Barbara Ess

Barbara Ess died yesterday at the age of seventy-three. Ess founded the No Wave magazine Just Another Asshole, featuring New York artists, writers and musicians. It was published as a multi-format periodical, taking the form of a 'zine, a tabloid, a commercial magazine, a paperback book, and an LP. 

Contributors to Just Another Asshole included Kathy Acker, Judith Barry, Dara Birnbaum, Eric Bogosian, Glenn Branca, Brian Buczak, Rhys Chatham, Michael Gira, Jack Goldstein, Kim Gordon, Dan Graham, Jenny Holzer,   Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Carla Liss, Thurston Moore, Cookie Mueller, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince, Lee Ranaldo, Jane Sherry, Kiki Smith, Michael Smith, Wharton Tiers, Martha Wilson, David Wojnarowicz, and countless others. 

While it's tempting to imagine a great tombstone that simply read "Just Another Asshole", Ess was also well-known for her life-long dedication to pinhole camera photography, and for teaching at Bard College since 1997. 

As a musician she contributed tracks to the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine, and in 2001 collaborated with filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh on the album Radio Guitar, which Thurston Moore released on his Ecstatic Peace label. 

In 2005 she published I Am Not This Body, a book of her pinhole photographs. 

Just Another Asshole #6

[Barbara Ess, Glenn Branca]

Just Another Asshole #6

New York City, USA: Primary Information, 2018

192 pp., 7 x 4”, softcover

Edition of 2000

My very first curatorial projects were exhibitions of artists’ magazines and artists’ records. Just Another Asshole was included in both.  

The periodical was a No Wave mixed-media publication started by Barbara Ess in her apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in 1978. It began life as a personal ‘zine of her collages, with the title scrawled in red nail polish on the cover. The third issue changed the format (to a tabloid newspaper) and each subsequent issue the format changed again. Number four was a four page spread in the 1980 issue of Artforum. Number five was a 12” LP: an anthology of seventy-seven very short tracks, by eighty-three artists. Co-published with White Columns, the album was co-edited by Glenn Branca and featured contributions from Jenny Holzer, Carla Liss,  Dan Graham, Barbara Kruger, Lee Ranaldo, Dara Birnbaum, Eric Bogosian, Thurston Moore, Amy Taubin and others. 

The sixth (and penultimate) issue was a paperback book. Again co-edited by Glenn Branca, this collection of writings included over sixty artists from the early 1980's downtown scene. It includes short stories, performance transcripts, plays, monologues, screenplays, and essays. 

Contributors include Kathy Acker,  Judith Barry, Buczak, Michael Gira (singer for the Swans), Jack Goldstein, Dan Graham, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Cookie Mueller, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince, Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), David Rosenbloom, Jane Sherry (who co-edited a previous issue of the publication), Kiki Smith, Michael Smith, Wharton Tiers, Lynne Tillman, Martha Wilson, David Wojnarowicz, and many others. 

Re-issued by Primary Information in November of 2018, the title is already out-of-print. 

Disband

Disband

Disband

New York City, USA: Primary Information, 2009

31 minute Audio CD

Edition of 1000

Disband were an all-female a cappella group who performed as part of the No Wave scene in New York city, in the late seventies and early eighties. Disband was founded by Martha Wilson and the group featured artists Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, Ingrid Sischy, and Diane Torr as core members. Barbara Ess (later of Y-Pants, and the founder of Art-Rite magazine), Daile Kaplan, April Gornick, and Barbara Kruger also performed with the group. 

The band played at the Tribeca punk club Tier 3 (which - in it’s single year of existence - also hosted DNA, Rhys Chatham, Bush Tetras, Glenn Branca, Madness, Liquid Liquid, The Slits, ESG, Lydia Lunch, The Raincoats, Lounge Lizards, Delta 5, Young Marble Giants, A Certain Ratio and Bauhaus) as well as art venues like PS1, The Kitchen, Hallwalls, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Franklin Furnace (which was also founded by Martha Wilson). 

Disband borrowed elements of performance art and even stand-up comedy, performing without instruments, typically to the laughter of the small groups gathered to watch them. “We did play some instruments,” corrects Wilson in the Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces, “we played plastic bags, newspapers, hammer, Col. Sanders chicken buckets, bed sheets, hotel bells”.

A tour of Italy with Laurie Anderson, Paul McCarthy, Chris Burden and other artists brought them to Florence and Rome, and the group also played Ithaca, Toronto, Chicago, La Jolla, Philadelphia, and Seoul.

However, in their four-year existence they did not release an LP, or even a 7” single. 

In keeping with their mandate to make out-of-print (and never in-print) materials available at affordable prices, Primary Information released this CD of long-lost recordings in 2009 (a year after the group reunited to perform at PS1). 

The disk features 21 recordings culled from the band’s live performances between 1979-1982:

1 The End

2 Hudson Street

3 Black Lung

4 Fashions

5 Rebel

6 The Redneck Song

7 Missiles And Pistols

8 I'm On The Winning Side

9 The Girl's Bill Of Rights

10 Dow

11 Bartolucci

12 Look At My Dick

13 Sad

14 Missiles And Pistols (Alternative Version)

15 Every Day Same Old Way

16 Perry Como

17 Five More Years

18 A Model's Revengeful Acquisition

19 The Snatch Song

20 Never Been Anywhere

21 Hey Baby

The CD is available for the paltry price of $5.00, from the publisher, here.