Generous Issue 01

Dear Reader–

The publication you are holding in your hands now is the collaborative effort of three Milwaukee-based editors, with contributions from sixteen artists and writers and one collective.

Since convening as a triad in mid-2015, we the co-editors passionately explored the subject of creating an arts publication. Through weekly meetings and scrolling group texts, our dialogue spurred, evolved, and ultimately defined what we are hopeful to accomplish with our publication.

Our mission is to create a space where artists are stirred to experiment.

We were looking to take risks, and to build relationships with artists that exemplify risk-taking in their work. Intentionality was key in deciding which work we would feature, with an interest in the transgressive. Not just another publication featuring visual work, Generous is an invitation to leap into the void, to engage loose and fast, for artists to feel challenged and to challenge viewers in response. Riding against the imposed boundaries of appropriate publishing, we were turned away from a printing company with strict policies against printing anything obscene. Our response? We must be doing something right.

Inside Generous you will encounter Features, or curated spreads we worked with the artists to develop. When you see the mark →, a Feature has begun.

When you see the mark ↓, you’ve reached the end of a Feature. The additional artwork populating the pages of Generous are assembled from a select pool of artists invited to contribute to our Submissions.

Generously yours, Khine Hline, aryn kresol, and Nate Pyper

ABOUT THIS MAGAZINE

Generous is a periodic publication that foregrounds new work by cultural producers who create outside the confines of canon.

Like the individuals it features, Generous takes risks and values spontaneity.

EDITORS Khine Hline aryn kresol Nate Pyper

GRAPHIC DESIGNER Nate Pyper

TYPEFACES

Sharp Sans No. 2 Times New Roman

PRINTER

Quad/Graphics N61 W23044 Harry’s Way Sussex, WI 53089-3995

CONTACT

Please direct all inquiries to generousmag@gmail.com

MAILING ADDRESS

820 Locust St Milwaukee, WI 53202

Table of Contents– 01

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SMUT: new drawings by Rachel Sanders Jasmine McMasters

Jake Meils

Peter Klett

In Conversation with Kim Miller & Zach Hill Wedding Crasher

Lily Solheim

Heimo Wallner

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COPE Collection

Bradly Fischer

Sympathy for the 90s

by Lise Haller Baggesen Saige Rowe

Caitlyn Cold

FIRST BITE with words by Kirsten Schmid Nate Page

Anamaya Farthing-Kohl

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In conversation with

Illustrations by Zach Hill

Kim Miller & Zach Hill Kim Miller moves. As a performance- and video-artist based in Milwaukee, she uses motion, sound, and image as signals that point to a culture in transit. Her work acts as a radical democratic model for change. She received her BFA from Cooper Union and her MFA from Vermont College.

Zach Hill is an emerging performance- and video-artist who graduated from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and studied under Miller as a student. He currently creates as 1/8th of the collective After School Special in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee. Both are recipients of the prestigious Mary L. Nohl Fellowship award (Miller in 2009 and Hill in 2015). The two sat down for a conversation to discuss their work, ethic, and a way forward.

ZH: What are your first concerns as an artist?

KM: It’s interesting. It’s not something that we always talk about. What are you first thinking about or what’s your first impulse.

ZH: There’s a lot of layering of language, action, costume, and even sculpture in your work. How do you begin to construct these performances or videos?

KM: I start with writing and language. I always thought I was a text-based person and that I think in language versus thinking in visual, but more and more I struggle with language. I’m not always super articulate – as you may have noticed in

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class – and same with performance. I’m an awkward person who’s not always in complete control of myself. Performance is the one chance to put everything into total control or to frame the lack of control in a more meaningful way. I start with language, but then I also start with movement, and there are these different places that converge into one. I also think a lot about the body in motion and what that can be in a very pedestrian way or in a highly defined art, like a ballet. I actually go to a lot of dance performances more than art shows because I’m interested in that form. There is the body in motion and gesture or a certain control of the body and what that looks like. And there’s writing, which often takes the form of a play.

ZH: I usually start with writing. I enjoy inventing dialogue and then coming up with whatever will be acted out.

I also work a lot with drawing when I’m working on my videos. I’ve been getting into a lot of animation. For me, it always comes back to drawing or a cartoon or costume. Usually my scripts are very normal, but also fantastical in some sort of way. I think about performance a little bit differently though. You’re saying it’s more pedestrian for you. I’m trying to make it not real.

ZH: Like a script?

KM: Literally a script, yes. So I may start with chunks but then assemble the chunks of writing into a script, and then sometimes I literally mash them together into a script. The visual details come in later. If you think about video, I’m not necessarily interested in special effects or in acting because I want to think about the pedestrianness or amateurness. And that’s where an interest in constructivism comes from, it’s straight forward. It’s utilitarian in a way, and it’s thinking about how can art be utilitarian.

Where do you start from?

KM: I don’t think real or not real is the equation for me. I’m not interested in characters or creating personas. Part of what I’m secretly always interested in or addressing is the construction of the self. What is the self and how can you dismantle this metaphor of or dismantle

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KM: I want to think about the limits of agency, our own personal agency in who we are in our decision making. Then the problem with all of that is then in the work. Often the work is on the verge of falling apart, intentionally, whether it means that the narrative is dissolving or the characters don’t hold together. I’m interested in pursuing a limit, whether it’s a limit of a body or of the subject, or the limits of one’s own personal agency in life.

Maybe this is a result of getting older and having just experienced the death of a close friend – sometimes, there is a limit you can’t go past and that’s really hard to accept. It’s so abstract, but that’s the logical limit we all face: death and mortality. It’s not a nice thing to say.

That’s a limit right there.

this narrative of a whole self? I think we’re all a mess and constantly in flux both as individuals and as a culture.

This idea of or construction of the self is something I’m interested in and interrogating. In video, presenting a clearly realized character that is acting in a naturalistic way, to me, reinforces the idea of a hermetically sealed self, and I’m interested in seeing the places in between or the falling apart or the ways that don’t match up logically. I’m not trying to bring a portrait of real life into the video, but I’m trying to think about some kind of metaphysical thing or metaphysical form.

Adding more illusion isn’t going to help me think through it.

ZH: It’s looming.

KM: Yes. If you just keep it to art, I do think there are limits, such as pushing a form to its boundary and then articulating that boundary or seeing what happens when you step past that boundary.

Contained within art, I think there is something in letting those limits be known. Sometimes, in a video piece, I start when I press record and end when I press stop. It’s not that I want to show a natural thing as much as “here is where the art begins and here is where the art ends.”

ZH: More like poking holes in these constructions of the self?

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ZH: Like showing the guts of how or what’s happening.

KM: There’s no “razzle dazzle,” even though I work really hard to construct and set it all up.

ZH: Do you think that relates to what you’re trying to do with yourself in video?

KM: Yeah, in video, when I’m performing a solo for the camera, I’m often trying to address issues of power – whether it’s one’s individual agency or the way a subject experiences power from elsewhere – and trying to negotiate power, including the power or narrative of language itself and how can you step outside of language.

In private, we can all imagine ways to step outside of language, but in public it’s hard.

For me, that’s what art is. Art is something public. If you’re doing some little thing and no one ever sees it, it doesn’t really exist. For me, it doesn’t exist until it comes out to the world.

ZH: I agree with that.

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KM: Now let me ask you. I always think of your drawing practice and then your performative videos as two separate things.

Do you conceive them as coming together?

videos because it can all come together there in one container: drawing, writing, performance, and narrative.

KM: Me too. I think that’s why I use video, because it’s a neat container.

ZH: I have seen those two practices come together in the past. I’m finding ways to implement drawing into video.

I’m really starting to see that all come together through animation. I see drawing as these brainscapes, and they’re also a form of meditation.

I always see myself constructing a grid and then pulling forms out of that grid. Within video work – which is what I’ve been focusing on more than doing anything performative live – I’ve seen it as an alternate reality.

The animations that I’ve been using have been amplifying what a character is thinking or have literally illustrated the metamorphosis of the character in the video. I’m always trying to find a way to fit together all the pieces of the artistic practice puzzle.

Okay – I draw, I write, I do performance, I make videos. I feel like I’m making

ZH: It can have everything in it.

KM: It can have everything in it and then it’s really easy to distribute.

ZH: Distribution is cheap. Because the internet is going to be free soon. I feel like I’m actually at a new turning point in my practice where I’m really finally able to see it all come together in that one box.

I think you can even see it through my senior thesis project.

It starts off very performative and toward the end it’s getting video savvy, or animation savvy, and tech savvy. It was exciting for me to see happen.

KM: I really loved your thesis exhibition and I guess I haven’t really seen work by you since then.

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through trying to change our identities get stuck. When I’m putting people in my videos, they’re usually themselves – like in my thesis video with Krister, Kayle and Cody – they’re themselves, and I’m myself. In the second piece that I finished in the two part film, we’re all characters, but the ultimate agenda is to get back to ourselves or return to our own individuality through this journey.

In some of your works you employ other people as characters. It feels like the role of these individuals performing as a group is that of participatory performer, leading to something a bit more “real,” or goofy, or naive (like a first time performance).

Can you explain what attracts you to this as an element in your work?

ZH: I finished a video piece two days ago.

I’ve been working on the same project since I graduated. It’s a two part film about – it’s pretty much about me as a college graduate. The first part was filmed and takes place in my home town and it’s me in a conversation with my best friend from home. And then we rob a costume store and change our identities, but then we can’t get the costumes off and it spurs this adventure through the United States.

For the second part, I filmed on a road trip with Grant Gill, Cody Powers, and Kyle Seis, so it shifts characters, but it’s the same narrative. It very new and different but all the same sort of stuff: wigs, silly dialogue, jumping on trampolines.

KM: I am interested in a certain amateurism, and not amateurism for its own sake, but for the unpolished performance. I want to foreground performance by using non-performers.

When you have a really good actor, you forget that you’re watching acting, and I don’t want people to forget. I don’t want to seduce my viewers. I don’t want to

KM: This piece you’re describing now, what was it like to work with other people and non-actors?

ZH: In my videos, I’m always playing myself, or a construction of myself, like either exaggerated or de-exaggerated version of who I am – to shed some sort of light on my own individuality. In the first video, with my friend Audrey, we start out playing ourselves as characters and then

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get them to forget that they’re watching something constructed. I’m interested in keeping people present with the knowledge that they’re putting this thing together. That they’re responsible for what they’re watching. It’s not just me giving them entertainment. The clumsiness, the amateurness, is deliberate in that way.

The other part of that is just that I use who is around. Like when you’re teaching, you’re often very entrenched in this home-school-home-school loop, and you use who you can. That’s why I use myself too, because I’m available.

ZH: I like a bit of imagination in those things. You can point at something and say “that’s my sculpture,” but it’s something else. I like those humorous breaks where the audience is being invited to play along with you or believe something that isn’t entirely true but is within the fiction. I’m inviting the audience to pretend while I’m pretending. I’d be interested to hear what role improvisation plays in your practice.

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KM: Usually I would say absolutely none. Well, that’s not true. When it’s just me, absolutely none. I try to control every pause and gap in word, but then working with other people, as much as I try to control everything, improvisation becomes a huge part of it and I try to embrace that. In this science fiction trilogy that I did over the past year and a half or so, one had all of the characters and plot planned but the dialogue was improvised, one had the staging and dialogue planned but the performance was improvised, and one there was no dialogue but the plot was improvised.

I tried to use improvisation as a tool in those three and ultimately I’m not happy with them at all. I want to make new work so I get those out of circulation. For me, I’m not a good improviser. I don’t like what I come with when I do it on the spot. Either it’s too indulgent or not thoughtful enough, especially in terms of language but also movement. Practice and contemplation and thinking things through usually makes it better. How do you feel?

ZH: One thing that I like, I was directing my friend Audrey, and she wouldn’t do anything I would say, and it ended up being way better that way. We ended

up having some great stuff.

In this video, I asked her to say “It’s fucking killing me,” and instead of saying it once, she said it 8 times, and each time it got more dramatic, until she was like “it’s fucking k i l l i n g me”. So it comes back to that – having a plan but letting people do them.

KM: You have to have a plan to be working with people but also be willing to let it go a little bit.

That’s the part where I die a little bit inside. It’s a good challenge.

ZH: I’ve hardly ever worked with other people, maybe in one or one pieces where I was directing a friend. I was dying the whole time, thinking, “You’re ruining it!”

KM: “You’re ruining my masterpiece!”

ZH: In the end it ended up really great. I’ve been thinking about less performance and more cinema. I’ve been interested in film history or what film can do. I’ve found myself interested in looking at filmmakers more often. One thing Shelleen Greene said to me was “film is collaborative.”

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KM: It’s hugely collaborative.

Collaboration is always hard for me, but there’s also something really great about being a part of a larger thing. I think what I want is then to have more money, so I can exert more control. There’s only so much control you can exert if your friends are not getting something, besides a muffin basket.

ZH: I did want to ask – just because the theme is First Time(s) – what are some of your firsts? First live performance?

KM: My first performance was as a villager in Fiddler on the Roof in seventh grade. Actually, before that I was in kindergarten, with my little friend and I dressed up and charged pennies for people to come watch me dance in the backyard. That was my first performance.

ZH: I think I was the magistrate in Oliver Twist. And I hated performance. I was awful. And I still kind of hate performing.

KM: In undergrad, I was doing other people’s work as an actor. A lot of my friends were filmmakers. I was doing video too, but I was really into the effects of video itself, gradients, and other technical effects.

Performance was fun. There is

something always sickly nerve-wracking about it that never seems to go away. It’s really different for me to perform for the camera, and all those were performances for the camera versus live performance, which is what makes me really sick to my stomach.

ZH: When I was in undergrad – so long ago – I did a performance when I was a freshman and it was awful. I sat in a chair in my underwear and put markers around me and let people draw on me.

KM: I remember that.

ZH: Don’t remember it. It was the first time I was like “I’m going to do this” and that was terrible. Then I didn’t do anything like that again until junior year.

I flew away in an airplane. I made this airplane out of a tricycle with this huge, technicolor wing, and wore this jumpsuit/ weird costume. I read a speech from a script, and I invited my whole class out and made a Facebook event. There were probably 30 people there. I read the script and turned on ♫ Road to Nowhere ♫ on a little boom box and then flew away on this tricycle airplane. And I didn’t come back to class. It was the last day before Christmas break and it was all about escaping winter.

performance when you’re riding (or flying) away and you can tell the audience is wondering “when is it over?

When does he come back?” That tense moment where you don’t know where the performance ends and normal life resumes. That was a really great part of the piece: watching you go away and wondering.

ZH: I’m really interested in the idea of a kid playing pretend. That’s how I entertained myself when I was a child.

I would pretend that I was a ninja or flying into space. I like the idea of bringing that into adult world, as an art practice, and inviting people to take part in that imagination.

KM: You didn’t come back?

ZH: I came back like a half hour later, when class was over.

KM: For me, it was in undergrad too, and it was a collaboration with a friend of mine who I just visited in New York and still know and we’re both still making.

KM: There was a really great moment in the video documentation of the

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We would take over parties. You know, there’s always a party to go to. We would get really dressed up, super fancy, in what you would wear if your mother was getting married, and we would make hors-d’oeuvres and mixed drinks and crash these parties. We would bring all the stuff and we would take over the hosting.

We made every party about ourselves.

It was like this extreme narcissism that we reveled in. And sometimes we would come to people’s parties and set up a photo booth and really start to cause a spectacle in the corner of the room. It was purely narcissism but also about this desire to get a deeper connection to a community rather than a typical party where you just go and hang out. We really wanted to make something more happen. So we used these things. And sometimes we would …

I don’t want to say this… dispense extras that maybe weren’t available at the party and then it became this other kind of party, and we were suddenly the hostesses in a very concrete way. Often times we weren’t invited. Sometimes we were invited but not invited to do that. We became a little bit notorious.

ZH: What were people’s responses?

KM: Sometimes people were like “Nooooo!” This was the 90s in New York City–we weren’t always dispensing extra favors, but we did it enough that it became what people were expecting so sometimes then they were happy to see us and then disappointed. Sometimes we just brought cupcakes. Usually people were happy because we brought extra sparkle.

Extra fun. For us, it wasn’t enough to

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go and hang out, we wanted more, more participation. Sometimes we would host them or we would go into openings – there were always openings –with a tray of snacks. Later, I was eventually in more organized performance groups where we performed live and toured and such.

I’m also still interested in the difference between performing live and performing for the camera and trying to find the limits of each of those but to conflate them together.

performance is a weird thing. Performance art is now an established thing, but you still have to negotiate your venue. You’re a gallery artist or are more oriented toward dance or you monetize it in some way, or do stand-up. Video just makes it an easier delivery system, or container.

That’s what is really exciting about the present moment is that video is so easily distributable and shareable. I haven’t exploited that in the ways that are possible yet, but I think because I’m coming from live performance to video, I’m realizing I can use the video as the thing as opposed to trying to translate the video back to live.

Just use the video as the end point and get that out there. Only in the past couple years have I started trying to do that bit by bit. Right now I’m doing a series of videos that are straight videos for the camera and I’m making that decision. I think I have a fear of commitment, so distributing a video is like “oh shit, did I just send that?” I stand by my work, but that’s the final form once you send it out there in some ways, and I’m trying to build that commitment. I’m not going to take this one any further, it’s done.

ZH: Like in your show that was at Green Gallery recently. The video was going but then you had different people participating in dance that I assume was related to the video.

KM: It was the same choreography, yes.

And then eventually what I did was I took the recording from the live band and made that the soundtrack for the videos. The final video combines elements from the live performance.

ZH: Whenever I exhibit a video, I want there to some sort of interactive element. You can participate or activate the stage and take in the videos through interaction. Something that makes it real or real fun.

ZH: That’s scary.

KM: It is.

KM: Don’t discount fun. Fun is powerful.

ZH: Can you speak to doing performance and video work in Milwaukee today?

KM: It’s hard for me to speak about doing performance in Milwaukee. I guess I don’t know how to get a distance from it. I think

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“We would get really dressed up, super fancy, in what you would wear if your mother was getting married...”

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1960s red-dotted ryan dress w/ matching short jacket over 1960s Oscar de la Renta red/white stripe canvas jacket, black canvas jacket w/ buttons latte boat hat w/ red sheer scarf

Wedding Crasher

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Photographs by Zachary Swearingen Styling by Allissa Montgomery, Gary Miller, Khine Hline Model Kim Miller

Yellow sheer scarf, Google shade, cream color raw silk jumpsuit under 1960s poly-Hawaiian dress, Chanel vintage lucite/leather platform shoes

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Mohair longcoat over wool/mohair hand-knit sweather, deep plum silk scarf

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1960s polkadot rain poncho, yellow vinyl rain coat over 1960s cream-color sequin dress, black tights (model own), Maywear blue suede shoe

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Deep green feather jacket over 1980s vintage Romeo Gigli jacket, Chanel shoe, 1910s hat

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Dressing Under Conditions of Severe Uncertainty

By COPE Collection “If I looked at what you were wearing today, I’d learn something about the weather. If I were to look in your closet, I’d learn something about the climate you live in.”

– common saying among climate scientists What will you wear for the apocalypse? Maybe that’s not a question you’ve seriously considered but being dressed right when the shit hits the fan could nevertheless be of crucial importance. Of course, it all depends on what kind of disaster you’re anticipating and where you are at the time. Have you already retreated to the mountains when the cities flood due to the rising sea level? Or have you decided to ride out the storm in your suburban home behind boardedup windows? Or, are you attending a gathering of fellow spectators to watch the catastrophe unfold on television and speculate on when and how it will hit home? There are endless perspectives and scenarios to take into account and tough decisions to be made as your stock your wardrobe for an uncertain future.

Besides the practical function of having a congruous outfit in the face of disaster, the imaginary of disasters has inspired fashion designers for decades. From the first camouflage t-shirts in the 1960s to the contemporary use of materials and elements from emergency gear, people have long been digging that doomsday style. In these dire times, it is as hip as it may be necessary to dress like there’s no tomorrow.

COPE Collection is a conceptual project that explores exactly this terrain in a transdisciplinary combination of academic research, curatorial practice and fashion design. The project originates at the Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research in Denmark, which is an international hub for cutting edge work in the emerging field of “disaster studies”. In collaboration with established brands, artists and fashion designers, the project explores cultural imaginaries of disasters through exclusive products and productions.

We embrace the imperative to cope.

Drawing on our research in critical studies of disasters and their aftermaths, COPE Collection presses beyond the self-congratulatory ethos of political consumerism and corporate responsibility.

In close collaboration with Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research, COPE Collection will develop innovative products and approaches to the support economies associated with contemporary disasters.

Moving beyond temporary disaster relief solution, the project interrogates fashion as a domain of everyday engagement with the disasters within which we are imbricated in the longterm.

COPE Collection will launch its first prêt–à–porter line in 2016.

COPE Collection is: Dehlia Hannah (philosopher/US) and Peer Illner (sociologist/DE), Kristian Cedervall Lauta (lawyer/DK) and Jacob Lillemose (curator/DK).

To talk about disaster fashion, then, is to venture into a terrain where the lines between functionality and aesthetics become blurred. Garments embody hopes for survival and strategies for navigating the complex psychological, social and cultural aspects of living in a world that seems destined to come apart at the seams.

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Sympathy for the 90s

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Words by Lise Haller Baggesen

Dear Young-Girl, You ask me, was I alive in the 90s?

Do I remember?

Let’s see… I remember reading that you remember something, not by remembering it, but remembering the last time you remembered it.

The last time I remembered taking Polaroids in a Berlin nightclub called Trésôr was yesterday.

The cavernous space was a former bank vault, hence the name, and of course it was underground. In this Underworld, we danced on the ruins of late communism/capitalism, as we understood them to be the flipside of each other’s coins. It was so crowded. The Polaroid shows a swelling sea of bobbing heads with one face in the center: a young-girl with sweaty forehead eyes shut mouth open. Her face in the photograph is blurry, almost liquid, like the chemical emulsion that carries her image and at the same time threatens to wash it away, to dissolve it. Do I need to spell it out? It was XTC. 38

Our mating rites were not for the faint of heart: One night in W139 — the epicenter of everything that happened in Amsterdam in those years, or so it seemed — Tommy X walked across a bed of burning coal to serenade his mistress with Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” If the outcome of the AIDS test he had received the same afternoon had been positive, he would have been singing a different tune, but that night the mood was celebratory.

On the opening night of the aptly named “Midnight Walkers and City Sleepers,” the curator (a friend of mine), asked if I would show one of the participants a night on the town. I said yes, of course.

After the opening party we went to San Francisco. The attractions to this place were manifold: it was just down the road, it was cheap, and it was open all night (as in ALL night). It had a jukebox, so you could dance there too.

Over a beer, the visiting artist reminisced about growing up in The Lake District in the 70s with its miners’ strikes and brass bands. I was super impressed because we all worshipped a working class hero, and especially the British.

He told me he still lived with his parents. “Oh. Wow,” I said. But he said it was okay because he had his own entrance. “Oh. Okay.” I am not sure if I remember all of this correctly… I might have made up bits about his dad being a coal miner and the strikes and the brass bands after the fact, as I have since familiarized myself with

his work…but I am sure he told me he still lived with his parents –because that is kind of thing you remember—and I remember his name was Jeremy Deller.

Another Polaroid is from Thai bar. In it three couples pose against a bamboo interior in thrift store outfits. We wanted to look like common people, because although we were in our late twenties, we were not fully grown. We did not have mobile phones, so it was more like “be there two o’clock by the fountain down the road.” The boys-who-are-girls-wholike-girls-to-be-boys who worked the bar were super friendly, but didn’t shower us with any of the attention they reserved for the regulars, and anyway, we went there just because it was cozy. We were into Blur and Pulp. Everything was Blur and Pulp. By which I mean to say: the 90s was the last time you could fully occupy the musical terrain you were part of, in such a way that it was everything.

On The Quietus, David Bennun reminisces about Tricky’s Maxinquaye, a landmark of the decade: For a long time, I didn’t listen to it. It was like a house you’d lived in, or your old school.

Somewhere that for a while, an eventful and formative while, had seemed like the centre of the world. Then you move on, and other things happen. You lead a different life, become a different person. When you do go back, it’s uncanny. In the Freudian sense: altogether

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familiar, altogether strange. It all seems so much smaller now, a place a whole other life occurred.

I’ve got a letter from the government the other day opened it and read it it said they were suckers they wanted me for the army or whatever picture me giving a damn, I said never 2

It wasn’t just me. It’s hard to recall, in our atomised era, but [then] it was possible for an entire segment of culture to not only like, or love, but to inhabit an act. If you were one kind of music fan, Oasis were where you lived. (At that point, it sometimes felt like Oasis were where the whole country lived, whether it wanted to or not.)

If you were another, you were Tricky’s tenants. 1

You cannot un-hear it. Not that you’d want to.

By now it should have occurred to all of us that suckers have authority, but back then we just thought it was all such a laugh!

We would party so hard we could almost forget there was an actual war going on in Europe: “No don’t look now, look over here: That’s Tony Blair, the sexy beast, with his YBA arm candy!“

In retrospect, the 90s as an era was a post-modern and pre-internet parenthesis in time, and the inter-bellum between the cold war and the war on terror. It was also the decade of the girl, as manifest in various cultural phenomena, beginning with Riot Grrrl’s rallying battle cry “revolution girl style now!” then morphing into the consumer savvy mainstream popularity with the Spice Girls, and intellectualized in Tiqqin’s “Theory of a Young-Girl,” released in France in 1999.

In defense of the Spice Girls I would like to say: although they were a commercialized consumer product, they were commodified in such a way as to poke fun at commodification – a clever trick of which we were aware. Thus the joke was on us, as our being aware of it was part of the cleverness, and even so;

Tricky’s Maxinquaye did, and does, defy definition. So much so, that when you Google the term “Maxinquaye definition” what you get, outside of references to the album, are links to thesauruses with the message: “We are sorry, but we have no definition of phrase ‘Maxinquaye’ yet.”

What made Maxinquaye the defining album of that decade — to me and many others who occupied that particular mood — was not only Tricky’s bag of tricks, but the sacred trickster by his side: Martina Topley-Bird. Nineteen at the time the album was recorded, Tricky’s muse and mistress was so much more than a sideshow; she was a show stealer.

Martina’s is not the voice of the decade, but a voice beyond her years. Yet her gritty girly-ness was right on time; once you’ve heard her laid back vocal slur and drawl its way through those Public Enemy lines, David Bennun. “Twenty Years On: Tricky’s Maxinquaye Revisited” The Quietus, 20 February 2015. http://thequietus. com/articles/17220-tricky-maxinquaye-review-interview (accessed 18 January 2016) 1

“Black Steel” Tricky, Maxinquaye (4th & B’way: 1995). Original lyrics by Public Enemy: “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Def Jam 1989) 2

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it did make you feel somewhat clever, and yes, empowered, standing on the bar of the Pink Flamingo in some brand new retro acrylic mini dress and knee-high boots blaring: “I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want!”

We did not care if everybody could see our knickers — another advantage of nobody having mobile phones — because that, in fact, was what we really, really wanted: to let the world know that we would show them our knickers when (and only when) we really, really, wanted to.

I have nothing to say in defense of Tiqquin’s “Preliminary Materials for the Theory of a Young-Girl,” which, as far as theories go, is really no more than a giant pile of fortune cookies. It opens with a disclaimer (because how else could it open):

petit-bourgeois happily settled in the suburbs with their plastic families? 3 Palatable as this sounds, we read on to discover, that Tiqqun — like anybody else (the proverbial “bunch of wankers”) who like to theorize on the Young-Girl — are stealing the Young-Girl’s body for their own purposes.

Roughly twenty years earlier Deleuze and Guattari had already lamented this theft by saying: The question is ultimately that of the body – the body they steal from us in order to fabricate opposable organisms. This body is first stolen from the girl: […] The girl’s becoming is stolen first, in order to impose a history, or prehistory, upon her. 4

Listen: The Young-Girl is obviously not a gendered concept.

A hiphop nightclub player is no less a Young-Girl than a beurette tarted up like a porn-star. The resplendent corporate advertising retiree who divides his time between the Côte d’Azur and his Paris office, where he still keeps an eye on things, is no less YoungGirl than the urban single woman too obsessed with her consulting career to notice she’s lost fifteen years of her life to it. And how could we account, if the YoungGirl were a gendered concept, for the secret relationship between ultratrendy musclebound Marais homos and the Americanized

But only after imposing their own pre-history upon her by declaring her: An abstract line, a line of flight.

Thus girls do not belong to any age group, sex, order or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes.

The two texts present the young girl solely as an abstraction –a mirror to her times— but do nothing at all to acknowledge the interior life of the young girl. The 90s in contrast did, exactly that, if nothing else.

End of Part 1, published in serial form Part 2 resumes in Issue 2 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 277.

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Tiqqun, Preliminary Material For a Theory of the Young-Girl (Cambridge: MIT Press/Semiotexte, 2012). 14-15 3

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F I R S T

B I T E

Photographs by Zachary Swearingen Words by Kirsten Schmid Styling by Allissa Montgomery, Gary Miller, Khine Hline Models Pip Atkinson, Katherine Baiocchi, Chloe Gutman, & Kirsten Schmid

What does your face mean to you?

Well, it depends in what emotions it is dressed.

I recognize myself most in fatigue.

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Kirsten is wearing a 1920s silk slip dress under black chiffon button-down blouse | Katherine is wearing a silk slip (3 dumpling)

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Pip is wearing underwear rope from Japanese kimono for young lady via Maywear, 1910 cream garders via Maywear, gold body suit (model’s own)

I’ve been looking in the mirror more lately.

What do you see?

I look at the bow in my lips or the droop of my eyelids to see how I’m doing.

I do that, too.

I look in the mirror to see if I’m alone.

You don’t mean that literally.

I don’t.

I resent that I want others to want me.

What part of yourself do you want them to want?

Nothing that belongs to me.

I’ve never thought about it that way… to whom does it belong?

I couldn’t say, but it isn’t something I ever feel in control of.

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I like that you have a special smile for me.

I love that you know it is for you.

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Chloe is wearing a charcoal gray silk dress under a Chinese embroidery silk jacket

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Generously supported by

Comb Gallery/ Artware Clothing & Gift Shop (COMB 2) 820 E Locust St Milwaukee, WI 53212 Hours: Tuesday–Friday 4–8 p.m.

Saturday 1–8 p.m.

Sunday 1–5 p.m.

Art and Music by Skully Gustafson & Erik Moore 824 E Locust St, Milwaukee, WI 53212 www.skullyskyrocket.com 4wheelsstudio@gmail.com

Acknowledgements: All contributing artists for leaping into the void with us John Sterr of Charles Allis & Villa Terrace Art Museums for his generous support in hosting the launch party at the Charles Allis on April 1, 2016

The Portrait Society Gallery A contemporary art gallery Generously supported by

207 E. Buffalo Street, FIFTH floor Milwaukee, WI 53202 Hours: Thursday, Friday, Saturday noon to 5 p.m. portraitsocietygallery.com