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Theoretical Boys (and Two Girls)
Recap of a panel discussion about NYC’s art scene from 1978-1983
Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, doing what they do best—at least when they’re not in a panel discussion (Photo: fr.academic.ru)
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“We’re not interested here in defining ‘No Wave,’ saying what was ‘No Wave’ and what wasn’t,” musician David Grubbs announced in his introduction to Thursday’s panel discussions. “We’re trying to explain what was happening in New York City in 1978 through 1983.”
The panels were the second installment in a three-night No Wave extravaganza entitled “Theoretical Music: No Wave, New Music, and the New York Art Scene, 1978-1983″ at the ISSUE Project Room in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The series started Wednesday with a screening of James Nares’s Rome ’78 and culminates tonight in a concert by seminal noise rock act Ut, the group’s first U.S. show since 1991. Grubbs, along with Columbia professor and art historian Branden Joseph, organized the event and moderated the discussions.
In spite of Grubbs’ desire to avoid categorizations, what emerged from the first panel—overseen by Joseph—was the image of a movement born when the ’78 class of New York art school students, faced with an ideological dead end in drawing and painting and an inability to get their work into galleries, turned to music and film. The primal simplicity of the genre they created was influenced equally by modernist minimalism, the then-young punk culture and a general lack of technical proficiency. Filling out the panel were painter/singer/keyboardist Taro Suzuki, formerly of the band Youth in Asia; bassist/guitarist/artist/critic John Miller, one-time member of the Coachmen and the Poetics; writer/painter/guitarist/bassist/singer/designer Kim Gordon, most famous for her work with Sonic Youth; and filmmaker/photographer/sculptor/architect/performance artist/rock critic/producer Dan Graham, a major presence in conceptual art since 1964.
In contrast to No Wave’s terse, abrasive aesthetic, the first group of panelists were for the most part soft-spoken and long-winded. The conversation was peppered with terms like “trope” and “gauche” and “deconstructing” and “phenomenology” and “archetype,” as the panel members talked about the intellectual and artistic forces that shaped No Wave.
“We were raging against the death of modernism,” said Suzuki. “I didn’t see any place for the visual arts to go.”
Gordon, who came to New York from L.A., was attracted to the more avant-garde sound and nihilistic attitude of No Wave, which differed from the more traditional rock sound and poetic lyrics of California punk.
Joseph suggested that No Wave was “music as art, or art as music, or music from an artistic perspective.”
“A lot of artists were working in these modalities to get their work out,” Miller explained.
Graham, meanwhile, said he was drawn to the underground music scene from “a cultural studies perspective,” and to rock and roll in general by the legacy of Andy Warhol and by his love of the Kinks. To him, rock writing was an ideal blend of poetic prose and literary criticism. He was also interested in linking No Wave with feminist theory, and with Gordon and Suzuki discussed “demolishing”—musically and behaviorally—the conventional concept of the male rock star. Suzuki described his own efforts at gender role bulldozing as “liberating and scary,” as well as “fueled by drugs and alcohol.”
New York’s budding club scene afforded No Wavers plenty of performance space, space they used not just to play music but also to display art and film. All of the speakers remembered seeing combination song, painting and/or film pieces—including Suzuki’s “Shock Opera”—in what were ostensibly only music venues. They also recalled how the closing of many of those clubs, along with a general narrowing of artistic interests among those involved in the scene, caused the movement to fade.
On the second panel were Gynecologists and Ut guitarist Nina Canal; writer and eclectic musician Ned Sublette; experimental composer Peter Gordon; Sonic Youth guitarist/vocalist and frequent guest musician Thurston Moore; and writer Byron Coley, who, with Moore, authored the book No Wave: Post Punk. Underground. New York 1976-1980.
Grubbs called the panel a “high school reunion of a high school I didn’t go to.” All of the panel members had either played together on stage at some point or had performed with each other’s band mates. His first question, “Where were you January 1, 1978?” triggered a long bout of nostalgia, as everyone thought back on old friends, former lovers, long-ago parties and infuriatingly cheap Manhattan apartments (to give you an idea of just how cheap and how infuriating: Thurston Moore lived on 13th St. between Ave A and B for $108 a month).
All of them lived in what Sublette called “the sweet spot” in between when the city nearly declared bankruptcy in 1975 and the AIDS epidemic in early ’80s. In that interim period, in Canal’s words, “Manhattan was like a village.”
“We were all bumping into eachother,” Peter Gordon said. “You’d run into someone and a collaboration would start.”
The panelists agreed the sense of community and the inexpensive living weren’t the only things lost since the end of the No Wave scene. When Grubbs asked “What did the records miss?” Peter Gordon mentioned the loss of the upper decibel range, as well as the “spatiality” and the unpredictability of the music—and the musicians—which could only be experienced live. Coley argued that of all the leading No Wave bands, only Teenage Jesus & the Jerks were “well-represented” in the studio recordings.
“This was live electric acoustic music,” Sublette declared, with different sound in each venue a band played in. He further argued that the studio recording was “a different art form” from the live performance.
Moore described the difficulty of trying to catalogue No Wave recordings for his book with Coley, while Canal, Coley and Gordon recalled prominent No Wave artists who never left a trace in vinyl.
The evening ended with each panelist describing how they moved away from the scene: Canal returning to her native London with the rest of Ut in the vain hope of landing a record deal; Peter Gordon priced out of his studio space; Sublette heading to different scenes in Cuba and later New Orleans; Moore “following” his peers in new directions with Sonic Youth; Coley going through a “maturation” and deciding to focus solely on writing. Peter Gordon also alluded to the devastation of the underground community during the AIDS crisis.
After so many fond reminiscences, this downbeat conclusion sounded a dissonant note. However, it seemed to strike a chord with the audience.