HOW HOW IT IT STARTS STARTS
AN ORIGIN STORY// EDITOR’S LETTER WORDS BY EMMA COHEN AND EMILY WOOD
Iconoclast was not born out of a desire to be seen, but to tell. It wasn’t meant to provide bylines and publicity for the sake of resumes, applications, and humble brags. It was born out of a dorm room in a mid-sized city that couldn’t yet contain the exuberance of voices left unexplored and uncelebrated. Iconoclast is a concept, but also a plea: to lift, to band together, to thrive. As two first year students coming onto campus with an inextricable love for Rookie Magazine, films (Mistress America, Diary of a Teenage Girl), and weird little pieces of people’s art on posters and cut up paper, we hungered for the cultural scene of a big city compressed into the campus we tread every day. Our new environment was diverse and nearly so much so that the things in the arts we were interested in were dissipated over a variety of venues on campus. The gap we soon felt in the arts wasn’t so much a lack, but a dilution. Our desire to take on Iconoclast as a project came from a need to collect the most creative, intelligent, and passionate artists working out of Western. We wanted a community to spew stuff at who would talk back. This is where the concept of a collective comes from versus simply just being a publication. We want to put in the hard work all the time, 24 hours, seven days a week. AKA we are fully ready to commit to our relationship with you. Please marry us.
The theme for our first published piece of work (which you currently have your eyes on!) is “Origin.” It seems fitting since so much of what Iconoclast seeks to do is foster and examine beginnings. The release of this zine marks a year after we (Emma & Emily) met. Moving into our slice of a dorm, meeting for the second time after a link up in Toronto, we hung posters and begun the navigation of what felt like some of the murkiest territory yet. Beginnings can be swampy and shrouded, tough to orient yourself in. But they’re also, obviously, a fresh start. What could be fresher than the age-old movie beginning and/ or ending of the first day of college? If you’re an upper year, you remember it well. If you’re a first year, you remember it even better, cause you’re in it. The first time Emma read Eileen Myles was in borrowing a beloved and well-thumbed copy from Emily. The first time Emily saw Frances Ha was sitting on Emma’s bed. By the time we met, we both had a love for Rookie Mag. Over time we’ve passed back and forth copies of Carrie Brownstein’s memoir, Emma Cline’s novel The Girls, and links to Mitski, Karen O, Angel Olsen, and CHAMPS tracks that loop in our heads on repeat. This cultural give and take continued our education in the pursuit of our creative careers. There are certain specific, prescribed moments of beginnings in life, the first day of uni being one. But for creators, the origin of art, where that drive comes from, is harder to pinpoint. The drive to make things usually comes from profound impact by another cultural artifact - feeling altered, changed, and filled with a desire to be part of the world of that cultural object. Our favourite pieces of art/film/music/writing etc make us feel known, larger than we are, in love. For the two of us, the origin of our friendship was borne out of a deep connection over culture - that kind of connection is powerful.
Our mission beyond anything else is that of creation and connection. Iconoclast is to be a place for diversity of stories - in medium and in message. We want to pull you in, listen to you and your work, make you some coffee, have a dance party and then blast your ideas into the world (or campus, which of course is a world unto itself) in fluorescent lights. The nature of a collective is that we are creating a concentrated community to lift each other up and work together and in the end (though, there probably is no end for something this ambitious) we will have multitudes of publications, products, projects, collaborations, celebrations. This year is the beginning, the origin, of lconoclast. Already we are chomping to get started, to create and to share the stories and art and work of the gleaming creators at Western, to band together and make some great stuff. We’re seeking those who boil with things to say - whether you talk via words, art, photography, dance, video, design, music, any of the inbetweens. This year and for the years to come, Iconoclast is going to be a place for projects, collaborations, explosions. We want to run gallery openings, podcasts, video channels, pop up shops, workshops, small print zines, and anything we (or you) can dream up. Iconoclast will be a collective that will compact and connect talent, hard work, creativity and the most outrageous fun we can whip up. To link artists to other artists, and to each other. For more information about the logistics of Icon, ie. who the heck runs this thing and how will it operate on a step by step basis, check out our website where we’ve done our best to spew all our thoughts and plans - website name here. If you have any questions for us, have an idea for a project you want us in on, or just want to say hey, email us at iconoclastuwo@ gmail.com (photos to right by Alex Lam)
DRY SPELL WORDS BY CAMILLE INSTON ART BY TATE RECHAN
says my head to the dead grass in my once family’s yard, if you could prick my intent to mate the tongue and teeth hooked into my palette, hung like ornaments to nifty pairings of consonant and vowel and if you could spur them to strip my night of its cloaks sing my thoughts like sermons buy my mind a drink then give it a fake number then make love to it in the back of my dad’s Nissan thread summer wind through my left nostril spin it in webs through my cerebral cortex fish it back out the right, call it intuition and then tie my ankles with my lips, march them through the desert then stick them on a cross and call it revelation give them to kim kardashian, let her take a selfie with them and then fax it to The Void, if you would be so kind as to plant your next root through my eye’s socket and throw your scraps of seeds to my skull’s hollow end so i can hunt them like the wolf the hare, well, then i promise to water you again.
ON CONSUMER CULTURE AND FRANK OCEAN’S ARTISTRY WORDS AND ILLUSTRATION BY DIYANA NOORY Frank Ocean took his sweet ass time preparing Endless (which was visually similar to a preceding mysterious livestream), Blonde, and the Boys Don’t Cry magazine. With only one fulllength album to his name, he’s managed to remain on everyone’s radar even after disappearing on social media, save Tumblr, and hiding from the press. Ocean’s work thus far has been breathtaking, and as such keeps his fans clinging breathlessly for more. Four years after the drop of Grammy-winning Channel Orange, anticipation for new Ocean music reached a fever pitch. Ocean’s admirers were presented with scraps of information that were combed over as carefully as hieroglyphs on archeological discoveries, desperate for a clue as to when another musical package would be delivered. We found ourselves desensitized to potential release dates as so many came and went without a word from Ocean or his team, and the hype escalated to unfathomable levels. When Blonde finally dropped on August 20, 2016, house parties turned into listening parties – Ocean fans dropped everything to soak in the music. While music fans collectively lost their shit, Ocean himself seemed as nonchalant as can be in his initial blog post announcement. Endless and the livestream on Ocean’s website solidified how he wants us to enjoy his music; it should be an immersive sensory experience as opposed to background noise, and we should respect an artist’s creative space and privacy. Sonically, lyrically, and conceptually the
album draws in its audience and doesn’t expect them to leave until it has shared all of its stories. Ocean complied with modern music marketing schemes whilst simultaneously subverting them. Pop-up stores have been popular among musicians lately – note Kanye West opened a bunch internationally this weekend as well – and sure enough Boys Don’t Cry pop-up stores appeared in only four cities to coincide with the release of Blonde. Although the 360-page magazine and exclusive CD track list were given away for free, Ocean raked in profit by selling anticipation and mystery and his album was released as an Apple Music exclusive. Our consumerist culture has been conditioned to expect instant gratification, so when Ocean took his time with his projects listeners displayed a sense of entitlement. Even the memes that have been shared over the past few years reveal how demanding we’ve become, despite the fact that artists do not owe us anything. Measuring time just became a countdown to the unknown date when Ocean would quench our thirst for new tunes. Expectations escalated into an alternate, unreachable realm and many listeners approached listening to the album with a sense of hastiness – “oh shit, FINALLY, let’s listen to this now”. People casually consumed to something that an artist has put their whole heart into, and if it didn’t meet their impossible expectations for such a brilliant musician they took it personally. Our addictive relationship with media can be toxic. We constantly crave new content despite the fact that we are constantly being provided with a new stream of visuals and audio. We scroll past masterpieces on our Instagram feeds after sparing milliseconds to double tap. We consistently turn to art to fill an unidentifiable void in our lives – or to add to the beauty of our lives, depending on what your outlook is. Ocean’s music usually arrives at points of high tension in my life, yet I don’t associate it with negativity.
Total absorption into his work, whether it be immersing myself in his videos or looping the audio as I work, provides a vital sense of comfort with his smooth vocals wrangling in my scattered thoughts. Is Blonde a timeless album? Time will tell. It took time to create this work, and it takes time to appreciate it. Judging an album that took four years to create by four second snippets or through a four-minute post-listening reflection session is an injustice to the artist. Ocean is the type of artist that makes you focus with all of your energy to understand him. You’ll need to devote 45 minutes to patiently watch his visual album sprinkled with silence and slowly developing sequences, or he’ll make you squint at the tiny caps lock text he uses to convey important messages. There will never be another Channel Orange. There will only be Blonde; this “I miss the old Kanye Frank” rhetoric is played out. The latter album is distinctly more experimental than Ocean’s debut, so of course any mainstream music fans he drew in with Orange may be taken aback by the distinctive mood presented by his latest release. When Ocean gave us our beloved Channel Orange, he also told us who he loves. He “wanted to create worlds that were rosier than [his]. [He] tried to channel overwhelming emotions”, so he channeled Orange. With Blonde, he gave us a poem titled “Boyfriend” in his magazine that further explores his emotions and his queerness. With his latest release, Ocean presented a multimedia platter of varied tastes and complex ingredients. No matter how long it takes for us to hear his music, Ocean’s art grows with us and in his new album he has proven his ability to create a diverse body of work. Like the visionary he is, he created great art inspired by his personal experience and made it a part of our experience as well. Read the full version of this article at http://tcelfer.tumblr.com
INITIAL THRILLS I measure time in photographs and shampoo bottles. Factions of fractures, faces that float in and out of focus, a lens characterized by free time. Life is a stack of fragments that never adhere to one cohesive statement: a wasteland of teleological uncertainty. Identity fraud isn’t a felony: it’s a prerequisite. Plagiarism is part of the group project. Lunch is a lonely light snack, while dinner is a four-course business meeting. Friendships fluctuate like bank account balances, but money always comes from somewhere. School is supplementary to social interactions and synthesized sexual encounters. Lust is found in urban dictionary under “fuck”, while love exists in horoscopes and history books. Elevators force intimacy on strangers, combining t-shirts with leather skirts: up, down, open, close. They provide vertical transportation between rhythmic routines and broken ceiling tiles, but horizontal movement is a key element in the uni student demographic. Residences are stacks of blank scantron squares, waiting to be shaded in. Like pencils, we
scratch through tunnels and passages, secret doors and back staircases that connect friends with endings and mornings with nights. The walls soak up secrets, collecting more confessions than a priest, providing blank space to vandalize and memorialize only to be painted over in the summer for the next set of students to arrive. Cards will commemorate this generation: room keys, IDs, student cards, debit, credit, bus passes, and cash. Books sit in stacks and papers provide a pleasing aesthetic. Old photos collect dust and old friends collect voicemails. Failed attempts at relationships stack up as quickly as old laundry, only you can’t wash out the stains they leave behind. Sexuality becomes less meaningful and more vital. Milestones become monotonous, and fears have been forgotten. ‘Heartburn’ suddenly has multiple meanings and lips are for more than opening and closing. Expectations mirror exceptions, and misinterpretations as a consequence of virtual communication are essentially unavoidable. There will always be a void to shout into, and always be a body to let into you, but you dictate your decision to pick and choose from the choices. Fragmented mistakes can be glued together in the morning, and Monday always washes away the waste of the weekend. Your mind is a hub for fostering brilliance and spontaneity. You will do things you never thought you would do. You will do things with people you’ve never really met. You will do things wrong, but you will also do things right. You will grow. You will change. You will lose. You will also succeed. You will never give up. You will question yourself over and over. You will cry, you will scream, you will laugh, you will lose sleep, you will sweat, you will vomit, you will sing, you will cheer. And you will love every second of it.
words by MORGAN MCAULEY art by JOANNA DIANA SKIBA
FACE VALUE VALUE FACE WORDS BY SAMA AL-ZANOON ART BY STEF ELEOF
I was strolling through the streets of downtown London when someone stopped me and asked if I was from Spain. Being stubbornly outspoken about my Palestinian heritage, I informed them of my true ethnicity. Immediately, I knew that my reply was a mistake. They replied by telling me “Palestine doesn’t exist” – thankfully, this was all they did. “Where are you from?” is a loaded question, a question I am asked quite often. On many occasions I have felt that it would be safer – even easier – to reply with a lie like “Italy” or “Greece”. My sister was recently informed by her colleague that stating she is Palestinian is too controversial for a business atmosphere. My father has advised my siblings and I to tell others that we are “Palestinian-Canadian” so they might treat us with some respect, as if the attachment of “Canadian” has more of a standing than a “Palestinian” label does on its own. As a sometimes white-passing Palestinian, my social experience differs from those who carry their culture on their skin. I am rarely called out on the streets with derogatory slurs like my mother has been. When I meet someone new they may not recognize the slight ethnic bump of my nose, or they may mistake the bushiness of my eyebrows as a modern fashion choice. The way they choose to view me as is altered by what they interpret from my face; a glimpse of “otherness” signals a change in their behaviour. When my heritage is confirmed, the convers-
-ation often becomes a debate about whether my culture is real. It is a waiting game – will they or won’t they devalue my existence? My nationality is inherently defined by international politics, and as such the mere act of existing is an endless fight for validity and respect. My ethnicity is automatically a political stance. There is a constant worry about whether the next person I meet is going use my background as a guideline for how they treat me. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often reduced down to an issue of religion, although nationality, ethnicity, and political power struggles heavily impact the situation. I’ve regularly heard people question why can’t Palestinians just get along with Israelis, since they think there is enough room for both groups to live peacefully. This oversimplified representation paints Palestinians as uncooperative and aggressive, when the issues are significantly more complex than whether the region has enough “space” for both Palestinians and Israelis to live. In the same way that many people mistakenly equate Israeli Zionism to Judaism, I have noticed that many in the West view Palestinians in the familiar and problematic “Arabs are terrorists” narrative. Criticizing the Israeli government is often seen as anti-semitic, when the Israeli government has clearly stated it is a secular state. Even protests by Palestinians outside of Palestine are seen as aggressive when they are only meant to make our presence visible. Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) is a Palestinian protest of the global support of Israel. Israel is violating international laws and human rights policies, yet our taxes and part of our tuition funds are used support their ventures.
While BDS protests are non-violent, government courts debate on banning them thereby implying it should be illegal to express disagreement with an oppressive regime. People have gone so far as to deny the historical existence of Palestine in order to show support for Israel, in an Orwellian doublethink show of loyalty. It is a frustrating situation wherein many bigots in the West will tell Palestinian immigrants to go back where they came from, while simultaneously insisting that Palestine does not exist. Individuals whose backgrounds aren’t questioned are privileged. Their privilege exists because it is backed by power, and this power is backed by systemic discrimination. A white Englishman is never interrogated about the validity of his English background; it taken at face value because European/ Caucasian culture is always legitimate. Their culture is not at risk of erasure like that of aboriginal people in the Americas, Oceania, Palestine, and any other colonized region. When politics don’t affect your livelihood you are able to view the topic as an interest or hobby, one that you may or may not choose to take part in. However, for people of colour, being political is a mandatory aspect of our everyday lives if we wish to stay true to ourselves.
UWO’s New Culture Collective find more information about who we are, what we’re doing and how you can get involved at
www.iconoclastuwo.com find us on social media at @iconoclastuwo