Anya With Cigarette (1978)
Who You Staring At?
Visual culture of the no wave scene in the 1970s & 1980s
No wave was a new artistic scene that appeared in the low-rent areas of Lower Manhattan, in New York in 1978. The failure of the hippy cultural and economic model at the very end of the 1960s, then the commercial transformations of new wave and disco, pushed the leading players in the movement to break with the established music industry and contemporary art circles.
Coming from a variety of artistic fields, no wave bands appropriated the instruments of the rock scene, to better turn them against it in order to subvert its icons. Out-of-tune guitars, deconstructed rhythms and raucous vocals enriched a range of radical visual productions, revealing an alternative cultural project blending many media: posters, cassettes and audio records, film and video. Saturated and dissonant sounds were translated into abrasive images that were altered by subverting reprographic techniques (Xerox art), as used in punk and industrial music networks as early as the mid-1970s.
This presentation borrows its title from Who You Staring At?, an album by John Giorno and Glenn Branca. A question that transcribes no wave artists’ confrontational attitude and determination to deconstruct the conventional gaze, presented here in an ensemble of multidisciplinary practices where dance, opera, music and the visual arts intersect.