During a recent interview, fearless storyteller Adele Bertei told Random Lengths News, “There’s never been an artistic movement in history where there were so many women involved.”
The queer cultural icon was speaking specifically about the radical No Wave music, art and experimental film scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s in downtown Manhattan.
“If you think about the Beats, or the 1920s Paris artists and writers, or the 1890s in France, there were all these very important artistic movements that kind of shifted the needle, culturally, but the women were pretty much absent,” Bertei said (or often relegated to the sidelines). “There might be one or two … whereas in New York at that moment, there were just as many women creating work as there were men, and it was also very cross-genre.”
This Saturday, on June 27, Bertei will be discussing her memoir, No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene, at The Den San Pedro. The discussion will be moderated by acclaimed music journalist Evelyn McDonnell.
No New York reveals the untold story of the boundary-pushing women who made No Wave possible: Nan Goldin capturing flash-lit portraits of gender fluidity, Barbara Kruger deconstructing media, Kiki Smith exploring the body’s mysteries, and Lizzie Borden challenging cinema itself.
Bertei, known for her bold creativity, has shaped underground culture for decades. She moved to New York in 1977 and became a pivotal figure in the No Wave movement. An original member of the Contortions, included on the seminal No New York album produced by Brian Eno, Bertei also starred in underground films, including Born In Flames by Lizzie Borden; opened for writers like William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Kathy Acker; and toured with The Bloods — America’s first openly queer all-girl band.
“The importance of this book [is] crucial,” said Bertei.
Bertei wrote No New York because she did not want the history of the women who were so influential and creative and such trailblazers during that moment in time and geography to disappear.
Women were making films, writing and reading poetry, and were band members in a cross collaborative atmosphere. It also was different from punk rock as punk was about music, the artist noted. While the scene today has not manifested such a group of artists, working cross collaboratively, in one specific geographic spot, Bertei sees many more women producing work, being courageous about it and outspoken. She posited it’s happening as a backlash to all of the restrictions this country has been hit with recently, politically.
“Through the global connectivity we can have a community that’s far, far more rhizomatic and connected across boundaries than what it was back then,” Bertei said.
No New York is for anyone interested in cultural artistic movements that were more on the revolutionary side, Bertei explained. And it’s for young women who might glean some inspiration from what women artists were doing back then.
The book features 55 rarely seen photos from Bertei’s collection and other artists like Nan Goldin and Richard Prince. It also includes profiles and stories about figures like Lydia Lunch, Lizzie Borden, Pat Place, and Kathy Acker.
“It’s for music lovers, art lovers and, in some ways, it’s also a cautionary tale,” she said.
As a young artist, Bertei recalled thinking that you had to experience the dark side in order to make great art, in terms of doing drugs and frequenting those types of places. That’s not true, she said. Many people she knew in that scene died young because of drug addiction and “bad lifestyles.”
“You do not have to go to those extremes to make art, but you do need to be able to be brave and allow your vulnerabilities to direct what you want to express and not be afraid of what other people might think,” Bertei said. “That’s artistic death. As an artist, you have to be brave enough to be singular in your work and not play to the crowd. That is something that No Wave artists did back then.”
No New York delves into artistic and sexual experimentation, the collision of punk and art, and the transition from the underground to the mainstream music industry. The book amplifies what Bertei noted is largely missing in today’s music scene, a lot of innovation or passion.
“There are people, like ROSALÍA who’s absolutely brilliant and is taking aspects of mysticism and different cultures and putting them into her work in a very theatrical, very passionate way that I don’t see a lot of young artists doing,” Bertei said.
Bertei hopes that people would want to take risks more.
“Perhaps people can be inspired by the fact that human connection is so important to collaboration and art, you need to be with other people, be inspired by other people, and work with other people,” she said.
In No New York, Bertei discusses being Brian Eno’s assistant. Recently, he was giving a talk where he discussed the idea of genius; he came up with a concept that he calls “scenius.”
Eno said, “[Famous] artists lived and drew from a very, very active flourishing cultural scene. And they were only one of the elements in that scene. All these people that were called genius actually sat in the middle of something that I call ‘scenius.’ So, just as genius is the creative intelligence of an individual, scenius is the creative intelligence of a community.”
Bertei said this idea is just as important to art as the specific person who might evolve from it.
Bertei said what astonishes her about young artists today is that with a cell phone, they can make movies and distribute them on YouTube, or there’s a myriad of ways to get work out there and make films for little to no money on a phone.
“Instead of using the phone as an active participant in making art, people are being passively addicted to it,” she said. “Hypnotized by the scroll and Instagram … where they could be using it as an instrument of artistic liberation. It’s there. And it’s just like when we made Born in Flames which became a feminist classic. Lizzie Borden made that film on a shoestring. She would get extra loose ends from the film schools. Whenever she could get a little bit of film … we [might] not shoot for two months … but [we’d] jump in the car and go. It was very guerilla, very DIY.”
The artists never thought that that film would one day be on Criterion or showing in film festivals or universities all over the world, Bertei said, but they took that risk together.
The memoir recenters the narrative on the fearless women who defined the movement, challenging traditional histories. Bertei said women back then were breaking paradigms about what they could say and what their gendered expectations were telling them they couldn’t say.
“There was bravery in terms of what we were coming out with, like, Born in Flames,” she said. “Jenny Holzer’s work, Kiki Smith, Nan Goldin, Lizzy Mercier, all these women were saying things that had never been heard before from women artists.”
We are in a very sensorial moment, Bertei said, because of cancel culture, the judgment of everyone and everybody sniping at each other; people and women are scared to talk about how they really feel.
“There are the brave ones but I think there’s been this cultural push — on the left too — to watch what you say, or don’t say the wrong thing,” she said. “ … Language is being policed in a very upsetting way right now.”
She noted it was also a very sensorial moment in the 1970s to the early ’80s.
“When Reagan came into power in the ’80s, that’s when the scene started to dissipate,” she said. “A lot of things started to happen in the early ’80s that crushed us. It was AIDS, it was the influx of heroin into our neighborhood. They did the same thing to Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, flooded Harlem with heroin, suddenly it was on every corner. That happened to downtown New York too.
“The only way we’re ever going to accomplish an equitable society is by getting together, LGBTQ people with Black people, with Latino and LatinX people. We all have to come together and stop seeing ourselves as these satellites.”
Join the discussion at The Den San Pedro
Time: 3 to 5 p.m., June 27
Cost: Free
Details: https://www.thedensanpedro.com
Venue: The Den, 1126 W. 37th St., San Pedro
[…] in history where there were so many women involved,” Adele Bertei tells Melina Paris in the new issue of Random Lengths News. She’s possibly being hyperbolic, but there’s no doubt that Downtown New […]