Just Another Asshole was a No Wave mixed media publication project launched from the Lower East Side of Manhattan from 1978 to 1987. Barbara Ess started the title in 1978 as a personal 'zine: a crudely photocopied compilation of her collages in a makeshift transparency on which the titled was painted in bright red nail polish. Ess served as editor for all seven issues of Just Another Asshole. [1]
Issues 3 & 4 were co-edited by Jane M. Sherry; issues 5 through 7 were co-edited by Glenn Branca.
Issues #1 & #2 were 'zines comprised of photocopied high-contrast cut-outs of appropriated newspaper headlines & détourned news clippings, many of them either banal or tragic happenings: fluke accidents; random murders; pedestrians killed by falling debris; television hypochondriacs; & botched suicides. Ess came up with the publication's title after reading a New York Post article about a deaf-mute boy killed by an intruder he couldn't hear: "There was a picture of the boy, and he looked so sweet. I made a color Xerox of it, and I wrote on it 'just another asshole' ", she recalled. Although the 'zine started as a response to the alienating & dehumanizing effect of media, which exploited the same images & headlines that Ess used for their shock & entertainment value, JAAsshole evolved into an exploration of that media's potential, when used in the right hands, to foster community & collectivity among like-minded artists.
Issue #3 was a tabloid format. This issue was co-edited by Jane M. Sherry. JAAsshole put out an open call for contributions in which ''anything submitted will be accepted, no matter what, no matter by whom''. The final product included contributions from Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Carla Liss & as many as forty others. It accompanied the ''Library Show'' exhibition at Colleen Fitzgibbon's East Village gallery. [2]
Issue # 4 was a four-page spread in the February 1980 issue of Artforum. [3]
Issue #5 was a compilation anthology LP of 84 artists' &musicians' work. The LP was released with the help of White Columns. It consisted of short, experimental music & spoken word recordings, no track longer than one minute (the cover states ''77 tracks x :45 sec. x 83[sic] artists'').
Issue #6 was a paperback book. Anthologies played a major part in defining the various attitudes of downtown N.Y.C. No Wave work. JAAsshole #6 is one of the great seminal writing compilations. Edited with Glenn Branca, this issue outlines the variety of styles & aesthetics that were developing in the early 1980s. In all, sixty artists & writers are represented, including works by: Kathy Acker; Eric Bogosian; Mitch Corber; Brian Buczak; Jenny Holzer; Cookie Mueller; Richard Prince, Joseph Nechvatal, Judy Rifka, David Rattray, Arleen Schloss; Kiki Smith; Tod Jorgenson; Lynne Tillman; Anne Turyn; Ann Rower; Reese Williams; David Wojnarowicz; & Barbara Kruger.
Issue #7 was Thought Objects (??? - I think No Wave was done by then)? This final installment of the Just Another Asshole project was co-edited by Glenn Branca & published in 1987. This publication includes photographs by Alice Albert & others as well as essays by Rosetta Brooks, Tricia Collins & Richard Milazzo, John Hilliard, Gary Indiana, Cookie Mueller, David Rattray, Carol Squiers, Amy Taubin, & Lynne Tillman.
For this blog, for this crowd, for this here New Year, we feature for your listening scarification...
Just Another Asshole #5 - The LP.
all decryption codes in comments
Side 1 / Cut 1 –
"Eggs Benedictus" – Larry Simon
"Kojak / Wang" – Dara Birnbaum
"Untitled 2" – Carla Liss
excerpt from "Times Sq. Show Audio" – Bobby G
"Incantation" – Wharton Tiers
"True Confessions" – Carol Parkinson
"Untitled 10" – Nina Canal
"Shift" – Lee Renaldo"
"Untitled 5" – Jenny Holzer
"Sound Stroke" – Annea Lockwood
Side 1 / Cut 2 –
"The Smith-Leroy Comedy Team" – Michael Smith / A. Leroy
"Dinner Time" – Chris Nelson
"Untitled 15" – Willie Klein
"Simply Riding a Dream" – Mitch Corber
"Untitled 8" – Mark Abott
"Untitled 3" – Dan Graham
"On the Promontory" – Michael Shamberg
"Radio Song" – Anne DeMarinis
"The Fucking Youth of Today" – Thurston Moore
Side 1 / Cut 3 –
"Red Ants" – Andy Blinx / Don Hunerberg
"Calvin Klein" – Vikky Alexander
"Dear John" – John Howell
"Untitled 12" – Salvatore Principato
"Penumbra" – Nigel Rollings
"Grand Central Station" – Peggy Katz
"Highway Patrol" – Eric Bogosian
"Happy Police Horn" – Herr Lugus
"Door Stop" – Amy Taubin
excerpt from "The Machines" – Remko Scha [4]
Side 1 / Cut 4 –
"Talking Art" – Susan Russell
"Untitled" – Bill Buchen
"Well, Alice" – Verge Piersol
"Tell the Story" – David Hofstra / Lynne Tillman
"K-4" – D. Brown
"Dogs" – Sandra Seymour
"Index Circa Seventy" – Phill Niblock
"United Technology" – Barbara Kruger
"Fetish" – John Rehberger
Side 2 / Cut 1 –
"Turtles Travel Slower on Asphalt" – Paul Mcmahon / Nancy Radloff
"Dub Bums" – Bruce Tovsky
"Untitled 9" – Martha Wilson
excerpt from "Slowly I Turn, Step By Step, Inch By Inch ...." – Ned Sublette
"Faspeedelaybop" – Glenn Branca
"You Will Start Out Standing" – Gail Vachon
"Deutschland Etude" – B. Conan Piersol
"A Natural Death" – Gregory Sandow
"Dirty Tape" – Stephan Wischerth
Side 2 / Cut 2 –
"Warhead in the Forehead" – Bob George
"It's True" – Judy Rifka
"Long Song" – David Garland
"32 Bad Movies" – Mark Bingham
excerpt from "Strangers in a Strange Land" – Michael Byron
"It's Hot Love" – Glenda Hydler / Susan Fisher
"Untitled 7" – Laurie Spiegel
"Entrada" – Barbara Ess
"Untitled 6" – Kiki Smith
"Untitled 13" – Shelley Hirsh
Side 2 / Cut 3 –
"Foreign Waters" – Peter Gordon [5]
"Watch Out - Verse 5" – Arleen Schloss [6]
"Sweden - Den Mother" – Tod Jorgensen [6]
"Voices and Chambers" – David Rosenbloom
"Untitled 4" – Doug Snyder
"Floating Cinema Excerpt" – Jon Rubin
"Untitled 14" – Thomas Lawson
"Pipe Music" – Harry Spitz
excerpt from "64 Short Stories" – Rhys Chatham / David Linton
"Salutations Roma" – Isa Genzken
Side 2 / Cut 4 –
"New Sneakers" – Daile Kaplan
"Working Youth" – Kim Gordon / Miranda
"Untitled 11"– Sally A. White
"Crown of Thorns" – Joseph Nechvatal
"Friend Heart Alarm" – Steven Harvey
"Radio Off" – Sammy Marshall Harvey
"Untitled 1" – 0:51
"Evelyn McHale" – Rudolph Grey
"Die" – Richard Morrison
excerpt from "Metal and Plastic" – Z'EV
Vitin e ri të Lumtur,
NØ
[1] – In the musick world, Barbara Ess has performed & recorded post-punk music with bands since 1978, including The Static, Disband, & Y Pants. She often performed at art galleries, at the Mudd Club, & at Tier 3.
[2} – After studying abstract art at Duke University, traditional painting, printmaking, & drawing at the University of Chicago, in 1974 Jenny Holzer moved to Manhattan to participate in the Whitney Museum's independent study program where she began her initial exploration of language as art. She began her ''Truisms'', philosophical concepts in simplified phrases for everyone. These then became black script on anonymous sheets that she wheat-pasted on buildings, walls, & fences around NYC. Her pieces encouraged pedestrians to scribble messges on the posters & make verbal comments. Holzer would often stand nearby one of her posters & listen to the conversations her art started, This interaction with the art was Holzer's real goal. In 1982 for the first time, Holzer installed a large electronic sign on the Spectacolor board in Times Square. This piece was sponsored by the Public Art Fund program. The message was part of her Survival series which commented on the great pain, great delight, & great ridiculousness of living in contemporary society.
At the beginning of her art career, Barbara Kruger was intimidated to enter New York galleries due to the art scene which was an atmosphere that, to her, did not welcome "particularly independent, non-masochistic women". However, she received early support for her projects from groups such as the Public Art Fund that encouraged her to continue art making. She switched to her modern practice of collage in the early 80s.
Hot on the heels of Pussy Riot's condemnation of Russia's politicized justice system & suppression of freedom of expression, millions of young women have been caught donning balaclavas in solidarity with feminism for the first time. Echoing scenes of riot grrrl rebellion & Guerrilla Girls anonymity, certainly, the call to charter communities of supportive & creative women via music is nothing new. An apartment on the edge of Prospect Park in Brooklyn served as host to infrequent practices for DISBAND members Martha Wilson, Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, & Diane Torr (a rotating membership, which at some moments has included Barbara Kruger, Ingrid Sischy, Barbara Ess, Daile Kaplan & many others). Amongst the numerous No Wave bands in New York in the late 70s & early 80s who predicated on negation, DISBAND represented one of many new spaces for women who rejected the mainstream culture of the time.
DISBAND did not come out of any specific tradition, but instead, members made their own by blurring the lines between performance art & live music. None of the members were technically skilled in music. As Martha Wilson states in the Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces, "We did play some instruments: plastic bags; newspapers; hammers; Col. Sanders' chicken buckets, bed sheets, hotel bells".
[3] – Ingrid Sischy, before becoming a photography & art critic for The New Yorker (1988), before taking the helm of Interview magazine (1989), long before becoming a contributing editor for Vanity Fair (1997) was the unlikely editor of Artforum magazine. The beloved South African native, who passed away in July, 2015 at the age of 63 from breast cancer, became the editor for Artforum in late 1979. When the issue arrived on newsstands, it caused a great stir. It was utterly unlike any previous issue of Artforum. The contributors included the photographer William Wegman, the English conceptual artists Gilbert & George, the conceptual artist Joseph Buys, the performance artist Laurie Anderson, the editors of the radical feminist magazine Heresies, & the editors of the art journal
Just Another Asshole. The whole thing had an impudent, aggressively unbuttoned, improvised yet oddly poised air. The cover of Sischy's first issue was a reproduction of the cover of the first issue of an avant-garde magazine of the forties called VVV. Sischy had borrowed the original cover from David Hare, VVV's former editor. Someone who had not come from John Szarkowski's MoMArt photography department might not have been as overjoyed as Sischy was by the cigarette burn & the spills that stained it, but she correctly gauged the surreal beauty that these ghostly traces of past life would assume when photographed, as well as the sense of quotation marks that they would help impart to the notion of a cover about a cover.
[4] –
Remko Scha - Guitar Mural 1 featuring The Machines C60, Taal Beeld Geluid, 1982. This is a recording of mechanically produced music from an installation in Corps de Garde, Groningen, Netherlands, October 1981. The Machines are a group of fan motors, electric drills, & electric sabre saws. They play electric guitars by means of rotating strings, rotating metal brushes, vibrating metal bars, & vibrating ropes. When the rotating / vibrating speeds of the motors are varied, different rhythms emerge from their interaction with the guitars. From the beginning of the 1980s until his death in November of 2015, The Machines was Remko’s band, though he never struck a note on any of their instruments during the group
's lifetime. Not directly. Described on Scha's website as ''a group of electric motors who play electric guitar'', The Machines was an exercise in automated music, a hybrid of kinetic art & minimalist punk rock.
[5] –
Peter Gordon - Star Jaws, Lovely Music, Ltd LML 1031, 1977. Peter Gordon & The Love of Life Orchestra; recorded & mixed by Peter Gordon with "Blue" Gene Tyranny; lyrics by Peter Gordon & Kathy Acker. Sensuous music expressed through a slick pop-rock language with simple harmony, generating a pop-classical hybrid. Saxophone solos, teenage-love lyrics, synthesizer effects, & conventional bass / drum parts mixed with quite a bit of intellect & abstraction. In addition to his own work or that with his Love of Life Orchestra, he has appeared on or composed music for albums by Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Vega, David Johansen, Elliott Murphy, The Flying Lizards, David Van Tieghem, Lawrence Weiner, and Arthur Russell.
[6] – Wednesday at A's was an on-going performance jam held in Arlene Schloss' Lower East Side loft on Broome Street. It began in 1979 & continued until 1981. During its tenure, the venue offered performance, art, & music featuring artists such as Jackie Apple, Eric Bogosian, as well as Schloss herself. Musical acts drew from the New York Punk / No-Wave scenes, featuring performers like Alan Suicide, Thurston Moore, & Glenn Branca, Flyers for Wednesday at A's were produced at Tod Jorgensen's Copy Shop on Mott Street - a nexus for what came to be known as the "New York Color Xerox School" which was an integral part of JAAsshole. NØ
