source from https://cwpt.club/Page-2-1
On a sunny afternoon last spring, I walked from my apartment in Brooklyn to the neighborhood of Gowanus, named after a fetid canal that cuts through blocks of refurbished warehouses and auto-repair shops, monolithic luxury condos overlooking the waterfront and run-down apartment blocks for low-income residents. My destination was Public Records, a venue that opened in 2019 in a century-old neo-Romanesque building and often hosts club-adjacent electronic music. Behind a metal barricade facing the canal is a sleek, wood-paneled club as well as an upmarket vegan restaurant and an after-hours listening room, all with high-end sound systems crafted from vintage components. Public Records feels like a realtor’s rendering of a postindustrial renaissance: derelict factories remade as beer halls and galleries, struggling artists traded for agencies marketing the lifestyles of struggling artists. (One apartment complex advertises “avant-garde living” in a “unique urban utopia.”) The possibilities for rebranding are limited, though, as Gowanus remains one of the country’s most contaminated waterways. On warm days, the aroma of vintage pollutants mingles with the smoke from Southern-style barbecue restaurants set up in disused shipping depots. Dredging the canal bed will take decades and may only show that toxic sludge outlasts humanity.
I’d gone to Public Records to see Terre Thaemlitz, a.k.a. DJ Sprinkles, who has established herself as a champion of house music while criticizing the commercialization of the genre: the conversion of a queer subculture into a DEIB vibe, a conflict-ridden history into a Pride Week playlist. Thaemlitz’s catalogue of recordings—frenetic mixes, post-Cagean ambient compositions, epic piano improvisations—testifies to her antipathy to classification based on genre or gender, which she has elaborated in essays, lectures, and multimedia works. She has railed against the vogue for difference and diversity within a culture industry that treats “marginalized identities” as symbolic capital while suppressing genuine dissent. Thaemlitz calls herself a “non-essentialist transgendered person,” and rather than burnish an identity-based brand, she has toggled between pronouns and aliases: Terre’s Neu Wuss Fusion, GRRL, Kami-Sakunobe House Explosion (K-SHE), etc. She refers to DJ Sprinkles, with his unkempt, shoulder-length hair and nondescript outfits—the white V-neck is a staple—as a “male drag” persona.
Increasingly, Thaemlitz’s iconoclasm has been hyped by the music press and corporate-sponsored platforms, elevating her status in the art world: She stands apart from the in-house critics who deal in digestible (or generative) broadsides against the parties paying them. She has ridiculed the notion that patrician museums are incubators of radicalism, though that hasn’t stopped her from speaking at conferences, participating in exhibitions, and even DJing parties at such institutions, including the Tate, Documenta, MoMA PS1, and, last year, the Taipei Biennial.[1] More and more, artists are conditioned to channel discontent into schemes for transcending or transforming the status quo, acting as freethinking dissidents as much as community-engagement consultants. The outcome, in Thaemlitz’s words, is “critique affirming its object,” reinforcing the “benevolence and open-mindedness” of the relevant apparatchiks and oligarchs—a problem that seems important to recognize but impossible to resolve without disinvesting, dropping out, refusing to feed (or be fed by) the machine.
After moving from the American Midwest to New York City for art school in 1986, Thaemlitz began to DJ at bars frequented by sex workers and hustlers, as well as those who patronized (or preyed on) them.[2] She came of age in a city roiled by the AIDS crisis and culture wars, in a milieu of outcasts who moved from dance clubs to die-ins to performances at downtown squats. Though Thaemlitz relocated to Tokyo in 2001, she has continued to revisit and reanimate the sounds that emerged from that momentous era: artifacts of fear, anger, and loneliness, but also forms of collective representation that granted agency and pleasure. At the same time, she has characterized the campaign for visibility as a misguided turn from resisting to seeking power. The celebration of queerness in the music industry, for instance, has driven a market for marginal voices without much use for marginalized people, except as underpaid (or unpaid) sources of content and buzz. Thaemlitz’s DJ sets channel these conflicts, moving between the high-energy hallmarks of house music to periods of stillness and disorientation—clips of anticapitalist oration over undulating ambient washes, feverish guitar solos over bombastic drumming—that seem to deter the orgiastic escapism of made-for-TV club scenes.
A few days before Thaemlitz took the stage at Public Records, she commandeered the club’s Instagram account to note the inapt coincidence of her appearance and Pride Week, renouncing the “corporatization of LGBT pride™” and the notion that “visibility + vocality are inherently empowering,” especially in an era of “hyper surveillance.” She lamented the devaluation of secrecy and withdrawal—as if the closet is merely a site (or symptom) of trauma. As I waited by the canal, I joked with friends about Thaemlitz mounting coup, refashioning the club as a bastion of resistance to cloying vibes and the “pink economy.” I pulled out my phone, navigated to Public Records’s website, and read the club’s motto aloud with the solemnity of a jurist presenting charges against the ancien régime: “SAFER SPACE CHAMPIONING THE INTERSECTION OF CULTURE + COMMUNITY / CREATIVITY + SUSTAINABILITY / COOPERATION + CONSENT.”
In fact, I’d signed up for a garden party, not a revolution: Thaemlitz’s afternoon performance was billed as inaugurating the Nursery, a “multipurpose community space” with greenery encircling a dance floor. I felt queasy as I pictured myself lounging among native flora in custom chaises hewn from reclaimed wood, mounting hills of sweet-smelling grass with vistas of the DJ booth, sipping watered-down cocktails beneath artfully arranged tarps and verandas. But I was also mildly ashamed of my own anxiety about fitting in or standing out, being seen as a member of a semi-underground scene (as packaged for the gratification of someone like me) or a consumer of the characteristic styles and sensibilities (ditto). For better or worse, I also recognized myself as a standard type: the older guy talking shit outside the club with a sense of ceremony, even duty. “What could be better: you stand in front of the door to the club and the spaces and you talk, you talk about what’s really going on,” wrote Rainald Goetz in Rave (1998), a fictional, ambivalent account of the pursuit of utopia on the dance floor in post-unification Berlin. “This guy and that guy hadn’t been here or there, didn’t have the cred the way we did, the requisite sincerity. The stories they were spreading, they’d ripped all that off.”[3]
DJ Sprinkles, Midtown 120 Blues, 2008
***
I’m not an insider; I don’t have a position to defend or cred to claim, though at the age of forty-one I’ve collected my share of I-was-there-when stories. I’ve also graduated from warehouse parties to natural-wine bars—and to worrying about the transition from someone who impulsively surrenders to the music to someone who watches the action from afar, casting doubt on the experiences of others. So I couldn’t stop thinking about “CULTURE + COMMUNITY”: wasn’t the nonsensical string of hashtags a sign of the neutralization of subcultures and negation of difference? Wasn’t I trading my own participation for the accoutrements of a lifestyle that belonged to—or had been taken from—someone else? (And wasn’t I coming down hard on Public Records, as if the club were to blame for my ambivalence as a patron, or even as a person?)
The commodification of dissent (and unease of erstwhile dissenters) is nothing new, of course. As Dick Hebdige observed in Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), the idioms, fashions, and iconographies that define subcultures are “stolen” from elsewhere “by subordinate groups and made to carry ‘secret’ meanings which express, in code, a form of resistance to the order which guarantees their continued subordination.” In Hebdige’s telling, the acts of appropriation undertaken by punks, mods, skinheads, Rastas, and dance-music pioneers went “‘against nature,’ interrupting the process of ‘normalization.’” Inevitably, they are again reclaimed as commodities, “rendered at once public property and profitable merchandise.” Now, though, thanks to the corporate internet—a world-sized machine for instantaneously logging, decoding, and commodifying expressions—subcultures are going the way of the studded leather jacket. Before posing much of a threat to the symbolic order, the safety pins and swastikas of our age are made legible and available to everyone, and therefore potent to no one.[4]
The mainstreaming of subcultures tends to prompt accusations of selling out and laments for the loss of authenticity. Thaemlitz, however, has focused on the decontextualization of music—the elision of people and places, social conflicts and material conditions—as scenes are reduced to lifestyle brands and playlists. By the time Thaemlitz relocated to Tokyo, the freaks who made up the audience at her gigs had been recast as edgy and authentic, ambassadors of an endangered urban idyll. They’d been mined for looks to be sold uptown and beyond (after being rid of the scent of poverty and mortality) via films, fashion lines, exhibitions, and, of course, real estate. The stock of renegades like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Patti Smith, and ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) had surged as the conformity of the 1980s gave way to the feel-good liberalism of the Clinton era, and house music had gone from soundtracking life on the margins to “some greeting-card bullshit about ‘life, love, happiness,’” in the words of a monologue introducing Midtown 120 Blues (2008), DJ Sprinkles’s widely revered debut LP. Plaintive and brooding, the album reckons with the role of house music long after the DJs who’d moved the crowds at sex-worker havens and illegal loft parties migrated to red-roped mega-clubs where real-estate moguls and models cosplayed as the audience.
***
Given the risk of career suicide, few who make a living as DJs or producers care to challenge the serotonin-charged idyll of nightlife egalitarianism: the dream of a beat-driven “unity” that dissolves the differences between people (and carries over to the next day), refiguring the dance floor as the agora and clubbing as civics. Even after the mass protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020—and the music industry’s carpet-bombing of social media with BLM-friendly posts—people of color who dared to counter the sloganeering with accounts of racism were often accused of being ungrateful, antagonistic, or cynical. Many ended up feeling that self-censorship was the price of postpandemic gigs. In a 2021 essay in Dweller, Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson describes the anxiety of being labeled “woke police,” “killjoy,” or “hater” for insisting on the political nature of an industry “built on the exploitation of historically Black music and the subjugation of Black artists.”[5] Thaemlitz, however, soldiered on, assailing the premise of the EDM festival circuit—the performance of “non-performative work”—not to mention the sudden rage for streaming simulations of concerts that valorize the “authentic live moment,” as if music is nothing without a band on a stage.
When I first came across Thaemlitz’s writing, I was struck by her willingness to target the pieties and pretenses of her own domain, positioning herself as a critic “operating from within.” In her writing and music, she opposed the upbeat messaging of the “creative industries” via first-hand accounts of selling her labor to clubs, record labels, booking agents, and brands, without denying the potency of the music or the possibility of genuine communion. I was never a club kid: I developed a lifelong allergy to PLUR after my first exposure as a teenager, when I trekked to a desert rave populated by bug-eyed tweakers gnawing at pacifiers, huddling in speaker cabinets. I spent my formative years on the fringes of various post-punk scenes, hearing heroic stories of DIY mavericks who broke through to the mainstream or toiled in righteous obscurity, quietly influencing legions. Then I grew older and lost contact with the underground, only to discover that I could habituate a streaming platform to deliver the underground to me. This ease of access had the thrill of sacrilege: Each “discovery” was a sign of sabotage in the guise of a fix. I saw Thaemlitz as addressing my own ambivalence about so-called counterculture—a commodity as well as a refuge from commerce, a source of disenchantment as well as “collective effervescence,” in Émile Durkheim’s words.
Several of Thaemlitz’s essays from the 2000s undercut the naive techno-optimism of the “free culture” movement via portraits of the artist caught in the constant churn of production, self-promotion, and gigging, leaving little room for experiments (or relationships) that do not lead to outputs. The process is familiar to most who attempt to live off culture: Time and labor are directed away from the social bodies that animate the work and toward “exposure”—the promise of capturing the attention of untold strangers and earning an income from the clicks. Exhaustion, alienation, and precarity are the typical results. Thaemlitz argues that the promiscuous, anonymous distribution of music is at odds with the deliberate, collaborative formation of subcultures, especially if those “subordinate groups” serve to express perspectives that are taken to be deviant or dangerous. She describes her music as belonging to “minor genres” not meant for “broad and indiscriminate distribution”; she puts out limited-edition releases via her long-running label Comatonse, whose antiquated website doubles as a shop and clearinghouse for her writing.
As streaming platforms overtook the music industry, Thaemlitz fought to keep her music offline, perfecting the art of the takedown notice while assuring commenters that she wasn’t policing access but acting on principles. Her aversion to Spotify, YouTube, et al has to do with her pursuit of listeners who understand that subcultures are built on the “collective power” of individuals to exercise “restraint and cooperation.” Thaemlitz points to the risks of incautiously circulating materials that identify artists and audiences as queer, trans, or otherwise aberrant. She resists the documentation of her DJ sets and talks for the same reason, if also to allow for freedom of expression and a shared sense of presence. In “Naisho Wave Manifesto (Secrecy Wave Manifesto)” (2016), she argues that the fantasy of mass appeal has led to the loss of “skills for understanding the value of secrets,” which have “protective power” and foster meaningful, enduring bonds based on “social responsibilities.” Scale is part of the problem, but so is the trade-off between publicity and intimacy. Why harbor a sense of investment or stewardship in culture if access is as free and frictionless as turning on a faucet? As artists are pressured to set aside substantive relationships and chase after streams, the character of the audience (and music) is altered: The balance shifts from those who share secrets to those who relish access to the rarefied realms in which secrets are currency. Eventually, the music comes to be seen as “universal”—as meaningful and claimable to the bourgeois bohemians dining at Public Records as to Thaemlitz herself.
***
Thaemlitz insists on the “hyper-specific” character of house music, which she traces to “transgender sex work, black-market hormones, […] racism, HIV, ACT-UP, Tompkins Square Park, police brutality, queer-bashing,” and so on. These phenomena have imprinted the genre much as field work, “invisible churches,” and ceaseless surveillance shaped the blues. The common experiences of artists and audiences may not be directly reflected in the 120-beats-per-minute tempo, booming kick drums, resonant synth riffs, and rhapsodic vocals, but they are crucial to understanding the longing for transcendence: a will to escape from particular material conditions, emotional states, and, inevitably, people; a melancholic wish to overcome isolation and dejection in concert with those who share the same burdens and desires.
How to stay true to these experiences and conditions without turning every DJ set into an exercise in sorting insiders and outsiders, or forsaking the idea of a present-day audience that gives life to the music? In her essays, Thaemlitz expresses no interest in the question of who has the right to listen and why, much less in catering to nostalgia. While striving to limit the circulation of her music, she appears at clubs, festivals, museums, and exhibitions where the audiences could hardly share an identity formed in opposition to the status quo (or be seeking a history lesson). But Thaemlitz’s music is nothing if not a bid to fully inhabit such contradictions: She evokes the “soulfulness” of house only to question the emotional effect, substituting the standard, gospel-inflected calls to “work it” with mangled monologues on the conditions of labor. The first time I saw Thaemlitz, at a bare-bones club in Brooklyn in 2016, she spent a couple of hours ushering listeners down the familiar, sweat-soaked arc toward oblivion only to pull them back from the brink, bending the curve into a question mark. She stripped out the layers of percussion until the rhythm had been submerged by rumbling bass notes and reverberant electric-piano chords that crisscrossed the club, falling into and out of sync. Thaemlitz made a similar gamble when I saw her DJ at Public Records in 2022, morphing a classic crescendo into a tempest of bongos, horns, and distorted guitar licks, then settling into a riotous hour of cumbia-tinged electric free jazz.
On both nights, I sensed that I was being confronted with my own rehearsal of losing myself. I felt a prick of self-consciousness as I lost the rhythm and wondered what to do with my body. Then I realized I was being asked to do with intention what I’d already been doing by rote. When I began to move again, I turned to others who seemed to be committing to the same exercise and I understood that we were discovering a new feeling in a familiar form. I was reminded that profound pleasures often emerge from discomfiting paradoxes, especially in the realm of nightlife. As Goetz’s narrator in Rave often says with unnerving flatness after such dance-floor revelations: “Totally cool.”
Typically, I’d undercut myself at moments like this out of anxiety. I’d ask: How real is the feeling of liberation and fellowship concocted by a middle-aged DJ who pays the bills by playing her own greatest hits—or Gayest Tits & Greyest Shits, to name Sprinkles’s 2021 compilation—for crowds of cultural professionals at the behest of venture-capital-backed hospitality groups and plutocrat-funded museums? After Thaemlitz’s sets, however, I felt that the question could just as well be phrased as a realization: How real! The suspicion and affirmation seemed to be at odds, but holding them both in mind (and body) at once allowed me to shrug off the dichotomy between buzzkill and vibe hound. Goetz devotes much of Rave to navigating these states, fixating on—and, eventually, relishing—the incommensurability of discourse and experience: “Everyone here acts like everything is different from what it is,” he writes of ravers. “That is the enigmatic appeal to the dignity of nocturnal ferment and endless celebration. Its irreducibly local and at the same time, yeah, that’s right, utopian dimension.”
LV’s pre-spring 2023 collection inspired by David Mancuso
***
Most chronicles of nightlife traffic in hagiography, boosterism, and fables of revolution sparked by inclusion: Outcasts journey to the club and find not only themselves but a community, and that community ends up changing music, if not the world. Even Tim Lawrence’s measured, admirable account of the disco decade, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979 (2004), elevates David Mancuso—the impresario and DJ who in 1970 initiated the legendary Loft party at his Manhattan home—into a social visionary who modeled multicultural, cybernetic democracy through his composition of bodies and sounds, birthing the “nightworld.” Mancuso sought harmony by way of heterogeneity, an ideal often lost in romantic narratives of countercultural movements as community-building exercises—as if community is not a locus of conformity, a constraint as often as a path to emancipation.[6] But the story of his psychedelic Gesamtkunstwerk leads, inexorably, to commodification and displacement, i.e., to the 1977 opening of Studio 54, a carnivalesque perversion of the Loft cofounded by Ian Schrager, an entrepreneur who’d become famous for swanky clubs and boutique hotels decked out with site-specific installations by artists. Studio 54 recruited dancers, DJs, and hi-fi gurus from Mancuso’s scene to supply ambience for the actual clientele: socialites, celebrities, and hustlers who showed up for the spectacle and networking. Donald Trump was a regular, of course, breezing past the velvet rope with his consigliere, Roy Cohn, preening for the paparazzi, and dishing for the gossip pages. According to Schrager, Trump never set foot on the dance floor, preferring to ogle the models and starlets from a safe distance.
Since Schrager repackaged the Loft as a strobe-lit Shangri-La for Trump’s gang, EDM has become an $11.3 billion global market. Seeking authentic nightlife figures as brand reps, Red Bull, Tiffany & Co., and others have enlisted unsung pioneers of disco and house: The jeweler teamed up with Beyoncé for the Renaissance-era “Lose Yourself in Love” campaign, trying the HardWear collection of diamond bracelets to the DJs and producers who soundtracked the AIDS crisis. The collaboration earned Tiffany—a leading advocate for heterosexual marriage as a luxury product—“an estimated social media value of $9 million,” according to AdAge. Mancuso got the same treatment six years after his death, when Louis Vuitton hijacked his legacy for the late designer and DJ Virgil Abloh’s “Fall in Love” collection, a fatuous tribute to the Loft’s “ideas of anti-prejudice and egalitarianism,” courtesy of a $140 billion conglomerate.
To be a successful, self-conscious DJ who serves not only as a selector but an avatar of a subculture is to play a role in the distillation of dissidence into a style, a brand experience. In The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012), Sarah Schulman links this process to a ‘gentrification mentality,’ which normalizes a belief in ‘obedience to consumer identity’ over 'recognition of lived experience’. Thaemlitz echoes Schulman’s view of the conversion of subcultures into products (to be flaunted by outsiders) in her polemics and often says she wants to quit DJing. Thanks to her status as a house-music icon, though she’s able to make a living from a handful of gigs per year. She may wish to exit the nightlife-industrial complex, but she’s constrained by her bank account and, I suppose, her identity as an embedded commentator. In a 2021 interview, she said, “I see what I do as an act of cultural criticism, music criticism, and media criticism while operating from within” those domains.
Fittingly, Thaemlitz seemed entirely at ease behind the decks at the Nursery. Stationed in a DJ booth resembling a Scandinavian cabin crossed with a high-design hot dog stand, she chatted with friends and surveyed the dance floor through a rectangular cutout, flashing an occasional smile at the crowd. For a couple hours, I stood on a miniature promontory across the yard, sipping mezcal-and-sodas, studying and mimicking the dancers. The garden was more of a refurbished handball court than a showcase for cutting-edge landscape architecture: a few spindly saplings scattered around vast slabs of concrete. How was the music? I’m really not sure. I remember gazing at Thaemlitz as she navigated the board in a white V-neck and aviators, nodding my head, shuffling my feet, and feeling that I’d stepped into a mesh of background layers. I must have internalized Thaemlitz’s observation that “music is usually one of the least interesting things about clubs”—I let my attention drift to the sunlit crowd and setting.
Opening party of Taipei Biennial 2023
Several months later, I joined Thaemlitz for a conversation as part of the opening of the 2023 Taipei Biennial, which culminated with a DJ Sprinkles set in the museum’s courtyard. After summarizing her case against the ersatz utopianism that characterizes much of the culture industry, Thaemlitz was asked by an audience member to sketch out an alternative; she declined, citing her own nihilism and the common abuse of hope to distract from material conditions. She went on to acknowledge that constantly monitoring streaming platforms and file-sharing sites had become so onerous as to discourage her from releasing, or even producing, new music on a regular basis.
I wondered if Thaemlitz was gradually withdrawing from the cultural and economic spheres that she finds objectionable so as to avoid validating them (and degrading herself). Withdrawal tends to be thought of as a sign of passivity, avoidance, or complacency, accompanied by anxiety around negotiating or cooperating with people who don’t share the same views—the antithesis of politics. In Politics and Negation: For an Affirmative Philosophy (2019), though, Roberto Esposito reclaims withdrawal as a strategy for opposing the relentless pressure to participate in order to win representation, while investing in sources of meaning and togetherness that exist on the margins. Looking beyond the binary of action and inaction, engagement and retreat, Esposito advocates for a “radical non-opposition” that “exposes the limits, the saturation, of the status quo,” and allows for dissent to go beyond fighting for change or speculating on the future. But Thaemlitz was skeptical of the concept: Where would we go, if not to a crypto-powered private island? How could we escape the circumstances that not only define us but form the basis for solidarity?
Thaemlitz landed in Taipei a month after Israel began to bombard Gaza, and several artists in the biennial had already been punished for expressing solidarity with Palestinians. Coincidentally, she had been publishing essays railing against institutions for censorship and hypocrisy, focusing on Germany, where a landmark exhibition of her work had prompted a critic to accuse her of “echo[ing] unchallenged arguments of anti-trans disinformation about the alleged danger of puberty-blocking drugs.”[7] With some bewilderment, Thaemlitz recounted conferences with German academics where she’d been recruited to express views that were off limits (or off-color) to the professors, spicing up the discourse with accounts of how trans people conceive of themselves when they aren’t serving as illustrations for theoretical frameworks. She, too, was guilty of “critique affirming its object,” but she’d at least figured out how to get away with something close to pure negation. When asked to describe the role she’s assumed, Thaemlitz paused, lowered her eyes, scratched her chin, and replied with a guilty smile: “Artist.”
The night before, Thaemlitz had appeared on a rented stage in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s sunken concrete courtyard as entertainment for the opening celebration. Waves of visitors wandered back and forth between the bar and courtyard as Thaemlitz played spare, spacey tracks. Gathering in semicircular islands beneath the party lights, the attendees chatted, drank, and eyed the stage, seeking guidance. Thaemlitz kept her head down and cycled through moods, content for the music to remain in the background. I couldn’t blame her; the event might as well have been an illustration from one of her essays on the denaturing of culture. After half an hour, though, she seemed to overcome the randomness of the situation: She transitioned to buoyant, busy rhythms with punchy bass lines and commanding melodies. She added layer after layer to the mix, as if to test how many voices could be yoked together before they resolved into a thrumming chord or fell into noise. Soon the music was teeming with color and warm with distortion, clamorous and tender.
With the crowd coming to life, I thought of the Loft and Mancuso, who often said, “I don’t play the music, the music plays me.” And what is the music if not the audience—a transitory congress of the beloved and unknown, a song that sounds different every time? Familiar themes take on unexpected traits as they jostle for bandwidth in the mix; notes fray, meters blur, and signals clip. Fittingly, as Thaemlitz neared the two-hour mark, the thunderous mass of tones and textures morphed into a single sound, migrating from speakers mounted on trusses around the courtyard to a central point: a nuclear-powered jukebox floating above the stage. Suddenly, sensing a meltdown, she killed the volume, faced the floor, and began to clap, feverishly echoing the rhythm. The crowd followed, supplanting the clattering pulse of cymbals with a chorus of palms slapping palms.
Keeping time with my hands, I thought of myself among the crowd downing cocktails at the Nursery and the fans downloading DJ Sprinkles releases from online forums (RIP, FunkySouls.org). I imagined Thaemlitz’s circular chats with YouTube customer service and tiresome threads with users, her rationalization of takedown requests via links to six-thousand-word essays. And I saw Thaemlitz go from playing for an absent audience to assembling one from the clusters of lanyard-clad partygoers, from the hissing and buzzing artifacts of her former world. Then the lights went off, the crowd fractured, and the museum shut down; I was back at my hotel by midnight.
[1] “The revolution will not be brought to you by the Guggenheim, Whitney, MOMA or Tate, and will not star Jack Halberstam reading Gaga Manifesto then preaching mob mentality by quipping a million people liking Lady Gaga must mean there’s something to it,” Thaemlitz writes in “The Revolution Will Not Be Injected” (2015). “The revolution will not thank wealthy patrons of the arts.”
[2] Thaemlitz won an “underground Grammy” in 1991 for her yearlong residency at the transsexual bar Sallys II, which she later described as a “site of education, where people could share information about their transitioning experiences,” and of “types of sexual enactment” that were taboo beyond such clubs.
[3] The artist Tony Cokes’s video trilogy SM BNGRZ (2021) relies on quotes from Rave and echoes Goetz’s account of nightlife as a site of communion and contradiction, with self-expression shadowed by the commercialization of club culture, the codification of desires and identities in service of capital.
[4] The internet has also cemented the fact that order is not imposed by a single, discernible force, and expressions of dissent are as various and ineffable as the infrastructures of exploitation. The critic Caroline Busta argues that “to be truly countercultural” in the age of platform capitalism is to “betray the platform,” which often means “betraying or divesting from your public online self.”
[5] Hutchinson, a co-founder of the Discwoman collective and booking agency, began Dweller—a festival devoted to Black electronic music, accompanied by a publishing platform—in 2020. “It’s hard to know what to do when you’ve been treated poorly by white peers as there’s no infrastructure to support you let alone believe you,” she writes. “This is an isolating experience, which is precisely a function of white supremacy: to distance you from any support by undermining your experience.”
[6] To extend the Loft beyond a single scene or demographic while maintaining a sense of camaraderie, Mancuso had regulars sign up as members and invite a limited number of guests, who could in turn become members. The result was an amalgamation of freaks, nine-to-fivers, hand-to-mouth bohemians, and record-label scouts who may never have crossed paths outside the party but counted themselves as belonging.
[7] The review, published in Texte Zur Kunst, focused on comments that Thaemlitz had allegedly made at an event related to the exhibition. She posted a lengthy letter to the editor on Comatonse’s website as well as two notes following the magazine’s response.
