Griot Girlz
On the exhibition FEMMES 'R' US. Feminism in Pop Music Art Film Today
Ina Wudtke
2006 I had the pleasure to get to know Sonia Boyce. We both had our studios at Studio Voltaire in South London. She invited me to come and see her during the set up of her show at the National Portrait Gallery. She was already working on her series devotional, a series of portrait drawings representing female musicians. In the version of devotional for the National Portrait Gallery, Sonia included photographs from the Galleries collection of stars the likes of Sade to Shirley Bassey a.o., combined with drawings representing other female musicians which she drew directly on the wall. The drawings and photographs were encircled in a way similar to annual rings of trees as a connection between both media of the installation. We were looking at the portrait photographs of the collection and we talked about our personal musical preferences in the context of the photographed female musicians. Sonja was puzzled that I knew only few of the white female brit pop and punk musicians, but therefore knew almost all black female British musicians by name. I sensed that the fact of being a white DJ just knowing black musicians was troubling her and I felt slightly embarrassed about my lack of knowledge about white pop and punk music.
When I think back about this experience, it seems symptomatic for the central questions I was dealing with while co-curating the exhibition FEMMES FEMMES 'R' US and which might have led to a new conception of the devotional series by Sonia Boyce for the Berlin exhibition. Instead of portrait drawings of black and white female musicians she listed two hundred names of black female musicians and created the silk screened devotional wallpaper. The selection of the female musicians spanned from the 60s up until the present and named Marsha Smith, Najma Arhbar and Vula Malinga (Basement Jaxx), Shara Nelson and Sara Jay (Massive Attack), Skin (aka Skunk Anansie), Moni Love, Martine Topley-Bird (Tricky) and the Sugababes as well one of the MCs of the FEMMES ‘R’ US Party that took place in the framework of the exhibition: MC Chickaboo.
The title FEMMES ‘R’ US derived from the female broken beats DJ/MC collective FEMMES WITH FATAL BREAKS to whose founding members I belong. When the collective was founded, I had been a professional DJ for already seven years, combining it with my work as a visual artist. I started out in the periphery of Hamburg’s urban ragga/dancehall scene, being the only female DJ at the Urban Sound Clash, organising parties and events with the NEID Crew (named after the NEID Magazine) and defending my first resident DJ job at Soulkitchen. Having experienced how difficult it was to be present as a female DJ not as a curiosum in the club world of the hip hop and ragga scene which back then was almost exclusively male dominated, I was looking for female combattants. Electric Indigo demonstrated how to do it by founding the female:pressure network for techno, house, minimal and electro. In March 1999, DJ Delta, Supersiren, Vela and I, under my DJ name DJ T-INA Darling, responded with the foundation in Berlin of FEMMES WITH FATAL BREAKS, loosely following the model of hip hop posses and sound systems.
If you look at music and feminism in the context of art, then most initiatives in the hip hop, jazz, drum & bass scene seem to remain absolutely unnoticed. In the course of the 90s identity debates, black, Caribbean and Asian women especially in the US and the United Kingdom, complained heavily about being excluded from the feminist discourse and initiated the deconstruction of the second feminist wave (around 1945-1980) by blaming it that it had only fought for white middle class interests. This led towards the dissolution of the old feminist relations. New complex issues began to define the most central terms of feminism. One may think for example of the queer feminist debate, which introduced the notion of unlimited sexes instead of the bi-polar male female model of earlier times. The model of identity made way for the hybrid subject as Homi Bhabha described it in The Location Of Culture. (1) In Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Empire the hybrid subject dissolves in turn in the multitude. (2) Negri and Hardt clarify the concept of the multitude with a link to US American hip hop posses. The multitude is characterised as the potential to organise itself.
At this point my work as an artist and co-curator of the exhibition FEMMES ‘R’ US kicks in. My intense interest in, and artistic practice with the themes of identity, feminism, DJ culture, Afro Caribbean diaspora – in the sense of Paul Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’ - became visible in the ten issues of the NEID Magazine, to which a great diversity of international artists participated. In the FEMMES ‘R’ US exhibition, a whole range of multiples and magazines issues were shown in this complex form for the very first time. DJ culture is just a phenomenon of the Afro-Atlantic discourse, as Robert Farris Thompson calls it. (3) Indeed, DJ-ing, no matter if it is techno, house or hip hop, has its roots in the practice of DJ pioneers like Cool DJ Herc, an Afro-Caribbean American whose New York Bronx based sound system became known throughout the world. Through the NEID magazine, the interest of the Femmes with Fatal Breaks for the musical black atlantic was enhanced with reflections derived from postcolonial discourses.
Sadly enough, this post colonial discourse hasn’t arrived yet in the continental European art context, no matter the efforts made by the likes of Cathérine David with documenta X, and especially Okwui Enwezor with his team of Documenta 11. (4)
In 90s Germany DJ-ing in art contexts was copied in a fashionable way, multiplied without thinking, until some critics bashed the fashion, which led to an almost complete erasure of DJ-ing from the art context. At the same time, modes of expression, contexts and languages of traditional white musical scenes flow into the art discourse without any problem. I am thinking of the numerous references of critics and theorists to musicians like Bob Dylan, references which the German critic Diedrich Diederichsen in his book Eigenblutdoping deconstructs and at the same time embraces. (5) I think about all the articles on, and exhibitions by artists like Chicks on Speed, who situate themselves in the tradition of Riot Girlz and world wide Ladyfests, the painted punk attitudes of Daniel Richter, Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion; or the German new wave kitsch in the works of Jonathan Meese. When it comes to art that references the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, continental European art discourse becomes speechless – words are missing and most of all a cultural context. This might as well explain the legitimate music style that rules in the art world. Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky once said he had the impression that experimental music, in order to appear as legitimate in the art world, has to renounce to the beat. To understand a beat as a complex avant-garde, as was the case in the 20s Harlem Renaissance with the discovery of syncopated swing rhythms, simply seems too much asked from the (white) art world. Things become even more troubling when the artist doesn’t have an Afro-Atlantic background herself, while still referencing the Black Atlantic. Where do this Afro-Atlantic references come from when you yourself are not Afro-Aatlantic? My work Gaps in Berlin - about former Jewish institutions in Berlin which where demolished – seemed puzzling in a similar way as the most common question was whether I am Jewish. Authenticity in the arts is constantly misunderstood as a direct relation between background by birth and artistic output. Although many recognized white artists acquired Afro-Atlantic techniques and have often referred themselves to their Afro-Atlantic sources, they seem suppressed from the art discourse, as they do not fit into hegemonic authenticity thinking.
While Heike Munder, curator of the exhibition It’s Time For Action (There Is No Option) About Feminism (2007 at the Migros Museum in Zurich) in the exhibition catalogue refers strongly towards Riot Girlz and the 90s feminist discourse, I would like to launch the new term Griot Girlz in the context of the exhibition FEMMES ‘R’ US, curated by Christine Lang and myself. Griot Girlz often but not exclusively tell stories in form of a rhyme or rap that lend themselves better to memorize them. They keep the herstory of their surroundings alive and pass it on to other generations. The roots of Griot Girlz derive from Africa (most likely from countries like Mali, Gambia, Senegal a.o.). Within the tribes certain families were dedicated to keep the herstory of these tribes, they went on extended travels and passed it on. Many centuries ago Griot Girlz sophisticated and abstracted this art form and enhanced their stories with spiritual visions like the “signifying monkey” or the mythological spider “anansie”.
One of Patty Chang’s early video works dealing with hegemonic authenticity thinking is the 1998 video Melons at a Loss. Patty Chang is very aware that the presence of her body in almost all of her earlier works functions as a reference for female Asian identity: “The fact that I am in almost all the pieces makes it very difficult not to reference Asian female identity, either as fitting within the confines of Asian female representation or else consciously rejecting that identity”. (7) In his remarkable book The Black Atlantic, the British theorist Paul Gilroy outlines this phenomenon using the term ‘double consciousness’ originally introduced by the American writer W.E.B DuBois. (8) In his book Welcome to the Jungle, writing about this ‘burden of representation’, Kobena Mercer points out that black artists are tired of having to represent in every interview their entire people/race. (9) This ‘burden of representation’ is also difficult to escape as a female artist in a feminist exhibition, having to answer questions regarding the worldwide stand of feminism rather than questions concerning one’s own specific artistic work. Patty Chang’s video Melons at a Loss, applies techniques of personal and professionally performed authentic texts in order to create images that are bestowed with new meanings by her remarkable performances. On one level it tells the story of her aunt who died of breast cancer but at the same time its strong performance references Yoko Ono’s performance Cut Piece as well as spiritual Christian images of fertility and feminity that are emphasized through the replacement of her breast with a honey melon.
In her work Lobby 7, Jill Magid plays in a similar way with performative femininity and uses her body in order to uncover complex surveillance techniques in public space.
Griot Girlz use the technique of re-representation, they create their own version of something that already exists in order to show respect or disrespect to the originators and on the other hand they add their own interpretation. Pipilotti Rist’s video You called me Jacky (1990), which was also on show in the exhibition FEMMES ‘R’ US, uses the technique of the re-representation in an exemplified way. It shows a little playback performance to the blues song ‚Jacky and Edna’ by British singer song writer Kevin Coyne from his 1973 album Marjorie Razorblade. Here Pipilotti Rist persiflates the male notated image of the lonesome cowboy which dominates Coyne’s song.
Within the exhibition FEMMES ‘R’ US, in its technical simplicity this work shows a strong contrast to contemporary animation techniques used in the music video Quio: Rising Tide (2008) by Christine Lang. With this video, Christine Lang renders a hommage to her long time colleague MC QUIO aka MC Looney Tunes, with whom she has had a DJ /MC Team since the beginning of the 90s. Christine Lang spins drum & bass and dubstep and MC QUIO rhymes on it. They both joined FEMMES WITH FATAL BREAKS in 2003, and are part of its new actual composition with DJ Spoke and myself. The video visualizes the song Rising Tide which had been previously released on MC QUIO’s album Phui. In Christine Lang’s video the reversal of gender roles is self-evident. It plays with hip hop video culture, attitude and filmic trick techniques. The tiny sewing scissor and tinker materials used by QUIO as its protagonist, function as weapons. The ascription of such utilities as feminine is persiflated as well in Elke Marks’ sculpture Tracht 1 Karodame. Elke Marks sows her sculptures together from diverse pieces of clothing, thus using materials connotated as feminine, reflecting a female feminist art practice which originated in the 70s.
Griot Girlz recall the names of predecessors or diss them, either way for the purpose of passing on herstory or - more commonly speaking – of passing on “oral history”. This technique is known from Old school rappers like Roxanne Shantee, the New York hip hop queen who dissed her female colleagues so badly that she provoked a lot of answer raps, as well as setting oral monuments for her colleagues. My own video herspace, which I produced for the exhibition FEMMES ‘R’ US, is to be seem in this oral tradition. In herspace I perform, in a critical and ironic way, four different referential female DJ characters in an interview situation. The statements of these fictional figures were generated out of interviews with real DJ’s from the international break beats scene. In the role of Fatgirl Slim I refer to more than ten existing female DJ’s of the broken beats scene, among which DJ FLORE and MC Chickaboo, both of whom performed at the FEMMES ‘R’ US Party. Social, economic and technical conditions for female DJ’s are being discussed as well as DJ-ing and mixing techniques. At the same time these techniques are applied on the video editing. More generally, the female personalities are representative for the economic and social situation of many independent working women on the free market. The FEMMES WITH FATAL BREAKS always attempted to feature and strengthen female colleagues in a well promoted framework of an all female line-up inside the male dominated broken beats scene.(10)
Ambivalenzen: Auseinandersetzungen der Töchter mit der Nazivergangenheit ihrer Väter, a work by the Viennese duo Klub Zwei, equally deals with the oral preservation of history, or rather herstory. Simone Bader und Jo Schmeiser interviewed daughters of Nazi fathers. Clippings of these interviews show how fascism in Germany and Austria has a deep impact onto the present day.
The work of Pauline Boudry is a reflection of the music business from a female musician’s perspective. Her video A Street Angel With A Cowboy Mouth is the tour diary of her queer band Rhythm King and Her Friends. Like Christine Lang, Antye Greie and others she is a musician/DJ as well as an artist/film maker. In her publication Reproduktionskonten Fälschen, co-edited with Renate Lorenz and Brigitta Kustner, Pauline Boudry analyzes the normative heterosexuality in the field of work and domestic home. This cooperation ultimately led to the founding of her band. (11) Rhythm King and Her Friends could be described as a post-Riot Girlz band. In it the dichotomy between Riot Girlz and Griot Girlz, which I polemically used to explain the contemporary struggle for hegemony in the arts, seems to be deconstructed. Their strategy consists of using certain Riot Girlz poses in order to transpose certain contents which Griot Girlz have been trying to talk about with far less attention (for example the theme “Get Paid”) to an art audience that got used to Riot Girlz poses. Whereas Malcolm Mc Laren translated what he saw in the “black” music hip hop scene for a white audience and thus created punk, Rhythm King and Her Friends uses this classic punk strategy on post punk. So we are there again where punk started and at the same time everything turns out to be different. It is this playful element in the hard battle of hegemonies which is echoed in the title FEMMES ‘R’ US, in that it reminds one of a well-known brand of toys. In hip hop language „toys“ are teenagers who imitate hip hop culture, by wearing baggy pants and having this “bad boy/girl” look in their eyes, while in reality there are everybody’s toy and are manipulated. Where one would have expected the word ‘toys’ in the title of our project, the word ‘toys’ was playfully replaced by FEMMES. You can’t play me I am no toy I am a FEMME ;-)
(1) See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London/New York, Routledge, 1994.
(2) See Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 2000.
(3) Robert Farris Thompson, Tango. The Art History of Love, New York, Pantheon Books, 2005.
(4) See Oliver Marchart, Hegemonie im Kunstfeld. Die documenta-Ausstellungen dX, D11m d12 und die Politik der Biennalisierung, Berlin/Köln, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein/Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2008.
(5) See Diedrich Diederichsen, Eigenblutdoping: Selbstverwertung, Künstlerromantik, Partizipation, Köln, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2008, pp. 95-116.
(6) See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey. A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, New York, Oxford University Press, 1988.
(7) Patty Chang, Shangri-La, catalogue for the exhibition at the Hammer Museum Los Angeles/New Museum of Contemporary Art New York/ Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago London, 2005, p. 17.
(8) See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness, London/New York, Verso, 1993.
(9) See: Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle. New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, New York & London, Routledge, 1994.
(10) See: www.femmes-breaks.com.
(11) The room in which Pauline Boudrys video A Street Angel With A Cowboy Mouth was screened was in the same time the place for the debate Feminism – Government’s Mission? Economic Factor? Insurrection? organized by Antke Engel (Institut for Culture Inquiry, Berlin). It refered to the contemporary stand of feminism and represented the multi voiced contemporary queerfeminist points of views. This debate was followed by the international film festival with the titel woman and work organized by Christine Lang.
On the exhibition FEMMES 'R' US. Feminism in Pop Music Art Film Today
Ina Wudtke
2006 I had the pleasure to get to know Sonia Boyce. We both had our studios at Studio Voltaire in South London. She invited me to come and see her during the set up of her show at the National Portrait Gallery. She was already working on her series devotional, a series of portrait drawings representing female musicians. In the version of devotional for the National Portrait Gallery, Sonia included photographs from the Galleries collection of stars the likes of Sade to Shirley Bassey a.o., combined with drawings representing other female musicians which she drew directly on the wall. The drawings and photographs were encircled in a way similar to annual rings of trees as a connection between both media of the installation. We were looking at the portrait photographs of the collection and we talked about our personal musical preferences in the context of the photographed female musicians. Sonja was puzzled that I knew only few of the white female brit pop and punk musicians, but therefore knew almost all black female British musicians by name. I sensed that the fact of being a white DJ just knowing black musicians was troubling her and I felt slightly embarrassed about my lack of knowledge about white pop and punk music.
When I think back about this experience, it seems symptomatic for the central questions I was dealing with while co-curating the exhibition FEMMES FEMMES 'R' US and which might have led to a new conception of the devotional series by Sonia Boyce for the Berlin exhibition. Instead of portrait drawings of black and white female musicians she listed two hundred names of black female musicians and created the silk screened devotional wallpaper. The selection of the female musicians spanned from the 60s up until the present and named Marsha Smith, Najma Arhbar and Vula Malinga (Basement Jaxx), Shara Nelson and Sara Jay (Massive Attack), Skin (aka Skunk Anansie), Moni Love, Martine Topley-Bird (Tricky) and the Sugababes as well one of the MCs of the FEMMES ‘R’ US Party that took place in the framework of the exhibition: MC Chickaboo.
The title FEMMES ‘R’ US derived from the female broken beats DJ/MC collective FEMMES WITH FATAL BREAKS to whose founding members I belong. When the collective was founded, I had been a professional DJ for already seven years, combining it with my work as a visual artist. I started out in the periphery of Hamburg’s urban ragga/dancehall scene, being the only female DJ at the Urban Sound Clash, organising parties and events with the NEID Crew (named after the NEID Magazine) and defending my first resident DJ job at Soulkitchen. Having experienced how difficult it was to be present as a female DJ not as a curiosum in the club world of the hip hop and ragga scene which back then was almost exclusively male dominated, I was looking for female combattants. Electric Indigo demonstrated how to do it by founding the female:pressure network for techno, house, minimal and electro. In March 1999, DJ Delta, Supersiren, Vela and I, under my DJ name DJ T-INA Darling, responded with the foundation in Berlin of FEMMES WITH FATAL BREAKS, loosely following the model of hip hop posses and sound systems.
If you look at music and feminism in the context of art, then most initiatives in the hip hop, jazz, drum & bass scene seem to remain absolutely unnoticed. In the course of the 90s identity debates, black, Caribbean and Asian women especially in the US and the United Kingdom, complained heavily about being excluded from the feminist discourse and initiated the deconstruction of the second feminist wave (around 1945-1980) by blaming it that it had only fought for white middle class interests. This led towards the dissolution of the old feminist relations. New complex issues began to define the most central terms of feminism. One may think for example of the queer feminist debate, which introduced the notion of unlimited sexes instead of the bi-polar male female model of earlier times. The model of identity made way for the hybrid subject as Homi Bhabha described it in The Location Of Culture. (1) In Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Empire the hybrid subject dissolves in turn in the multitude. (2) Negri and Hardt clarify the concept of the multitude with a link to US American hip hop posses. The multitude is characterised as the potential to organise itself.
At this point my work as an artist and co-curator of the exhibition FEMMES ‘R’ US kicks in. My intense interest in, and artistic practice with the themes of identity, feminism, DJ culture, Afro Caribbean diaspora – in the sense of Paul Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’ - became visible in the ten issues of the NEID Magazine, to which a great diversity of international artists participated. In the FEMMES ‘R’ US exhibition, a whole range of multiples and magazines issues were shown in this complex form for the very first time. DJ culture is just a phenomenon of the Afro-Atlantic discourse, as Robert Farris Thompson calls it. (3) Indeed, DJ-ing, no matter if it is techno, house or hip hop, has its roots in the practice of DJ pioneers like Cool DJ Herc, an Afro-Caribbean American whose New York Bronx based sound system became known throughout the world. Through the NEID magazine, the interest of the Femmes with Fatal Breaks for the musical black atlantic was enhanced with reflections derived from postcolonial discourses.
Sadly enough, this post colonial discourse hasn’t arrived yet in the continental European art context, no matter the efforts made by the likes of Cathérine David with documenta X, and especially Okwui Enwezor with his team of Documenta 11. (4)
In 90s Germany DJ-ing in art contexts was copied in a fashionable way, multiplied without thinking, until some critics bashed the fashion, which led to an almost complete erasure of DJ-ing from the art context. At the same time, modes of expression, contexts and languages of traditional white musical scenes flow into the art discourse without any problem. I am thinking of the numerous references of critics and theorists to musicians like Bob Dylan, references which the German critic Diedrich Diederichsen in his book Eigenblutdoping deconstructs and at the same time embraces. (5) I think about all the articles on, and exhibitions by artists like Chicks on Speed, who situate themselves in the tradition of Riot Girlz and world wide Ladyfests, the painted punk attitudes of Daniel Richter, Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion; or the German new wave kitsch in the works of Jonathan Meese. When it comes to art that references the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, continental European art discourse becomes speechless – words are missing and most of all a cultural context. This might as well explain the legitimate music style that rules in the art world. Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky once said he had the impression that experimental music, in order to appear as legitimate in the art world, has to renounce to the beat. To understand a beat as a complex avant-garde, as was the case in the 20s Harlem Renaissance with the discovery of syncopated swing rhythms, simply seems too much asked from the (white) art world. Things become even more troubling when the artist doesn’t have an Afro-Atlantic background herself, while still referencing the Black Atlantic. Where do this Afro-Atlantic references come from when you yourself are not Afro-Aatlantic? My work Gaps in Berlin - about former Jewish institutions in Berlin which where demolished – seemed puzzling in a similar way as the most common question was whether I am Jewish. Authenticity in the arts is constantly misunderstood as a direct relation between background by birth and artistic output. Although many recognized white artists acquired Afro-Atlantic techniques and have often referred themselves to their Afro-Atlantic sources, they seem suppressed from the art discourse, as they do not fit into hegemonic authenticity thinking.
While Heike Munder, curator of the exhibition It’s Time For Action (There Is No Option) About Feminism (2007 at the Migros Museum in Zurich) in the exhibition catalogue refers strongly towards Riot Girlz and the 90s feminist discourse, I would like to launch the new term Griot Girlz in the context of the exhibition FEMMES ‘R’ US, curated by Christine Lang and myself. Griot Girlz often but not exclusively tell stories in form of a rhyme or rap that lend themselves better to memorize them. They keep the herstory of their surroundings alive and pass it on to other generations. The roots of Griot Girlz derive from Africa (most likely from countries like Mali, Gambia, Senegal a.o.). Within the tribes certain families were dedicated to keep the herstory of these tribes, they went on extended travels and passed it on. Many centuries ago Griot Girlz sophisticated and abstracted this art form and enhanced their stories with spiritual visions like the “signifying monkey” or the mythological spider “anansie”.
One of Patty Chang’s early video works dealing with hegemonic authenticity thinking is the 1998 video Melons at a Loss. Patty Chang is very aware that the presence of her body in almost all of her earlier works functions as a reference for female Asian identity: “The fact that I am in almost all the pieces makes it very difficult not to reference Asian female identity, either as fitting within the confines of Asian female representation or else consciously rejecting that identity”. (7) In his remarkable book The Black Atlantic, the British theorist Paul Gilroy outlines this phenomenon using the term ‘double consciousness’ originally introduced by the American writer W.E.B DuBois. (8) In his book Welcome to the Jungle, writing about this ‘burden of representation’, Kobena Mercer points out that black artists are tired of having to represent in every interview their entire people/race. (9) This ‘burden of representation’ is also difficult to escape as a female artist in a feminist exhibition, having to answer questions regarding the worldwide stand of feminism rather than questions concerning one’s own specific artistic work. Patty Chang’s video Melons at a Loss, applies techniques of personal and professionally performed authentic texts in order to create images that are bestowed with new meanings by her remarkable performances. On one level it tells the story of her aunt who died of breast cancer but at the same time its strong performance references Yoko Ono’s performance Cut Piece as well as spiritual Christian images of fertility and feminity that are emphasized through the replacement of her breast with a honey melon.
In her work Lobby 7, Jill Magid plays in a similar way with performative femininity and uses her body in order to uncover complex surveillance techniques in public space.
Griot Girlz use the technique of re-representation, they create their own version of something that already exists in order to show respect or disrespect to the originators and on the other hand they add their own interpretation. Pipilotti Rist’s video You called me Jacky (1990), which was also on show in the exhibition FEMMES ‘R’ US, uses the technique of the re-representation in an exemplified way. It shows a little playback performance to the blues song ‚Jacky and Edna’ by British singer song writer Kevin Coyne from his 1973 album Marjorie Razorblade. Here Pipilotti Rist persiflates the male notated image of the lonesome cowboy which dominates Coyne’s song.
Within the exhibition FEMMES ‘R’ US, in its technical simplicity this work shows a strong contrast to contemporary animation techniques used in the music video Quio: Rising Tide (2008) by Christine Lang. With this video, Christine Lang renders a hommage to her long time colleague MC QUIO aka MC Looney Tunes, with whom she has had a DJ /MC Team since the beginning of the 90s. Christine Lang spins drum & bass and dubstep and MC QUIO rhymes on it. They both joined FEMMES WITH FATAL BREAKS in 2003, and are part of its new actual composition with DJ Spoke and myself. The video visualizes the song Rising Tide which had been previously released on MC QUIO’s album Phui. In Christine Lang’s video the reversal of gender roles is self-evident. It plays with hip hop video culture, attitude and filmic trick techniques. The tiny sewing scissor and tinker materials used by QUIO as its protagonist, function as weapons. The ascription of such utilities as feminine is persiflated as well in Elke Marks’ sculpture Tracht 1 Karodame. Elke Marks sows her sculptures together from diverse pieces of clothing, thus using materials connotated as feminine, reflecting a female feminist art practice which originated in the 70s.
Griot Girlz recall the names of predecessors or diss them, either way for the purpose of passing on herstory or - more commonly speaking – of passing on “oral history”. This technique is known from Old school rappers like Roxanne Shantee, the New York hip hop queen who dissed her female colleagues so badly that she provoked a lot of answer raps, as well as setting oral monuments for her colleagues. My own video herspace, which I produced for the exhibition FEMMES ‘R’ US, is to be seem in this oral tradition. In herspace I perform, in a critical and ironic way, four different referential female DJ characters in an interview situation. The statements of these fictional figures were generated out of interviews with real DJ’s from the international break beats scene. In the role of Fatgirl Slim I refer to more than ten existing female DJ’s of the broken beats scene, among which DJ FLORE and MC Chickaboo, both of whom performed at the FEMMES ‘R’ US Party. Social, economic and technical conditions for female DJ’s are being discussed as well as DJ-ing and mixing techniques. At the same time these techniques are applied on the video editing. More generally, the female personalities are representative for the economic and social situation of many independent working women on the free market. The FEMMES WITH FATAL BREAKS always attempted to feature and strengthen female colleagues in a well promoted framework of an all female line-up inside the male dominated broken beats scene.(10)
Ambivalenzen: Auseinandersetzungen der Töchter mit der Nazivergangenheit ihrer Väter, a work by the Viennese duo Klub Zwei, equally deals with the oral preservation of history, or rather herstory. Simone Bader und Jo Schmeiser interviewed daughters of Nazi fathers. Clippings of these interviews show how fascism in Germany and Austria has a deep impact onto the present day.
The work of Pauline Boudry is a reflection of the music business from a female musician’s perspective. Her video A Street Angel With A Cowboy Mouth is the tour diary of her queer band Rhythm King and Her Friends. Like Christine Lang, Antye Greie and others she is a musician/DJ as well as an artist/film maker. In her publication Reproduktionskonten Fälschen, co-edited with Renate Lorenz and Brigitta Kustner, Pauline Boudry analyzes the normative heterosexuality in the field of work and domestic home. This cooperation ultimately led to the founding of her band. (11) Rhythm King and Her Friends could be described as a post-Riot Girlz band. In it the dichotomy between Riot Girlz and Griot Girlz, which I polemically used to explain the contemporary struggle for hegemony in the arts, seems to be deconstructed. Their strategy consists of using certain Riot Girlz poses in order to transpose certain contents which Griot Girlz have been trying to talk about with far less attention (for example the theme “Get Paid”) to an art audience that got used to Riot Girlz poses. Whereas Malcolm Mc Laren translated what he saw in the “black” music hip hop scene for a white audience and thus created punk, Rhythm King and Her Friends uses this classic punk strategy on post punk. So we are there again where punk started and at the same time everything turns out to be different. It is this playful element in the hard battle of hegemonies which is echoed in the title FEMMES ‘R’ US, in that it reminds one of a well-known brand of toys. In hip hop language „toys“ are teenagers who imitate hip hop culture, by wearing baggy pants and having this “bad boy/girl” look in their eyes, while in reality there are everybody’s toy and are manipulated. Where one would have expected the word ‘toys’ in the title of our project, the word ‘toys’ was playfully replaced by FEMMES. You can’t play me I am no toy I am a FEMME ;-)
(1) See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London/New York, Routledge, 1994.
(2) See Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 2000.
(3) Robert Farris Thompson, Tango. The Art History of Love, New York, Pantheon Books, 2005.
(4) See Oliver Marchart, Hegemonie im Kunstfeld. Die documenta-Ausstellungen dX, D11m d12 und die Politik der Biennalisierung, Berlin/Köln, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein/Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2008.
(5) See Diedrich Diederichsen, Eigenblutdoping: Selbstverwertung, Künstlerromantik, Partizipation, Köln, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2008, pp. 95-116.
(6) See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey. A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, New York, Oxford University Press, 1988.
(7) Patty Chang, Shangri-La, catalogue for the exhibition at the Hammer Museum Los Angeles/New Museum of Contemporary Art New York/ Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago London, 2005, p. 17.
(8) See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness, London/New York, Verso, 1993.
(9) See: Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle. New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, New York & London, Routledge, 1994.
(10) See: www.femmes-breaks.com.
(11) The room in which Pauline Boudrys video A Street Angel With A Cowboy Mouth was screened was in the same time the place for the debate Feminism – Government’s Mission? Economic Factor? Insurrection? organized by Antke Engel (Institut for Culture Inquiry, Berlin). It refered to the contemporary stand of feminism and represented the multi voiced contemporary queerfeminist points of views. This debate was followed by the international film festival with the titel woman and work organized by Christine Lang.