Who You Staring At?

No wave was a new artistic scene that appeared in the low-rent areas of Lower Manhattan, in New York in 1978. The failure of the hippy cultural and economic model at the very end of the 1960s, then the commercial transformations of new wave and disco, pushed the leading players in the movement to break with the established music industry and contemporary art circles.

Coming from a variety of artistic fields, no wave bands appropriated the instruments of the rock scene, to better turn them against it in order to subvert its icons. Out-of-tune guitars, deconstructed rhythms and raucous vocals enriched a range of radical visual productions, revealing an alternative cultural project blending many media: posters, cassettes and audio records, film and video. Saturated and dissonant sounds were translated into abrasive images that were altered by subverting reprographic techniques (Xerox art), as used in punk and industrial music networks as early as the mid-1970s.

This presentation borrows its title from Who You Staring At?, an album by John Giorno and Glenn Branca. A question that transcribes no wave artists’ confrontational attitude and determination to deconstruct the conventional gaze, presented here in an ensemble of multidisciplinary practices where dance, opera, music and the visual arts intersect.

The activities of no wave groups defined the limits of a zone, the Lower East Side and Tribeca in the late 1970s, where urban decline provided a veritable open-air laboratory for a new generation of musicians, filmmakers, visual artists and performers, whose collaborative work quickly came to constitute the heart of the scene.

Before being struck by the ravages of AIDS, this zone in south-east Manhattan expressed its difference from the sphere of art galleries in the neighbouring SoHo district. These two worlds nevertheless rubbed shoulders in Artists Space which, in May 1978, hosted the groups Daily Life, DNA, Contortions, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Theoretical Girls, Tone Death and The Gynecologists, for a series of no wave concerts. Newly arrived in New York, Brian Eno attended this five-day festival, discovering a post-punk movement that he documented that same year by releasing the compositions of some of these artists on the compilation LP entitled No New York. A compilation that marked a dialogue between "high" and "low" culture, also found at the same time in the music programme that Rhys Chatham curated for The Kitchen, beginning in 1971 – the musician will compose a few years later the sound piece of the no wave ballet Drastic-Classicism (1981) for the choreographer Karole Armitage. This complicity between art and music then developed as early as 1980 in the ABC No Rio multi-disciplinary centre.

More familiar with squats and clubs like CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, the Mudd Club and 8BC, no wave musicians gathered together at collective events that would make up the richness of the movement and its history.

"The Times Square Show", an exhibition organized in June 1980 by the Colab collective enabled many filmmakers, visual artists and independent musicians to continue their creations outside of cultural institutions

The following year, the "Noise Fest" created by Thurston Moore and Josh Baer for the White Columns alternative venue featured the first public performance by Sonic Youth, along with contributions by Glenn Branca, Mark Cunningham and Y Pants. An exhibition designed by musicians Kim Gordon and Barbara Ess accompanied these concerts, notably showcasing the works of Robert Longo, Nina Canal, Alan Vega and Ikue Mori. In the same vein as these events, Christian Marclay invited other major figures from the scene for his "Eventworks" festival (Boston, 1980).

Shown on this occasion, films by Eric Mitchell and Vivienne Dick also testified to the existence of a no wave cinema, which emerged in New York clubs and screening rooms such as the Millennium Film Workshop, The Collective For Living Cinema and the Bleecker Street Cinema, showing works by Amos Poe, James Nares, Beth B and Scott B. These experiences paved the way for Nick Zedd’s and Richard Kern’s "Cinema of Transgression", notably embodied by Kembra Pfahler and Lydia Lunch.

The vibrancy and diversity of this scene, passed on by Glenn O’Brien’s "TV Party" television programme between 1978 and 1982, revealed the project of a visual and sound "compulsion". The title of a piece composed by the group Mars in 1977, this brief and incisive term indicates a unique gesture, a visceral reaction to the dominant musical and artistic trends that characterised no wave’s subversive dimension.

Works from the Centre Pompidou collection:

• Dan Graham, Glenn Branca, Performance and Stage-Set Utilizing Two-Way Mirror and Video Time Delay, 1983, video
• Raymond Pettibon, The Whole World is Watching: Weatherman ‘69, 1989, video
• Ida Applebroog, Beth B, Belladona, 1989, video
• Barbara Ess, Sans titre, 1989, monochrome chromogenic print, pinhole camera
• Raymond Pettibon, Sans titre (Grounded?! Never Been), 1998, ink on paper
• Raymond Pettibon, Sans titre (Reagan lays a golden egg!), 1991, Indian ink, wash and red ink on paper
• Raymond Pettibon, Sans titre (Heavily into Masturbation), 1986, ink on paper

Other artwoks shown:

• Vivienne Dick, Guérillère Talks, 1978, digitized Super 8 film. Collection Vivienne Dick et LUX, Londres
• Karole Armitage, Rhys Chatham, Drastic-Classicism, 1981, video. Collection Karole Armitage et Rhys Chatham
• Beth B, Scott B, Letters to Dad, 1979, digitized Super 8 film. Collection Beth B et Scott B / Kino Lorber
• Rhys Chatham, Joseph Nechvatal, XS exemplification of XS: The Opera Opus (1984-1986), 2022, sound slideshow. Collection Joseph Nechvatal
• Joseph Nechvatal, Black Spring, 1983-1984, graphite on paper drawing. Collection Joseph Nechvatal
• Joseph Nechvatal, Supreme Court, 1984, graphite on paper drawing. Collection Joseph Nechvatal
• Joseph Nechvatal, It’s Not Funny, 1983, graphite on paper drawing. Collection Joseph Nechvatal
• Joseph Nechvatal, Fuck Death, 1984, graphite on paper drawing. Collection Joseph Nechvatal
• Joseph Nechvatal, Peace The New Sleep, 1985-1986, graphite, photomechanical paper, Masonite. Collection Joseph Nechvatal

Sound works from the New Media Arts collection. 

With Kathy Acker, Glenn Branca, Karen Finley, John Giorno, Michael Gira, Richard Hell, Arto Lindsay and Sonic Youth, among other musicians.

Also available in the exhibition:

Reading with Kathy Acker recorded at Centre Pompidou on November 24 1982, as part of Centre Pompidou’s Revue parlée ('Spoken review") – illustrated with photographs by Françoise Janicot.

• February 1, 2023, 8:00 pm
  Opening and performance by musician Rhys Chatham

• As part of the cycle "Vidéo et après":
  • February 8, 2023, 7:00 pm, Cinema 2
    Sex, Power, and Control: The Art of Beth B. Beth B in conversation with Nicolas Ballet
  • March 8, 2023, 7:00 pm, Cinema 2
    XS: The Opera Opus. An Operatic Transvaluation of No Wave Aesthetics by Joseph Nechvatal and Rhys Chatham
  • April 28, 2023, 8:00 pm, Museum, level 4
    Performance by composer Mark Cunningham. As part of the finissage of the exhibition

• February 9, 2023, 7:30 pm, Cinema L'Archipel
  Screening of the documentary Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over (2019) by Beth B, in the presence of the director

• February 10 – March 4, 2023, The Film Gallery
  Exhibition "Who You Staring At? B-SIDE!"

À lire aussi dans Le Magazine :

No wave : au cœur des contre-cultures new-yorkaises des années 1970-1980

Par Nicolas Ballet
Attaché de conservation, collection nouveaux médias, commissaire de l'accrochage