This is the 12th blog post in my memoir project. It is a detour to mark a recent and painful passing.
Cara Perlman, an ex-Colabber and a filmmaker who runs Seaperl Productions, appeared to me in a dream. She said, "Hey, we're all dying. You better get busy." And so it happens…
Barbara Ess, 1944-2021, was celebrated with obituaries in Art News and the NY Times, as befits a long-time professor of art, esteemed photographer. And erstwhile influential musician.
Barbara was one of a number of people circulating around Colab in its earliest days, more specifically a crowd of bold exciting woman artists. I met her at Coleen Fitzgibbon’s storefront ca. 1978 during the Just Another Asshole magazine assembling/exhibition event which she produced with Jane Sherry.
Just Another Asshole, We
Imagine calling a magazine “Just Another Asshole”! Punks were post-Beat for real. So many Beats were serious assholes – and nearly all male chauvinists. So this is a magazine full of other assholes. Perfect. So are we all, and so should we be aware of how we use our assholery properly or improperly, against each other.
I saw Barbara again in her apartment a few blocks from mine. I was bringing her my layout for JAA. Barbara lived there with Glenn Branca (1948-2018), the cult composer.
Glenn was revered by many young musicians. Howie Seligman fondly recalls performing as one of the 100 guitarists at the World Trade Center for a Branca concert. When I met Glenn at their kitchen table, he was filling his role as the punk Beethoven. He was shabbily dressed (as ever), and glowered rather than conversed.
More Famous than Me
Paul McMahon, who acted as a musician (he was) in my uncompleted movie “Party Noise”, was in a band called Daily Life with both Glenn and Barbara. Paul recalls, "Glenn was always wearing dirty, black clothes, in layers, like really dirty and sort of tattered, though elegant, somehow. He claimed he found everything on the street, abandoned for whatever reason. He’d just put it on without washing it first."
"Barbara’s songs were like screamed mantras,” Paul writes: “‘No work, no job, no love and no money’, ‘Be my mother be my father be my sister be my brother’ repeated over and over with a steady, on the beat, rhythm led by her bass."
Barbara had a nervous intense manner. I noticed as she spoke how much we seemed to resemble each other physically. In our subsequent brief encounters over the years there was this same odd tension.
Babies and Tintypes
I saw her again years later when she came out to Staten Island to do a pinhole camera photo of our baby Taylor in front of the white rosebush. She was doing babies, probably with a pinhole Polaroid since I saw a proof of our featureless infant in front of an explosion of white spots. I was never able to get a copy.
Barbara called me some time later to ask if I’d do a talk to her class at Bard College about my collection of antique photos. I accumulated many of these as I drifted through countless country antique stores, fingering sheafs of old images, enchanted by the dead. I studied up on what I knew about old photography, which was almost nothing, but she never called back.
Barbara Ess, Untitled, 1991
Famous For Being Unknown
Barbara was a key actor in that late ‘70s circle of artist musicians. Her final days with a suddenly diagnosed fast-acting cancer, rather like being hit by an intercellular truck, were reported on social media by her friend Virge Piersol. They were both in the seminal [?! oh, how wrong] avant-girl band Y Pants which Barbara started. That group was one of many in the music/art underground celebrated in Thurston Moore’s book No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 (2008).
These were people who really had no interest in making it in the “music industry”, still the game-controller in those days.
Ed Halter, a film historian and Ess’s colleague at Bard, notes that Y Pants was praised by conceptual art and No Wave art rock fanboy and producer Dan Graham for their “percussive primitivism and girl vocal teasing playfulness”.
Y Pants: Left to right, Virge Piersol, Barbara Ess, and Gail Vachon
Poets Who Know It
Barbara also performed with Barbara Barg (1947-2018), another super-cool woman poet I knew through work-work (typesetting). The wave of poets who made up art-rock bands during those years has been documented by Daniel Kane in his book "Do You Have a Band?" Poetry and Punk Rock in NYC (2017).
The Ess/Barg collaboration was on the first issue of Tellus, the audio cassette magazine started by Joseph Nechvatal, Claudia Gould, and Carol Parkinson. They recorded at PASS, the studio Carol managed. Joseph was in Colab, so the ABC No Rio Cardboard Air Band also recorded for Tellus at PASS. I wrote some CAB songs, but I wasn’t really into the music track.
I was minimally trained on guitar by a guy who was fired from Creedence. So now that’s another thing to regret from those days, that I didn’t whip out my toy piano, kalimba and broken bongos and join in the party on stage. Or at least been more of a fan-boy of art-rock.
Unlike me, Barbara was not a hanging-out person, so although her path during those late ‘70s-early ‘80s years intersected with a lot of my friends, I didn’t see her outside of specific contacts.
Long Time Gone
The search term "Barbara Ess" leads to a wormhole of independent music afficionadoes as well as the more well-groomed artworld that admires -- and sells -- her pictures. Izzy Leung, once her student at Bard, wrote for Aperture the journal of canonical photography, about her recent show around the aesthetics of surveillance.
Her themes were deep. Leung quotes her: “I asked someone once, how is the world where you are not? You never know… When you walk out of a room, what’s it like when you’re not there?”
Bomb magazine remembers her with a quote: “When I try to get clever I fail, so I stick with the basic issues of human life on earth - sex, death, relationships, discovering who you are, being hurt and confused.”
Just another lovable person, and a wonderful profound artist.
LINKS
Paul McMahon, "Daily Life"
http://paulmcmahon.tv/daily-life/
Barbara Ess & Barbara Barg - “You Who Know Pain (No Wave)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffd-PRhS-aA
Daniel Kane in his book "Do You Have a Band?" Poetry and Punk Rock in NYC
introduction on Issu
https://issuu.com/columbiaup/docs/kane-punk-poetry-excerpt
Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tellus_Audio_Cassette_Magazine
Y Pants music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToXqAkGauoQ
Just Another Asshole #6
sold out
Just Another Asshole was an influential and now-legendary mixed-media publication series edited by Barbara Ess from 1978 to 1987.
https://primaryinformation.org/product/just-another-asshole/
Ed Halter, commentary from Meshes of the Afternooon blog at:
http://mylifeandprophecies.blogspot.com/2008_01_15_archive.html
Barbara Ess, Peekaboo, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Magenta Plains, New York
