 Hello everyone. I want to introduce myself for those of you who don't know me. Oh that was scary. I'm Jess Wilcox. I'm the programs coordinator here at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Arts and I'm really excited to introduce this panel today. I will resist with every inch and every breath, punk, and the art of feminism organized by AIR Gallery and the Women in Arts Collaborative at Rutgers University. This is I believe our fifth year of collaborating with these two organizations. We do it every March, which is one reason I look forward to March, not because it's Women's History Month, since every month is Women's History Month at the Sackler Center, but because I get to work with these two great institutions. So I won't go on. I'm going to pass it over to the moderator of tonight's panel. This is the second year in a row she's been moderating. We loved what she did last year and invited her back. So Leah Devon is a visual artist, historian, and associate professor at Rutgers University. She has presented her work at numerous venues, including the Blanton Museum, the University of Southern California One Archives Gallery and Museum, the Houston Center for Photography, the Leslie Lohman Museum, and MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center, and she has written for and been featured in art papers, capricious, wired, feminist.com, GLQ, and radical history review, among other publications. She recently wrote an essay for public collectors and exhibited at a show based on her collection of teenage punk penpal correspondences, which was featured in Art Forum Critics Pics last month. Without further ado, help me welcome Leah. I have some thank yous too. So we want to thank Jess Wilcox and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center here at the Brooklyn Museum first, also AIR Gallery, Women in Arts Collaborative at Rutgers University, especially Connie Tell and Nick Yanaselli for all of their support. So having grown up surrounded by and involved in different punk communities, the kind of art and thought that we're focused on tonight is really some of the most meaningful for me. Ever since I got involved in punk when I was a teenager going to all ages shows in Olympia, Washington, Seattle, Washington, the kind of feminist art and collective action that were part of those communities, ended up really being a defining experience for me. And I think it's still, to this day, shapes the way I think about my identity and my politics and my relationships. But when I was putting together this event and trying to think of something to say to introduce it, I had a really hard time because I think punk, like being a feminist or being queer, is something that it's really hard to boil down to just a few sentences, like some common set of things that punks do or they think, and punks can't even agree on the word punk. And so it's not so easy to write down a few sentences in a museum calendar or come up with an introduction or pick artists or pieces of work that encapsulate a movement. But luckily what we have here today are a group of really multi-talented, very smart people who just can't be categorized or simplified in any way. Whether they're making music, touring around the world, sleeping on people's couches while they show experimental videos and backyards and theaters and even roller skating rinks. Whether they're making scenes and images with great intelligence and urgency or doing groundbreaking performances while topless. Those are the kind of fearlessness, the kind of aesthetics and the kind of activism that I want to see more of. So at a time now, I think where punk is being reimagined and re-visualized in a lot of different ways, both in our institutions and outside of them, we're really happy tonight to have this group of people to showcase their music, photography, exhibitions, performances, so many different genres that they work in and have them here in conversation together with us and with you in the audience to be able to talk about punk and feminism in this moment, especially now because as we've seen from their work and events around the globe lately that punk and feminism still have a lot of power as a confrontational force. It gets, for confronting the status quo and all kinds of voicing outrage, all the kinds of things out in the world that we are making is so angry as we've seen with Pussy Riot and some of the people who are working with them right now that we'll hear more about. So I'm going to go ahead and introduce all of our panelists in a row so I don't have to interrupt each one of them and we can just go ahead and let them go from here. So let me start with my first panelist, Lydia Lynch. Lydia Lynch is passionate, confrontational, and full body of work. Really almost doesn't need introduction. She's released too many musical projects to tally, has toured for decades, curated dozens of shows, written half a dozen books, and pioneered so much of what many of us do or aspire to do. She's presently touring Retrovirus, a retrospective of her decades-long musical output, and she'll release A Urge to Kill in June 2015. How Happening Gallery will present The War is Never Over, her first solo exhibition in America, which opens in May 2015. Narcissist is to work at the intersection of performance, dance, art, and activism. She's presented work at the New Museum, TS1, The Kitchen, MoMA, Abrans Art Center, and many nightclubs, galleries, and alternative art spaces. She's performed internationally at many venues and has videos that have exhibited worldwide. Her video is self-gratifier, one of my favorite, the best use of a sex toy, at the 2008 Good Vibrations Film Festival, and bestly won the winning prize in 2013. Interested in troubling the divide between popular entertainment and experimental art, Narcissist appeared on America's Got Talent in 2011. She's a recipient also of a 2015 Creative Capital Award. Ask Your Superact has curated exhibitions, screenings, and live music events and performances for art spaces, film festivals, and academic venues internationally, including TS1, The Kitchen, I-Beam, Museo Rapino-Tamayo, Europe Winner's Center for the Arts, and Liverpool Biennial, as well as also non-art spaces, including the roller savings that I was talking about. She's previously the director and curator of the Carnegie Mellon Miller Gallery and Syracuse University's Warehouse Gallery, as well as the Pratt Institute Film Series. Osa Ed Toy is the author and editor of Shaka and Osa Ed Toy is an artist, a zine blog for, by, and about black counts, feminist, queer, as musicians, artists, and activists. Osa is also an art teacher, a potter, a show promoter for girl bands, queer bands, and social justice fundraisers under the name No More Fiction. She was a maximum record model columnist from 2009 to 2011, has toured with the People of Color zine project, and she won the print event award for Artist of 2009. She's also been in a bunch of bands, including The New Blood, which released an album on Kill Rock Stars in 2008. And then finally we have the musician and writer Johanna Feynman. She's a founding member of the feminist band Litigra and co-owner of the Segal Salon in New York. Her publications and correspondence from the 1990s through the early 2000s are archived in the Riot War collection of New York University's Bales Library and Special Collections. She's a recipient of a 2014 Creative Capital Award from, Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation, and her recent cultural criticism has been an Art Forum, Book Forum, Art America, and New Inquiry. And she's currently working on a book on radical feminist Andrea Dworkin. Okay, so let's just hand it over to Lydia because I know she will just take off. Thank you so much. Punk and feminism. First of all, I never considered myself a punk. I'm no wave, and that is different than punk. I never made punk music. I made no wave music. I have more in common with the surrealist and the situationist. But the title of this panel was With Every Breath I Resist, and I have always been fucking resisting. My first inspiration to resist was when I was eight years old, and I watched a black and white horror film in upstate New York and a black ghetto, one of three white families on the block. I felt quite at home in the horror show that was happening. And it was 1967 and the race riots broke out because Rochester, like 17 other cities in America, Cleveland, Detroit, Watts, et cetera, people were just sick of being bullshit into the reality of this country where they promised one thing and given another. So my house is the epicenter of the race riots of 1967. Well, I'm watching a horror film, so there's horror outside and inside, and I'm living with a maniac who happens to be my father. Now, this to me is to be considered like a war zone. This is the American war zone. And when I heard those people walking down the street, Rochester, New York, which also bred Kim Gorton, Wendy O'Williams, Emma Goldman spent time there, but Malcolm Axe and Martin Luther King and Saul Alinsky also visited there. I don't know why something in the water is so fucking poison. Thank you very much. It is the first Superfund site. It is the first of 1600 Superfund sites. And yes, I have had cancer numerous times, but look at me, I'm just a picture of absolute health. That's in spite of it. It was at eight years old when I first got my first calling to protest because I saw people running down the streets and screaming. And this riot went on for three days. My house is the epicenter. A helicopter crashed. 3,000 people are arrested. And what they're saying is I'm laughing. I won't fucking take it anymore. What the hell did I know? I'm eight years old. In that time though, music was a music of protest. There was the doors. There was ball of confusion by the temptations. There was white rabbit. There was a music of protest, which to me was just the radio. You're disappearing into it. What do you know? Your father tells you, forget the riots, go to your room. Why? This to me is like a celebration. Now, I didn't remember until many years later that not only was I aware of the 1967 riots, but the same riots happened in 1964 when I was five years old. So from the time I was five to the time I was eight, I basically lived in a war zone imagination, waiting for the next war to hit. And to me, I knew who the enemy was. Because first of all, I lived with the enemy. The enemy is my father. My father at that point was a door-to-door Bible salesman. He was a gambler, a trinker, and an asshole that he'd sell in Bibles and I was about at that point where I decided that God was after all dead because my dad is selling him door-to-door. So I had the enemy in the house. I had the enemy of war perpetrated by the Patriarchy and then I had God the fucker. So I knew from about the age of 12 what my goal was. And that was to take on this unholy trilogy. Hence, my first word show is called Daddy Dearest because I had to go after the enemy within, within my house. And from there it just spread. I moved to New York. I ran away first at 14 and then I came here at 17. And I came here to do spoken word, but spoken word didn't exist then, really. I mean, it was no way, it was 77. I mean, it was post Lenny Bruce. He was post Patty Smith in a rock and roll poetry, which was inspirational to me but very too traditional. And it was not slam poetry. So I came and I wanted to do spoken word. Actually Lenny Kay was the only person that listened to me. The rest of them listened to me. And I decided, well I'm going to get my word out one way or the other. And if that means I have to use music, which I did, my first group, teenage Jesus and the jerks what's interesting is half the music was instrumental. So what's the point? Well, it must be the title of the song, no? And that's, I guess, when my musical Schizophrenia also began because like many of us I wear many hats. So I had to abandon sound like teenage Jesus at the same time that I had a sound like big man. So I began in New York, which was at that point in 77, a bankrupt city on the edge of collapse, where everybody came just to like lose their mind. And as opposed to like the punk, what we think of punk like in England, in New York punk then, although I was no way, was personal insanity personified and thrown onto the stage. So I took it to the stage and I kept taking it to the stage. And I was just talking to Leon, she goes, what about stage fright? I said, look, the first time I took to the stage in teenage Jesus walking up with a guitar, that I don't know how I managed to learn how to play, because I knew nothing about music except it should sound really fucking ugly and go really hard and contradict everything that inspired me. It's like I knew the minute I was walking to the stage, it was not my job to ever feel panicked, but to cause panic, as an articulate intelligent woman who was against one of three things. Got the father, got the fucker, and got my own father in my house. And that has always been the trajectory that my art, music, and literature has taken a target at. Literature was my first inspiration, not music. Henry Miller, please go back and retrop the Capricorn because I've been reading it again, and I just can't believe other than it is I'm surprised I ever wrote a word. So my whole point in ever speaking out was to speak against what I thought was the injustice that is how to not be as we all are, no matter how we've been battered, whether it's a battery of economy, or of nuclear family, or of religion, or of ideology, or of sex or race, that how do you not become a victim that carries on the cycle of abuse. And I used my art to get through that. And I did films like Fingered and Right Side of My Brain and wrote my book Paradoxia in order to try to, because I knew I wasn't alone. What was interesting to me as a victim was my details may have been specific, but trauma is universal. And somebody had to come out with a woman's voice of articulate aggression and using the enemy's language, put it right back in their fucking face. And that is basically what I'm still doing today, whether it's through literature, art, photography, music, illustrated word, or writer's workshops, because I think basically we as victims in this society of a country that is a mass murdering megalomaniac need to tell a different story to other people. Need to be the voice in people's mouths that know they have a screen that they cannot articulate. And that's what I do. Thank you very much. I'm living the rush. I feel honored to be here. Narcissus eroticism, humor, and spectacle are primary tools Narcissus employees in explorations of gender, racial identity, and sexuality. The aim being to complicate and deconstruct stereotypical representations. Narcissus identity is defined by this plastic mask. A repurposed weight display form available in three different skin tones that was designed by female entrepreneur Verna Doran in Los Angeles in the 1960s. I cut the mask in half when I want to speak and when I want to engage my map in my performance work. In addition to live performances and video work, photography is central to this project. I am showing here a series of photographs created during a Yaddo residency last summer entitled Narc versus Judy. It feels especially apt to present this work which deals with Judy Chicago's dinner party here tonight. Judy Chicago is of course well known as one of the pioneering feminist artists and teachers. Statements such as this forced me to think of other pioneering feminist artists of color such as Alma Thomas, Faith Ringle, and Betty Sar and their comparative lack of visibility. Nevertheless, Judy Chicago is one of my heroines, not only in her artistic achievements, but also in the authority, directness, and power with which she speaks about her art and the causes she is so passionate about. I realize with some surprise in preparing my notes for today that my Narcissus project has ended up sharing some fundamental commonality of her work. The first point of commonality is her selecting her own name and in doing so as I have as Narcissus making a symbolic statement of self determination. The name she chose contains a personal reference. Chicago is her hometown. In choosing the name Narcissus I reference that I am a sister or a woman of color. Additional points of commonality are Chicago's use of central core or vaginal imagery or actions in my case. Her often earnest, craft oriented approach, her emphatic populism and her radicality, the dinner party in its day upset codes and norms and was called weird sexual art. It's not art, it's pornography a misconception I can relate to. Although this story has ended well for Chicago, a final point of commonality I hope to not share is the fact that the dinner party lived only in book form for 30 years before being given permanent home here at the museum. I rediscovered this work through an old copy of one of these dinner party books, which was in the Yado Library and was inspired to create this photo series. Narc versus Judy is my dialogue with the dinner party. In these images I have symbolically entered into the work, captured it with my camera, reframed, cannibalized and digested it and produced something new. In a sense I have made her achievements of her time and have asserted myself against any oppressiveness that this work might represent. With these images I have both honoring and mocking the dinner party. What does it mean to use chipped thrift store plates instead of her elaborate, too literal preciously hand crafted ones and to use brick of rack, images from cookbooks and lowly fruits and vegetables represent the pudenda and what new meanings are produced by presenting our version Finally, given a choice would I as Narcissist aspire to have a seat at that table. The video I will now show also created at Yado appropriates and re-invents Red Riding Hood and interrogates and subverts the meanings of this fairy tale which holds so much power in our mind and psyche. Red Riding Hood is the story of a little girl sent out on a journey on her own. She is told by authority, in this case her mother, to stay on the path to follow the rules of society she has a place and she must stay in it. The fact that her mother has to give her this direction to me suggests that Red Riding Hood may already be a rebel. In traditional versions Red Riding Hood has the mind and desire to seek independence but not the means to secure or protect it. The moral of the story being that she has learned her lesson and will now stay on the right path the path dictated by authority by patriarchal society. In my portrayal of this fairy tale I'm considering how traditional meanings shift and new meanings are created when Narcissists are using puppets and camera angles plays all the roles the mother, Red Riding Hood the wolf, the grandmother and the hunter In my version is she able to become the hero of her own story? This is my first public showing in this video it's still in its final draft form Once upon a time a little girl lived with her mother in a small stone cottage near the edge of a great forest Everywhere the little girl would go she always wore a beautiful red cape and hood. One morning her mother asked her to carry a basket of cookies to her grandmother Her mother told her not to leave the path or stop to talk to anyone on the way After waving goodbye to her mother she sat out at once carrying her little yellow basket over her arms right forest path she remembered Her mother had told her she must not leave the path but the day was so beautiful the forest so friendly she thought there could be no harm in disobeying her mother just this one time and slighly through the wood along the path and over the hill until he reached grandmother's house The sunshine of the forest made grandmother's room appear very dark It seemed so dark to Red Riding Hood that she could hardly see her grandmother in bed Grandmother looked so different and her voice sounded so deep and rough Quickly about three different phases of my curatorial work and then share one project. So starting young I was involved with Riot Girls a teenager in Los Angeles For those who don't know Riot Girls is a feminist and punky movement that formed in the early 1990s and it fundamentally shaped my approach to the curator It instilled within me the idea that if you're not seeing yourself represented if you're not seeing your interests and values reflected in your community or in mainstream culture then one of the things you can do is to create your own version of whatever it is you want to or need to see punk rock and riot girl the idea that anyone can do this that you can make or invent your own scene even if you don't have the proper education or skills has always been important to me For example, I've been directing and curating university galleries for almost a decade although I don't have formal training and curatorial studies or even a master's degree which may have been to my advantage in some ways that I didn't learn a standard or established way of doing things or making exhibitions I came to curating inadvertently as an art school student learning traditional fine art practices In high school I was involved with and close to friends who set up music shows, organized Riot Girls meetings and conventions and DJed radio shows In college I started opening the film series which included performance and live music in which quickly brought me into the New York experimental film scene in the 1990s I'm going to show you some flyers for the first screenings I put together at Pratt when I was an undergrad and just starting out figuring out what I was interested in and how to do things and you can see the aesthetic remnants of my scissors and glue cut and paste scene making days so my motivations for starting the Pratt film series are fairly similar to what I'm doing now 18 years later and that is trying to break down boundaries between disciplines while at the same time bringing together different types different types of audiences and makers in common space also with the film series I wanted to provide a platform for artists, works and ideas and politics that I believe in and at that time I meant to show people alternatives to mainstream sexist movie fare on the cult of the white male O-Tour through showing experimental work work not easily accessible to the public and work by women, queers and people of other nationalities there was a formal and financial connection for me at the time between experimental short films and punk shows like rather than seeing one commercial feature length movie or one popular band for the price that's out of reach for many you could see half dozen films or bands for a few dollars where your support would have more impact and for me the latter option was more risk-taking and more open to new ideas and forms and people when the film series grew I began to realize I was helping to build a community beyond my school beyond the surrounding Fort Greene neighborhood and even beyond New York City and this was before the Microson Movement was written about in a store size I worked as nearly 100 shows totaled at Pratt and got funding for artist space, the student programming board and kept events free of charge to minimize barriers for entry to entry so my second phase was as an independent curator so during the Pratt film series building a dedicated following and receiving good responses led to new opportunities I began curating shows and events for film festivals, art spaces bands and music venues the shows consisted primarily of film, video and audio works but also included live performance music and many art shows that I'd set up for one night sometimes they were followed by a dance party or a dinner party and that would draw a different group of people as an independent curator I made shows for those original art or film contexts and then toured with the same shows to alternative spaces to reach a greater and more general public other people have called this the rock band model bringing the work to the people rather than waiting for people to find the work for instance I'd be asked to curate a show for Ivy or Yale School of Architecture or Lady Fest and after presenting these programs to the viewers they were made for I would then tour them to places like Indiana a disco hall in Dublin a skating rink in Philly an elementary school in DC a boat in the Liverpool or a sports bar in Dallas and I did a lot of shows and bars during those years one of my projects was for Miranda July's video distribution network, Janey for Jackie and that, Janey for Jackie started out as a way for female movie makers to see work by other female movie makers through a video chain letter format which was an inherently feminist and punk project knowing that this was a unique opportunity for me to reach teen girls in their homes through the mail order system in Miranda's fan base at the time I put together a group of videos that I thought would encourage girls to make their own movies so all the works were low budget I mean with simple techniques and portrayed female sexuality in ways that weren't seen on television or in movies at the time and this was also a way for me to sneak in full screen shots of coming this is a girl's screen and these shows were all before YouTube and Vimeo but much less access to alternative unconventional and experimental work touring with these programs helped create distribution and access to work that wasn't being seen or wasn't being seen widely they helped to build and connect audiences and a network of micro cinemas and artist spaces so the third and most recent phase has been for university galleries when I was touring with as an independent curator I was often bringing art to non-art spaces I witnessed how that really opened up ideas around art agency and creative production with non-artists in the last several years I served as director and curator for university art galleries my main goal was to create new identities for the galleries while building up a wider constituency beyond art students and regular gallery goers some of my strategies were to expand the type of work that the gallery showed the type of producers we exhibited the issues we covered and who we collaborated with so looping back to what I started with as I reconnected with old friends many through Facebook I realized that everyone I personally knew in Ryderall back when we were 15, 16, 17 years old has continued on to socially and politically progressive careers as artists, activists, writers and educators with my currently touring exhibition Hélène Chi me and my co-curator C.C. Moss were interested in how Ryderall has influenced our peers and artists working today the impact movement has had internationally with Pussy Riot in Russia and with new Ryderall chapters continuing to open around the world which were tracking online the red pushpins are the earliest chapters then pink, then yellow and green are the current in recent chapters including Malaysia, Turkey, Costa Rica, Brazil Germany and Los Angeles we wanted to show that Ryderall was more than a briefly lived music subgenre that only reached a small homogenous group of girls in the Pacific Northwest which is how it's typically written about the exhibition opens with the sampling of the creative output of the movement there are hundreds of self-published scenes at hand-designed posters solicited from institutional and personal archives through open calls, word of mouth and invitations which is similar to the way that Ryderall spread pre-internet music playlists represent different Ryderall scenes across six countries and these were guest curated by musicians and label owners and accompanied by records, band shirts and other design and handmade ephemera people usually talk about Ryderalls having one sound but there was actually a range of styles Ryderall overlapped with different scenes and genres such as indie pop, hardcore and emo or crewcore in the Pacific Northwest surfing garage and LA synth pop and electro in Belgium we created an open online Ryderall census that anyone can contribute to and rather than presenting a single one single definitive history of Ryderall we wanted to bring in numerous voices and experiences and keep it open-ended and this is where the collaborative generative parts of the exhibition come in and the rest of the exhibition surveys the work of a handful of contemporary artists who were involved with or influenced by Ryderall you can see how the movement's ideas tactics and aesthetics have evolved and mutated in their work for 10, 20 years from scenes that the artists made in high school to music from their college years or 20s to new work made for the exhibition and all of the artists have worked collaboratively many have built platforms and networks for other artists in under-recognized groups to connect, share share resources and self publish these exhibitions and events that I talked about were not only attended by the usual art crowd but also through visitors who had lived their whole lives in some of the cities but had never gone to an art gallery and didn't think they were interested in or could relate to art some of the other projects I've worked on involved are attracted scientists engineers sports fans mushroom hunters geographers, designers, sociologists and more so in conclusion my curatorial work is an only meant for art world consumption I'm interested in combining a diverse set of creators and audiences I try to create an open space for people to come together and talk about contemporary culture I think curators can make important choices about under-representation and they can create access and distribution for work that might not otherwise have it as well as bring new audiences to this type of work in these ways of thinking thank you buddy so I'm a teacher an art teacher in a potter in New Orleans, Louisiana and I used to play in bands all the time but they kept breaking up and I couldn't take it anymore so I guess you could say I want an indefinite hiatus for making music I'm sitting here on this panel tonight because I'm a punk and a feminist but I love those ideologies out in the world mainly through being in bands and looking shows so that's why more than anything else Shotgun Seam Shows has been a music fanzine before I was a punk or feminist I was just a teenage music nerd and my parents my mom was sitting in the audience tonight making the suburbs of northern Virginia starting at the age of 14 I would sit in my room adjusting as many band interviews and record reviews as I could at first I was fixated on underground hip hop and then I switched to alternative I love the smashing pumpkins and corny love reading their interviews led me into the world of 90s indie rock and the later punk doesn't sound too unusual except for when you consider that around the same time all of my friends here mostly black girls will listen to like TLC and Voice of Men I like that stuff too but I just got really mesmerized and sucked into rock music also although my dad has a large vinyl collection it contained not a single iota of rock and roll he likes african pop and rnb and stuff like that so I had to learn about rock music all by myself with no help from my friends or older siblings I got a little bit of internet internet access if you remember those free a.o.l. dial-up disks that came in the mail but mostly I just rely on magazines for information I would rolling stone and spin and then ray gun venus and I still have this old issue of BB gun magazine that I used to read and I read psychotic reactions and carburetor done by Lester Bangs and I remember trading mix tapes and live show bootlegs in the mail with other music nerd pet pals across the country I grew up playing violin in school orchestra but I was 19 when I started playing guitar I was at the age of 20 after dropping out of college for the first time I moved to DC and put ads in the washington city paper out of five bandmates I'm still in touch with some of the people I met through placing those ads being so consumed with starting bands and playing shows and touring in my 20s resulted in me not finishing college until 2007 at the right old age of 28 despite the fact that I graduated high school and started college at 17 I actually dropped out of school completely for about five years and was convinced I could learn everything I needed to know through self education I had with this book called the day I became an auto didact when I was younger and I didn't see the point of paying thousands of dollars for information I could define for myself for free however my parents having left Nigeria specifically in order to get my education never let the issue rest and so I did end up finishing eventually thanks to them so the first issue of shotgun teachers came out in 2006 I had a head full of feminist theory that acquired on my own through my community and from school including the very useful concept of intersecting identities I was also volunteering a lot and doing some community organizing and felt that any art I made should also be political the intersection of punk and radical politics felt natural to me being from Washington D.C. with Trugazi and Positive Force and all that and also having been deeply inspired by a white girl and most of all I began to feel very isolated as a black person in punk particularly when I moved to Portland Oregon and found myself in a political but also predominantly white punk scene that was constantly but awkwardly attempting to address its own racism and that's something that I just was talking to a new friend of mine calling before this that's something that took me a long time to put into that that one sentence took me a long time to kind of form like when I was going through it at the time it was confusing and it felt awkward and weird but I just couldn't put it into any words and I think it took me like years after moving away from Portland to kind of look back on that experience and be like that was just so weird, you know like I was surrounded by like all these white people who were constantly like rehearsing anti-racist politics but there were no people of color around them I was remittal of all that just like very bizarre by that time I had already read many other scenes like punks of color that describe the problem of being isolated and misunderstood within a predominantly white scene they detailed the symptoms of white privilege and created a space for dialogue for kids of color that had not previously existed one such scene that really inspired me in this way was the evolution of a race riot by Mimi Nguyen I think that if it wasn't for that scene in particular mine would never have gotten made I've spoken to other people of color who were never able to find people of color scenes I've spoken to women who grew up only seeing guys in bands I feel really lucky to say that by the time I started writing scenes of playing in bands I had the road already paved for me by people who had already come before me a scene like evolution of a race riot was not only educational and cathartic but also assured me that if I made a scene about black punks there was an audience of interested readers waiting for me out there that scene created a sense of being unified people of color community within punks that I don't think existed before I've spoken to the past about how riot girl and comic bus spawned a lot of personal scene writing and how I felt inundated by that style by the time I started my own scene that's one reason I chose to make a fan scene I also didn't want to come from a place of critique other people were already doing that I just wanted a magazine that was a celebration of black punk identity and I made it about black punks specifically because there weren't many black voices within the dialogue that was occurring among punks of color the punks of color dialogue was dominated by light-skinned people mixed folks, Latinos and Asians especially on the west coast plus I grew up in a house full of ebony in essence magazine so my zine was kind of like a junior rock and roll or pun planet for black kids I didn't really talk about feminism so much it just was feminist in its approach and the first issue I interviewed my friends Brontes Cronel, my ex-girlfriend Adi Roberson who would later become Mike Band-Aid and the next issue I wrote a book I wrote about a book I read by RuPaul and another I read by Dom Letts the reggae DJ who brought reggae to the London punks and later issues I covered New York photographer Alvin Valtrop and performance artist Caleb Lindsey I got to interview Mick Collins of the Gorrie's Face to Face and Polly Styron of X-ray Specs via e-mail shortly before she died I wrote about all the black kids in the 1980s DC hard core scene and wondered what happened to them all because by the time I got there the scene was pretty much all white I paid homage to the punk photo book Band in DC by Cynthia Colley Leslie Clegg and Sharon Cheslow who I wrote a book for Shock of Seamstras was definitely me creating a psychic refuge for myself and other black kids isolated in white punk scenes for those of you who don't know the name of this event was taken from the song was a psychic death it's one of my favorite mechanical songs I even have a vague memory of one of my old bands covering it although since my white woman the word psychic death reminded me of a character of the character of Picola Breedlove Louis Dye to make a short story even shorter Picola is born a dark skinned black girl into a racist, misogynist and violent world that eventually drives her to insanity now I'm not saying that mental illness is equivalent to psychic death I know that's not true the culprit in the book isn't insanity the culprit is hatred and it's internalization we live in an ugly and dysfunctional world and we carry that ugliness our mission around inside of us our mission in this life is to prevent self-destruction to prevent our own psychic deaths and then to lend a hand to others so that they can do the same often it's just as simple as speaking publicly and unapologetically from your experience just so other people like you realize they're not alone in their thoughts and experiences and I think Polydia Lynch just you know gave us an amazing example of what that looks like and then there are those of us and then there are those among us who actually experience physical death premature, violent, unjust physical death and the last year we've seen the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement here in the US in response to the killings of unarmed black men and the lack of accountability for those deaths of course this predicament isn't new and my zine was definitely written in reaction to the limited expectations placed on black people solely because of our skin color like the Afro Punk movement I focused on freedom of expression for black people but admittedly this goal has seemed frivolous to me when compared to the myriad other challenges faced by black American but the black American community including like incarceration poverty on and on and on but on the other hand look at how black expression and representation has been newly confined in the wake of the shooting of Trayvon Martin in particular now black men can't wear hoodies without feeling the weight of suspicion on their backs respectability politics are an increased effect in black communities and in its own little way shock and seamstress always meant to reject those kinds of confines I attempt to use a Xerox copy music fancine to resist stereotypical conceptions of blackness it doesn't feel like much but I promise the desire to redefine ourselves to redefine blackness to surprise people with the scope of our self expression was always central to the project and that's all I selected and thank you Jazz Simliat and Stephanie for putting this panel together and thank you to my co-panelists I couldn't be more interested in the work that's been presented tonight so thank you and really honored to be a part of this evening so I you know for better or worse whether you like it or not I'm associated with the historical movement of riot girl which I'm happy about four years ago you know with like the 20th anniversary of riot girl basically roughly I started having opportunities to reflect on the movement or the moment where you want to call it so I my talk tonight will be mostly excerpts from things I've written sort of recently looking back to that time period of my life and also the early days of litigra and but in thinking about putting this together I actually went back to older writing and I found something I read around 1994 and it's funny because in 1994 I kind of thought riot girl was over and I was I mean it sort of was for me but it's you know listening to astria of course it has continued to have a lot of meaning for people you know up until the present but so in 1994 I had just moved to New York City from Portland or again I started thinking about as I moved to New York to come go to art school and I started thinking about punk what could punk mean to me instead of being my context or my community or my scene to make art in what if it was more like a set of strategies to make art for different audiences or a wider audience so my first scene called the opposite part one and I found this brief passage where I talk about being 16 in my first experiences with punk and feminism which for me were like happened at the same time I'm very lucky in that regard I think many people talk about riot girl being a response to a male dominated punk scene so I had really great examples of strong women in bands from the beginning so oh my name is up there let me see if I can okay this is try me and this is later this is from 1998 which was like the reunion but it was the best try to find anyway so this is from 1994 it is no coincidence that the first time I heard someone talk about rape through a microphone was also the first time I heard a girl sing like Henry Rawens it was Adrian Spidboy at 924 Gilman that was the all ages punk club at Berkeley California where I grew up the literal content of her performance what would appear in a transcript was a statement about sexism and sexual abuse I think I can't remember what she said but I understood I was being presented with a not so modest proposal the vision of a girl not being a girl but being an aggressive athletic punk singer boy instead there was now one last rule and sometime either before or after that I wandered into people's park with my best friend who in high school my best friend was Miranda July who maybe you guys have heard of it was the middle of the day and there was someone on stage who looked like Jim Morrison with tits singing to a group of maybe 15 people it was this dyke band called Tribe 8 and that was Leni Bredlove and they were playing the most obnoxious punk songs ever so we sat in a liquor piss syringe grass nervously transfixed and I didn't really spell this out I thought my audience would know what a Tribe 8 show is like but we basically walked into this like leather dykes in this castration scenario where like a dildo is castrated it's kind of hard to explain but it was extreme and it was extremely interesting to us a 16 year old and also I think for kids growing up in Berkeley being radical was kind of like tinged with this tradition of male intellectualism or on the other hand being radical is like being a hippie woman milking a goat or something so this is great at the time I didn't know the argument of the work only the fervor the body critique the stupid gratification of the live performance of punk music so then I moved to Portland so that was when I was 16 and when I was 17 I moved to Portland I went to Reed College for about a year and I fell in with a bad crowd immediately oh well here's I don't know I just that was I think Trivate's first recording seven-inch with Vakini Kiln Lucy Stoner's in Seven-Year Bench I think and we were, everyone was obsessed with this record obviously and so okay went to Portland and then you know I lived in this house called The Curse with a bunch of punk girls feminist girls and I think this is kind of an interesting point to make we found out about, we were feminist punk girls what we found out about Riot Girl from a newspaper article this is Yada Lee Clay and we were like really excited but we already knew about some feminist bands obviously Yada was my fanzine with Miranda and that was her first one I think I don't know who took that picture here's another one and then this is the only picture I could find with a sticker but I think she made this sticker and it's on this ugly journal I don't know what it was doing with that journal we were just constantly being sexually harassed as women constantly are and we would put the stickers on and I just thought that was a nice sort of accessory to the snarlah zines that that's a snarlah on the sticker and I think we had it in the zine like as a tearout thing so snarlah existed and I wrote a little something about it for this book called the riot girl collection which Lisa Darams edited it's based on the fails library collection the riot girl collection snarlah in the beginning the zine became a six issue collaboration we acted to the zines mostly by boys that we knew about because we knew riot girl existed but we didn't have any of the zines yet it was punk by association and in style but Miranda and I were determined to present our own content distinct from what we view as standard zine fodder in the place of scene reports, record reviews and travel diaries we asserted a more abstract world of memory and self-reflection filtered through our new unforgiving feminist analysis we'd soon learn though as we came into contact with the confessional writing assisted with riot girl that we weren't alone in our introspective approach when I met Kathleen Hannah and Kathleen was my became my roommate and my bandmate and this band called the Troublemakers and then of course later into the t-bra when I met Kathleen she was collecting zines for riot girl press an ambitious new girl run distributor that carried a small catalog of feminist zines she made an announcement about it after the kitty kill show I met Kathleen in Portland and I handed her a copy of Snarla we became friends and while the kitty kill was on hiatus for a year she moved into the attic of the curse here's the flyer we put on shows in the basement so Troublemakers was our band and then Donna and JD Klan that was a team dress before they decided on a name an excuse to the team I don't remember what group that was anyway maybe that's enough then I wanted to read this paragraph that I wrote about riot girl because the first thing I was asked to write about riot girl and the sort of resurgence of interest came about was a review of Sarah Marcus's The Girls to the Front and the editor was like we have to say what riot girl is and I was like I'm not writing the review because I cannot define riot girl but so this is the paragraph that I came up with any stat that defining riot girl still feels dangerous in itself mythologizing rhetoric the revolution belonged to all girls but couldn't be owned or represented by anyone it's work was done in secret an incremental and internal acts of resistance as well as publicly through song scenes, gatherings and as a 1992 tour flyer for the band Rob Mobile and Heavens to Betsy announced new aesthetics and ways of being now riot girl struggles to be heard over almost two decades of association its influence detected in the emancipatory via the female front of Dween Pop and the periodic percent of a woman rock star but in the original anthems of riot girl girl power was not the can-do soundtrack of gymnastics routines it was the power to confront a rapist an urgent challenge to the systematic silencing of girls and the invocation of inconsolable eventual and exhilarated revolutionary states which would have been as unwelcome and spiced world as they were in the man's world the cover the zine that I read from first I mean that wasn't literally the cover but that was the drawing that I used unicorns were a big thing back then I feel like that could be another thing at all riot girl unicorns um oh well that's the tigra in a photo booth in Japan that's me, Kathleen and JD but I'm what's this out of order here's another zine I made in art school um Arto um so I graduated from art school and then Kathleen moved to New York and we started the tigra and um can you guys read that yeah um so that's sort of my fame that's like my meta commentary about the tigra um in seeking specific technical information we discovered that behind the hysteria and now expertise lies the magic world of our unmade art um to me that's what that band was all about kind of because we are maybe all of my bands I don't know maybe anyway I've spent so much time reading electronics manuals and stuff um anyway I'll let that speak for itself um I wrote a little short thing for um this is kind of funny for the Red Bull Music Academy but um it's about the beginning of the tigra um and working with Kathleen in New York our feminist punk scene had fallen apart in a blaze of 90s style hallucinatory identity or maybe it got defanged by the Spice Girls and imploded under the dull scrutiny of mainstream journalists it doesn't really matter the point is we had new hope and energy and we got in our hands on some cheap electronics our samplers were outdated garbage even back then low resolution and unreliable but from a practical home recording standpoint to assemble songs in our apartments and from a conceptual standpoint our conscious ineptitude with the technology expressed our girl punk scorn for that particular strain of male expertise associated with electronic music also our pop piracy placed us in a lineage at least in our heads with the 80s artists we revered appropriationists like author Kathy Acker, photographer Sheri Levine and the hip hop group Public Enemy PE paired the best sample based production ever with revolutionary lyrics and that was our plan too blood messages of insurgency embedded in a party vibe so there's some floppy disks and a car with a long and simple lid and then the last thing I wanted to talk about was it's a scene of fast-forwarding to like right now my my family my GD my GD was in Latigra we were asked last summer to write a song with Pussy Riot to perform on House of Cards they had agreed to be on an episode maybe you guys have seen it, it's out now episode 3 there they are so and at the end of the show they play this song and I wrote a piece for Art in America it's in this month's magazine and I'm just going to read a little piece of that it's like a diary of working with Pussy Riot let's see I cut so much up trying to figure out what to say yeah we were asked to write the song and this is about doing it well it's preposterous to compare Latigra to Prisoners of Conscience we paid only a small social price for our rebellion and mostly we profited from it JD and I never the less felt like they were our cures in some way after all you could say we had been a fake band too with programmed beads sampled guitar parts backing tracks and didactic video projections Latigra was probably an authentic as a live act I felt we were adopting the form of the punk band for our political performance art well Pussy Riot's original concept was high stakes hinging on gorilla disruption we held on to a utopian vision of what could happen in a crowd of like minded people at a club on a hot July day after we agreed to collaborate I stared at my guitar leaning against the wall of my home office while I talked to JD on the phone first there was the question of what the song should sound like appearing as Pussy Riot on the show or as a fictionalized version of their conceptual band should we keep the sound on brand it should be aggressive the column responds girl punk right or maybe our goal shouldn't be Pussy Riot realness but rather a slicker retouched version of Russian feminist gorilla punk what did Pussy Riot want what would house the cards let us get away with remember July as we worked on the song sending audio files and notes back and forth and becoming friends apocalypse unfolded in our Twitter feeds the Israeli bombardment of Gaza escalated in sickening images from citizen journalists paused our work Malaysian Airlines flight 17 was shot down of our eastern Ukraine diverted an attention from anti-food and activists Sergei Udalsov's court date the left front leader was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for his part in organizing a mass protest in 2012 closer to home Eric Gardner was murdered on Staten Island put in a choke hold by Officer Dan Daniel Pantaleo supposedly for selling Lucy's and for objecting to constant police harassment GD added tempo changes switched the drum sounds a few times and added sympathy things but soon we were getting down to the wire and needed to figure out the vocals uncomfortable writing lyrics in English Nadia and Masha said we should start at some and something they didn't want the song to focus exclusively on Russian politics they wanted it to expand Pussy Riot themes to address global issues it was a funny assignment we have to keep our references general so as not to contradict the specifics of the fictional landscape of House of Cards and we wanted to approximate the women's rhetorical style a singular combination of radicals titillating menace and a heady vintage feminist critique of valid power there they are outside their trailer there's the lyrics so we ended up going to Baltimore to be in the scene with them at the end GD and I were taken to a trailer where we changed our clothes and we did the thing you're not supposed to do sign a contract without reading it this one was like 50 pages long but whatever we were going to be actors now we were just going to follow instructions the truth is it really doesn't matter how smart you are which you can be or how far back your feminism goes in these situations you have no control and if you think that you do you're just going to be upset when the episode airs mainstream culture is a brutal mediator of non-self presentation and political ideals and yet how can you believe in your message without having faith that it will survive a little dilution or fragmentation we're going to stop there the way we're going to do it now is we have time for questions from the audience but we want people to go ahead and go to the microphone all the way over on the side Jess is going to help you over there answers are also good not just questions or they're just leaving hi I wanted to ask Lydia about adulterers anonymous which is my first introduction back as a teen into your work and so impressed by it so do you have a specific about adulterers analysis a poetry book I wrote with thanks to Bank of the Group X and what was most amazing to me is we were just sitting around trading notebooks writing these poems and there was a lot of psychic phenomena going out of my house at the time I lived in Highland Park and she lived in my Washington LA and it got so frantic that she just would refuse to come over to my house and she swore there was like a murderer in the kitchen every evening there's midgets in the Murphy bed and the girls were breaking the mailman wouldn't even deliver mail anymore but I think it was just too much sexual tension but what I was worried about writing this book is that it was put out by Grove Press and Grove Press were the biggest crusaders again censorship in this country they're the ones that got Henry Miller and Hubert Selby published and really to a lot for anti-sense my first book was published by Grove Press was really the most magnificent thing again we did like tag team spoken word shows where we both got stage just riffing at each other put out a record call of Ruth Hieroglyphics so just working in that format I mean sharing a poem it's a very weird format like here's a few lines here it's like Haiku trade off so it's a lot of fun that was an amazing collaboration thanks so much she's one of my favorite singers do you have a question to go for? so this question might be just specifically for Astria but I think everybody could maybe could you speak a little? it's a little hard so this might be specifically for Astria but everyone's input is great so I'm a painter who started independently curating in the last few years and just is a side passion and specifically with female artists who do not have exposure I do not live in New York City but I wonder like when you were independently curating how did you fund it because often I usually don't have a program that acts me and then it comes out of pocket so do you have, aside from just doing lots of research through Knife everything else, do you have any ideas? well there's a lot of different scales that you can do things you probably know and there's shows that were done on no budget at all, been in living rooms and empty malls abandoned malls and things with the bars that would be split at the door like a music show and of course all the artists they knew what the situation was and how we just split the money at the door with all the artists and universities have money so when booking tours I would try to put together a few stops at universities which would get us through a few other smaller shows in between I didn't have an apartment for a little while in order to save money I was looking at a suitcase and bartering there was a lot of bartering that was going on Lee and I had a conversation about this earlier about doing things in really different scales and wanting to do larger things and having that one thing we were talking about that was important about punk is that you don't have to wait for somebody's permission to do what you want to do to get selected for the show or the award if you want to do it you just have to make it happen that was a message that we weren't hearing enough of we were hearing what artists do with the right school and get the right residency that's just not the message that we got when we were younger it's part of what made us feel motivated to put together this panel is just to remind ourselves that the first exhibit was called you make me crawl the fucking walls and it was like 20 pairs of kitten heels nailed up to the ceiling and also that you don't have to know what you're doing yeah it's actually you saw some of the flyers and I talked about how I did 100 shows at Pratt through student activities money and I started figuring out what I was doing we have questions for each other I don't know if this question was addressed earlier was the topic of Tumblr feminism or anything like that okay and I assume do you know what I mean like the extremist viewpoints on Tumblr were like we're just standing up for women's rights and I guess my question is in terms of that I find myself on the internet arguing with all these people who I probably shouldn't waste my time arguing with and I feel like there are less printed scenes now obviously than there used to be that are less diluted and it's difficult to find that's arguable by the way I would say it's arguable whether there's less scenes well not that there are less scenes but they're less accessible to the girls who are out in the sticks who need to read these things and I guess my question is what would you say in terms of that is the state of right girl right now and how can you progress and go outside with it I'll stop arguing with people online you're wasting your fucking time doing shit you should be out in public doing it do a shit on my apology to me now as opposed to the place that I came out of or what the movement is it's community, it's doing something in a room with people doing intimate things not in your own cubicle are you a people you'll never fucking meet I think online is about talking to people you don't know and we could also talk about like toxicities in various left movements right now I guess that's mostly what I was like I didn't mean necessarily to people who are like staunch like like conservatives but more so to people like the toxicity of it and how like that can be resolved well it's part of your question about the right girl movement now yeah okay well with some of the research I've done with the right girl chapters map which is online which has links to the current right girl chapter page Facebook pages and tumblers and and other sites you can see how each of the chapters missions internationally currently change based on who the members are where the location is and what their individual needs are or group needs are and that's pretty exciting to see a lot of the chapters are explicitly intersectional POC, queer trans inclusive or there's just an article that came out five days ago about how the majority of people who associate with right girl right now are from from Southern America South America Central America and like the number one city was Mexico City I think that's really amazing and and that's also like a story that's not talked about and that's based on this author's research online statistics et cetera and it's kind of easily do you want to say something since you have a blog and you do do online um I don't have a lot to say about like the tumbler I'm sorry the tumbler feminism I don't really know exactly what that is but I really do like the idea of having there be like an online counterpart to the physical actual real world project that you have I think that like what you're saying about people like you know on the sticks or the booties not being able to access zines as easily it's sometimes remedied by making things available online but I just definitely believe in the balance of like definitely have um the kind of real life counterpart to your online work and vice versa I was pretty resistant to blogging for a long time mostly because I like cut and paste tonight um just came from the school of thought that um I just wanted to like give some people something that was handmade and like intimate that way and I didn't understand how blogs conveyed that at all and then I got tired of laying things out my hand for a second and thought the blogs were awesome the way that they're really efficient and easy and now I just like both and I think that they both have their place um I also really like this is kind of a tangent not answering your question but I also like issue you or like things that um issue.com like um things that kind of like bridge that gap um where okay so issue you is a website where you can upload the pdfs of your zine that you made by hand and you like literally like flip the pages it's like there's a cover and then you click and it flips the pages so you kind of it's like you know like kind of bridging the gap it's kind of a combination of both we kind of you know it's like you scan it in and like every like fingerprint and like glue smudge is like on there um and you can see it and it's cool like but it's accessible to everyone and it's free everyone who has internet access and it's free um so there's kind of things like that that I think are kind of like in between that I really love um but yeah I think that both of those things have their place and I just totally agree with Lydia like definitely like you know operate in the real world as much as possible and then have the online piece be kind of a way to like disseminate your message in like a cheap and easy way for people who aren't in your town or whatever cool thank you um this question is about Penu and specifically thinking of Narcissus sister but I'm wondering about all of you um so I discovered Narcissus sister at one of Suzanne March's parties like way back and I remember between your work which I saw quite a few times um I love the Bloody Mary PC, they have a free internet uh and also Julie has views I'm thinking it's not I don't expect to see feminist performance art in a gay bar so I that you had such a big um stage or that I'm wondering if you could just speak about how you somehow correlate that into the career that you have now um the career I have now is quite multifaceted and um I like that so I do perform a little bit in our world um I perform at performance art festivals and I still perform quite a bit in night clubs and alternative spaces I like very much that my project is broad I like that my work um has the kind of content that can be read in different ways um in different situations in different framings um I I think that the fact that my work is broad presents some challenges I think there's often misconceptions about what I do because I live in an night club or because my bread and butter gig is still performing in the box I think our world perhaps um misunderstands the depth um and the complexity and the intellectualism of my project because of this um however it would never be satisfying to me to only present my work and any one agreement so I will continue to keep it as broad as possible um I would like to thank you so much for creating Chopin's Team Stress um especially hearing your story growing up it's very similar to mine growing up you're like only black girl in the punk scene completely immersed myself in music because I just really relate to a lot of other people around me um and I met you briefly at the POZ zine project panel in LA I think like two years ago when I first found out about Trizzy and I bought it immediately and just read it and found out about so much Tony Young uh Laura Maddog I believe um I've heard a rumor that you might be doing a new series of Chopin's Team Stress so I'm not sure if that's correct or not and if it is do you think you're going to cover more issues dealing with the black community outside of music I totally lied and said that issue six was going to be my last one then I just kept making them so now I feel stupid but I made six and a half about um Nigerian American punks like it was like a like a quarter size zine with four interviews and then at number seven about setting up shows in New Orleans um under the name No More Fiction it was like flyers and anecdotes which was really different because it was a lot of first person writing so again I have to feel like I look good um but like the other ones are more fancy based and like interviews and that one was kind of more first person then I want to do at number eight and I just decided to do it because I wanted to go to Chicago Zine Fest again because it's my favorite Zine Fest and my friends are going to be there and I wanted a reason to go and because I said that I wasn't going to do Zine but still kept doing interviews in the meantime I have like all this stuff to put in it so yeah I just I like it and a lot of it came from um I was telling um someone earlier that I'm an art teacher and I was like I've been able to share zines with kids so I like walk them through the entire process of making their own zines and they're mostly fan zines they just mostly write about like what they're excited about like Legos and Ariana Grande and Latin craft and stuff it's really really cute and it just like really got me stoked on zines and writing all over again the style of it just like people writing about whatever they're excited about is such cool writing to me so I think I kind of fell in love with it all over again and I want to keep doing it and am I going to write about black people outside of music? I haven't yet most of my interviews are with musicians I think Mark Edwards was just here I have an interview with him on my blog he's in a band called Cellular Chaos Art Was Quit but yeah I think I'm just I mean it's like the thing that I'm most obsessed with still like I go to fewer shows than I used to but I still go to shows I still buy records so yeah that's probably what I'll keep on doing I have done issues on visual art and stuff like that I'll do it on whatever I'm interested in but it'll probably mostly be a music fanzine I'll look out for it Thanks Could we raise the lights on the aisles a little bit so we could see who's asking questions Thank you Hi, my name is Coco Dahl I'm a performance artist and also a curator I started a curatorial last year called No Can Night I put exhibitions together where I invite other curators to create a great variety of artists that are dealing with feminism content and dialogue I've worked with actually Norsi's sister and Canbra and Bianca Cassadi I created with I'm very much related to Austrian knowledge I'm very excited to know about your work because I also am interested in showing a variety of feminism to the public the past generational past cultural and showing the different the different media new generation and old generation together anyway, short thing the next show is in the church in Norway actually in 10 days it's called Pervasive Feminism I'm cooperated with Jasmin Rahi What's your question? The assistant of the church I invited the pastor to do she's a female pastor I invited her to perform a speech and we have her also 22 artists I invited Maureen who's also an Italian curator and my question is it clear what I'm saying I'm really excited about this I've been working for four months and I would really like to invite everybody to come it's in a beautiful church the content of feminism the sacred space and the execution is going to be addressed there which church is it? it's in Green Point by my colleague Park if anyone has questions about that event you can get up to the question that's my question would you like? thank you can you tell me what you think thank you for the talk it was really good something that I've been wondering about is it seems that a central part of punk and hardcore and all of these alternatives is the cathartic experience that you get when you're at a punk or hardcore show and it's not that really catharsis is unique to punk or hardcore but it's a very unique time of catharsis and as soon as you try to break it down and sort of inject it into these other areas it seems like it transforms it becomes a little bit other and I'm wondering if that's something that you've had to deal with to try to reconcile and sort of overcome that does that make sense? when you mean break it down into other areas you mean outside of music experience? I can't really speak for everybody but a lot of my experience with the scene has been very small with no stages and everybody's sharing equipment and that's very special and very unique and I think it's extremely characteristic of punk and hardcore I know that you work in a lot of alternative art spaces but especially in more institutionalized like Brooklyn Museum other university galleries it seems hard to bring that effect to people and it almost seems like if they really wanted something like that then they would seek it out in more traditional ways I'm really glad you asked that question actually that's been a question that's been a conversation I've had privately with a lot of people when we're putting together this show punk at the Brooklyn Museum that doesn't really need to be there what changes in punk if it's in an institution versus in a small venue and a lot of you guys have talked about how you do a bunch of your work in alternative spaces places that are outside of galleries or art institutions so maybe you guys can address a little bit if something does change what's interesting to me is I haven't lived in New York since 1990 but I've been coming here a lot for less two and a half years and I've been to at least like 20 shows that were so mind-blowing and there were only 20 people there I mean all over Green Point incredible bands and I'm just blown away like where are the fucking people here we're at a museum so I guess it doesn't matter where you place it if you can place it somewhere people are going to come that's great, that's amazing I'm always amazed if anybody comes to my show but a lot of New York does not support its own at this point and if you're an alternative band you know that it's really hard to get into a museum because you know maybe I don't want to go to a dirty club I can't stand death by audio I don't like the sound there doesn't mean there's something about part of the action they don't want the intention they don't want the community I mean I don't know, I don't live here that's just why it's so weird and 20 bad guys were weird all of those clubs I don't get it so that's why I live in Europe so I come out to a show and it's a museum or a gallery or a club the fact that here tonight there was like 350 people, maybe 400 it's pretty amazing and you can't get that number of people in smaller spaces we've been talking about institutionalization and just to clarify with Alien She the exhibition that's touring the focus on that exhibition is on people who have gone into visual arts as their career so they're choosing to be in that setting and with the ephemera in the first part of the exhibition the way that's framed is this is the creative output of that movement we're not trying to recreate or represent the entirety of Riot Girl this isn't the history of Riot Girl I think that history can be told in better formats than an art exhibition this is specifically about the Riot Girl and the creative part of that can I just also interject that people who have money are museums I want all these people to pay we can pay people and institutions to financially support people whose work we believe in and I think that's one important reason to use those resources as well as that it makes the audience broader to go to a punk show you have to be the person who knows to go under the fence and around the corner and through the hole to get to that show a lot of clubs that are out there that are closing down and go pay 10 bucks and here I know a lot of people knew about this but also we ran into people downstairs and we just told them about this event and they just walked up here that they wouldn't have encountered otherwise a different perspective on this conversation I'm very grateful that everyone in this room is here but at the same time I have had amazing times playing tiny shows and intimate settings that just means a lot to me I don't know I feel like our experiences might mirror each other a little bit I've gone on tour and played a lot of small shows and been very satisfied by that it's exciting when you can play to a lot of people in a certain sense I don't know I do think that the topic and the settings are mismatched in my opinion we did the People of Color's Needs Tour and the way that we made it go the way that we were able to afford to do it was by stopping at colleges along the way because they would pay us and then we could do free shows or no one turned away for a lot of fun type shows and do those it served its purpose in funding the rest of the tour but the topic and the context always seem mismatched to me I just feel like I don't know I'm not trying to be famous or well known I'm just doing what I like to do and I think it's cool to perform or read to people do you want to hop the fence and do the whole thing I think that kind of digging and being willing to find something off the grid is kind of what makes it special and I don't know this is how I feel about it but I also disagree with what you're saying either about the advantages to the different scales different settings I have a question actually related to that since we are in an art institution and also the title on the theme for tonight partly being punk and the art of feminism so in that whole sense I'm really interested to hear what you guys think about the institution and feminism and in the context of a punk perspective we're doing something different here tonight so they're changing that right here so we know that institutions for most parts it's male dominated as music is all about entertainment but just that they're having this is at least showing some alternative here right now and especially the kind of exhibits that are at this museum the institution is just this institution or the museum of modern art talking about this institution does seem to have a different programming and to me wherever you can get wherever you can communicate with people it doesn't matter if it's in a squat or in a hospital or in a museum as long as you can communicate with people I don't really care where it's at and the more places like this that do stuff like this the more it expands the possibility of it gosh it's way too large one advantage to museums and I'm not saying that museums or institutions big institutions are afraid to go or that they're all homogenous and have the same agenda or whatever but one advantage is that beyond more money there is also skilled staff and you realize things like technicians, designers and other things that you might not have access to elsewhere I just think you know we don't have to choose like governments can be in a museum and it can be in the streets and it can be on the internet and it can be in a printed fancy and it should be in all of those places and even more places and I don't think we have anything to apologize about museums and looking at art and then to women being fully represented in these kinds of institutions I wanted to say that the idea of museums as elite spaces I think is awesome there is like I hope does anyone have that stat about like how many people go to the mad versus a year versus being in professional sports in New York it's way more diverse and it's pay what you wish versus something that not many people can afford first of all thank you so much you women are all so inspiring I have a question part announcement I guess I currently live in a punk house in Bushwick and I am the only girl so I'm kind of sick of it so first of all females, everyone is invited I'm a 64th girl street Bushwick off the gate to Jay I've just been in curating shows it's just a basement you know so if you feel like going to the fence we have shows every weekend and I've been finding more and more it's just been I mean they're all amazing and I love the music but I've been finding more and more that it's a lot of dudes mashing the front and then like me not get killed so just if you guys have had any experience with that and any advice and advice on how to maybe change, shift the scene the move houses move houses yeah no when I was in Bryan I was about to get stomped in a mosh pit and some girls came and fished me out and then gave me a bunch of zines that's a formative feminist experience and that's why I set up shows you know like I was a woman in a band and I saw the kind of shows that I liked to play and I wanted to recreate those for people who came to my town so that's a thing set up shows for any people like kind of create the atmosphere that you want to be in my thanks for your thoughts I wanted to touch on something that you all spoke about or whatever could you talk into the mic I hate speaking there's a live stream of this so there's people on the internet who want to hear you there's something about you know you kind of have to be in the know you guys parted out like you have to know about the zine you have to know about the hole in the fence and crawl through it and so you know in one aspect that kind of creates like a community of freaks like I'm weird it's like you are weird and that's beautiful but on the other hand it sort of creates like an elite of like we're the in group you know you're the out group and I just I mean you all have done that in different ways and I just wanted to know how that affected you know your punk practice your feminist practice so sorry I said the thing about the hole in the fence that's me why I consider my work activist since in some ways I'm not out there being a radical activist in obvious ways and I love the idea that there are subtle ways of being an activist and that also includes presenting one's work for example in a setting such as this or in a museum other museums and I think that there's a way yes that even activism can become very pretentious that these are people who are especially entitled to be radical and to know the ills of the world and to show us how to correct them and again I think that there are so many different ways of being punk or being activist and it can be just by making your art or in the way that I do and in making the art that feels important to me that speaks about the issues that are important to me and so I think that's a way of making the work accessible making it available to people not only to the people who can find the hole in the fence or can decipher the zine so again making my work able to live on a broad platform and to address the comment the other person asked me a question that I didn't fully answer to edit where necessary that I know that I can still be punk I can still be radical I can still be an activist when I edit my work so that I could live for example on national television so those are the ways again in which I I attempt to be radical in ways that are accessible and still very strong and very poignant so let's just have one more question I have a question for Osa and Johanna and it's about the archiving of zines so there's often these questions about zines for squats and I haven't really heard people talk about the archiving of zines and what that means and whether that changes the medium I can say I started making zines like half decade or so ago because I wanted to be in a band but I couldn't and it just seemed like a very punk like just get something out there immediate like a very female thing and I've noticed a trend personally of people reaching out to myself and to my friends to try to archive zines in libraries try to put in blogs and I'm wondering if you think that that's a trend if you think that archiving zines kind of changes the nature of the medium and also I know both of you have chosen to archive your zines Osa you've had your zines be published into a book and I know that The Right Girl Anthology published your zines so I'm wondering if why you made that choice That's an interesting question and I think about it sometimes I think about how I think the way that I like I think that the way that I can socialize zines is different than like even like the zines that I read when I was younger like I feel like and there are people who still do that now the fact that zines have been kind of way more ephemeral and how people made just enough copies for their friends you know and how sometimes I think like wow I've been making copies of like number two for eight years or whatever how I mean I would look for zines I would look for like the first issue or second issue of a zine and not be able to find it like a couple years after it was out you know so I know that I'm doing it differently than other people have and I think that for me it was about making sure that people who wanted to find it could find it because I felt like it was a topic that wasn't common you know so I guess it's like a weird balance like I just said I think it's cool that you have to kind of search and find stuff but at the same time I think I wanted to make it as easily available to people who needed it because I kind of saw it as like a service to myself and the like black kids and pups who found it so I wanted to make it easier for people who needed that kind of like psychic refuge or whatever to find it I don't know if that's exactly answering your question it's related well um flat copies of my zines are archived at the Fales Library um alongside my personal correspondence and some t-shirts and VHS tapes from the 90's and um for me it was like kind of a no brainer I can't preserve any of this stuff on my own um and even though I'm embarrassed of my early work I think it's kind of um to um you know people are interested in it and I don't want to be responsible for every like researcher's question so it's like kind of self interested like I don't you know I can have enough self esteem to you know say look I contributed something um and I want people to access it but I don't want to like deal with it every day um I want some of those to deal with it and also um something being in archivies that's contextualized like my stuff's in the riot girl collection so it's um um alongside you know work by my contemporaries and there's a larger context for it so things that I feel stupid about I you know people that say oh well that was just like a thing at the time everyone was into unicorns or whatever you know both sides correspondence I just think it's um cool and important and time changes those scenes I mean they're not of the moment whether they're um stored in my file cabinet at home or at the library so um I'm really excited that they're preserved you know and I'm really excited that your work is preserved too well I could listen to these people talk all the time but um um thanks so much to all of our panelists