Babette ✁

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Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language (Paris: Gallimard), 17.

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Is there smoke in the room?

Babette Is there smoke in the room?, 2019 Paper, box, crushed velvet, lavender Dimensions variable

Included in the group exhibition I AM SO MULTIPLE IN NIGHTS at The Pool, Brussels. Curated by Pádraic E. Moore.

Photos: Alexey Shlyk

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What’s Lutz got to do with it? On Lutz Bacher & Tina Turner

What’s Love Got to Do With It is the title of Lutz Bacher’s new exhibition at K21 in Düsseldorf. It’s the second exhibition of note this year to borrow a title from Tina Turner: the 10th Berlin Biennale was titled We Don’t Need Another Hero, a Turner hit of a similar vintage, and it's hard to say whether Lutz is playing artworld ping-pong, slamming a slice serve back at that other German art institution, or whether Tina Turner, a black woman and one-time battered wife, who in 2013 rescinded her US citizenship to become a citizen of Switzerland, has become an unlikely antidote to our Trumpian age. Lutz’s exhibition reopens the programme at K21 with three rooms of cryptic objects, surveillance mirrors and fragments of texts, a web of criss-crossing ideas and bleak ideologies, discarded artefacts from her native United States of America. 

The work is more on-the-nose political than I had expected from Bacher, who has a reputation for being evasive. A long, paper artwork runs like a ribbon throughout the rooms: white banner with wavering black scribble, like a seismograph. I have seen images of this work before, installed in a space in San Francisco, where it was presented in 2017 without a text or a title. I did not know, when I first saw it, that this jagged black line (like “barbed wire”, says Frieze[1]) was the signature of the current President of the United States of America, spliced, repeated, amplified. And yet, I think, I innately understood. The violence of that juddering black mark was enough. 

Lutz Bacher, installation view, 3320 18th St., San Francisco, 2017. Source.

Lutz Bacher is not the artist's real name. No one knows her real name, except, I’m sure, some close friends, her bank clerk, her dealer. Since the 1970s she has been making work under the masculine, Germanic pseudonym Lutz Bacher, so appropriate for a conceptual artist making a show in Düsseldorf. Lutz Bacher does not really give interviews and is never photographed, at least in any official capacity. Lutz Bacher’s exhibition reviews describe her, invariably, as “elusive”, “slippery”, “mysterious”. 

When I search #lutzbacher on Instagram, the current ‘top image’ shows a woman that I presume to be the artist, stood alone, a black silhouette against the Donald Trump signature work. Head downturned, frozen in a sort of half-smile. Slight. Self-contained. Pin-striped blazer and what looks to be a scarf around her neck. Appropriately for an artist who has used low-fi photographic and video imagery throughout her career, the image is pixellated, low-grade, and I imagine it was taken covertly at the opening reception of What’s Love Got to Do With It. I imagine that the photographer got a kind of smug self-satisfaction when she captured it, pinching her fingers on the screen to zoom in and isolate the figure, uploaded it, hashtagged it. “I got her.” 

#lutzbacher on Instagram. Source.

Tina Turner is not the singer's real name, either. Born Anna Mae Bullock, or perhaps Martha Nell Bullock, her first recordings were under the name “Little Ann”. It was Ike Turner that named her Tina. He was reportedly inspired by Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and trademarked the name so that if Little Ann left him he could hire another singer and she could also perform under the made-up name. He thought Tina Turner was replaceable. 

Lutz Bacher, James Dean, 1986, video slideshow, 16 paired slides shown on two monitors, dimensions variable. Exhibited at Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, 2014. Source.

Lutz Bacher is fairly anomalous among feminist artists of her generation in that her work prods at masculinity more than it does femininity or feminine constructs. While her contemporaries made didactic works that sought to dismantle female-assigned gender roles, or focused primarily on the female body as a site of exchange and exploitation, Lutz Bacher, with her draggy name, fixes her gaze on maleness. Hundreds of beaten-in baseballs slumped onto the floor of the Whitney; a diptych of James Dean publicity shots, doomed heartthrob looking two different directions; a hoard of photographs taken by a US soldier stationed at Bien Hoa Air Base in Vietnam, found by the artist in a Berkeley salvage store; a Twilight publicity poster framed behind tinted glass, Robert Pattison’s brooding share receding into darkness; Playboy bunnies stencilled on the steel shells of military planes; cut-outs of Elvis Presley and T-Rexes on a chessboard; a conga-line of frat boy-ish trucker hats snaking across the gallery floor. 

Martin Herbert points out that her work is in an “ongoing conversation” with an ecosystem of male artists and writers – Duchamp, Flavin, Johns, Warhol – and that her work has a preoccupation with “masculinity, domination, selfdefence”. He argues her work “suggests that the fixity of gender roles is the problem, and the best thing to do, via a rewiring of the gaze, is to explode it”.[2]

Tina & Ike Turner perform Proud Mary live on Italian TV station RAI, 1971. Watch.

An ex-boyfriend once told me that Mick Jagger stole his whole routine from Tina Turner. This boyfriend was notorious for invented truths, but watching a YouTube video of Tina and Ike perform Proud Mary in 1971, I’m inclined to believe this one. She inhabits the song so fully, so vigorously, it comes alive in her. Face muscles contorting into wild postures, lips wrestling with words. Shrieking, stuttering and stomping, a ticking bomb. 

Lutz Bacher, Huge Uterus, 1990. Source.

Lutz Bacher’s rebuff to feminist artists who made work exclusively fixated on the female body was her 1990 work Huge Uterus, a video documenting the six-hour long surgery the artist underwent to remove fibroids from her real-life uterus. Lia Gangitano, the gallerist/curator who showed this work at Thread Waxing Space, has indicated that critics’ persistent focus on Lutz’s obfuscation of authorship, their reading of her work as elusive, is partially misplaced. “My experience of Lutz’s work and her practice is really about intimate collaborations,” she argues in an online talk by ICA London, “and incredibly personally revealing work.”[3] She cites Huge Uterus as an example – what could be more personally revealing than a video from inside one’s uterus? But I think Gangitano’s point holds even for those works that do not reveal the artist’s internal organs. The artifice of Bacher’s identity does not prevent her from revealing herself. To paraphrase Wilde, give a woman a pseudonym and she will tell you the truth. 

Cher & Tina Turner sing Shame, Shame, Shame, The Cher Show, 1975. Watch.

I never thought of myself as a Tina Turner fan until the summer of 2015. I was at a party. A housewarming in a glass-fronted penthouse with views of the canal, one of those endless celebrations that continues to unfold for hours on end. By now, we were deep into the second day and most people had dropped off, leaving only a core group of revellers with electric chat. When the sun streamed in through the windows, we stocked up on ingredients for Bloody Marys. 

“This song was released just as both of their marriages broke down,” said a friend as he typed the words “cher tina turner shame” into YouTube. “It’s just the two women, striking out without their husbands. They nail it.” Tina sashays onto the stage in a long blue gown like a beaded curtain. It catches the light as she moves her legs, jellyfish dancing in a sea of diamonds. She sings the opening bars of the song alone – “Shame, shame, shame, shaaaa-ame!” – before Cher is announced with a scream, whoops and applause – “Awwwwwwww!!!! Shame on YOU!”. Cher is wearing the same dress but in pink and they sing the rest of the song as a duet. They have sass, conviction, and genuine rapport, looking into each others’ eyes as they sing. My friend was right – they nail it. 

Lutz Bacher, Accidental Tourist, Greene Naftali Garage, Brooklyn, 2016. Source.

Do you love me? This is the question Lutz Bacher asked her friends, colleagues and collaborators again and again for a number of years. Their answers to this loaded questions are published – unedited – in an artist book of the same name (Do You Love Me?, Primary Information, New York, 2012). In a blurb for Mousse, Stefano Cernuschi says that reading the book "feels like being in the backseat of a car driving fast, and you can’t hear every word that is spoken between the front seats, and mostly you can’t see the faces, but it’s kind of thrilling and also rewarding to be close enough to grasp what they say.”[4] What you realise from reading the answers is that, in answering an intimate question about Lutz, people always reveal more about themselves than they do about her. Sometimes the most personal insights come from talking about something outside of us. 

Just as Lutz Bacher’s anonymity does not make her work any less personal, her use of hyperbole and humour does not make it any less serious. A seemingly throwaway gesture, like covering the floor with glitter, reveals prisms of light breaking across the ground. Glitter, that synthetic, silly substance associated with frivolousness and nightlife, becomes the medium to reveal the transmutability of the cosmos; something so natural, so contemplative, it could be seen as Romanticist, in the same way that a William McKeown painting can be, with its glimpse through an open window into the two-tone fade of the sky.

Elsewhere in her work, plastic vinyl screens are printed with hot, hovering suns, or cool mountains, synthetic vistas that seem palpably real. A spinning milky way is painted on the side of an elongated school bus. I suspect Bacher would reject my literal reading of this work, but this work, The Bus, struck me as apt, because when you’re young enough to ride a school bus, your universe really is that small. 

Tina Turner, What’s Love Got to Do With It?, 1984

Tina Turner was in her 40s by the time she released What’s Love Got To Do With It in 1984. Her big comeback hit after her divorce from Ike Turner, the video sees her strut around New York with lion’s mane hair and a leather skirt, playfully rebuffing sexual advances. Her relatively mature age (by popstar standards) works in the track’s favour. She’s tough but jaded. Given up on love. She carries the pain of her abusive, broken down marriage into the song's guttural vocals, and we believe her when she looks into the camera and sings with conviction: Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken? 

It’s like the song was made for her, but really it wasn’t. It was written by two white British guys who first offered it to Cliff Richard, Donna Summer, Phyllis Hyman and even Bucks Fizz, who recorded the song first and planned to include it on their album. They dropped it upon hearing Tina’s version.

*

I’ve since fallen out of touch with most of the people at that party I told you about. Thinking back on it now, it seems like a distant flicker from another time, like when Joan Didion writes that she has “lost touch with several of the people she used to be”. 

I have, however, been a Tina Turner fan ever since. 

Lutz Bacher, Bus, 2011. Digital photograph, dimensions variable. Image courtesy the artist, Ratio 3, San Francisco, Alex Zachary, New York, and Cabinet, London. Photograph by Vincent Fecteau. Source.

Like Tina’s, Lutz Bacher’s success and recognition has accumulated with age. I guess it’s what happens when you refuse to play the PR game, to avoid all the trappings and limelight and sycophancy that comes with artworld ascendancy, but despite her being consistently active since the 1970s, Bacher’s work went largely unacknowledged by the mainstream until about six years ago, when she was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and then subsequently snapped up for a spate of solo shows in Europe. I wonder if she is relieved, bemused, or exasperated at her boom in recognition and success. 

I remember hearing at a lecture once that Carol Rama, having been marginalised by the artworld establishment for almost her entire life, and then suddenly awarded the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion award at the age of 85, was nonplussed about her late recognition. “I’m not interested in stupid people,” she told The Walrus in 2005. “When I think of the attention I’ve been getting these last few years … so late in my career, I feel sadness. It leaves me somewhat stunned: all of this now?!”.[5]

Does Lutz feel the same way? “All of this now?!” My instinct is no. My instinct is that she is three steps ahead of us, turning back to shoot a sidelong glance every once in a while to see if we’re following yet. Perhaps her pseudonym, her “there-but-not-there”-ness, protects her from our slow-to-catch-up gaze. 

In an interview last year, Tina Turner told The Daily Mail that “when the lights go out, I go back to being Anna Mae Bullock.”[6] Perhaps Lutz Bacher, too, goes back to being whoever the fuck Lutz Bacher wants to be. My instinct is that, like Rama, neither of them are interested in stupid people. 

Babette

[1] Moritz Scheper, ‘Critic’s Pick: Lutz Bacher’, Frieze, September 2018. URL: https://frieze.com/event/lutz-bacher-3

[2] Martin Herbert, ‘Lutz Bacher’, ArtReview, Summer 2015. URL: https://artreview.com/features/summer_2015_lutz_bacher/

[3] Lia Gangitano in ‘Online Talk: Lutz Bacher’, ICA London, streamed live on 7 November 2013. URL: https://archive.ica.art/bulletin/video/online-talk-lutz-bacher

[4] Stefano Cernuschi, ‘BOOKS. Lutz Bacher: Do You Love Me?’, Mousse. URL: http://moussemagazine.it/lutz-bacher-do-you-love-me/

[5] Carol Rama, quoted in The Walrus, March 2005. URL: https://thewalrus.ca/2005-03-detail/

[6] Tina Turner, quoted in The Daily Mail, 14 September 2017. URL: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-4886020/I-taught-Mick-Jagger-dance-says-Tina-Turner.html

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Babette Reads: Stephen Tennant excelling at fancy dress

“At Mrs Benjamin Guinness’s fancy dress ball, [Stephen] Tennant attempted to impersonate a beggar but arrived ‘elegant as a fairy’ with a billowing silk cloak to hide the rags. At the Impersonation Party he masqueraded as Queen Marie of Romania, a virtuoso performance requiring hours in front of the mirror and minute attention to detail. Clad in white silk, with pearls, gloves and meticulous coiffure, he seemed, as his biographer notes, a professional in a roomful of amateurs. But a professional what? His talent – if that is what it was – was essentially evanescent: the gesture, the smart remark, the pyjamas that ‘went with the room’.”

From D. J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation, 1918–1940, London: Vintage Publishing, 2008.

📸: The impersonation Party, 1927. Back row: Elizabeth Ponsonby, in wig as Iris Tree, Cecil Beaton on her right. Seated: Stephen Tennant, as Queen Marie of Romania, George Sitwell, with false nose, Inez Holden. Harold Acton. Foreground: Tallulah Bankhead, as Jean Borota.

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Babette Listens: Trixie Matell on Queery

Trixie Mattel: 50% of my audience are straight women. A quarter are lesbians and a quarter are gay men ... I never planned on having my audience all-women but I really love it.

Cameron Esposito: Do you have any idea why lesbians like you? TM: I think it’s because young women, especially young women vibrating on a slightly different frequency, gender-wise, or what they’re presenting, or their sexuality, I think that me parodying hyper-femininity makes them like (sighs) oh, ok good – that’s not what a woman is and she’s making a joke of what people expect women to be, so I feel very comfortable with the woman I am.

Listen here.

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In the same way, the writing is imperfect. It assaults the reader: to enter one of [David] Wojnarowicz’s texts, whether on the page or on the painting, is to be sucked immediately into its undertow, its incantatory, rushed, gloriously run-on sentences and breathless paragraphs, its made-up, jittery punctuations and scattershot capitalizations. It is impolite writing—impolite in its lack of structure, in its sudden, prefaceless glides between fantasy and reality, in its hyperactivity, in its lack of deference to the reader. But the work doesn’t taunt: it’s the difference between writing that says, Catch me if you can, and, Come with me, come with me, come with me. This writing wants you to follow it, and you want to follow it too.

Hanya Yanagihara for The White Review, 2 July 2018

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Castro Street Fair, Harmodius and Hoti, August 1975 (via Dazed)

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“She was, or would soon be, a Young Divorcée, and the term still carried glamour. Her divorce decree would be a passport conferring on her the status of citizeness of the world.”—Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps (1939)

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“An 18th-century, gold sedan chair that pop star Madonna loves to sit in whenever she visits”.

Taken from here.

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Un chant d’amour (1950). Written & directed by Jean Genet. Cinematography by Jean Cocteau. Watch it on UbuWeb here.

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Radical Reinvention – The Making of Edwige Belmore

History is kind to those who leave behind a tangible body of work. It is less so to those exuberant personalities that lived with great flair, but channelled their creative energy into more ephemeral modes of expression. Babette is fascinated with oral histories of these more fringe personalities in the history of art, design and pop culture. One of them is Edwige Belmore (1957–2015). A subcultural icon who criss-crossed between Paris and New York, Edwige played in several punk and new wave bands in the ‘70s and ‘80s (most memorably Mathématiques Modernes), starred in a spate of experimental films, was photographed by Helmut Newton and walked the runway for Jean Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler. And yet, no one of these things quite encapsulates (or contains) her legacy.

When Edwige worked as the Maitresse de Maison for French fashion house Agnès b’s New York store, she was told by a ‘friend’ “that it must be pretty cool to be paid for doing nothing”.“I’m not doing nothing,” she retorted, “I’ve been something for my whole entire life,”[1] and its that intangible ‘something’ that burns most brightly of Edwige’s legacy. Her essence. Her attitude. The way she presented herself to the world.

It is deemed shallow to suggest that someone be remembered for their ‘look’, but Edwige was no fashion plate. Rather, she used her body as her primary means of expression. With her cropped, peroxide blonde hair and a razor blade hanging from one earring, Edwige radicalised the Paris fashion world in the 1970s. She walked the tightrope between a DIY, street-punk aesthetic and high fashion: “She was punk with total elegance,” reflects videographer Clayton Patterson.[2] When top French fashion houses would gift her free items, Edwige would style them with her wardrobe of battered hand-me-downs. “I did a concert with Matématiques Modernes wearing jeans that were completely destroyed, a Chanel jacket and a push-up bra,” she told Italian Vogue before her death. “I didn’t want to be like every punk in Paris, or every punk around that dresses exactly the same.”[3]

Edwige also pioneered a new aesthetic for queer women. She was openly bisexual, romantically linked to Sade and Grace Jones, and sported a playful combination of butch and femme aesthetics, teaming mannish suits with bright red lipstick. “She was the legendary lipstick lesbian,” photographer Marcus Leatherdale told New York Magazine.[4] When she spent six months in Japan in 1982, Edwige would sneak into the male-only sex clubs of Shinjuku, pretending to be a boy.[5] It’s hard not to imagine that the 1982 science fiction film Liquid Sky, with its androgynous lead Margaret (Anne Carlisle), a queer club kid with cropped, peroxide hair, is not at least partially inspired by Edwige.

This subversive aesthetic was not limited to clothing. Edwige took a diaristic, even confessional, approach to tattooing that was quite unique among her generation: “My tattoos are stepping stones in my life – moments, loves, fears, messages”.[6] Patterson reflects, “It was highly unusual for someone to have words and sentences on their body in the mid-’80s”[7] and in a eulogy published on the punk blog Please Kill Me, Sandra Schulman (a former lover of Edwige’s) recalls that Edwige’s tattoos “lined her thin arms and up her neck, scripted across her collar bone and trailed down her legs”. Many were part of a project in which “she asked all her friends and lovers to mail her a note in their handwriting and she would ink it onto her body.”[8]

Edwige clearly saw her flesh as a canvas, but what is more provocative by today’s standards was not her tattoos, but the self-harm scars she wore unapologetically alongside them. Schulman describes bringing Edwige swimming at a New York health club: “In the women’s room she stripped down, strode around, and had the Village gym bunny ladies gasping at her scars, tattoos and boy/girl manner. Six feet tall barefoot.”[9] Patterson also remembers the scars: “She was such a beautiful woman, a Paris runway model, and to have her body modified like that was also very unusual.”[10]

Though self-harm was as taboo in the ‘70s and ‘80s as it is now, Edwige abided by an approach of candid honesty. “She told me that ‘everyone has a past’,” reflects model agent Kendall Werts, “but that the past will never define your future.”[11] In New York Magazine’s eulogy, friends and colleagues remark that Edwige’s acceptance of her flaws and contradictions was part of her powerful appeal. “She was a super-glamorous femme-butch dyke who was honest about her struggles with pain, with depression — but she never dumped that on anyone. In fact, she cheered other people up without lying about her own struggles,” says writer and artist Penny Arcade.[12]

Edwige was candid about a great many things, and that includes her own ‘creation story’. In the few interviews with her available online, she recalls with earnest detail how she simply decided one day to reinvent herself and ‘become Edwige’. Abandoned by her parents at a young age (“They gave me $20 to have a life. They moved into the country side and I stayed in Paris,” she told Moco Loco in 2014),[13] Edwige was raised in a convent with little access to the music or subcultural movements of the early-1970s. That changed in 1976 when, aged 19, she saw the Sex Pistols perform live. It would prove to be a life-altering event: “No one at the time had SEEN anything like that! NEVER! It was the first MIND BLOWING new thing.”[14]

This brief exposure to the punk movement would inspire Edwige to reinvent herself with a remarkable degree of precision. “It was November 6 of 1976, I decided that in exactly a month from then that on December 6th: Edwige Will Die, and Edwige Will Be Born”.[15] True to her word, on December 6, she burned all of her clothing, bar one hand-me-down vintage leather jacket. “I decided to embrace that new movement … I wanted to be part of something. That was my family … I shaved my head, I burned all my clothes.”[16] She bought a pair of riding pants, a white shirt and a tie and took to wearing the same outfit day in, day out, like a uniform. “The real Edwige was born. The one before was shy, was ugly, was insecure, was scared.”[17]

There is something remarkable about the agency Edwige took in her reinvention, or self-creation as it were. She is by no means alone among her generation in creating a new persona for herself, but unlike most ‘invented’ stars, she candidly acknowledges the constructed nature of this act, detailing the steps taken to become who she wanted to be. Much as Edwige’s flaws only added to her strength of character, revealing the constructed nature of her identity seems, to me, to add conviction to the act.

With ‘the new Edwige’ established, the next logical step was to join a punk band. It happened organically. “I was in a club and these two girls approached me and said, ‘Wow you look great! Want to be part of our band?’. I said ‘OK!’.”[18] The band was called L.U.V. (which could stand for either ‘Ladies United Violently’ or ‘Lipsticks Used Viciously’, as you please), and true to the ethos of punk, Edwige played no instruments. She did not let such a detail get in the way of her enthusiasm. Again, what endures of the band was their aesthetic: “We were a mythical band… We were FIERCE looking.”[19]

That fierce look was enough to attract press attention, with French Vogue and Elle clamouring for interviews, and Edwige quickly emerged as the poster girl of the Parisian punk movement. In 1977, the publishers of French avant-garde magazine Façade (inspired by Andy Warhol’s Interview) invited her to grace its cover – starring alongside no other than Andy Warhol. In the magazines wrap-around cover and inside spread, the peroxide-blonde Edwige leans in and kisses an unperturbed Andy, who dons a pin-badge of her image on his lapel. The headline? The Pope of Pop meets the Queen of Punk.

With Andy Warhol for Façade, Paris, 1977

Edwige recalls of the shoot that she spoke very little English at the time – and Andy no French – but the pair managed to strike up a rapport via instinctive, non-verbal communication. When she travelled to New York later that year, she gave Andy a call, and he brought her along to Studio 54. “Approaching the illustrious nightclub of all nightclubs, swathes of partiers parted like the red sea as she entered the club for her very first time, arm-in-arm with her regal rebel counterpart,” reports Autre Magazine.[20]

This ultimate outsider quickly found acceptance from the ultimate insiders of New York and Paris. Brought to a party by Paloma Picasso, she was spotted by Helmut Newton who, rumour has it, persisted to follow her around the party, begging to photograph her. She relented, but insisted she was photographed “not as a model, but as a personality.”[21] She also sat for Francesco Clemente, who painted her with “eyes half closed and completely blue … I was nodding out or on drugs. Blue, blue, blue, blue!”[22]

With Helmut Newton, 1986

Upon her return to Paris, Edwige was appointed front-of-house at Le Palace, the city’s answer to Studio 54, where the staff wore crimson and gold tunics designed by Thierry Mugler and Grace Jones performed atop a pink Harley Davidson on the opening night. Everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Roland Barthes came there to party, and Edwige’s job was essentially to decide who would be permitted entrance. She took the same, seemingly contradictory, approach to the door policy as she did her fashion choices, creating a mix of elite and punk, gay and straight, black and white, rich and poor. “Karl Lagerfeld mentioned in his book that I once refused the King of Sweden because obviously, he must have been an asshole.”[23]

Its perhaps in this role – the high/low gatekeeper of Parisian nightlife – in which Edwige is most fondly remembered. When she died in 2015, tributes came flooding in on social media. One of the most substantial homages to Edwige to date has been Jean Paul Gaultier’s Spring/Summer 2016 couture show, which was both inspired by and devoted to his late muse. Gaultier’s collection was a 70s-inspired romp of butch tailoring, femme sequin jumpsuits and sassy models. “Red lips, fishnet tights, lamé; gold leggings, white gloves it was all about attitude, attitude, attitude,” read the review by British Vogue.[24]

Jean Paul Gaultier’s Spring/Summer 2016 couture show, a tribute to Edwige, complete with mock Le Palace façade, an Edwige-inspired ‘bouncer’ and lesbian trysts with runway models

The show opens with a lesbian tryst between a runway girl and an androgynous pixie-cropped model who starts manning the door of a club, a replica of ‘Le Palace’. The parade of models who sashay up and down the runway includes Anna Cleveland, daughter of legendary model Pat, who Edwige surely must have rubbed shoulders with at Studio 54. The girls bring their cigarettes and glasses of champagne along for the walk, stopping to air-kiss one another (or catfight) en route. For the finale, the our queer heroine pulls door-girl ‘Edwige’ inside ‘The Palace’. The curtains descend and reveal the full crew of models, accompanied by Mr Gaultier, dancing, laughing and drinking champagne to the sound of Amanda Lear’s ‘Fashion Pack’.

If heaven looks like this, I do hope they let me in.

Babette, 25.08.17

FOOTNOTES

[1] Edwige Belmore, quoted in Eepmon, ‘In Conversation with Edwige Belmore, The Queen of Punk Pt.2′, Moco Loco, 31 December 2014, accessed online at http://mocoloco.com/in-conversation-with-eepmon-edwige-belmore-the-queen-of-punk-pt2/ on 19 August 2017

[2] Clayton Patterson, quoted in Walter Armstrong, ‘The Life of Punk Queen Edwige Belmore and the Death of the Old Downtown’, New York Magazine, 25 September 2015, accessed online at http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/edwige-belmore-death-of-a-punk-queen.html on 19 August 2017

[3] Edwige Belmore, quoted in a video interview with Barbara Frigerio, ‘Focus on: Edwige Belmore’, Vogue Italia, 4 July 2011, accessed online at http://www.vogue.it/en/people-are-talking-about/focus-on/2011/07/edwige-belmore#ad-image102614 on 19 August 2017

[4] Marcus Leatherdale, quoted in New York Magazine, ibid.

[5] Moco Loco, ibid.

[6] ibid.

[7] Patterson, ibid.

[8] Sandra Schulman, ‘Death of a Glamazon. A Tattooed Love Letter to Edwige’, Please Kill Me, 26 September 2015, accessed online at http://pleasekillme.com/death-of-a-glamazon-a-tattooed-love-letter-to-edwige/ on 19 August 2017

[9] ibid.

[10] Patterson, ibid.

[11] Kendall Werts, quoted in New York Magazine, ibid.

[12] Penny Arcade, quoted in New York Magazine, ibid.

[13] Edwige Belmore, quoted in Eepmon, ‘In Conversation with Edwige Belmore, The Queen of Punk Pt.1′, Moco Loco, 31 December 2014, accessed online at http://mocoloco.com/in-conversation-with-eepmon-edwige-belmore-the-queen-of-punk-pt1/ on 19 August 2017

[14] ibid.

[15] ibid.

[16] Vogue Italia, ibid.

[17] ibid.

[18] ibid.

[19] Pt.1, Moco Loco, ibid.

[20] Summer Bowie, ‘Beautiful Vagabond: 10 Things You Need to Know About the Late Edwige Belmore’, Autre Magazine, 24 September 2015, accessed online at http://autre.love/this-and-that-main/2015/9/24/beautiful-vagabond-10-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-late-edwige-belmore on 19 August 2017

[21] Pt.1, Moco Loco, ibid.

[22] Pt.2, Moco Loco, ibid.

[23] Nick Vogelson, ‘In Memory: Edwige Belmore, Our Lady of Punk’, Document Journal, 22 September 2015, accessed online at http://www.documentjournal.com/article/in-memory-our-lady-of-punk on 19 August 2017

[24] Ellie Pithers, ‘Spring/Summer 2016 Couture: Jean Paul Gaultier’, Vogue, 27 January 2016, accessed online at http://www.vogue.co.uk/shows/spring-summer-2016-couture/jean-paul-gaultier on 19 August 2017

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Bobby “O”, Hi-NRG and the expression of queer desire

A few months ago, someone at a party asked me what song I would choose to have played at my funeral. I answered without hesitation: ‘Passion’, by The Flirts. This response was met with wide eyes of incredulity by the heterosexual man who had posed the question, and debate spilled out around us about why I should (or should not) choose something with more meaning, more depth, more substance. But I believe meaning can be found in the shallowest of places.

Hi-NRG is generally considered to be a shallow place. Peaking between 1982 and 1989, Hi-NRG rose like a phoenix from the embers of disco – an inferno which, by the late-1970s, was not so much petering out as being stomped out by a critical backlash epitomised by events like 1979’s Disco Demolition Night. The origin of Hi-NRG is fabled to be in Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ (1977), with its rolling arpeggiators and what Summer described in interviews as its ‘high energy vibe’.[1] Like disco before it, Hi-NRG uses predominantly electronic sounds, and was produced and consumed largely by marginalised communities, including queer African-Americans, Italian-Americans and Latinos. It was music for nighttime and nite-clubs, for dancing to, escaping to, for fostering inclusivity.

“You could think of early disco as the music of outsiders”, says curator, DJ and Hi-NRG enthusiast Pádraic E. Moore, who points out that Hi-NRG also furthered disco’s vital contribution to “the formation of gay identities, promotion of queer culture and disruption of gender norms”.[2] Moore cites Hi-NRG tracks like Patrick Cowley’s ‘Menergie’ (1981) and Modern Rocketry’s ‘Homosexuality’ (1985) as daring and provocative expressions of queer desire. Cowley and his ‘Menergie’ collaborator Sylvester were both early pioneers of the Hi-NRG genre, associated with San Francisco’s Megatone Records, and both of them would be killed by AIDs by the end of the decade. (Indeed, records like ‘Homosexuality’ seem even more radical and defiant given the backdrop of the AIDs crisis, and the accompanying discriminatory culture of the US mainstream.)

Moore stresses the DIY aesthetic of Hi-NRG in this initial, more underground phase, made possible by the increased availability and affordability of electronic music equipment, including Roland’s 808 drum machine and later, Yamaha’s DX7 synthesiser. By the middle of the 1980s, the genre would find mainstream success, with Stock Aitken Waterman producing a number of Hi-NRG hits by Divine, Dead or Alive, Hazell Dean and Bananarama; Moore also points out the Hi-NRG influence on queer artists such as Bronski Beat (in particular their 1984 track ‘Why?’) and Frankie Goes To Hollywood (‘Relax’). Though some great Hi-NRG tracks came from this period, the mainstream’s co-option of the genre would eventually lead to Hi-NRG’s dilution and demise – what Moore derides as the “vanilla cul-de-sac”[3] most radical art forms ultimately end up in. At its peak, though, Hi-NRG was a radical expression of queer desire, fuelled by the burgeoning LGBT club culture in the UK and the US.

This queer history of Hi-NRG is not without contention, though, and this essay will focus on the work of Bobby Orlando, a pioneer of the genre who I’m drawn towards not only because I love his music, but also because he is a problematic figure who in many ways troubles this reading of Hi-NRG. Orlando has been accused of plagiarism, homophobia, sexism and exploitation, and was characterised by a 1987 profile in The Face Magazine as “the self-styled master of classic techno trash” who aspired to be “the Ronald McDonald of the music industry”.[4] But Babette loves a problem child and in this essay I will argue why Orlando’s music is nonetheless worthy of our attention, and can still be celebrated within a queer history of late 20th-century dance music.

Bobby Orlando grew up in New York State, a teenage boxing sensation who could allegedly do one-finger push-ups. Not wanting to ruin his pretty face, he quit fighting sports and took up music instead, initially dipping his toe into the ‘glitter rock’ scene, attracted by its flamboyant masculinity and its taste for excess. In 1977, the year Giorgio Moroder released Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, Orlando ditched the guitar and swapped glam rock for disco. He set up his own label, “O” Records, in 1980 – in the midst of the disco backlash. Contemporaneously to the aforementioned Cowley, Orlando carved out his own niche of fast-paced, synth-laden, campy staccato disco that would become known as Hi-NRG.

An almost exclusively electronic genre, Hi-NRG is defined by its synthetic sounds (Moore points out its eschewal more orchestral disco elements such as layered strings[5]) and Orlando’s music in particular makes use of gratuitous patches and samples. Compare his amped-up early version of the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘West End Girls’ (1984) to the more stripped back and definitive ‘hit’ version (1985) to see what I mean. Orlando’s penchant for artifice extends beyond the sounds he made, however, and into the broader aesthetic and practice of his music-making. The Flirts, arguably Orlando’s biggest musical legacy, were girl group of sheer artifice. Session musicians recorded the vocals, then a rotating roster of models, dancers and actresses lip-synced the song live: one blonde, one redhead, one brunette. Different tours and albums had different line-ups, with Orlando himself the only consistent factor.

One blonde, one redhead, one brunette: The Flirts performing live in 1983

Capitalising on this line-up of leggy, preened and pouting models, Orlando opted for a ‘sex sells’ approach to The Flirts’ song-writing. ‘Passion’, their biggest hit, opens with the zingy line “I’m waiting for you baby, it’s time for show and tell”, before going on to literally spell out sexual desire in a refrain of “P–A–SS–ION!”. In another track, ‘Calling All Boys’, The Flirts send out a signal of sexual invitation not to one specific boy/man, but to ALL boys/men. With its interchangeable frontwomen, hypersexualised performance of femininity and non-specific objects of desire, The Flirts are ostensibly meant to represent all or any women (or at least all or any white women since, gallingly by today’s standards, the group’s diversity is limited only to hair colour). With one or two exceptions, The Flirts’ performers are known only by one name – Hope, Holly, Sandy – and they serve only as vessels for Orlando’s expression.

This use of female bodies as two-dimensional, interchangeable marionettes is, of course, deeply exploitative, even if its symptomatic of the music industry’s attitude towards women as a whole. It should be noted that Orlando’s relations with many of his key performers, including Divine and Roni Griffiths, would turn sour after a couple of years’ collaboration. I don’t mean to underplay this problematic aspect of Orlando’s music-making, but to play devil’s advocate, I personally think his layering and obfuscation of authorship, and outright subversion of authenticity, is precisely what is fascinating about Orlando’s music.

Alongside the mirage of constructed femininity that was The Flirts, Orlando released and produced music under dozens of other names and self-invented bands, most of which had no members other than Orlando himself (except for the odd session vocalist). Wikipedia lists over 70 Orlando ‘acts’, and their camped-up, flamboyant names are a joy to read through: Barbie & The Kens, Hotline, the New York Models, Hippies With Haircuts, The He Man Band, The Fem-Spies, Girls Have Fun, Lilly & the Pink, The Bang Gang, Bubba and the Jack Attack …

The act of naming, and its transformative potential, was clearly not lost on Orlando. The adoption of constructed personas, fictitious identities and assumed names is a practise widely adopted within the queer community. It is a form of expression used not only by drag performers, but artists and activists (Rosa von Praunheim, Gluck, Claude Cahun, Tom of Finland, to name but a few). Orlando’s adoption of playful pseudonyms, many of which seem centred on gender/sexuality, seems to fit squarely within this practice, except for one rather large problem: Orlando identified as heterosexual and was reportedly homophobic. Rumour has it that after his music career fizzled out, Orlando became a religious zealot and wrote a book on creationism. I warned you he was problematic.

A 1942 self-portrait by Hannah Gluckstein, aka ‘Gluck’, recently included in Tate Britain’s exhibition of ‘Queer British Art 1861–1967′. The work is included in the collection of Britain’s National Portrait Gallery

Orlando’s music is throbbing with heterosexual desire and pumped-up machismo – “Let a man like me make a woman out of you”, promises one track, its cover art decorated with an illustration of a chiselled man lifting a barbell. In a rare interview with The Face Magazine in 1987, Orlando spoke of channelling the controlled aggression of his early boxing career into his music: “The only difference is that with records you take the aggression you would normally use beating the hell out of a guy by punching beats. It’s the same punch, the same drive.”[6]

One suspects that driving this male bravado and hetero-peacocking was an over-compensation of sorts, or even internalised homophobia. It’s not the place of this blog to speculate on Orlando’s sexuality, but whether or not the man himself was (is) queer, I think it’s fair to say that despite all the above, his music certainly was. Orlando’s performative take on masculinity is as artificial as The Flirts’ performance of femininity. Both expressions of gender identity chime with Susan Sontag’s definition of camp. In her still-relevant ‘Notes on Camp’ (1964), Sontag cites “the exaggerated he-man-ness” of bodybuilder Steve Reeves and Samson and Delilah actor Victor Mature as well as the “corny flamboyant femaleness” of Jayne Mansfield, Jane Russell.[7]

There is also a strong tradition of ostensibly ‘heterosexual’ anthems performed by women for a largely gay audience: Miguel Brown’s Hi-NRG hit ‘So Many Men, So Little Time’; Sinitta’s ‘So Macho’; Eartha Kitt’s ‘I Love Men’; The Weathergirls ‘It’s Raining Men’, etc. Seen in this context, tracks like The Flirts’ ‘Calling All Boys’ can take on a new meaning. And besides – that problematic Flirts paradigm of women as vessels becomes less straightforward when one views it through the kaleidoscope of queer identity: this is a song about this is desire for MEN, written by a MAN, performed by WOMEN miming WOMEN. Ironically, by adhering to uphold strict gender binaries, Orlando’s acts only serve to reveal how constructed and performative they are.

The exception, of course, is Divine – the only Orlando act to gender-bend in the more literal way. Unlike the majority of Orlando acts, Divine was not a persona of Orlando’s invention. An actor and drag queen, Divine had developed both a strong public identity and large fanbase by the time he began to collaborate with Orlando in 1981, having starred in several cult hits by filmmaker John Waters, including Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974). As such, his sizeable impact on the history of queer identity in the late twentieth century extends beyond the scope of this essay and indeed deserves one in its own right. One point worth touching on, though, is that Divine’s expression of femininity – all grit, fighting talk and disobedient body – is, to me, a truer expression of womanhood (or at least my experience of it) than any of Orlando’s nameless models provide. Once more, there is realness to be found in artifice.

The expression of desire in Orlando’s records, whether read as queer or hetero, is as performative and artificial as the gender identities he constructs. In the Bobby “O” track ‘I’m So Hot For You’ (1982), Orlando croons, “I saw you at the party so I thought I’d play the game / Two strangers in a lonely room, I asked you your name”, before bursting into its infectious chorus of “I’m so hot for you and you’re so hot for me … what are we waiting for?”. (“Pass the poppers, please”, read the top YouTube comment when I listened to it). This is typical of Orlando tracks – eyes lock across a crowded party, a lonely lothario asks a girl her name and everyone’s fantasies come true. These plotlines are so cliché, though – so artificial and oversexed – that they almost stop being sexy. The scenario is too cinematic to be believable. The beats are too fast to bump ‘n’ grind to. This is music for taking pills and dancing euphorically to, not slow-jamming to before taking someone home. It’s burning passion with no fulfilment.

In his extensive survey of post-punk Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds points out that the “non-funkiness” of Hi-NRG is one of the defining traits of the genre. It is “slamming rather than swinging”, he writes. Reynolds discusses Hi-NRG only as a footnote to Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’, which though not ‘pure’ Hi-NRG itself, adopted many its its stylistic traits. He mentions Hi-NRG’s “orgiastic vibe”, but argues that ‘Relax’  was only sexy “in the exhibitionist sense of the Amsterdam leather bars [frontman] Holly [Johnson] visited, where the sex acts had an element of ‘theatre and performance’ … ‘Relax’ was driven by something far stronger than sensuality: an idea of sex as a weapon, shock tactic, threat”.[8]

Screenshot from the banned version of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’, showing BDSM/leather bars. “You can really see how deviant this must have seemed in 1983″, says Moore[9]

The same could be said of Orlando’s sexploitation disco classics – the notion of sex as a dancefloor statement of intent, rather than a sensual act carried out behind closed doors. Orlando’s heroes and heroines know exactly what they want, as exemplified by 1982’s ‘She Has a Way’ (“She knows what she wants from you / You’ll do things you’d never do”). That’s not to say it’s always a happy ending, though. Much of the desire expressed in Orlando’s Hi-NRG pop songs is one-way – take Girly’s ‘Working Girl (One-Way Love Affair)’ or The Flirts’ ‘Helpless’ (“I can see you in the arms of another girl … you shattered my world”). These thwarted expectations of love are pure, swooping, teenage-style catastrophes of the heart. The sentimentality of such Orlando tracks, just like the directness of his more erotic numbers, give us permission to feel the most untempered emotions.

In 1978, the queer, socialist British journal Gay Left published an essay by Richard Dyer titled ‘In Defence of Disco’. In it, Dyer argues that there are three main characteristics of the disco genre: eroticism, romanticism and materialism. Dyer points out that almost all popular music is arguably erotic, but unlike the disembodied eroticism of pop music (admittedly more chaste in 1978 than it is today) and the ‘phallic’ grind of rock, disco’s eroticism is a full-bodied experience, making it open to all genders and sexualities. Then on the romanticism of disco, he argues that its “passion and intensity embody or create an experience that negates the dreariness of the mundane and everyday”. This flight from the banality of the everyday experience, and its accompanying structural sexism/racism, “can be seen as a flight from capitalism and patriarchy as lived experiences”.[10]

Though Dyer is, of course, discussing disco, I feel his points are equally relevant to its descendent Hi-NRG (“if not more so”, adds Moore, who brought my attention to the essay[11]). The full-bodied eroticism that Dyer describes is certainly a key component of Hi-NRG, alongside the euphoric escape from the conditions of late capitalism. Though both disco and Hi-NRG can be characterised by their excessive appetites (for drumbeats and cowbells, for flamboyant get-ups, for drugs, for sex), both offer a moment of respite from and alternative to the grind of day-to-day life, particularly for oppressed groups such as the queer community which, as pointed out at the beginning of this essay, made up large swathes of Hi-NRG’s audience.

Like most great pop/dance tracks, Orlando’s songs do not promise to deliver anything but a few minutes of punchy, sexy euphoria. But in my eyes, this is precisely what makes them so transcendental. To those of a certain bent, they deliver a pure hit of serotonin to the brain, and their artifice and ephemerality only serve to heighten this connection. I return, once again, to the wise words of Susan Sontag: “One cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one may do or feel on the sly.”[12]

Whether or not I’m permitted my wish of having a camp, sexy Hi-NRG track sang by three anonymous models played at my funeral, no hell or wild horses could stop me from enjoying it in the meantime.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Alan Jones & Jussi Kantonen, Saturday Night Fever: The Story of Disco (Chicago: A Cappella Books, 1999), cited on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi-NRG, accessed July 2017

[2] Pádraic E. Moore, personal communication, July 2017

[3] ibid.

[4]  Kimberley Leston, ‘The Story of O’, The Face, 1987, accessed online at http://www.italo-disco.net/HTML/HTML%20Interviews/Bobby%20Orlando%20Interview.html, July 2017

[5] Moore, ibid.

[6] Leston, ibid.

[7] Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’ in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin Classics, 2009), p. 279

[8] Simon Reynolds, Rip it up and Start Again, p. 504

[9] Moore, ibid.

[10] Richard Dyer, ‘In Defence of Disco’, Gay Left, Summer 1979, pp. 20–23, accessed via http://www.gayleft1970s.org/issues/gay.left_issue.08.pdf, July 2017

[11] Moore, ibid.

[12] Sontag, ibid.

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Gay Left, Issue 8, Summer 1979, p. 6

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“I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.” – Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)