight years
before being accepted to Westbeth. She came via
New Mexico with two children in tow.
“It was really tough because for those 8 years I
had to prove that we of a family of 3 were living
off less than $40,000 a year,” said Joan. “And in
Manhattan that is extremely difficult.”
Now Joan lives in a light-filled three-bedroom
apartment with her very own studio not far from
Jon’s abode.
“I have been very fortunate, I’ve only been without
a studio for about 5 months in the last 30 years,”
said Joan. “I feel very fortunate to be here. I am
more and more grateful.
”Even though she has lived at Westbeth for 13
years she says she still feels like a newcomer.
Many who started in its early days, have myriad
stories to tell about the landscape of change
they’ve seen over the years.
Filmmaker Edith Stephen is a veteran of the
community and has lived at Westbeth for 40 years.
Her documentary Split Scream documents the
bohemian life she has seen living inside the artist
residence.
“My experience at Westbeth has been an exciting
experience, very much like the world. At the time
we came in, Greenwich Village was flourishing,”
she said. “We had a real bohemian life …But
since then, the world has changed. We have lost
Greenwich Village, since it has been gentrified.”
Edith expresses the changes she has seen in its
residents and how the sense of community has
decreased. She laments that its bygone era might
have been its heyday.
“When I opened up my door years ago, the hallway
was filled with people, arguing, discussing, and
talking as a community,” she said. “Today when
I open my door, there’s nobody in the hallway.
People have their doors closed and there are hardly
any names on the doors. And if you email them,
you’ll find that their email consists of numbers,
letters, and no names.
“In its recent history, Westbeth has opened its
doors with art exhibits in its in-house gallery as well
as music and dance festivals and concerts.
“In the last decade Westbeth has developed more
and more as an artists community and also is
offering a lot to the larger New York City community
in exhibitions, music and dance festivals and
concerts. I envision that Westbeth will continue to
grow as a viable arts community.” said resident
Francia Tobacman Smith.
Francia is a painter and Linoleum Reduction
Printmaker who has been a long time resident
along with her husband, musician Bruce Smith.
She believes the best part about living at Westbeth
is living within a community with other artists that
understand each other.
“The special part of being at Westbeth is that
you never feel odd or strange about being an
artist having your values, ” she said. “Other artists
understand that at times, you have had to make
sacrifices for being a working artist and what that
means in your life.
”Over its forty-year existence, the area has changed
drastically, but Westbeth has maintained its artistic
and bohemian spirit and remains a vessel in
time. One can almost envision the hallways where
Diane Arbus once walked. Some of the residents
remember her. They’ve lived through it all. It always
has been a place solely for artists, and is still to
this day, the world’s biggest artist residence. That
ideology has never changed, even as the tenants
have. Edith adds, “The most interesting thing about
Westbeth is the experience of living a bohemian
life, with kindred spirits.”
Westbeth Artists' Housing, New York, 1st Floor Plan A1. Architectural drawing courtesy of Eileen Marie Lynch Interiors.

Westbeth
PHOTOS BY SCOTTO MYCKLEBUST
Westbeth Artists' Housing, New York, 55 Bethune St. entrance, Westbeth Gallery, Revolt Magazine interviews long time Westbeth's resident artist Jon D'Orazio, Exterior street veiw of Westbeth,
Bank St., Pages of Westbeth News magazine published in April 1970 with list of the first resident artists, partial list; painters, photographers and playwrights.
REVOLT
Magazine Number 4, 2013

Artists' Housing
Westbeth Artists' Housing resident's hallway, Westbeth artist writer Helen Duberstein in her library, Richard Meier's Westbeth interior courtyard, Revolt Magazine contributing writer Lena Vazifdar
interviews Westbeth artist Joan Robert Garcia in her Westbeth studio, Interior view of an artist's residents, Westbeth building exterior logo signage.

Art &
Politics:Fracking
Drawingtheline
BY LINDA DIGUSTA
Alice Zinnes is a force of nature. An environmental
activist in the movement to halt the use of the
controversial natural gas extraction process
called hydraulic fracturing (often referred to as
“fracking”), for the past few years she has worked
at least 30 hours each week on activities related
to her cause. Her dedication would be remarkable
even if she had not already devoted herself to
another demanding calling – art.
A lifelong environmentalist -- “At least since second
grade when a NYC drought was so upsetting to me
that I would turn off the running water while my
mom washed the dishes.” -- in high school Zinnes
headed the Ecology Club, which started a recycling
program in the community. She applied to college
intending to major in environmental science, but
while in school, she fell in love with painting.
Now an artist and teacher at Pratt Institute, Alice
became aware of hydraulic fracturing when drilling
was proposed near her Pennsylvania home in the
Upper Delaware River Basin. “At first,” she said,
“I couldn't believe they would frack the Delaware
River, since it supplies drinking water to 16 million
people.”
Viewing Josh Fox’s documentary “Gasland” raised
her awareness, and her involvement deepened
when she organized an art benefit for Damascus
Citizens for Sustainability, the grassroots
organization that Gasland is dedicated to and
one of the first on the East Coast to publicize the
dangers of fracking. She recalls, “I then created
what I thought would be a small email list for
residents of the Upper Delaware, as a way to
quickly disseminate information, but through
word-of-mouth, this list pretty quickly went viral,
connecting people from upstate NY to Louisiana, to
Texas and Ohio.”
“As I became relied upon by others, I simply
accepted my new responsibilities,” said Zinnes,
who sends multiple emails almost daily to the
group. “Some of these people I actually see, while
others live all over the country... I've been surprised
at the powerful community we have become. I feel
we are like soldiers in a platoon: loyal, supportive,
understanding, and dependent on each other for
our very survival.”
REVOLT
Magazine Number 4, 2013
Behind every issue confronting us as citizens,
there are people working hard to raise awareness
and support for their causes. In the case of the
groundswell against the practice of hydraulic
fracturing, the vanguard includes names we
all already know, like Yoko Ono, Mark Ruffalo,
and “Gasland” filmmaker Fox, who garnered an
Academy Award nomination for best documentary
feature.
Also on the front lines are those most directly
impacted by the drilling, working constantly to
get the word out in the hope that others will learn
more and take a stand when they realize that
fracking, in the long run, affects everyone. “Getting
involved is an ongoing journey with numerous
conversations, reading about environmental and
health issues, studying reports about geology
and financial aspects, and getting to know an
impressive, knowledgeable community of people
who are working to protect rights for a clean
planet,” said another anti-fracking artist/organizer,
Ruth Hardinger. “The first event I organized was a
talk upstate in January 2010. Wes Gillingham from
Catskill Mountainkeeper drove through a blizzard to
speak about the impacts of fracking.”
To bring awareness to a wider audience and
mobilize more artists, Zinnes, Hardinger, and artist
Peggy Cyphers curated the 2010-2011 exhibition
“Fracking: Art & Activism Against the Drill” at Exit
Art in Manhattan. Working with the Exit Art staff,
they put together a group exhibition featuring work
addressing the issue by 60 artists. The program
also included a talk with a panel of leading figures
in the movement, attended by over 300 people in
spite of another blizzard. Many attendees of the
event went on to become important players in the
“fractivist” movement.
“Fracking became an important issue for me about
7 years ago, when I was traveling in Peru, and
learned about mineral rights and the government's
claim to any resources immediately below the
surface of the earth,” said Christy Rupp, an artist
who participated in both the show and the panel.
“Even if it was just a few inches under a farmer's
field, if oil or gas or rare earth metals were
discovered, the rights to extract are owned by the
government.”
Noticing a parallel threat to communities here,
Rupp, as she describes below, explored the issue
further:
“Wishing to connect the dots, I started to learn
more about the 30 year ongoing oil spill in the
Ecuadorean Amazon, in which since the 70's
Texaco, and then Chevron were dumping formation
water the (waste product from oil drilling) directly
into shallow surface ponds, which then would leach
out … entering people's farmland, their homes,
their wells. The government of Ecuador's response
was to cater to the oil companies lethal habits,
giving them more lucrative drilling contracts in the
Amazon region, and using the waste to spread
on roads to keep down the dust created by the
heavy traffic needed to support drilling. People
in that region suffer birth defects, cancers and
miscarriages at a rate far higher than normal. The
government wants to either ignore the problem or
just condemn the area and force people to leave,
the problem can't be cleaned up with money.”
After visiting areas of West Virginia devastated by
coal mining, Rupp is hoping to bring the message
home before it is too late. “Fracking,” she explains,
“Like Tar Sands, oil drilling and coal, takes the
land people have used historically for sustenance
and sacrifices entire regions.” As she sees it, the
practice generates massive profits for a very few
individuals at the expense of many, and “We are
witness to a land grab, or a transferring of wealth,
similar to the banking crisis, the looting of the Post
Office, or the desire to privatize social security.”
Peggy Cyphers, another life-long activist, is also
intent on drawing the line on hydraulic fracturing,
at least where she lives. “The anti-fracking
movement has been taking on big money and
big business, and many networks of grassroots
activists are fighting back…My sister Jane Cyphers
and her husband Joe Levine are founding members
of Damascus Citizens for Sustainability and got
me involved,” she said. “The best part of New
York State is that we have the watershed, so the
discussion is huge and in a way it keeps us safe.
Not so for Pennsylvania and Ohio, that's a done
deal as every landowner is selling out.”
A ceramic artist and creator of the aptly named
Earthgirl Pottery, Jill Wiener is a Calicoon, NY
26

Christy Rupp, Flood Plane - Food Plan, detail, cut paper collage, 2010 16 X 24". Photo courtesy of the artist.
resident who also hopes her state is a tougher
target for the gas industry. “I got involved in the
anti-fracking movement in 2008 when I first heard
about it from a friend another potter, in our local
supermarket,” said Jill. “I immediately thought,
what a harebrained scheme, and that we -- New
York -- were much too smart to fall for this.”
Despite their energy and dedication these activists
seem to be standing against Goliath. Volunteers
from all walks of life, they speak and stand against
the pricey PR machines of mega-corporations who,
touting jobs and US sourced energy, play to the
public’s hopes and fears in this age of uncertainty.
Additionally, since CO2 emissions burning natural
gas to generate electricity are about one half of
what is produced when coal is used, gas can be
seen as a solution to reduce environmental impact
while solar and wind power are developed for
widespread use. 1
Why all the concern? The projected environmental
ameliorations from extended gas drilling described
above depend on price and profit considerations
for the industry to be interested in making them
a reality. Its willingness to voluntarily invest these
profits in maintaining high standards is also
necessary -- without it the potential collateral
damage is far worse than that caused by coal. In
other words, we would all need to trust the energy
corporations to do the right thing.
Already, there has been considerable consternation
expressed by the scientific and local communities
about the lack of disclosure by the industry of
just what chemicals are being used. The refusal
of those in control, including government and the
courts, to allow Americans to determine whether or
not the substances they are being exposed to are
acceptable for them is most notoriously exemplified
by the 2005 exemption for these corporations
from the Safe Drinking Water Act, dubbed the
“Halliburton Loophole.” 2
Still another consideration is the toxic health
hazard posed by radon gas, which is produced
when natural gas is consumed. Radon, present in
very high amounts in the Marcellus Sale deposits
that the industry has slated for hydraulic fracturing,
is carcinogenic and remains where the gas is burnt
as fuel, degrading first into polonium, then lead.
As communities experience effects of the
practice, consequences such as tainted
drinking water, illness in humans and animals,
harassment of residents by drilling operation
employees, radioactivity, and increased seismicity
(earthquakes) have been reported. Potential
environmental benefits are offset not only by
present damage to the ecosystem from the drilling
itself and the expansion of road traffic and water
use that it demands, but also by the likelihood that
a profitable boom in gas to fill today’s needs will
only serve to delay investment in moving towards
the truly carbon-free options that are essential to
the health of the planet in the longer term.
Where one might expect government regulators
to intervene and demand that there is sound
science behind the claims in favor of fracking
andincreased use of natural gas, grassroots
activists are picking up the slack. Ruth Hardinger
and her friend Becca Smith decided to raise funds
for a pipeline emission study in New York City.
“Two reports on this study were just released to
the press. These highly important studies, using
the most advanced technology, present empirical
evidence that current steps of continuing and
increasing natural gas use would only accelerate
climate change,” Ruth said. “In other words, if
the US spends close to 1 trillion dollars in the
development of natural gas as planned, the effects
of climate change will only be accelerated.”
While everyone involved in the movement has
signed and distributed a seemingly endless stream
of letters and petitions to governors, mayors, and
agencies, one artist -- Jill Wiener -- took it upon
herself to take the fight to the next level, running
unsuccessfully for town council on the Democratic
and Rural Heritage Party lines in 2011. In an
interview at the time, she explained “I live in the
country on 60 acres with a beautiful spring-fed
pond. I’m a potter. I grow chemical-free flowers.
I depend on my clean water for everything. It
[fracking] is not proven to be safe, and I’d never
inflict this on the land I call home or on my
neighbors or community. We have people running
for office all over the shale. [the Marcellus Shale
is the geological formation rich in natural gas] I’m
running for town council because my councilman
supports it. I didn’t want to do this—I wanted to sit
in my barn and make pots.” 3

Christy Rupp, Cut & Run, detail, cut paper collage, 2010 16 X 24". Photo courtesy of the artist.
Wiener’s last comment brings us back to the fact
that the tireless activists featured in this article
are all artists, and the time and energy they
expend to fight fracking has to have an impact on
their creativity and careers. “In fact, my activism
interferes with my getting much studio time,” Jill,
who works with the all-volunteer organization
Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy, said. “I do try to
make sure that when I am in the studio I leave
the fracking at the door, but really just outside the
door. I try to not have the two intersect. My art is
happy, fracking, not so much.”
“For a few years I spent 5-6 hours per day on
fracking-related activities, and slept almost not at
all...I painted very little,” said Alice Zinnes. “The
summer when the grandfathered test wells were
drilled near my home, I was at the drill site a few
times a day, photographing activities, etc. I'm
now trying to become a painter again… My whole
exhibition career has been put on hold -- except
that I've shown a few times in fracking-related
shows. But since my own work really isn't political,
going the avenue of exhibiting in environmentallygeared
shows isn't an option for me.”
Ruth Hardinger’s creative experience is different.
“My work is essentially in abstraction and process
has always been sourced by a reference to
something I found important,” she says. In recent
years, she has created a series titled “Normal
Faults and Pathways,” inspired by geological
studies of the migration of the fluids used in
hydraulic fracturing, triggered by the underground
detonation of explosives. The works consist of
parts that disconnect and reconnect. Despite this,
her involvement still takes its toll, in her words:
“The kind of time I put into this is holding me back
from other aspects of my life that are precious to
me: my family and my art, my business work and
ability to relax, exercise, play. I have lost income
because of the time this takes.”
Has it been worth it? Alice weighed in on the
upside, too: “Though my involvement with fracking
has taken hours – sometimes whole days – away
from my studio, in many ways, I feel it has brought
a greater depth to my painting, and my life in
general. I have met some truly wonderful people
in this movement, and feel empowered by the
passions we all share -- in the end I would not
choose to have done my last few years differently.”
REVOLT
Magazine Number 4, 2013
In terms of consequences dealt out by those with
opposing interests and views on fracking, Zinnes
told us she has reason to believe that she, along
with other activists including actor Mark Ruffalo,
were placed on a watch list by Pennsylvania
Homeland Security. “Just about everyone involved
in the anti-fracking movement was on it,” she said.
“I'm being followed by the gas industry on Twitter,
which is creepy. Josh Fox's trailer was burned down
while he was out of town… All the local government
officials have signed leases, so no one would
investigate this incident very far.”
“I’ve had some intense conversations with ‘profrackers’
and we probably won’t be their close
friends!” says Ruth Hardinger. “Nobody has
threatened me. I’ve heard of that in other states…
there are some totally horrific events, for example
in Dimock, PA, where those whose water was
contaminated could not receive water buffalos
because other pro-frackers in the town opposed
their receiving clean water.”
There is some reason for the anti-fracking forces
to be hopeful, such as delays in green-lighting
the process, at least for the time being. In March,
Pennsylvania Representative Matthew Cartwright
(D) introduced legislation to remove oil and gas
industry exemptions from the federal Clean Air
Act and the Clean Water Act, which, if passed,
will include closing the “Halliburton Loophole.” 4
Even filmmaker Josh Fox has stayed the course in
the wake of Oscar notoriety, and “Gasland II” was
released at this Spring’s Tribeca Film Festival.
For Peggy Cyphers, her dual commitments to
art and nature will collaborate this year. “I am
heading out to the Prairie in Iowa, to Grin City
Collective Residency, and will be working on a
new piece about the preservation of our last 1%
of magnificent Prairie,” she told us. This year’s
projects also include a site-specific installation on
the Calvert Cliffs of the Chesapeake Bay, using
washed-up artifacts to create bird habitats to hang
from the cliffs. Cyphers looks forward to working
out of doors and, as she likes to say, “Responding
to the call of our amazingly beautiful Planet!"
Christy Rupp sees lessons to be learned. “As
a nation, we don't need the cheap energy, we
need a plan for the future. That best use plan is
agriculture, and small business, not the evacuation
of rural areas that are vulnerable to lax zoning
laws,” she told us. “We need to cut the addiction
to cheap fuel which only makes us crave more. We
need a plan for renewable energy that works locally
as well as globally.”
“My hope is that the world will get off fossil fuels
before all life is completely wiped out. My fears
are that we will not make necessary changes in
time,” Alice Zinnes told us. “I'm now spending my
time equally against fracking and for sustainable
solutions… Partly, fracking is so depressing that
I need something else to bring me back up, and
partly I realize I need answers to this horrendous
problem... I am afraid we will have famine, storms,
droughts, war and revolutions globally and
nationally. Right now I'm wondering whether I'll
live my natural life span, and I doubt it. I'm afraid
today's kids will not.”
Ruth Hardinger hopes that “My work will contribute
to halting this insane technology for cities, states
and at the federal levels, to changing perspectives,
so as not use this energy which is destroying
and will destroy so, so much.” Keeping the
dialogue going while building bridges to the art
community, in collaboration with Sideshow Gallery
in Williamsburg, she is presenting and moderating
the panel series “Culture Trashes Nature,” in
which experts, activists and artists -- guests have
included artists Aviva Rahmani and Lillian Ball,
writer Jonathan Goodman and scientist Frank
Gallagher--come together to discuss how the way
we live impacts the environment, as well as what
can and is being done to counteract the damage
and prevent future harm to the world we all share.
1. “Fracking’s Future,” Michael B. McElroy and Xi Lu, Harvard
Magazine, January-February 2013 http://harvardmagazine.
com/2013/01/frackings-future
2. “Fracking Halliburton,” Kate Sheppard, Mother Jones/Blue
Marble, November 10, 2010 http://www.motherjones.com/
blue-marble/2010/11/halliburton-fracking-epa
3. “Fracked to Pieces,” Melinda Tuhus, E – The Environmental
Magazine, November 1, 2011 http://www.emagazine.com/
magazine/fracked-to-pieces
4. “Federal Legislation Aims to Close ‘Fracking Loopholes,’”
Susan Phillips, State Impact Pennsylvania, March 14, 2014
http://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2013/03/14/
federal-legislation-aims-to-close-fracking-loopholes
28

THE
CINEMA
VIEW
LOST IN WHEAT: Terrence Malick's
To The Wonder
BY DAN CALLAHAN
Video still, Terrence Malick's To The Wonder.
For both audiences and critics, Terrence
Malick has increasingly become a
point of controversy and contention.
“Badlands” (1973), his feature debut,
was acclaimed by most as an instant
classic about criminal love and
sociopathy, but his follow-up, “Days
of Heaven” (1978), was met with a more mixed
response. Some thought that that movie leaned far
too heavily on the merely pictorial beauty of Néstor
Almendros’s cinematography.
Malick withdrew from filmmaking for twenty
years, a leave of absence that has yet to be
fully explained. His comeback, “The Thin Red
Line” (1998), was met with both respect and
bewilderment due to its consistent staring at grass
waving in the wind, a visual pre-occupation that
came at the expense of the people on screen. We
only had to wait seven years for Malick’s next film,
“The New World” (2005), and that movie was the
site of an epic online battle between two critical
heavyweights: Matt Zoller Seitz, who defended the
movie as if it were a girl he was passionately in love
with, and Dave Kehr, who dismissed it with clinical
and well-earned authority.
Six years passed before Malick’s “The Tree of Life”
(2011). This has been one of the most divisive
of modern movies, championed by a small group
of supporters as a masterpiece on childhood
and grief but rejected in furious terms by Kehr, J.
Hoberman, Jonathan Rosenbaum and many other
of our finest film critics. “The Tree of Life” has been
taken apart limb from limb by Kehr and Hoberman,
both of whom expressed outright loathing for the
film’s flowing editing style, which Kehr judged the
result of a director who had shot miles of footage
and who could not be bothered to make firmer
decisions about structure and visual composition.
Many of these critics (not to mention generally
confused audience members), looked askance at
the film’s religious and spiritual yearning, which
was often categorized as lightweight New Age
malarkey.
“The Tree of Life” is the greatest American film I
have seen since David Lynch’s “Mulholland Dr.” in
2001. And so it is with a heavy heart that I must
now turn to Malick’s new film, “To The Wonder,”
a movie released practically right after “The Tree
of Life” if we are to compare his work rate to what
it has usually been in the past. Most alarmingly,
IMDb lists a further three films Malick has shot,
all in post-production! What is going on here? Why
is Malick suddenly so inspired to work and shoot
at such a rate? Since he does no interviews or
publicity, only rumor and hearsay can supply any
motive for this surge of creative energy. It might be
up to a later biographer to figure out just what goes
on with Malick, and this is sure to be a difficult
job, even if “The Tree of Life” seems like one of the
most autobiographical of films.
“To The Wonder,” alas, seems to me guilty of every
one of the faults Malick’s critics decried in “The
Tree of Life” and his past work, and a lot more
besides. It plays, in fact, like a parody of a Malick
film, all quivering wheat and whispery voice-over
and vague reaching for enlightenment. The film
centers on Marina (Olga Kurylenko), a Ukrainian
woman who moves to Oklahoma to continue her
love affair with Neil (Ben Affleck), a man involved
in some kind of environmental chicanery. Nestled
within the movie is another storyline about how
Neil takes up with a childhood friend, Jane (Rachel
McAdams), and has an affair with her.
Marina and Jane might as well be the same
woman as far as Malick’s camera is concerned.
Kurylenko looks and behaves like a fashion
model, and there are interminable shots of her
ecstatically throwing her arms around various
exteriors and interiors, until we get the sense that
Kurylenko hasn’t the foggiest notion what she is
supposed to be portraying. She’s just trying to
move in an interesting way for her director, who
seems entranced with her, but that entrancement
is a dead end. Malick views All-American blond
McAdams in exactly the same way, asking her to
roll around in the dirt, roll around in the grass and
be at one, presumably, with nature. Affleck is much
like Richard Gere in "Days of Heaven", a smarmy
model who also seems to have no idea what he’s
supposed to be doing. On the edges of the story
are people who do not look like movie stars, many
of whom are afflicted with impairments or diseases
of some kind, and Malick’s brief fetishization of
their difference in contrast to his tediously pretty
lead actors is borderline offensive.
The case for and against Terrence Malick is far
from finished. Maybe one of his next three films
will be another “Badlands” or “Tree of Life.” But
this new work, which might be dubbed “To The
Blunder,” seems to underline the value for him of
taking his time.

THE
LITERARY
VIEW
Skyscraper Blues:
Federico Garcia Lorca's Poet in New York
BY DAN CALLAHAN
Photos courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
House of Bernarda Alba” and “Blood Wedding,” the
Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca first came to
prominence as a poet. His poetry collection “Gypsy
Ballads,” published in 1928, was warmly received
both in Spain and abroad, but Lorca bridled against
being typecast. “The gypsies are a theme,” he
wrote. “And nothing more. I could just as well be a
poet of sewing needles or hydraulic landscapes.” In
June of 1929, Lorca sailed for America, where he
would stay in New York as a student at Columbia
University. During his New York visit, he visited
Harlem, saw the Stock Market crash, and wrote a
book of poems, “Poet in New York,” which would
the verse about Wall Street, where such negativity
might be expected. His poem about a visit to
Coney Island is called “Landscape of a Vomiting
Multitude.” This is what he sees in a poem called
“Dawn”:
Dawn in New York has
four columns of mire
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in the putrid waters
Dawn in New York groans
On enormous fire escapes
searching between the angles
for spikenards of drafted anguish
his rather strange and conflicted “Ode to Walt
Whitman,” which is less of an ode to Whitman and
more of an anguished plea for some kind of selfunderstanding.
Many of the drawings by Lorca that preface some
of these poems are delightful, but a lecture he
gave on his New York stay, which is included here,
feels almost comically at odds with the much
more cheery version of his trip that he gives to his
Lorca, who was homosexual, was very close to
Salvador Dali, so intensely involved, in fact, that
Dali finally had to distance himself from the older
poet’s ardor. Luis Buñuel took a dim view of Lorca,
and Lorca himself felt that Buñuel’s joint film with
Dali, “Un Chien Andalou” (1928), was an attack on
his person. “Buñuel has made a little shit of a film
called ‘An Andalusian Dog,’ and the ‘Andalusian
dog’ is me,” Lorca told his friend Ángel del Río. The
influence of Dali’s surrealism on Lorca’s poetry in
“Poet in New York” is clear, and the results can be
felicitous. These poems are filled with unexpected
combinations of descriptive words and images:
only be published after his murder in 1936 at the
hands of a Nationalist militia in Spain.
“Poet in New York” was first put out in 1939 and
1940 in Britain and the US. It has seen several
translations since, and now this very handsome
new bilingual edition from Farrar, Straus and
Giroux that also includes some newly translated
letters that Lorca wrote to his family. “Poet in New
York” has not always had a positive press. It was
thought anti-American by some when it was first
published, and it remains a very thorny, almost
wholly ambivalent work. Many of the poems do
look at Manhattan in a negative way, and not just
If it isn’t the birds
covered with ash
if it isn’t the sobbing that strikes the windows of
the wedding
it is the delicate creatures of the air
that spill fresh blood in the inextinguishable
darkness
I love the combination of “inextinguishable” with
“darkness,” and I love when Lorca references
the “blue horse of my insanity.” So many of these
images have a dreamlike rightness to them. That
isn’t always the case when he tries to make a
naïve but heartfelt plea for African Americans
in “Standards and Paradise of the Blacks,” or
mother in his letters home. Lorca was an artist who
was always being violently torn between thoughts,
emotions and positions, and this violence
sometimes resulted in the hand-in-glove beauty
of some of his poems and his great plays and
sometimes led to some of the work in this book,
which is a bit like hearing someone hit a piano hard
to make a lot of discordant sound. “I badly want
to communicate with you,” Lorca says in his New
York lecture. “Not to give you honey (I have none)
but sand or hemlock or salt water. Hand-to-hand
fighting, and it does not matter if I am defeated.”
REVOLT
Magazine Number 4, 2013
30

THE
LITERARY
VIEW
Cherchez la femme:
James Salter's All That Is
BY DAN CALLAHAN
Very few living American writers can be said to
have been influenced by Ernest Hemingway, but 87
year-old James Salter wears that laconic style like a
badge of honor. Compared to contemporaries like
John Updike, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer or Philip
Roth, he has written comparatively few novels and
has not yet won a wide readership. Salter’s two
masterpieces, “A Sport and a Pastime” (1967) and
“Light Years” (1975), met with little understanding
when they were first published, but they will surely
survive long after more lauded novels of that time
have faded away. Every sentence in Salter’s work is
a discrete and burnished object, lovingly screwed
into place for maximum impact yet also cryptic and
elusive. His oblique way of writing, which he has
perfected over many years practice, has allowed
him to create some of the most evocative literary
sex scenes of all time.
Salter’s new novel, “All That Is,” is studded with
sex scenes, lofty descriptions that exalt sex as a
be-all and endall
of life, and
this attitude
is not without
its disturbing
implications.
His narrative
voice is a mix
of tough guy
and dandy,
man’s man and
unrepentant
hedonist; he’s
like a tour guide
of pleasure,
letting his
loose narrative wander into minutely considered
digressions on favored writers, succulent meals
or the very fine cut of a suit. Salter’s cloudiness
mirrors that of his novel’s protagonist, Philip
Bowman, a literary man, a man of the world and a
gentleman of publishing who learns notably little
throughout his long life.
The book opens with a foreboding chapter which
briefly details Bowman’s experience in the navy
during World War II, twelve pages that take in
memories of some of his crewmates and a girl
from this war period, Vicky Hollins, who sounds
like a Howard Hawks heroine: “Vicky Hollins in
her silk dress, the glances clinging to her as she
passed. In heels she wasn’t that short. She liked
to call herself by her last name. It’s Hollins, she
would announce on the phone.” Just four short
sentences, and you can see and hear Vicky Hollins,
this 1940s dream girl; though she is never seen or
heard of again in the novel, she is its talisman, its
goal, the woman that Philip Bowman will look for all
his life. Moving from the beauty of women, Salter
sketches the enormous brutality of war in a single
paragraph, describing what happens to the men on
a sinking ship as most of them get sucked into a
whirlpool and drown. In the clear-eyed yet stunned
way that Salter tells it, even this nightmarish scene
has a kind of remembered grandeur.
“All That Is” goes on to describe Bowman’s
encounters with women throughout his life. He
falls in love with the upper class blond Vivian and
imagines a life with her: “He saw himself tumbled
with her among the bedclothes and fragrance
of married life, the meals and holidays of it, the
shared rooms, the glimpses of her half-dressed,
her blondness, the pale hair where her legs met,
the sexual riches that would be there forever.” The
adolescent-minded Bowman, however, does not
realize that Vivian is a limited girl who is totally
unsuitable to the life he wants her to lead in New
York—she leaves him after a time and he can’t
understand why.
Bowman then goes on to several affairs, usually
with married women, and Salter describes with
relish the enraptured beginnings of these affairs as
well as the amours of Bowman’s colleague Eddins.
The imagery this writer uses to describe the sex his
people have is sometimes so sumptuously apt that
it doesn’t make you horny so much as it makes
you want to stand up and applaud him. Here is
how Salter describes Eddins being fellated by his
future wife Dena: “It was like a boot just slipped
onto a full calf and she went on doing it, gaining
assurance, her mouth making only a faint sound.”
And then later on: “Her buttocks were glorious, it
was like being in a bakery, and when she cried out
it was like a dying woman, one that had crawled to
a shrine.” Here is Salter’s description of Bowman
with his juicy English lover Enid Armour: “He
gathered and went in slowly, sinking like a ship, a
little cry escaping her, the cry of a hare, as it went
to the hilt.” That phrase “sinking like a ship” reads
ominously after the actual ship sinking in the first
chapter—though the experience of World War II
is sketched in only a few pages at the beginning
of this book, it seems to drive all of the behavior
of the men here who had served and somehow
come through, which serves as another link to
Hemingway’s work.
“All That Is” is tricky to read when it comes to how
it portrays its women. It’s hard to tell, sometimes,
if they are being seen only from Bowman’s point
of view or if they represent how Salter himself
sees them. The female characters in this book are
looked on as enigmatic sexual baubles, lovely to
physically possess while they are still attractive
but sadly on the shelf as they age (the fate of an
older Enid Armour after she loses her looks is laid
out in a chilling page and a half set in a restaurant
where she drinks too much and makes a fool of
herself). The women in “All That Is” have no life of
their own unrelated to men, and you can say that
that is Bowman’s problem but it is also a problem
in the book itself. Salter sees so many things so
clearly, from a distance, but he is too buttoned-up
and traditional to try to imagine anything from deep
inside a woman’s point of view.
“All That Is” is a novel filled to brimming with
piercing little vignettes of isolated people, both
men and women, and it is Salter’s rare talent that
he only needs a line or two, sometimes, to make a
person come to life with dawning clarity. If there is
any writer he resembles, finally, it is not Hemingway
or the macho cohort that came after him but
Isak Dinesen, a woman who made an art out of
nostalgia. Like her, Salter sees everything through
a glass darkly, and what he shows us is troubling
but mouthwateringly sensual and essential.

THEATREVIEW
Theatre for the Person:
BY ADAM LATEN WILLSON
Two Perspectives
Special Thanks to Reka Polonyi and Adam Belvo
I have always seen theatre as a ne plus ultra of
the arts – by melding together literary, visual,
locomotive, and phonetic elements, it serves as a
vanguard for all of the disparate forms of artistic
expression. But until 2009, my relationship with
theatre had only been in the abstract. I had rarely
ever performed and when I had, it was more for the
sheer devil-may-care fun of it.
In 2009, I became an official member of Aztec
Economy (www.newyorkisdead.net), a Brooklynbased
underground theatre company that
specializes in lyrical studies of human psychology
and crisis. Since then, having contributed to over
15 productions in varying capacities, I have grown
to think of theatre as a serious and evocative art
form, and have acquired firmer ideas about what
theatre is capable of. Aztec’s plays are abnormal:
some of them more like poems or dramatic
experiments, almost always unconventionally
staged and feverishly scripted. We have performed
in a variety of unexpected venues – once on the
deck of a docked steamship, another time in the
attic of a New Orleans karate dojo. We have toured
frequently, participated in prestigious festivals
such as the Ice Factory, but also produced small
Brooklyn events in backyards. In a word, we
are always on the lookout for new and gripping
challenges for ourselves and for our audiences,
and we attach ourselves to each project with
unflagging adrenaline and dedication.
Truth be told, however, because I have mostly
collaborated with this one group, my understanding
of the possibilities of theatre is still very limited.
Recently, I had the fortune of meeting Reka
Polonyi, a highly spirited social theatre practitioner
who has traveled the world engaging immigrant
and refugee communities in devised theatre
workshops. In 2004, she studied Drama and
Theatre Arts in Scotland. Afterward, she made the
rounds, traveling and working in Cuba, Ecuador,
Argentina, Brazil, and finally in Hungary, where
she worked with a community of Roma gypsy
performers. It was this experience that inspired
her to pursue a Masters degree in social theatre
at the Central School of Speech and Drama in
London. In 2011, she was commissioned by the
UN Refugee Agency and the Ecuadorian National
Ministry of Public Health to lead a workshop on the
Ecuador / Columbia border that addressed sexual
health concerns for adolescents. This workshop
later became Chancho al Horno, an award-winning
collective led by Javier Perugachi that is currently
seeking UNESCO funding to broaden their scope.
In 2012, after moving to New York, Reka helped
found Frontierra, a community-based theatre
company in Corona, Queens that focuses on
immigrant rights awareness and mobilization (www.
frontierra.org). Reka’s devisement process borrows
Photo courtesy of Frontierra Theatre Group.
from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed.
Founded in the 1960s and inspired in part by
Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, TO’s
methodology provides a new way of looking at and
working with theatre as a device to promote social
and political change by opening up a free dialogue
between performers and audience.
A few weeks ago, I conducted an interview with
Reka about her involvement with theatre, her
process of theatre devisement, and her general
ideas about the craft. Then, Adam Belvo, a fellow
member of Aztec Economy, interviewed me
about my thoughts on theatre. What follows is an
alternation between our two perspectives. It was a
great pleasure sitting down with Reka and hearing
her ideas, as well as further codifying my own ideas
about the dramatic arts.
What is your rehearsal process like?
Reka: I’ve had a few participants who had never
heard of the word ‘theatre.’ So the first thing that
we do is usually gauge the energy of the group,
whether they are ready to get up on their feet yet,
what’s it like in the room…
Just like in any other practice,
we start with a warm-up. But
depending on the energy of the
group, it could be something
like sitting in a circle, but we
each do a movement, and then
we build on that. So then OK,
now we’re ready to stand up.
So let’s do the name thing,
then let’s each do a movement,
and then we all repeat it. If that
goes okay, then the next step.
But every time we take a little
bit more risk…At the beginning,
we do a lot of games focused
on trust and confidence, and
working together as a group,
making images together…
With image work, we get in
a small group and form an
image of something with our bodies, whether it’s a
crane or a bridge – something simple. But then it
becomes slightly more interesting. Like a machine
– a washing machine or a coffee machine. This is
also a Boalian thing, a Theatre-of-the-Oppressedbased
game. First you make your machine real
simple, like a little mechanical bicycle. Then each
one adds on to the last person, so that you have
one big machine. And as the facilitator, you can
slow it down, you could speed it up, or say ‘Oh now
this part’s broken.’ Then slowly, you come to a
stop. ‘OK, next we’re going to do another machine,
but a machine of love.’…Usually, we talk about it
afterward: ‘So why is the machine of love like that?
REVOLT
Magazine Number 4, 2013 32

Why is that person over there? How is it connected,
how is it not connected?’ Most games have a sort
of debriefing. It’s a little session when we’re all
still in a circle and we’ve just finished it, and we
ask, ‘How did that feel? Why?’ And then, ‘Next!’ So
we’re building on thematic structure.
How would you define theatre?
Adam Willson: Theatre is not life. But it’s sort of
like a mirror. In the sense that we look in a mirror,
and we see a really essential part of our being in
the mirror, even though it’s not real...So, maybe an
interesting side-question is what is the difference
between theatre and film. I think the main
difference is that film has a much greater capacity
to plumb the psychological…It’s really about
perspective and playing with this perspective to
get into the inner world. The depth of psychological
attention in theatre is not so deep as with film.
I think at the same time, there’s something
immediately dynamic and important about theatre
that you can’t get in film. And I think part of the
theatre experience is that at the same time as
getting involved and immersed in the plot or activity
onstage, you always have this subliminal sense like
‘I’m watching a play’ or ‘this isn’t real life.’ What’s
interesting about theatre, and you can’t really do
it with film, is this sort of discrepancy. And I think
as an audience member watching a performance
– if it’s a good performance or a challenging
performance – it should be an experience of
continually wrestling back and forth between these
two perspectives. It’s like ‘No, this isn’t real life. I’m
not totally immersed in this. I’m actually sitting in
a chair.’ Wrestling with that and also with ‘yes I’m
totally in this story.’
How does community-based devisement
engage the performers and audience?
Reka: So for example it could be forum theatre,
which I do a lot of as well, and that’s also based
on the Theatre of the Oppressed. Forum theatre
takes a long time, but we eventually get to that
point where we have a beginning, middle, end –
we have a climactic point…What happens is once
the audience has watched the first round, the
facilitators come in (in Theatre of the Oppressed,
they call them Jokers) and act as communicators
between the audience and the actors. Except
in this case, the spectators become the ‘spectactors.’
That’s the terminology for it. We take one
of the major elements or themes that we were
tackling in that play, and we say, ‘Raise your hand
if you’ve ever identified with that or felt that.’
People raise their hands, and then we ask them:
‘If you were Maria or if you were Peter, or another
character, what would you have done?’ Some of
them are not quite sure how to process it, but
they might say, ‘I would’ve told my boss to fuck
off.’ Okay come on over and try it. The actors who
were there continue, but they have to improvise
at this point, right? Then, we clap the audience
member that did that and say, ‘What changed?
Has anything changed?’ So basically, it brings up
a dialogue….‘Can you do that in reality? Can you
tell your boss to fuck off? Can you ask for more
pay?’…So the important pieces are there, but a
play often ends with an ending that is realistic but
not idealistic. So we’re asking a question. We don’t
have an answer to what somebody could’ve done.
We’re asking the audience to help us figure it out…
What we’re hoping is that those solutions that were
figured out we’re all going to take home and then
practice them in real life. Theatre’s just a game.
Photo courtesy of Frontierra Theatre Group.
You can stand up to your boss in theatre, because
it’s fun and ok, and nothing happens, but the point
is to see if we perform these possible solutions
outside.
What is the sort of theatre you would like to
see?
Adam Willson: I’m a big fan of street theatre. I
think a lot of the time it ends up not really being
done the way I would like to see it. What I was
talking about before how when you’re sitting in a
theatre and you’re constantly wrestling with this
‘am I a spectator?’ or ‘am I in the story?’ – I think
the best way to specifically elicit that from an
audience is to have them continually questioning
their role in the situation. The sort of theatre that
I would love to see is the sort of street theatre
that at all times the audience is never quite sure
what they’re seeing- whether it’s a play or it’s a
happening, or it’s just two drunk bums spouting off
nonsense, you know – and working it so that there
may be points of revelation, where the audience
realizes, ‘Ok, I can sort of see what’s going on
now,’ and then continually work with that and try to
turn that over. I would like to see more theatre on
the subways, but not theatre on the subways
like, ‘Hey guys, we’re going to do a play for you, like
we’ve got our costumes on, we’re going to read
some Shakespeare.’ Because I feel that’s a little
too us-and-them, where it’s like ‘You guys are just
commuters coming home from a long day of work,
and we’re going to perform to you, and we’re not
together in this.’ I would like to see the type theatre
that we see on the subway every fucking day,
performed unintentionally.
What is the world climate like for social
theatre?
Reka: The US is very resistant. It’s hard for me to
judge, because I’m very new to the US. I’ve only
been here for two years. But I’ve heard that it’s
very underrepresented, that it’s still at its startup
stage. There are for instance in New York two
masters degrees in social theatre – but one is a 5
year program and one is only a two year program –
at CUNY and NYU. NYU is more focused on theatre
and education, so it’s more institutionalized, more
in a school setting. When I say ‘social theatre’,
for one, it’s like ‘Oh, what is that?’ But also, it’s
like ‘Oh, you mean a teaching artist.’ It’s hard to
explain that no, it’s not that. With the UK, you can
say that it’s like the motherland of many social
theatre companies. It’s very well-funded there, it’s
very well-recognized, and usually you don’t really
have to explain what it is. Practitioners such as my
self get hired by various companies, non-profits, or
NGOs working on certain issues and needing that
branch of the work. I think that’s really important,
because within the educational structure, it’s very
limited: you have theatre, but you don’t really have
the social theatre branch in the US.
What do you think of political theatre?
Adam Willson: I’m pretty skeptical of an
intermingling between any one of the arts and
politics. Obviously the arts have their roots and
orientation and motivation in building a community,
especially theatre. And so that’s political in the
Aristotelian sense of political. At the same time, I
think what people mean by political theatre – it’s
basically using theatre to express a non-artistic
platform. It can be more or less explicit. When it’s
very explicit – it’s like the same thing where you
go to a play and the whole play, the characters are
shouting. After a certain moment, the audience
is going to stop paying attention. I think the same
thing happens when theatre is too sermonizing. I
think the most effective theatre educates you in
something that you weren’t aware of before, but
it does it in a disguised way. So, it’s not preaching

to you, telling you, ‘This is how you should read
this,’ or ‘This is what this is about.’ But through
various disguising and transformative elements,
it can impart these political messages or any sort
of message. Art should never hammer things over
people’s heads. If that’s happening, then that’s
a problem…A lot of political theatre veers in and
out of this aggressive performance art that has
on the tip of its tongue, ‘This is the dogma’ or
‘This is the dictum.’ I don’t think that really honors
the nature of what theatre is. Basically how I
feel with the arts is this: ‘Take an art. Figure out
what that art’s good at. And once you’ve figured
out what that art is good at, then you can blend
it with another element.’ That’s my feeling about
multimedia theatre as well. That’s my feeling about
circus theatre, for example. That’s my feeling about
political theatre.
How do you reconcile the personal dialogueoriented
method of social theatre with the
political initiative of your programs?
Reka: When I was trained in social theatre for my
Masters degree, there was a whole class there
on the ethical dilemmas of taking funding from
various organizations. Obviously the aim of social
theatre is not to take a political vocabulary and
set of ideas and push that forward. So it becomes
problematic when you get funded by a certain
funding body. But it’s really a case-by-case thing. In
many cases it’s about taking the money and doing
the work, but kind of negotiating some way around
their demands. I was very lucky in the sense that
the UN pretty much gave me full reign. They said
it needed to be around the theme of sexual health
because of their funding. So I tried while we were
devising themes to bring up some sexual health
questions – not even criteria, but questions – to
see how the group reacted. But they were actually
a lot more concerned with gender roles, which
could relate. And that’s what I mean by negotiating.
It can relate, but it’s not only about sexual health.
I have a fiscally sponsored organization called
Fronteirra. And the funding that we’re looking for,
what I’m looking for is really around immigration
issues. So, it’s really about informative projects
around the immigration reform that’s happening
right now, about strengthening the immigrant
community…So, there’s already that focus. But
then afterwards, what the issue is, what themes
they want to discuss are up to group
What is your take on social theatre?
Adam Willson: In general, social theatre is
basically using theatre to build community
mobilization. The idea is to get together a group
and have them focus on their story, whatever that
story is. And I like the premise of it. But I think
it’s maybe a little too utilitarian for me. It seems
the goal is to use theatre as a way to implement
education. And I think a strong element in theatre
is education, but not the only element. Also, I’m a
little skeptical of democracy. I’m skeptical because
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I believe that once you get so many voices in a
room, first of all it’s going to be hard to come to
some sort of consensus. But also I think there’s
this idea that when you allow so many voices –
and basically in a certain sense, you’re trying to
take the average voice of the group – what ends
up happening is you lose sight of the best and
the worst…And I’m worried that democracy in the
arts or otherwise tends to facilitate mediocrity. If
you’re only focusing on community devisement, I
think you’re losing sight of the possibility of actually
creating a masterpiece. I think a masterpiece could
come out of that sort of methodology. But at the
Photo courtesy of Frontierra Theatre Group.
same time, I can see how quite often it doesn’t…I
very much appreciate that social theatre is being
done. And I appreciate that there are governing
bodies or NGOs or whatever who are funding these
projects. But at the same time, by basically taking
these sequestered groups or differentiated groups
and working with them on particular issues, with
a specific goal in mind, for a specific time, I think
it could end up cramping these groups’ abilities to
actually express themselves in a free way. Theatre
is a serious business. All art is a serious business,
and I think a lot of people who don’t do art don’t
realize how serious it is. If you want to do good
stuff artistically, it takes a lot of fucking work, and
it takes a lot of fucking focus…Without the proper
preparation and training, I’m worried that these
workshops might prevent people from really seeing
what theatre is about. But that may not be the
worst thing in the world. After all, it’s getting them
out and performing. So, I can’t knock it too much.
I’m just talking about my concerns.
How would you characterize the difference
between social theatre and conventional
theatre?
Reka: Over the weekend, I watched Farrah Crane’s
play called ‘Night.’ It takes place in Lebanon in
wartime. It’s a very strong piece and very well
written. It was performed by lovely actresses but
who, as far I know, have had no experience of
war. And they’re performing for people who, just
like them, have generally had no experience of
war. That doesn’t mean it was less interesting.
But in my head, as a social theatre practitioner,
it’s like what’s the point? I mean it’s interesting,
but it’s something that’s not legitimate – it loses
something. I feel like we’re taking advantage of
a dramatic situation, and it’s like ‘Oh, something
terrible is happening over there, and let’s make a
piece about it.’ And we feel bad about something
we have nothing to do with and have never
experienced and don’t know about…
But I don’t have some of the experiences of the
groups I’m working with, and that’s a conflict too.
The way I was introduced to theatre was also as a
bystander…But at the same time, it got me where
I am…So it’s an ethical wheel. For me and a lot of
the colleagues of mine, I came from a middle-class
background. I have had no traumatic experiences.
So, I come into this field like ‘Yes! Change! It’s
good!’ Because I have the privilege of being able to
think for myself. My hands are not tied.
I remember a specific incident where I was faced
with this veil I have over my head. I was working
with a homeless group, co-facilitating. We were
doing a forum piece in a homeless shelter. There
was this piece about a recovering alcoholic. There’s
this recovering alcoholic who’s 9 months sober
in the beginning. She’s doing great. She wants to
give back to society. She works with refugees as a
volunteer. But then there’s this one refugee whose
case gets worse and worse, and this individual
can’t help. So she starts drinking and drinking and
drinking. By the end of the piece she’s so drunk, on
the floor, and this refugee friend comes knocking
on the door and says, ‘I have nowhere to go. Can I
stay here?’ And the character says ‘Ah! Sorry, no!
Just go! I can’t help you’
Then we asked the audience, ‘Is there any point in
the play where you would’ve said or done anything
different?’ One person said, ‘Yeah. It’s the last
thing, I’d change something right there.’…So, the
spectator comes up and replaces the character of
the recovering alcoholic. The refugee friend knocks
on the door, it opens, and the guy says ‘yeah come
on in, come on in.’ They both sit down on the
bench for 30 seconds completely silent, and then
the guy who intervened, he takes this big bottle of
whiskey and asks, ‘do you want some?’ And the
actor shrugs and says, ‘Yeah.’ That’s it. And they
just drink on this bench for 30 seconds. Everyone
claps, and we ask, ‘so what was that all about? Did
that change anything?’ The guy who intervened
said, ‘Yeah, totally. I mean I’m in the shit. She’s
in the shit. Might as well be in the shit together.’
For me it was a great shock…It’s a beautiful idea
that I would not have thought of, because I’m with
this sort of background. I was brought up with the
opportunity to make a difference. My parents were
fighters. So I had a very active kind of upbringing…
where you can’t just take something for granted –
no, you have to move forward. And that’s a luxury.
It really is. But sometimes it’s about being rooted
in the present, and taking the moment for what it
is. Work on the now. I’m still learning constantly.
I have a lot to learn about conventional theatre as
well.
Magazine Number 4, 2013 34

THEATREVIEW
Kay Turner's OTHERWISE: QUEER SCHOLARSHIP
BY KATIE CERCONE INTO SONG
A
production conceived and directed by
Kay Turner, Otherwise: Queer Scholarship
Into Song, ran at the Dixon Place on
the lower east side the first week of April.
Intellectually dense, witty, filled with unexpected
high notes and badass funky flows, Kay Turner’s
full-length evening academic post-punk sing-alongsong
excursion had me tipping my hat. Not only
did Turner succeed in making heavy reading sexy
– herself and nearly all female cohort of colleagues
draped in animal print, shimmery lame et all (with
sensible shoes) – I also just want to rhetorically applaud
Turner for banging the mic stand on the floor
ceremoniously throughout the final number.
Inspired by the likes of 10 “Professors of Pleasure”
who have all published new works of queer scholarship
within the past year, Turner hired equal number
of musicians and in some cases performing
artists to “translate” the works into musical scores
for the live performance. Each segment featured
an introduction by the professorial author followed
by the musical interpretation. When not serving as
MC, Turner sang with Gretchen Phillips (known together
as the proto-riot grrl punk and funk lesbian
rock band “Girls in the Nose”) and ended the show
with a musical approximation of her latest publication
Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms.
“I want you to go home humming an academic
tome,” said Turner, who had guests singing outloud
academic buzzies
linear time-keeping from within the plush gold confines
of a stage prop Turner called her “Great Chain
of Queer Being.”
Things turned dangerous when Lisa Duggan introduced
her new book Sapphic Slashers. Based
on the 1892 case of a Tennessee woman who
slashed the throat of her female lover and killed
her, the book anchors its narrative in an act largely
motivated by the “inconceivability” of femalefemale
public union in the 19th century southern
United States. According to Duggan’s book, this
incident marks the emergence of the “Lesbian” in
American mass culture and caused distortions that
still haunt American female homosexual mythology
today. Inspired by the book, the evening’s musical
interpretation by Turner with Viva DeConcini and
Mary Feaster weighs “expert” (male) testimony
peddled to the public imagination at that time – ie
“Girl slays girl! Victim of Erotomania! Feast of Sensation!”
- against the truth of women who committed
crimes because they were not permitted to love
one another.
Kay Turner singing “I Prefer My Meanings” with lyrics arranged from Tavia Nyong’o’s forthcoming Little Monsters: A Queer
Bestiary. Photo: Dixie Sheridan.
I can’t believe I’m saying this but, thank god for
booze! Without New Yorker’s dangerously consistent
marriage of spirits and the social, we might
not have radical performing arts laboratories such
as the Dixon Place on the island at all. Started
as a salon in Paris in 1985, Artistic Director Ellie
Covan imported DP to her East Village living room a
year later and maintains its state-of-the-art facility
to this day in part due to the sale of pre and post
show bevs. Not that I generally partake. On the record
I arrived adrenaline drunk on single origin hot
chocolate, giddy and wired enough to take copious
notes throughout the evening.
like “Queer Bestiary” and “collective temporal distortion.”
OTHERWISE was a brave, canon-breaking,
raw and juicy rampage for, through and between
the energetics of queerness.
José “Cuban Missile Crisis” Muñoz started off the
night with Cruising Utopia, a book which explores
intersections between queer futurity and “the Utopian
Kernel of art.” Temporality, particularly as a
site of future-possibility, was a common thread running
throughout the evening. In Carolyn Dinshaw’s
introduction to her book How Soon is Now?: Medieval
Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness
of Time, Dinshaw discussed the “mystical divine
now and the collapse of time” in pre-modern nonsequential
Medieval texts. With Medieval Barbie
as her boxed-in sidekick, Dinshaw boldly collapsed
Before the conclusion of the evening we had heard
from several more scholars and musicians including
Dr. Ann Cvetkovich who’s work on depression
as a public feeling was interpreted by a yellow
jump-suited Dynasty Handbag. An emerging icon
of queer performance, Dynasty has been hailed
a “crackpot genius” by the Village Voice and a
“dislocating mess, in a good way…” by Time Out.
For her interpretation of “Dr. Ann’s” work she
presented an exhilaratingly absurd laptop accompanied
vignette about a nun trapped in the prison
cell of her imagination (lots of tongue wagging and
teased hair). And if all that wasn’t hitting the jugular
of this queer era we live in, we also heard from
“Witch Brew Two,” a New Jersey based “crone” rap
duo with yin-yang duds and an old school Casio
keyboard followed by the lovely Maxine Henryson,
a photographer who’s work portraying the Divine
Feminine of Contemporary India was presented
Kirtan-style by Masi Asare and Chris Williams.
If you missed the show, and wasn’t converted by
the sassy review in the Times (Queer Theory May
Not Have a Beat, but Academicians Can Still Dance
to It) (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/06/books/
otherwise-queer-scholarship-into-song-at-dixon-place.html?_
r=0) you can still read the books, that is - flashy
clothing, intoxication, violence, and witchy babes
(optional).

ARCHITECTURE
VIEW
On Being Post-Sequin
An Interview with Theresa Himmer
BY KATIE CERCONE
Theresa Himmer is a contemporary artist
working primarily with urban installation, video
and sound that splits her time between New York
City and Reykjavik, Iceland. A recent graduate of
the Whitney Independent Study program, Himmer
was included in the Young Artist’s Biennial,
Bucharest in 2012 and has produced extensive
public art projects in Iceland, Mexico and Russia.
Trained formerly as an architect and still very much
informed by the discipline, her work deals with
urban landscape related to diasporic experience
and intersubjectivity, the dynamics of spatial
perception and architecture as a semiotic structure.
You may have seen (and heard) her work
in the elevator of Art in General last spring. For All
State, a 6-hour long site-specific sound installation
she produced for Art in General which is currently
installed at Reykjavik Art Museum, Himmer
scavenged sounds from the given milieu of the
elevator. Utilizing “the crisp bell that marks the
passing of floors, the squeak it makes passing 2nd
and 3rd, the hidden emergency phone’s empty
duut, bellowing doors opening and closing and the
sharp click of the mechanical switchboard in the
engine room on the roof,” Himmer investigated
each sample for its parametric variations in rhythm,
spatio-temporal reverb, tonality and inversion.
As a final score replayed for visitors to the site as
they rode the elevator, All State was a sound wall
weaving an inexhaustible system of variations
layered over the daily noise of the elevator’s utility.
Interested in the border territory suturing
the constructed space of the social with the
veiled reality of the psyche, often her structures
and audiovisual projects are a unique expression
of a type of institutional limbo. In an interview
with Revolt, Himmer talks about her recent
installation in Russia, queer and feminist readings
of her practice, her current video project and
why she’s content to see the last sequins of her
Mountain Series in Iceland thrown to the wind.
KC: I’m interested in the interdisciplinary nature
of your work, when did you make the transition
from architecture to art and what was that like?
TH: I trained as an architect and received a
professional degree from an architectural school
in Denmark. Initially when I applied I wasn’t
interested in becoming a “real” architect, I wanted
to go into the set design department. It turned out
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Magazine Number 4, 2013
that department wasn’t great and I ended up in a
very experimental department that was teaching
architecture in a way that was very open. Somewhat
Bauhaus based, the program was very wide in its
approach to talking about what architecture is or can
be. My thesis was an urban public space landscape
project on the roundabout where the Holland tunnel
exits in Tribeca. I made a park around a grazing field
for the police horses who have their stable around
the corner. That program was my initial training and
then I did practice as an architect for several years.
I learned all the hard-core architectural disciplines
from the initial conceptual phase all the way to
building and detailing practicing with two really
good studios, one in Denmark and one in Iceland.
Of course the practice of architecture proper is
quite different than practicing as an artist, although
I never really feel that I left architecture to go into
art. My artistic practice is coming through and out
of architecture and it is still very much dealing with
architectural disciplines – aspects of place, the
relationship to a context, and the ability to read
a context and insert oneself into that in a special
way. In terms of formal studies there was a point
of transition when I decided to study Fine Arts. My
practice exists in an overlapping space between art
and architecture. Exploring that space from within
an art context during a 2 year MFA program at SVA, I
began to think about the dynamics of spectatorship
and the optic dynamics that are tied to creative
practice in general. After that I spent one year at
the Whitney Independent Study Program which
became a kind of unifying process where I was able
to combine the two sides with a more theoretical
foundation. SVA was quite unstructured in an
academic sense. As a community it was amazing
and as a program it was open enough that anyone
could make of it what they wanted, depending
who you end up studying with and in what groups.
Meanwhile, as you know there wasn’t a lot of theory.
Getting that theoretical and critical foundation
from the Whitney Program was a big step for me,
Double Vision (2012) installation view. Public art project in the city of Perm, Russia. Photo courtesy of the artist.
and then integrating that with my prior knowledge.
KC: Can you explain some of the differences you’ve
noticed in terms of rules and regulations governing
work with structures/public space/buildings in
Europe and the U.S.? Is one more open to a hybrid
and innovative approach to spatial configurations?
TH: I actually haven’t done any public art projects in
the States yet but I have done quite a few in Iceland
which has a Scandinavian kind of logic to the way
things are regulated and I recently finished one
project in Russia. In Iceland it’s very free and easy
to do projects like that. For my first installation in
Reykjavík we didn’t even ask for permissions from
36

On Being Post-Sequin
continued...
the city. Because it was part of a public art festival
they kind of backed me with verbal support and
positive vibes. I did get permission from the three
people that owned the house that I was working
with. For me that was really important as it was
private property and it was someone’s home. I
was very respectful of that but I didn’t even think
about applying to the city. I don’t know if it would be
possible now but at that time it was. As a contrast
for my recent project in Russia I was invited by a
public art fund under a newly established art
museum in Perm. The Museum functioned also as
a producer so I didn’t even come near any of the
regulation and permission problems but I think it’s
a completely unimaginable bureaucracy. So I’m not
actually sure where the United States falls in that
spectrum, but I imagine it’s somewhere in between.
for granted? Why do we take this system for
granted? There could be a million other variations.
TH: Yes, I think that was also embedded in your
question. I am interested in creating these kind of
in-between zones where energy stands still between
values associated with something being beautiful.
Something that I thought a lot about in connection
with the Russian commission were these Hal Foster
and Miwon Kwon aspects. All these ideas of the
itinerant artist and the artist who comes to a site
KC: What is your process when you work on some of
these large-scale site-specific outdoor projects? How
much time do you spend at the site and how much in
the studio? Do you consider your work post-studio?
TH: My process is very much informed by coming
out of architecture. It’s very much research based
and conceptually based in the sense that there’s a
research phase where the conceptual boundaries
of the project are laid out. This goes for all the
projects that I’m involved in whether video, sound,
photography or urban installation. There’s a
development phase and then there’s a production
phase. Usually most of the project is in place before
it comes to production. I would say to the poststudio
question – yes - at this point because I’m
traveling in between places my practice is in a way
tied to my laptop. At least the development phases
of the project before they become physical, if they
even do. For example the video project I’m working
on now is actually not site-specific in that sense. It’s
a project that I started while I was at the Whitney
Program doing research and making some initial
studies relating to it. I recently returned from a trip
to the Czech Republic where I was shooting for ten
days at two different locations. That’s sort of typical,
mapping out gathered material and then editing.
KC: I’ve noticed in your work you often set up a
situation in which one might begin to interpret and
even challenge relationships between “structure”
and “institution,” opening up a space where we
can begin to imagine the boundaries between
these entities as porous and fluid. Can you talk
about these notions in relationship to your work?
TH: It is definitely a theme that’s reoccurring in my
work also in the sound installation that I did at Art
in General. That was in a way operating on a similar
level only in audio instead of video. My project Double
Vision in Russia also operates similarly but on the
level of urban space. That project is about questioning
the signifiers of that type of space. It’s taking
architecture and making it a sign and simultaneously
addressing what our vision is being directed at
through corporate promises and advertising.
KC: It’s almost like you’re making this figment
that’s related to the structure but it’s almost
an imaginary space, as if a parallel universe
where we question, why do we take this structure
Parallel Memories (2013), video still. Photo courtesy of the artist.
two poles and there’s a gap in which we can see the
surroundings critically or from a new perspective.
It’s then we explore exactly what is being taken for
granted. By flipping the relationship upside down
we see what goes usually unnoticed. For the project
in Russia I was working with this really everyday
space, this ordinary piece of facade that suddenly
by reframing and reconfiguring that in relationship
to the site, an opening was created. It allowed for
a critical reading of that site in its cultural context.
KC: Is there anything else you want to say
about the piece in Russia in particular?
TH: I can talk briefly about the background
because it’s typical for the way I work. I was given
an old department store as a site to work with. It
was built around the mid 70s during the Soviet
Union era and is a known typology. They were
all over the Soviet Union. It is a white rendered
modernist structure, and there were these bright
yellow McDonalds M’s. It’s an angled building so
they were on all sides visible from every corner. A
McDonalds had just opened on the ground floor. On
the roof were Cyrillic neon letters that spelled the
store name from back when the building was built.
That transition became the starting point of the
project. It became about these two types of signs:
the neon signs and the golden M’s. I read the
building as a type of semiotic structure; if the neon
signs point back to the 70s when the building was
made as a manifestation of Soviet Era ideals, then
the golden M’s point toward an abstract promise
of a global corporate future. There’s kind of two
directions and I wanted to insert myself within that
conversation and make a third type of sign which
just points directly to that which is near and present
both in space and in time. I wanted to direct the gaze
simply to that which is close as a potential space
or quality, beyond what we think of as the surface
and is supposed to do something site specific and
clever. Coming to the city by the Ural Mountains,
it’s such a complex context. It’s a really dynamic
city with a heavy history. The public art program
is amazing and they’re doing really amazing and
important projects. Meanwhile the whole idea is
based on an artist being invited into a situation in
which they’re validating an urban renewal project
on a larger scale. Initially I was really hesitant to do
anything visual because visually, any urban square
or open space is super charged with the memories
either of the 2nd world war or the Soviet Era. There’s
a real danger of making something superficial, and
how can you possibly know? I wanted to steer away
from that so I initially proposed to make an audio
installation. They liked it and said they hoped we
could make that too at some point (perhaps just a
polite rejection) but meanwhile said to me, “We just
think that our city looks not so good, we just want
something with sequins.” I’m thinking - oh my god -
really, okay, I can really understand that utterance.
In a way it makes total sense. That became part of
the framework, their wish for something beautiful,
for something pretty. It’s also about cultural
context in relationship to a material. Making huge
installations out of sequins in Iceland where you
can meet the President in a grocery store, it’s kind
of a cliché but it’s not far from truth… Iceland is set
within a Scandinavian social democratic landscape.
The sequin material is all about glitz and lure, it’s
used for signs and the sequins are morphologically
an interpretation of coins. Displacing that material
from Scandinavia into a contemporary Russian
context totally changes the meaning, there anything
glitzy and glamorous can’t help but allude to
nouveau riche culture. All these aspects were what
in the end manifested itself in the actual project.
KC: I’m personally excited about the Eileen Gray
retrospective at Centre Pompidou in Paris. I find it
interesting that many feminists have named her
as a sort of early Sapphic “non-heroic” modernist
figure, calling her buildings and furniture sites

of “performative queerness.” Do you see any
relationship between your work and hers? How
do you situate yourself as a female architect/
artist in relationship to the larger structures
and institutions in which your work intervenes?
aesthetic that you’re working with in a different context
too, you weren’t trying to build the next Guggenheim.
in Iceland for almost 5 years before moving to New
York. Now I am working between these two places.
There’s something about the dynamics of changing
TH: I don’t really know that I relate to her, although
she’s someone that I respect immensely. I know
little of her relationship with Le Corbusier but
there’s definitely a whole issue around the female
architect. The contemporary landscape of superstar
architects is predominantly male. But then again
that might not be the most interesting place to
be. I recently heard an interview with a Danish
modernist architect Knud Holscher. He spent a big
part of his career doing public projects and some
product design for example toilet seats of which he
spoke with dignity and pride. When he was asked
which project he would have loved to do during his
career, he answered that he had always wanted
to design public housing. That I respect deeply.
Much of the contemporary architecture we see in
glossy magazines is so much about ego and capital.
Obviously there are amazing female architects and
practitioners, but in the dominant media, they tend
to still stand in the background. Perhaps except Zaha
Hadid and Kazuyo Sejima. When I tell people that I am
also trained as an architect, often I am met with “Oh
so do you do interiors?” as if it is difficult to imagine
a woman being a building designer and easier to
connect her to the realm of the (domestic) interior.
I think it’s super problematic that there’s these
gendered relationships in practices, but I don’t know
that my work relates to this whole aspect directly. I
think that in certain ways a queer / feminist reading
of some of my work has occurred mostly in terms of
the three installations in Iceland. One reading has
been that it’s a feminist gesture or insertion of a
feminine presence in urban space. Someone has
also made a queer drag reading, saying it was like
a building in drag. I think that’s super interesting
and I really enjoy these readings and how they can
expand the project. I’m interested in thinking along
the lines of - is the project within the boundary of
this physical object or does the boundary extend
to where the readings start and end? Meanwhile
these ideas are not something that, at least on
a conscious level, I have charged the work with.
KC: What stands out to me about your work
is that you marry what I’d term a hard-edged
European conceptualism with healthy doses
of imagination and whimsy, where does this
come from? What artists are you looking at?
TH: This is a really old school and male reference
but I’m definitely looking at Dan Graham and Gordon
Matta-Clark. Obviously if you come out of architecture
then it’s really hard to not look at Matta-Clark with
great respect. I think his work is really about taking
architecture out of the boundaries of functionality and
all these kind of modernist tropes that architecture
proper has to deal with. More viewing architecture
as a kind of semiotic system, which is very much
at the basis of my practice. Others I look to with
admiration are for example Matthew Buckingham,
Chantal Ackerman and Rachel Whiteread.
KC: One thing that you said earlier was that you
originally wanted to do set design which puts the
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Magazine Number 4, 2013
Parallel Memories (2013), installation view, "There's No Place LIke Home", Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany.
Photo credit T. Arendt.
TH: I think that’s interesting in terms of the relationship
between art and architecture. My relationship to
temporality is very different, a different relationship
to monumental permanence. The whole process
of drawing an architectural work and then building
it is an incredibly long process. I’m interested in a
kind of temporariness. The first of the installations
in Reykjavík has lasted now since 2006. In the wake
of the last winter, the hurricane recently on the east
coast came by Iceland as well, the very last sequins
blew off two of the pieces. Now they’re these naked
structures left in the urban space, which sparked
a whole consideration about what to do with them
and could they be restored. After a long process I
have decided to take them down. It seems like a
very right and natural thing to do because they were
so much born out of a certain moment in Icelandic
time, the years leading up to and following the big
global economic crash that was specifically violent
in Iceland and the several years of excess that led up
to it. Also the sort of commodification of everything
that could be commodified in nature, which was
what these projects were about. Because they’re
so specific to this moment in a sort of a geographic
time of Iceland as a culture and also a specific
time in my personal development it just feels that
it’s right to take them down. Even the material has
a natural time. So, great that the last sequins are
gone, it’s fine. Not everything has to last forever.
KC: I understand you’re quite the nomad
these days. What is your relationship to
notions of the local, homeplace, nation and
territory and how do these shape your work?
TH: These aspects of place and belonging and relating
to a place are really at the basis of my practice. I
have very strong relationships to 4 very different
places, of course they are all western cultures so
they are not so radically different but each has its
own specific logic. I’m half Czech and half Danish
so I have very special relationships to both these
places. I grew up going back and forth over the iron
curtain traveling to Czechoslovakia as it was called
formerly and Denmark where I’m born. Then I lived
place and changing the situation from being inside
and part of a situation to looking at the same place
from the outside, which I think opens a possibility
for a more a critical distance. I just finished a
new video work called Parallel Memories, that is
partially about that. It’s about returning to the site
of an inherited trauma, tracing the structures of
real places with the psychological structures of the
memory of a place. This is a project that I started at
the Whitney Program and it is currently on view at
a group exhibition in Germany at the Westfälischer
Kunstverein. The exhibition is actually called
“There’s No Place like Home.” When I was doing the
project in Russia I accidentally met a Russian guy
around my age who had grown up in Czechoslovakia
as the son of a Russian soldier who was part of
the occupying forces. My history is informed by my
mother immigrating to Denmark in 1968 before
the borders closed. There was something about
the tension between these two subject positions
– this became the framework of the project. They
seemed as if they couldn’t be further apart but at
the same time these two stories overlap within a
kind of common space of childhood and a common
experience of a geographic and cultural place
embedded in a specific time. The video is becoming
quite structural in that sense. I’m filming through
an architectural maquette and trying to see if the
structure of shared space and memory is aligned
with or just framing the reality of now. - So there’s
always both an exterior and an interior, - always
this kind of parallactic dynamics of spectatorship.
KC: Is he a subject in the video?
TH: There’s not a dialogue but there’s a voiceover
which is two voices, his voice and mine. The video
is a documentation of me going back to some of
the places I remember myself and also retracing
some of the places that he is talking about. There
are sites that I have never been to within this
former Russian base that is outside of Prague. I
tried to put myself into another subject position.
There’s a blending of the boundaries of subjectivity.
38

REVOLT
takes
BOSTON
artSEEN
COLUMN
Deadbeat
BY SUZANNE SCHULTZ
Revolt took Boston to see what the city had to
offer .
ALERNATIVE ART SPACE, (450 Harrison
Avenue, 3rd floor), is presenting a group
show COLOR, with artists Gloria Bernstein, Amy
Kaufman, Randi Siu, Garry Harley and Fernando
De Olivera 6-9 p.m. 1st Friday.
Gallery 601, (433 Harrison, Loft 306),
Photographer Cariappa Annaiah will be
presenting his eclectic body of work July 7th,
6-8 p.m.
The Liberty Hotel, (Charles Street),
presenting Gloria Bernstein July 9th, 6-8 p.m. in
the main salon
Axelle Gallery, (91 Newbury Street),
presenting the work of Eric Roux-Fontaine
September 21-October 20. Opening reception
September 21th, 6-8 p.m.
All Asia, (334 Mass Ave Cambridge),
Grateful Dead night with Crazy Fingers and
Deadbeat, June 28th, 7-1 a.m.
WALLYS, (427 Mass Avenue), every
Thursday night is Latin Jazz night!
Check out the Art & Music programming
on BNN TV. Live stream BNN TV.org watch
what’s happening now. Monday nights 6 -7 p.m.
July 8th, Erin McNeil
July 29th, Paula Tognarelli from the Griffin
Photography Museum
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
Photo courtsey of Deadbeat.
BY DAN FORDE
Deadbeat, a Grateful Dead cover
band from Boston, keeps tradition
alive with their own interpretations
of Jerry Garcia and the Dead's most
popular work. Merging each decade,
style and reincarnation of the Grateful Dead's
music with their own thirst for fun, Deadbeat has
been fortunate to find a combination of members
each bringing their own dynamic of the Dead
to the band. Since the band originated in 2005
with drummer Joe Pulitano's answer to another
Craigslist post, after several dead-ends trying to
find the right musicians, Joe met two guitarists
Brian Stormwind and Gary Barth who were seeking
out a new drummer. Deadbeat has grown to
absorb an amazing albeit somewhat motley group
of musicians. One of the most recent additions
to Deadbeat includes singer Jen Markard,
former member of New York's own most popular,
decades-strong Grateful Dead cover band, the
Zen Tricksters. Other members include bassist
Mike Bailey, and keyboardist Rich Cesarini. While
most of the members are full-time professional
musicians and music teachers, it's somewhat
surprising to hear that perhaps the biggest hippy
of the bunch is also the president and founder of a
national insurance marketing company. Deadbeat
comments on the wide appeal of the Grateful Dead
"It's not just aging hippies re-living Woodstock...
although there are a few of those too. There is
an incredible number of young fans following
the Dead's music." Whether reliving the past, or
discovering the past and keeping it alive for the
future, those who have gone to see Deadbeat
perform notice most of all that this group of six are
not, will not, and have never been tired of bringing
us the best of the Dead.
But not just the Grateful Dead. Following in Jerry's
footsteps, Deadbeat includes plenty of other
covers in their set-lists similar to those the Dead
themselves may have played, from old-school R&B
and Motown, to Bob Dylan and Jimmy Cliff. Simply
said, Deadbeat has lots of fun playing the more
dance-able side of the Dead's repetoire, and while
they're playing, its fairly obvious there is nothing
they would rather be doing.

2 Tha Beat Y’all When
Hip Hop
Pedagogy
Goes BOOM!
BY KATIE CERCONE
Left to right: 1 BoomBoxBoy, New York City, 2012, photo courtesy of Melanie Mosier (pictured), 2 BoomBoxBoy, New York City, 2013, photo credit: Vito Fun, 3 BoomBoxBoy, New York City, 2013,
photo credit: Brandon Stanton, 4 BoomBoxBoy, New York City, 2012, photo credit: Pascale M. Duthel.
BoomBoxBoy and I were on the 2 train
headed back from the Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture. Over the course of
the evening’s program Higher Learning: Using
Hip Hop to Transform Schools and Communities 1
(moderated by Hip Hop Scholar in residence
Martha Diaz) I had wrenched out my wrist taking
copious notes. BoomBoxBoy had lugged in his box
midway through the evening wearing a zazzle brite
black and magenta sweater and slept through
a good third of the dialogue. When I asked him
to talk about his BoomBoxBoy project for my Hip
Hop Pedagogy article on the way home he said
chuckling,
“Hip hop pet a dawggy?”
I’m not sure if he knew what I actually said
or what pedagogy meant 2 exactly or not, or if that
even matters. His rhetorical manipulation of my
words - slyly signifying on my white privilege as he,
a black man, *cutely* dismissed my intellectual
jargoneering – well, that’s hip hop. As the poet
Audre Lorde said, you don’t dismantle the master’s
house using the master’s tools. Hip Hop is an
African Diasporic artistry rooted partially in the
musical lineages of the transatlantic slave trade,
where slave songs talked about killing the master
in coded language and used the drum beat to
organize massive rebellions. During slavery reading
could get you whipped and killed 3 .
Numerous scholars have talked about how
dance and the expressive use of the voice are a
critique of the very idea of ownership. Today, we
see and feel the widespread ramifications of our
founding father’s strategic xenophobia in ways
covert and unequivocal. We see the ultimate
worship of the black male, or what many have
termed ‘black male posturing,’ in Hip Hop and
professional sports at the same time we see
systematic societal neglect for the livelihood of
black and latino youth en mass.
As BoomBoxBoy (real name Prince Harvey)
and his performative pet-a-dawggy can attest,
Hip Hop as we progressive folk want to know it
is alive and well. I’m here to extrapolate on the
REVOLT
BoomBoxBoy project as well as report just a few
of the reasons Hip Hop is still meaningful, radical,
and relevant in the New York City community and
throughout the globe.
For one, hip hop is boosting literacy rates
across the country. According to Martha Diaz, who
founded the Hip-Hop Education Center at NYU's
Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and
Human Development, there is over 300 hip hop
education courses and after school programs in
the United States.Under the direction of Diaz, the
Hip-Hop Education Center is developing a Teaching
Certificate in collaboration with the New York
University's Metro Center and Teachers College,
Institute for Urban and Minority Education. They
also have a Hip Hop Education guidebook you can
download directly from their site. Afrika Bambaataa
recently became the current Hip Hop Scholar in
Residence at Cornel University. Jorge "PopMaster
Fabel" Pabon, one of the earliest b-boys
(“breakdancer” is not actually the correct terms
says Pabon 4 ) teaches a cipher-style hip hop dance
class and a hip hop history course at NYU. Today,
Hip Hop is being disseminated in a manner which
creates a generative space and leads youth toward
the embrace of emancipatory knowledge.
Although the formulaic raunch of
commercial rap may reign supreme in the public
eye, there remains the fact that throughout
the world thousands of individuals are working
collectively to go beyond beats and rhymes and
expose the exponential social-emotional uplift that
hip hop does.
Scholars such as Dr. Ernest Morrell are
highlighting the need for culturally appropriate
curricula in the schools and articulating how hip
hop can revolutionize education in America. As
he addressed during the Schomburg panel, a
key issue precipitating the 50% high school drop
out rate for black males in this country is the
fact that our schools still run on a Eurocentric
model developed during the industrial revolution.
Harkening back to the days when the education
of slaves was made illegal in the United States,
today black male youth have “wounded academic
selves.” Bringing hip hop into schools is providing
a space in the classroom setting in which they feel
successful and motivated. Maintains Morrell, black
male youth in particular are “logically disinvested
from their institutions – it’s not pathological. The
school system is abusive to young black males.”
He sites the rhetorical power of language in hip
hop and hip hop praxis - namely how hip hop
has been at the forefront of every youth social
justice movement globally for over 30 years - as
living proof of how 4 decades after DJ Kool Herc
inaugurated the first wave of hip hop the culture is
still SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER.
Let’s not forget that beyond the culturally
circumscribed Eurocentric model is the ancient
African Diasporic wisdom from which hip hop
sprung - Gulla abusive poems, Yoruba song
contests, African American language rituals such
as the dozens 5 , toasting, boasting and bragging. In
societies of West Africa, a social outcast and pariah
known as the “griot” is the cultural praise singer
and oral historian. Explains Greg Tate, within the
“wisdom of African cosmologies, these messengers
are guaranteed freedom of speech in exchange
for a marginality that extends to the grave.” 6 Fast
forward to the supposedly caste-free democratic
republic we call America, what will it take to upend
the simultaneous worship and denigration of the
rapper-contemporary-griot?
Another Schomburg panelist and Hip Hop
Educator, Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, explained how
hip hop is the core expression of black and latino
males, “it is their fundamental language.” She is
responsible for beyondthebricksproject.com, a
grassroots community engagement media initiative
promoting community based solutions to increase
educational and social outcomes for school age
black males. Another organization, called the
Posse Foundation, has adopted the hip hop ethos
of the “crew” aka “posse” to send promising
high school students in groups of ten to college.
Providing full scholarships to a 4-year school
the Posse Foundation places teens from diverse
backgrounds in supportive, multicultural peers
groups. The organization’s founder Dr. Deborah
Bial was recently awarded a MacArthur genius
grant.
Magazine Number 4, 2013 40

Another key player in Hip Hop praxis, Jen
Johnson, founded the Hip Hop Debate Institute at
the Institute for Minority Education at Columbia
Teacher’s College. Based on her contentions that
the alienating white male-centric nature of schools
has largely shaped the debate community, Johnson
founded the Hip Hop Debate Institute to create a
platform for students from diverse backgrounds
to embrace debate as an empowering activity and
political toolkit. Johnson explained how the majority
of men and women in congress have a debate
background, which means that in America “debate
is a pipeline to power” that black and latino youth
may not always be granted easy access to within
the traditional school setting. Encouraging her
students to navigate multiple ways of speaking and
being, scholars at the Hip Hop Debate Institute
become proactive and multilingual performative
pedagogues.
As we see scores of educators like Diaz,
Morrell, Sealey-Ruiz and Johnson aggressively
adopting hip hop to teach an array of subjects
including math, science, art, debate, and even
healthy eating habits (Hip Hop H.E.A.L.S.), 7 (http://
www.hiphopheals.com/#home) is there a danger of
the genre becoming ‘pimped’ by yet another
foreign entity? As one Schomburg audience
member pointed out, the nature of hip hop is that
everyone participates. This means that for hip hop
educators, letting the students teach them about
the authenticity of the culture they participate in is
crucial.
And what about the rappers? And the
market? And the pressure to conform to the
ghettocentric models that sell records? As Darlene
Vinicky contends, “a mass-produced culture of
consumption and violence only speaks for and
to a capitalist agenda.” 8 Concerning mainstream
rap, theorist Murray Forman has argued that “the
ghetto” is now the “symbolic center that anchors
the narrative image portrayed.” With a “gangsta
ethos saturating much of its texts,” the current
ghettocentricity of hip hop and black culture in
general “has continually threatened to override
other possible images of lived cultural space
among the hip hop generation.” 9 Interestingly
enough, as the thorough research comprising his
case study concludes, rap’s rogue shift toward
gangsta chic coincides with a period of rapid
commercial growth from 1987-88.
Which is not to say that all gangsta rap
is bad, or mere minstrelsy. As Forman contends,
the practice of identifying Hip Hop’s locus as the
ghetto - as real, imaginary, symbolic and mythic
as this space may be in music - also invigorates a
powerful global counter-discourse or what Nancy
Fraser terms a “‘subaltern counter-public.” 10
Critics such as Davarian L. Baldwin have likewise
articulated how the rise of gangsta rap in the
West Coast single-handedly dismantled New
York City’s monopoly on hip hop and re-opened a
discourse that had become increasingly shaped
by the middle-class-oriented “politically correct
disciplining of black bodies.” According to Baldwin,
gangsta rap broke the spell of orthodox Black
Nationalism which “obscures the daily battles
poor black folk have to wage in contemporary
America.” 11 If Hip Hop is at the heart about
politicizing youth toward a critique of state and
corporate hegemony in an unorthodox manner,
it’s important that we see past false dichotomies
segmenting “conscious” and “unconscious” lyrics
and rappers. Clearly, rappers of all stripes manifest
willful spaces of praxis. What will it take to move
rap’s positive content from margin to center?
In Tanzania, East Africa, for instance, where
swearing is considered unacceptable in public,
leaders of the local hip hop scene, many youth
themselves, act as gatekeepers of rap’s lyrics. Rap
songs must be about important social issues and
avoid the topics of drugs and sex 12 .
The Tanzanian system recalls the recent
vilification of southern rapper Rick Ross whose
rhyme: "Put molly all in her champagne, she ain’t
even know it / I took her home and I enjoyed dat,
she ain’t even know it.” (Rocko, U.O.E.N.O.) clearly
brags about date rape. In the last few days of
women’s history month, Ross became the target
of a media firestorm that almost sunk his entire
career and caused Reebok to pull the plug on his
lucrative endorsement contract (nobody bothered
to mention how Ross also says “I’d die for deez
Reeboks, U.O.E.N.O.” – making him a rapist and
a pawn of corporate America). Although Ross may
not be any more explicit than the majority of crunk/
trap/gangsta rappers out there, his slip indicates
an increased sense of dialogue around artist
accountability in rap made possible largely through
social media. As Jamilah Lemieux writes in Ebony,
Ross’s ratchet rhyme presented “an important
teachable moment for young men, boys and even
some full-grown adults who don’t understand
consent.” 13
Interestingly, periods of enhanced attention
paid to issues of racial equality and the successful
building of multiracial alliances within American
history often coincide with economic depression
such as the increased sensitivity amongst whites
for racial issues in the massive hunger marches
that occurred following the great depression in
1930. 14 In the wake of the recent market collapse,
scores of young people who feel that they are
being ‘skipped over’ by the job market are looking
to rappers as inspirational figures. As Jay Z says
it, “[hip hop] brought the suburbs to the hood.” 15
When I think of racial justice oriented entities such
as the Black Panthers more than leather jackets
and raised fists comes to mind. What comes to
mind immediately rather is the $200 I get in credit
each month I can spend on food because I make
less money than it costs to breath here in New York
City. The Food Stamp program was created by the
American government when they noticed that the
Black Panthers were gaining an inordinate amount
of attention and support simply by offering free
breakfast to inner city children.
In “What is the Current Direction of Hip-
Hop?” 16 a webisode hosted by Dr. Marc Lamont
Hill, hip hop academic Dr. Tricia Rose alongside
emcee Jasiri x and Pharoahe Monch discuss hip
hop’s radical future potential. Says Jasiri X, “We’re
at the best of times and the worst of times. On
one hand you have a hip hop industry that has
been completely corporatized and pushing some
of the most soulless pop music that we’ve ever
heard and on the other hand you have technology
that’s allowed artists like myself to come with a
grassroots perspective, to connect directly to their
audience and get a positive message out.”
For many, technology seems to epitomize
what is both most wrong and most righteous with
regard to today’s rap. While folks like Darlene
Vinicky are pinpointing technology (the internet,
iPods and transnational corporations to be exact)
as the reason hip hop has shifted from a collective,
physical and participatory event into a spectacular
and problematic space that ultimately “lulls us
into complacency and isolation,” 17 the truth is, hip
hop was born of technology. Without repurposed
electronics and the creative appropriation of prerecorded
albums and sounds, there would be no
hip hop. When hip hop went global, it was largely
due to the internet and MTV.
Personally, I like to situate the internet
as a collective type of isolation, a collective postconscious
or super-conscious if you will. And in
the defense of the internet, I’d say that the rapid
dissemination of all dis supafly bangin sh*t we
call hip hop does lead to the formation of real
allegiances and coalitions. It might also be the
case that while American rap is lost in some gilded
cage of a pimp-hoe minefield the rest of the world
has picked up where the real hip hop left off. Says
Jasiri X, “Overseas a lot of times the culture of hip
hop is more respected…and even the revolutionary
aspects of hip hop. You have hip hop artists really
responsible for creating the soundtrack that set
off the Arab Spring and some other movements
around the world.”
According to Bocafloja, an artist largely
responsible for politicizing rap in Mexico, the
gestation point of the global hip hop movement
was a festival that began in Cuba in the early
nineties. Bringing people of color from around the
world together to organize around hip hop as a
social justice platform, Bocafloja says that it was
these festivals, which by their third year were being
funded by Fidel Castro, that cemented important
cross-cultural allegiances still in existence amongst
today’s global raptivist network. 18
There tends to be a sentiment among the
academy that the revolution is always happening
“over there,” which ignores the myriad grassroots
movements here in the States and underestimates
exactly how and why the sheer power of the
American entertainment industry has carried
the torch of hip hop to lands near and far. Either
way let’s face it – hip hop is American. It was and
will always be about enterprise: black jobs, black
owned companies, black commerce. It’s the first
black musical genre to broadly take the power back
from the whitey parent companies. Which doesn’t
excuse the parading of substance abuse as leisure
or violence against women as the norm in rap.
And by identifying hip hop as a black power thang
I also don’t mean to steamroll the multicultural
beginnings of hip hop, particularly it’s early
Nuyorican, Caribbean and Latino influence and
innovators.
Bracketed by three males on Lamont
Hill’s series is Tricia Rose, who basically wrote
the bible of hip hop academia Black Noise. For
Rose, the power of hip hop pedagogy, and black
music in general, is the oral history which speaks
to an African Diasporic experience not recounted
in mainstream narratives. Word up, the pimp-ho
sh*t is about as transgressive as free pancakes at
iHop. As Beth Coleman has hashed out, the pimp
is an age-old figure whose black male iconographic
celebrity in the United States trajectory descends
from the American slave economy: “The male
African got wise, ‘What does he do to you when
you are with him?’ ‘He makes me have sex and
offers gifts like pork chops.’ Being that he was
in a precarious situation, being that we were in
a negative disposition the African at the time
who was a slave, he said, ‘Alright, what you do is
ask him for two pork chops’…and the system of
manipulation began for survival.” 19
Says Rose regarding the most problematic
elements of hip hop’s current commercial
mainstream, “I think we have lost a long historical
value of black music speaking not just to politics
but to the black condition, to what it means to be
African American or part of the black diaspora
that really has been reduced to the kind of BLING
BLING, what I call the hip hop trinity: the gangstapimp-ho
trinity has produced the most money ever
and it continues to drive youth interests. I think
until we unlock that it’s going to be a hard way.”
Rose’s point is really important. I for
one can attest to the fact that as much as I am
seduced by scholarship mythologizing the guerillastyle
collective street renaissance that was early

hip hop, I’m equally seduced by the mainstream
bump and grind core. Like the free pancakes, some
days that sh*t just tastes so good. Call me the
quintessential white hipster binging on black cool.
As far as I’m concerned, without blackness, I have
no culture to speak of.
From an essay called “Color Notes”
published by William Houghton in 1927, the white
male writer concedes to how freed slaves have in
effect conquered their former masters, “We talk his
dialect, we sing his songs, we dance his dances…
his tempo, jazz is the universal rhythm. Whenever
we relax we fall under his spell; it is only in our tight
working moments we are free of it.” 20
This is certainly not to say that music
erased racism in America, where during the time
of this publication lynching still happened and
segregation was still enforced. In many ways
Houghton’s writing only serves to emphasize the
projection and exotic/erotic tropes characterizing
whites views of black expression.
The subjective Modernity to which
one’s humanity (subtext “white” humanity and
“black” subalternity) lays claim to food, shelter
and a means of survival is always comprised of
whiteness constructed through investments in
black culture. 21 All of us by whatever approximated
privileges pass as white enough or straight
enough to be marked a “citizen” of the republic
are implicated in a violent and oppressive neocolonial
frame in which race is cast as, in the words
of Achille Mbembe, the “nocturnal side of the
Republic.” 22
In terms of my allegiances to hip hop I
may have entered by way of the typical salacious
sedation but what I’ve ultimately gotten out of hip
hop is much closer to a type of embodied faith and
burgeoning sense of global citizenship. Which is
where BoomBoxBoy, REVOLT Magazine’s posterboy
of Hip Hop pet-a-dawgy in the flesh, factors into the
equation. Like hip hop’s founding fathers DJ Kool
Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa,
Prince Harvey is of West Indian decent having
grown up in LA, Dominica and New York City. I’m
largely interested in his work because I think he’s
usurping the sheer sex appeal of the hip hop
aesthetic to interestingly promising socio-political
ends.
BoomBoxBoy, influenced by the character
Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do The
Right Thing, is a performance work by the artist
Prince Harvey exploring ownership, community, and
socially appropriate modes of being with respect
to race, class and gender. Incorporating personal
narrative, anecdote and hip hop a cappella –
BoomBoxBoy’s call and response approach to
rapping and beat making urges the audience to
take a participatory stance embellishing the music
by clapping and speaking along in rhythm.
On BoomBoomBox boy’s turf, I’m clapping
along, I’m a participant. I may be initially roped
in by the eye candy of his hypermasculine
*bling*bling” semi-nudity (which as far as I’m
concerned is drag for Prince Harvey, who when he’s
not strong-arming a boombox in his underwear is
as likely to be seen in a skirt or a glittery sweater)
but I’m ultimately solicited as a participant. I’m
also schooled. When BoomBoxBoy gathers his
audience he not only hoots and hollers, he talks
about being a black male, having a gender and
sexual identity, and the importance of community
and dialogue.
Prince Harvey, who grew up in a female
dominated household and loves to surround
himself with a crew of fierce, sex-positive womenloving
women, is amongst a cadre of young artists
determined to queer the dialogue of Hip Hop and
effectively derail its associations with misogyny
and unrestricted male privilege. Another artist I’d
connect him to here is Cakes da Killa. Cakes is the
type of artist that covers Frank Ocean's "Thinkin
Bout You,” with his own lyrics, which go "I've been
thinking bout dick/ na na na na," commenting on
the recent public discussions concerning Ocean’s
sexuality and how hip hop is finally “Gay” in the
media because an R&B singer that dates women
once crushed on a dude.
Pitchfork is calling Cakes the new Lil Kim
figure, “A raunchy-ass bitch who absolutely owns
being a raunchy-ass bitch.” 23 It’s not raptivism or
anything, but it does offer a bit of a silver lining
in terms of re-thinking the hetero-family unit as
the universal index of health and wellness. It’s
also interesting to note that when rap albums
get “cleaned” up for big retailers like Kmart
and Walmart the music companies only delete
drug references and profanity. Misogyny and
homophobia, however, remain clear as a bell
and likewise par for the tween course. 24 In terms
of Cakes work, it certainly begs the question of
why there are so few female MCs following in the
footsteps of the great female MCs. Is the drag male
the new female rapper par excellence?
The recent cover of the Village Voice
featuring “Flowmosexual Gender Ninja” of “Warrior
Rap” Mykki Blanco seems to suggest YES. Played
by a young man, Mykki Blanco is the female rap
alias of Michael Quattlebaum Jr., age 27, who
states that riot-grrrl was his primary musical
influence as a youth (before hip hop, when punk’s
homophobia turned him off). 25
What’s interesting about the BoomBoxBoy
project is that he takes a more nuanced approach
to his gender-nomadism. In some of his videos
online he has recorded instances of harassment he
experienced during his performances from groups
of young women, homophobic men and police
officers. He’s had to learn the hard way that taking
your clothes off and asking for money in Times
Square in the footsteps of the Naked Cowboy and
500 or so life-size Tickle Me Elmos is a lot different
than traipsing around Baltimore, where he was
nearly arrested for obscenity related allegations.
And to make things clear, BoomBoxBoy is asking
for money. The project began as a way for Prince
Harvey the artist to raise money to produce his first
hip hop album: BOOM. According to Harvey, BOOM
will be the first official full-length hip hop a cappella
album. “The project started as a way of getting
exposure and funding to black artists creating
culturally relevant work,” says Harvey, “but you
don’t have to say that if you don’t want to, it brings
me great pleasure when people think I'm just a
nigga.”
Say what?! That’s another interesting
development within hip hop these days, the
turn from “nigger” to “nigga.” Although largely
misunderstood, the nigga turn is a profound
utterance indicating the sheer importance hip hop
places on authenticity. In his seminal essay “On
the Question of Nigga Authenticity” R.A.T. Judy
says: “Understanding the movement from nigger
to nigga means recalling the historical systematic
employment of nigger as exchange value…nigga
is that which emerges from the demise of human
capital…the nigga is unemployed, null and void,
walking around…a nigga who understands that all
possibility converts from capital, and capital does
not derive from work.”
Judy’s argument is one that seems
to address a number of timely concerns for a
generation undergoing huge shifts within the
economic sector and the general “niggafication”
of white suburban America. Conversely, one could
almost argue for an artist like Prince Harvey, and
his Facebook page will certainly attest to this, the
BoomBoxBoy project is equal parts Radio Raheem
and Rappin’ Rockin Barbie (Mattel© circa 1992).
Ultimately what came of Prince Harvey’s
humble quest to get paper and produce a full
length album is a larger than life pet-a-dawggy
with a hyperreal appeal straddling the street and
the virtual sphere. BoomBoxBoy’s stage extends
to Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Soundcloud,
where I have been, solipsistically at times, frankly,
pretending I’m him, and watching his hilarious
posturing and community building unfold. If
you haven’t had the pleasure of encountering
BoomBoxBoy on his trek through the five boroughs,
you soon will.
1 “Higher Learning: Using Hip Hop to Transform Schools and
Communities,”
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Nov. 27,
2012
Panel Moderator: Martha Diaz
2 Ped·a·go·gy [ped-uh-goh-jee] n. The function or work of a
teacher; teaching. The art or science of teaching; education;
instructional methods.
3 David Pleasant, “Rhythms of Resistance,” Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture, December 14, 2012
4 Jorge Pabon, “Fashion Moda: A Legacy of Community and
Creativity in the South Bronx” panel at the Bronx Documentary
Center, February 16th, 2013
5 David Toop, The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip
Hop, South End Press, 1985
6 Greg Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary
America an Eye Opening look at Race, Politics, Literature and
Music, Simon and Schuster, 1992, pg. 232-233
7 Hip Hop H.E.A.L.S. is an initiative in NYC Public schools using
rap and hip hop culture to explore healthy eating options for
youth. Guest artists include hip hop legends Doug E. Fresh and
the Cold Crush Bros among others.
8 Darlene Vinicky, “(Progressive) Hip Hop Cartography” in Wish
to Live: The Hip Hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader Ruth Nicole
Brown + Chamara Jewel Kwakye, (eds.) Peter Lang, 2012,
pg. 29
9 Murray Forman, The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and
Place in Rap and Hip Hop Wesleyan University Press, 2002,
pg. 59-61, 191
10 Murray Forman, ibid, pg. 198
11 Davarian L. Baldwin, That’s The Joint!: The Hip Hop Studies
Reader, Murray Foreman and Mark Anthony Neal, Eds. 2012,
pg. 235
12 Alex Perullo, “Hooligans and Heroes: Youth Identity and Hip
Hop in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania,” That’s The Joint! ibid, pg.
331
13 http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/rick-rossthinks-rape-is-a-punchline-999#ixzz2PF1RpoKS
14 Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism New
York: Random House, 1998, pg. 190
15 Jay Z quoted by Todd Boyd, “Intergenerational Culture Wars:
Civil Rights v. Hip Hop” Todd Boyd and Yusuf Nuruddin, That’s
The Joint! ibid, pg. 444
16 “What is the Current Direction of Hip-Hop?” Published Dec
31, 2012 on YOUTUBE by 1HoodMedia, "Our World with Black
Enterprise" hosted by Dr. Marc Lamont Hill with Pharoahe
Monch, Dr. Tricia Rose and Jasiri X
17 Darlene Vinicky, ibid, pg. 29
18 Bocafloja, “Global Hip Hop Movement” Panel at the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, April 16,
2013, Panel Moderator: Martha Diaz
19 Beth Coleman, “Pimp Notes on Autonomy” in Everything
But the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black
Culture Edited by Greg Tate, Harlem Moon, 2003
20 William Houghton cited in Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls:
Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern,
Duke University Press, 2008, pg. 218
21 Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and
the Shaping of the Modern Duke University Press, 2008,
pg. 17
22 Achille Mbembe cited in Richard Iton, In Search of the
Black Fantastic: Politics & Popular Culture in the Post-Civil
Rights Era Oxford University Press, 2008, pg. 134
23 Miles Raymer, “Cakes da Killa: The Eulogy,” Pitchfork,
February 7, 2013
24 Gilbert B. Rodman, “Race…And Other Four-Letter Words” in
That’s the Joint: The Hip Hop Studies Reader Murray Forman
and Mark Anthony Neal, eds. 2012, pg. 193
25 Jenna Sauers, “FLOWMOSEXUAL: The Making of Mykki
Blanco” The Village Voice, April 10-16, 2013, pg. 8
REVOLT Magazine Number 4, 2013 42

Matt Craven, DOTS, mixed media on found paper, 2012

SWAGILISH Salomon
and THEillUZiON
BY KATIE CERCONE
When I asked Salamon Faye of the
illUZiON if I could interview him
about the syncretism of the spiritual
and the political in hip hop, I didn’t
know that I’d end up having to take a look at
myself. Like always, I was in hot pursuit of some
magical-liturgical projection amalgamating hip hop
scholarship, rap glitterati boundary transgression
in the spectacular and my own perceived lack. I
thought if I tapped my heels together three times
and dove into a sea of rappers, I’d find GAWD.
And then I did, both inside myself, and mirrored
back in the illUZiON’s hand symbol, or mudra,
“the code” Salomon says. It translates to LOVE
FAITH AND GRATITUDE. Interestingly, it’s the
exact same symbol we make with both hands
outstretched during the Kundalini sacred prayer
Japji, which causes a profound experience with
your own Soul bringing tremendous personal
balancing and connection with the Infinite. It is
about understanding the Wizdom of God. A few
dayz following my request to Faye, I was whisked
away to the mountains (yo we was flyin’) by Joshua
aka Insane the Rebel aka Enasni Leber (sh*t is
backwards yo!), half of THEillUZiON, for a group
interview with a few more of the Bushwick-based
Apostrophe Collective. Joining us was the visual
artist Ryan “Bock Haus” Bock, who’s currently
collaborating on a video with Salomon titled
“Quest.” Looking out over a majestic green valley
from an ivy draped castle filled with beautiful
women (roaming in the yard was the illustrious
singer Elira Roe) and psychic dogs (all dogs are
psychic), we got down to bizzness and talked about
where we all comin from and why we all artists. Call
it a Transcendental Summit; you could say we held
Spiritual Court.
KC: How did you come up with the name illUZiON?
SF: For me the name THEillUZiON was to represent
how we were gonna try to lure people in with what
they were accepting at the time but once they’re
like “oooh this is cool” SMACK you with the truth!!
EL: We live in a world of illusions and we are the
product of various illusions – we identify by that.
KC: Does it relate to the Hindu concept of maya,
translated to illusion, veil and simply “not that?”
Maya means that the universal truth cannot be
translated to a simple concept the ordinary mind
can manipulate. We use the word “maya” to keep
the mind from attaching to incomplete reality, any
thoughts?
REVOLT
Quest, video still, 2013, collaboration between Salomon Faye and Ryan Bock.
SF: It is a truth that I’m trying to convey but I try to
be it more than to speak it. It’s hard to really speak
about that using words without things getting lost
in translation. The way I try to promote it is really
trying to demonstrate how I practice self-mastery
and how I apply that truth in my life.
KC: Your song Fools Gold – I read the title and
lyrics as a metaphor and commentary on the
American Dream – can you explain more the song’s
message?
SF: We’re pointing out the false values that people
have. We’re not just simply trying to rhyme and
show our rhyming ability - we can do that - so like
we’re just trying to make points and that song ac
curately interpreted is a point made.
EL: It’s a where we come from kind of song. We
come from the fool’s gold. When you grow up in the
hood you see these false fantasies that everybody
has to escape the reality. The poverty, the broken
apartments, that’s all it is in the hood, yet they
think everything’s cool, they spend a lot of money
on clothes, grow weed, bottles – and it’s just a
false fantasy. That’s the illusion that people want to
live and that’s what we came from, you know? And
we’re getting out of it. Salomon says “slept on the A
train woke up on my A game,” that was our life then
and now we’ve broken away from the fools gold.
SF: Wanna try a little fools gold, if you wanna vibe with
the rebel God tribe put a hand up… it’s not like that
reality is far from us too. For us to be able to identify
the illusion we once had to be consumed by it.
EL: There’s a choice. A hustler makes a sacrifice a
good book or a paradise - you choose your reality.
Some people say they need to sell drugs to survive
– at the end of the day you do what you want to do,
right? You can live the illusion – or you can make
your own reality.
KC: I feel ya. Some critics have described this track
as “true school” and “revivalist,” can you trace
THEillUZiON back to the golden age of hip hop
in the South Bronx of the 80s and 90s? What is
the true school and is there a particular hip hop
lineage that you follow?
EL: As for influences my pops used to breakdance
and do graffiti. I grew up in the Bronx in the 90s so
that’s hip hop to me. When I started listening to
hip hop 50 cent was out, Dipset was out, all these
people they were doin their thing. I always listen to
90s stuff, 80s stuff.. cause that was my thing but
honestly I don’t know everybody gets influenced I
listen to jazz I listen to Rock n’ Roll… I’m Dominican
and Ecuadorian so Spanish music is a big influence
in my life.
SF: I get influenced by what I like, shit I don’t like.
What I don’t like might make me make a certain
decision or approach something a different way.
There’s a point where Wayne was an influence to
me but DUDE! The music I make is nothing like
him tho I can’t deny that influence that he had at
a certain point in my development so I would just
say life experiences, what happens to come my
way naturally. Me and Rebel we haven’t been really
trying to replicate a golden age or a golden era.
Magazine Number 4, 2013 44

RB: I think it’s very natural. Until very recently hip
hop as a whole has been very stagnant it’s been
in this bit of a drought I feel like and until just
recently, younger artists are emerging and without
even really meaning to are sort of bringing back
this early 90s golden age of hip hop sound. The
way that I see it is that it’s not even a conscious
situation but it’s also very natural it’s like this wave
– they go up, they go down.
EL: WORD – yea a lot of people are like “I want to
rap like the nineties I love the nineties, nineties this
nineties that - ”
SF: It’s not even about that.
EL: I can’t tell you I make nineties music. I listen
to Led Zeppelin, I listen to Anthony Santos I listen
to Tribe Called Quest I listen to Lil Wayne I listen to
Kanye College Graduate.
SF: I listen to Chance the Rapper
EL: I listen to Jay Z good music era y’all gonna -
SF: Open Letter, all my niggers like 3 Hunna
EL: I listen to GBE - you know!
SF: Pretty Flocka
EL: And some cats be like that’s not real hip hop
SF: What you talkin bout! What is real hip hop?
EL: I just like music I like all types of stuff.
EL: Yo there was wack rappers in the 90s. There
was a stagnant era in the 90s you know you had
Biggie and Tupac but you also had Too $hort. You
had all these other people that were sayin some
bullshit too. Even Biggie, Biggie wasn’t sayin much
of anything positive. You had Tribe Called Quest. On
the west coast you had people rappin slow on the
east coast you had people rappin fast down south
you had people rappin, say com’on what’s real hip
hop? People in New York are gonna say rap from
New York in the 90s is real hip hop people in the
south are like that shit is wack!
past 30 years. Do you feel part of a cohesive Hip
Hop Nation that is - as Afrika Bambaataa would say
- “speaking truth to power?"
SF: People can call it what they want. I’m not really
for being against or rejecting another thing, I try to
either understand it or overlook it. As far as being
a part of a cohesive hip hop nation I’ll say hip hop
is cool right now, very diverse, it’s a platform where
everybody can be themselves. I just play my part in
that.
KC: Where do you situate yourself and the
iLLUZION crew in relationship to the global hip
hop diaspora? Can you talk about the evocation of
style and guts in hip hop as a type of transnational,
spiritual swag politicizing youth and raising
consciousness worldwide?
SF: Through hip hop? Yeah I mean that’s great. I’m
working with a few artists right now in other countries.
I think it’s dope to expand the connection - the
consciousness - and everybody’s working together.
As far as politics I don’t really include much of that in
my hip hop. My music is all my artistic expression of
truth. I don’t look to attack or limit the expression of
the government or whatever might be behind it. That’s
being spoken about by others. I stick to my task, which
is just being the light.
Somebody spiritual they’ll call it that, somebody
not spiritual they’ll say “in the zone” or something
but it’s this trance state where something does
come over you, or go in through you. It happens to
me all the time freestylin’ there’s a certain zone
of comfort where the message and the words just
seem to come out almost as if I’m watching it
happen. It is a state of mind, a form of meditation.
I’m sure it’s like the same vibe or frequency that
people are getting into in African dance or it’s
whatever some people call it. Sometimes I say it’s
the vein, like getting in the vein – it's God flowing
through you. It’s being able to let go of everything
and just move – woosh! As far as lyrics and the
creation process of the art and unraveling truth, it’s
funny to watch. Writing or making something with
such concentrated thought or energy, feeling that
you’re creating that world manifesting from inside
to out. I understand myself more going over the
things I come up with because it’s more than me,
when things are at their best. Because you
know when you’re like looking for some inspiration
or thoughts you’re digging, you’re digging from
options, things from right there to pick from and
then when you stop digging it’s just coming. It’s a
spiritual experience - this is life - it’s always there
that vibe it’s just if you’re present to it. God is
always PRESENT
KC: And how is illUZiON pushing the borders of the
genre and carving out a new space in today’s hip
hop?
EL: It’s authentic, and we don’t even try. If I were to
try I could make some 90s shit I could make some
west coast shit I could make something trill. I could
make some trap shit, I could make a trap album,
what? Trap Supastar! But I don’t try to make “some
shit” I Just do what im inspired to.
SF: I don’t even like being narrowed in to only
being looked at as a hip hop artist. A lot of rappers
put themselves in that box and limit themselves.
They become album after album, mix tape after
mix tape, uh-uh son, niggas want to write plays!
This is where we at right now, the foundation of
where we started. We started out rapping well, we
started applying thoughtful things about life to our
ability to rhyme and now we gotta push it further.
Rap is too easy now it’s not just about rapping or
rhyming a word. So we not tryin to carve hip hop.
Hip hop is what it is and we a part of it because
we’re artists that emcee and we’re doing our best
to become better artists and have that be a part
of the influence and the identity of our culture,
nauuughmean??
KC: The Hip Hop Nation has been called a ‘couterrepublic’
within the United States, it’s also been
said that hip hop has been at the forefront of every
youth social justice movement worldwide for the
Salomon Faye, photo credit Dakota Blue Harper.
KC: You do put messages in your work and that’s
political, you just don’t talk about politics is what
you’re saying?
SF: Yeah
KC: I like to think about hip hop in terms of earth
and sky awareness. The drum beat is about our
roots, breakdancing draws energy up from the
earth through the feet. Hip Hop also links back to
the practice of “possession dance” in Africa where
to dance is to literally transcending human form
and becoming one with source. I like to think of
rappers, particularly the freestyle or the flow as a
type of cosmic verbal divination. Salomon I noticed
you dropping some pretty nu age bars, talking
about the sun god, the sky, the third eye and
rapping as your “divine purpose” or as you called it
before “unraveling truth” – can you say more?
SF: It’s about being so wrapped up in something
you love that the force - that will power- it drives
through you to where it is a spiritual experience.
EL: You got to get lost in it, right? Even the first time
I write a song you know you got everything you want
to say and even at that you know I find out months
later the shit that I wrote made so much sense…
that shit just came out and now I listen and I’m like
that shit so dope. You got to sing “If you wanna vibe
with the rebel God Tribe” like 5,000 times and you
almost forget what the song is about… I may have
not even gotten it while creating it.
SF: The message is not just hidden in the result
but also the creation process. Yo, that shit is God’s
language to me, art is just an analogy to be able
to bring together how this higher consciousness
that some people call universe, higher force, I call
God - this is how it communicates - within and
through, outside, around, what is. What isn’t. We
understand what it is whenever we come to that
point of understanding.
KC: I’m interested in the significance of the party in
hip hop and in your video. There is this apocalyptic

narrative, like party at the end of the world,
warning: Fool’s Gold! You’re confronting the pitfalls
of the American Dream/illUZiON when your lyrics
go “money hoes and clothes everything that’s trite”
– but it’s also just a party scene. Hip Hop started
as a bloc party in the Bronx with DJ Kool Herc and
the b-boys, the cops tried to break it up, but hip
hop kept going, and much of the music is
for what I put out and how it’s received. Being able
to find that balance, that sweet spot where the
fun is taking up the same space as the message.
That’s the conflict an artist that has something
to say should have. How can people enjoy this
and how can I still express these points without
preaching, without it being like a fuckin lecture or
something. That’s the conflict I have with
what they want to do, we shouldn’t look to hip hop
right now to be a savior because hip hop’s not
saving anything even if it is positive! It has potential
too and anything has potential too so if you wanna
do something that helps the planet - do it. If Hip
Hop is influencing strong and positive decisions
then wonderful. Something I want to do as an
individual is express what I’m learning and how
I’m growing to help people. I do that NOT through
hip hop, no, just through music. Yo hip hop is very
limited right now. The state of mind in hip hop is
very limited. I like to say things that make people
question what they might value and not value
within society. I just influence a curiosity for life cuz
I’m curious I’m seekin I’m just putting out what I
see fit and I’m not wasting words anymore when it
comes to writing a song.
KC: So there’s your message, the party is the
vehicle, and lastly – yo you guys have a lot of
swag. You have a lot of attitude and confidence, it
only multiplies when you are together, it’s almost
performative. I mean for instance like Tupac, a lot
of people don’t know this but he actually attended
acting school when he was comin up in LA. What is
that? Can you talk about that? How is that part of
what you are doing, is it a tool?
Salomon Faye and Enasni Leber of THEillUZiON, photo credit Dakota Blue Harper.
still oriented around the party meme. In what ways
is engaging the collective more important than the
message, and how can we conceive of the party
environment as a generative, joyful and political
space?
EL: One thing I learned about in NYC is that when it
comes to a party, they are always sort of political.
It’s always political, it’s always everybody in NYC is
selling everything and that’s everywhere. Being at
our gallery Apostrophe we’re used to parties every
week and usually the same people come every
week, every week, and it’s like a ritual - yo - it’s like
church. You get to play a game of life every week.
You go to this party and you play life different every
week. Next week you come and you a boss. Next
week you comin and you ain’t doin much. People
want to pop bottles, they want to trip, they want to
pop a molly, they want to do all of that, they want to
be the man, what? Damn! Bag some bitches! It’s a
fantasy. It’s just not real life. That’s where the fool’s
gold comes into play, that’s why it’s in the video,
naturally, it all comes together.
SF: Catch it Bock Haus
RB: That’s also part of the illusion. Partying is
such a desirable thing, everyone wants to party,
it’s kind of the nature of humanity as a whole.
They want to have fun but I think it’s important to
inject something into that. It can’t just be all about
partying it has to have more meaning than that.
That’s what I get from the illUZiON. If you look at
that video superficially you think oh it’s a party
they’re having a good time da da da but then if you
really pay attention to the words and what is being
said than that is where the political aspect of it
comes in.
SF: straight up! I think it’s for us as artists about
being conscious of what we’re putting out and me
speaking personally I feel a sense of responsibility
everything I create because I’m speaking with
purpose and I want to be heard so I got to think
about my listeners and I know people wanna have
fun. They’re out smoking and drinkin and tryna
have a good time but at the same time let’s create
something out of this wonderful moment. Let’s
grow from it, let’s become stronger.
RB: The party is not the focus it’s just the vehicle
that you put it in.
KC: Many people have situated rappers within
terms of the West African Griotic tradition, a Griot
being a praise singer of a socially
marginal position with biting wit and political
commentary. He is the repository of the oral
tradition of the culture and he pays for his freedom
by a marginalization that follows him to the grave,
literally, he’s not permitted to be buried with the
regular folk of society. In the United States we
have the race issue, and often hip hop is seen
as a type of insurrectionary knowledge about
the true state of things that has pushed its way
through music when, barred from other outlets
such as mainstream News. Like Salomon when
you say “Last time I met a whore, met her with a
metaphor…” you’re making a social commentary
in a multiplicity of ways. Do you relate to the
role of the contemporary griot and do you feel a
responsibility when you rhyme to speak of and for
the unseen and unheard in our society?
SF: Aight, ok one right now I wouldn’t say hip hop
is being used to improve society, it’s just not. It
was at a time but right now I don’t even know what
hip hop is, but it’s cool. I identify as just being an
artist in general and an aspect of my expression is
hip hop so WORD. With that said I feel responsible
for how and what I say and how I come off as
an emcee, as a part of hip hop. However, I don’t
feel responsible for or think hip hop should be
responsible for socially anything. People can do
SF: I feel like it’s a developed confidence. I
wouldn’t have always been able to express myself
like this in an interview, in front of a camera, on a
microphone, in a performance. This is natural but
this is over time. I remember when I was scared
to rap in front of people, but I was different in my
room or in front of someone I’m close to. Now it’s
me naturally feeling close to everybody and being
at a level so comfortable with myself and aware of
myself and comfortable with who I am that this is
just what happens.
EL: Yea yo, what you see is what you get. I mean yo
like you develop habits and these habits become
your character and you need different characters
for different things. I’m me right now, I’m chillin, I’m
cool. If I need to be on point I’ll be on point. I might
go up to someone else and just be Joshua. It’s like
whatever.
SF: That’s where I feel like the art of personality
comes into existence. This is just our personality yo
and that has a big part to do with God.
EL: We pray a lot, we meditate a lot.
SF: We get lost
EL: We read a lot
KC: What do you read?
RB: Ancient Scrolls
EL: Fiction too, I like being creative and I like
creative books, man I just read -
SF: I didn’t like fiction until I read Clockwork
Orange. Aight, boom! Conversations with God.
DAMN Bro. I’ve been like unraveling this truth, you
know like moving the clouds out of the way and the
sunlight has been allowing me to see.
KC: Afrika Bambaataa calls the 5th element of Hip
Hop “Knowledge of self in the community” Does
this resonate with you? What is the significance of
the posse mentality to your work?
SF: Posse mentality?
REVOLT Magazine Number 4, 2013 46

KC: The Apostrophe collective, working with other
people. So you’re clearly not totally down with
this sort of mainstream commercial leviathan hip
hop has become these days, so to speak. And yet
many others still uphold this notion of a codified
movement that is hip hop in the historical sense
with certain rules and codes. A big element of
this is community, what is the significance of
community in your life and work?
SF: My community is important, communication
is important, knowing and making an effort to
be in harmony with the people around you. I’m
with the community, that’s why you see me as a
collective or a posse. There’s a vibe. It’s important
to have like minded people around who you are
learning from who are learning from you and who
are adding to the cause ready to be artistic, ready
to do something positive, passionate, trying to
grow. It’s important to be able to maintain good
relationships, it’s a part of growing, it’s a part of
being able to hold something together. It’s just
natural, if that’s hip hop than great. I feel like I
been a part of hip hop before I realized this life of
being an artist. A lot of things I just grew up doing
naturally and now I’m starting to be more aware of
how what I picked up naturally back then are the
cornerstones holding this thing together.
KC: Ryan – so in terms of your studio work that’s
flowing into the collaboration with Salomon, I was
interested in the mask concept because like music
there’s this idea that in many cultures the mask
is what channels the spirit, linking both art and
hip hop back to a type of urban or contemporary
Shamanism.
RB: Shamans are still in all different cultures,
Asia, Africa – Witch doctors would wear masks
that were uglier than diseases that they were
trying to expel trying to scare the sickness away
or something like that it’s like an ancient way of
handling things. I don’t know if I would use the
word spiritual. I just have very particular visions of
what I see translating into what I make. The trance
occurs when I’m making something. I get into this
rhythm or this zone where what’s happening is very
natural and very intuitive. I’m not always aware of
what I’m making until it’s finished. It’s spiritual but
it’s almost so natural to me I don’t like to label it
as something along those lines, and it’s difficult
because the word shaman has so much baggage
that comes with it. I’ve always been drawn to
things that shamans use like masks. Once I started
learning about these things I started to realize this
is really sort of what I’m channeling in a way, it
became the most appropriate label for my process.
KC: How does that relate to the bashful bags I’ve
seen in your work and on the Apostrophe crew? Is
that related to the mask concept – it seems to me
like it’s this very pop and very accessible way of
expressing it.
RB: It is very accessible, the bags are to me like
more fun, you know what I mean? It doesn’t have
to be really serious.
KC: How did you come to do this collaboration with
Salomon? What is “Quest” about?
RB: To me it’s very much like realizing your own
individual path, your own individual journey.
Everyone experiences it differently. Instead of
forcing a lifestyle on people it’s more of just a call
to question what’s true to you.
SF: Following the vibe of what is feeling right.
Walking where your intuition or your instinct or vibe
takes you - that’s the quest. Ryan said it best, the
key word “realization” of someone’s path. That’s
what it really is, realizing your being. The whole
Bashful Bags, Ryan Bock, at Apostrophe Gallery in Bushwick.
quest is about not being afraid to step into that
realm of uncertainty, of questions. Walk through
the fire or you’ll be tossed in the flames because
you have to do it anyway. We’re already in it. The
question is are you going to walk through it or
become apart of the Fire that inevitably burns us
all. One way to think of this Fire is “The system.”
KC: And so what is Quest? Is it a music video? Is it
video art? How are you showing it I mean it looks a
bit like a painting.
RB: It’s a work of art. We’re calling it “motion
painting.” We’re trying to have an opening for
it at a gallery. It’s like two of the oldest forms
of communication, painting (art) and music,
combining the two and not necessarily labeling
it as a music video or as video art but more of
a collaborative effort to create something that’s
both timeless and very original. Especially in light
of what people are working on today when they
make a music video. We’re not as concerned with
labeling one thing or another. It's a great way to
reach more people and different groups of people
– people who are interested in hip hop, people who
are interested in art - and just to combine forces.
KC: What’s the Love flow illUZiON performed
at Irving Plaza? I feel like everyone has a lot of
negative things to say about hip hop and yet you
see this full spectrum of ideas and experiences
conveyed in the music, what is the significance of
your message about love in this day in age?
SF: That message – it’s about being honest with
myself and being comfortable where I’m at and the
impact I want to have as a musician. I want to play
music so a song like that is a success to me,
it’s communicating and conveying my message
with clarity. On a song like that talking about Love
- that’s what it is yo. It’s just really being able to be
me in the best level.
KC: And I feel like too what’s different about it is it’s
not connected to a very specific closed narrative
about love that is strictly romantic and strictly
heterosexual love, this song really seems to be
more open, a joyful message about love in the
most expansive sense?
SF: Love in the sense of community, god, respect,
gratitude, honesty. This is what I communicate and
this is my code. These things are part of my code
Love-Faith-Gratitude.
KC: Another ancient concept I’d like to connect
to your work is the African idea of Nommo “the
word,” believed to be life force itself (to speak is
to make something come into being). As Mos Def
says, “Speech is my hammer bang the world into
shape now let it fall - HUH!” Based on what you’re
saying it feels like you have brought a great deal
of consciousness to your speech. Can you relate
to this idea – that when you spit rhymes as a
rapper you’re actually bringing things into being,
changing the very fabric of existence through your
consciousness and verbal sparring?
SF: Yeah. It’s definitely true. You can utilize
thoughts, speech, emotions and deeds as tools in
a way that creates your reality. I’m conscious of it
that’s why I speak most clearly in a song but even
in everyday life I practice being aware. I don’t
resonate with and I don’t acknowledge negativity. I
speak with purpose and put thought into what I am
creating. It’s not just as simple as every word like
woosh – life! But your thoughts and emotions they
create a reality. It’s what you focus on whatever
you’re thinking about most of the day your thoughts
your words your heart your movement if it’s all
synchronized and focused on the same intention
then the world is responding to it rapid like
instant you’re just connected and every moment
is so precious. It’s being present, God Is always
present [makes illUZiON hand symbol] You see
that? Smooth right? That’s a sign, you peep that?
That’s Love Faith and Harmony, Gratitude - this is
the code of illUZiON. You want to be down?! Get
with the code!! LOVE FAITH AND GRATITUDE. Give
thanks, be thankful for what you have. Are you
complaining about what you don’t have? What do
you have? What do you have young man?
EL: Yo listen shit is not going to be handed to you
for free -
SF: Shit is not going to be handed to you for free
nigger. I know, I know about the success we have
and how this is about to be -
EL: WOW we worked for this shit!
SF: This ain’t luck nigger, WHAT? WHAT?

Dominique Claire models Revolt Wearable