No Wave Woman

Imagine New York City in the summer of 1977, recovering from financial collapse.

While serial killer David Berkowitz prowled rat- and garbage-infested streets, lightning struck and caused a 25-hour blackout, leading to riots and fires. Against—and in response to—this dystopian backdrop, the no wave movement took shape within derelict apartments and makeshift performance spaces across Downtown Manhattan.

No wave—an avant-garde, anti-commercial community of musicians and filmmakers creating obscure, abrasive work in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Downtown New York City—has recently sparked new interest. Adele Bertei, a no wave musician and former personal assistant to Brian Eno, published No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene in March. Nova ’78, a documentary about the three-day 1978 Nova Convention centered on Naked Lunch author William S. Burroughs, featuring performances by no wave artists, was released last year.

At the Getty Center on Friday, October 23, guests can attend a special screening of Nova ’78. After the screening, no wave artist Julia Heyward—who co-emceed the Nova Convention—will perform her electronic-vocal monologue from the now-legendary event that brought Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Anne Waldman, Frank Zappa, and Patti Smith to the stage at the East Village’s Entermedia Theater.

Heyward, known then for her monologue-based pieces at venues like The Kitchen (a seminal arts venue originally housed in the former kitchen of Mercer Arts Center in Greenwich Village), mixed modalities like spoken word, chanting, and even Mongolian throat singing and sub-Saharan African yodeling to confront themes like feminism, class, and religion. In the late ’70s she formed a band called T-Venus, and later, when the MTV era exploded onto televisions, she coedited the music video for “Burning Down the House” (1983) by Talking Heads.

In advance of the upcoming Getty performance, Heyward reflected on her role in the no wave movement and how women, previously known to the music scene more as wives and muses, contributed to its creative power.

What do you remember most about the 1970s and 1980s downtown art scene in New York?

Julia Heyward: Downtown New York during the ’70s still had the left politics of the ’60s, which we infused into mixing and matching forms and disciplines. Dancers were talking, avant-garde composers were looking to developing countries for ideas, visual artists were forming bands but didn’t necessarily know how to play their instruments (but somehow did). I was making multimedia performances mixing film with slides and theatrical elements. This work became known as performance art. The monologues we were performing became known a decade later as spoken word. It was planting season, and there were lots of seeds.

How did you get involved with the Nova Convention?

Heyward: I think adding Laurie Anderson and me to the bill as the emcees was likely Rebecca Christensen Litman’s idea. She was one of the producers of the event and is prominently featured in the film. They clearly needed more females, with only Anne Waldman and Patti Smith on the bill.

What inspired your haunting monologue “Keep Moving Buddy,” which was performed at the Nova Convention and during an October 4 event at the Getty Center?

Heyward: It is clearly political centering around class and power. We rejected the nihilism of the disco drug culture that also inhabited downtown clubs. The punk scene took different tools to react to middle-class stagnation. I took words as my weapon.

How did you learn the vocal manipulations of Mongolian throat singing?

Heyward: I was turned onto some early recordings of Mongolian throat singing by [composer] David Hykes. He had an overtone choir that I was briefly a part of. I listened to that recording for years, trying to achieve the amazing overtones and horn-like quality of the singing postures.

What was the crowd reaction and scene like at the Nova Convention?

Heyward: It was wild. It was the largest audience I had performed in front of at that point. The Beat poets had a large following in Lower Manhattan—they turned out en masse and reacted with crazy enthusiasm.

Sarah Cooper, senior public programs specialist and organizer of the Getty event, explained that no wave happened at a point when women were becoming protagonists, not just wives and muses. Do you agree?

Heyward: Yes. The punk music and no wave scenes were dominated by women. Lydia Lunch, the Slits, Patti Smith, the Bloods, the Bush Tetras. All-girl bands were everywhere, and it was a new thing.

Performance art (the scene I was a part of) was dominated by women who were ignored in other mediums. Joan Jonas and Carolee Schneemann were in their early 80s before they got the recognition and shows that they deserved in museums but were creating their own venues regardless. My favorite visual artists are women: Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, Hilma af Klint, Lee Bontecou. Some are from the early 20th century but took decades to be recognized—now they’re considered pioneers.

My generation changed that narrative a bit—Laurie Anderson [who has achieved lifelong recognition and numerous honors and prizes] is an example.

The Getty Research Institute holds many of your flyers, posters, and other ephemera for promoting no wave music and events. They’re energetic and artful themselves, created extremely inexpensively, right?

Heyward: “Poverty of means” is a term I use for making work with no money. I made those, and most of my work, without much support from grants. I made music videos for a while in the ’80s to support my performance art projects and was an adjunct college teacher after that. It took years to make my performances because of the wall-to-wall visual projections that were involved.

What are you working on today?

Heyward: I am making visual art and time-based work. I am working on a second part of my latest performance, which was co-written by my partner Perry Hoberman. I mostly determined the narrative, and we both wrote the music and produced the visuals. He was also the programmer for the interactivity. The visuals were controlled by an iPad and were panoramic.

I am as surprised as anyone about the new interest in my work in Europe. I just had two shows in Germany, one in Nuremberg and one in Münster. Both focused on my media work. We did small, simple performances similar to the no wave shows. No extended band or visuals. They were hungry for this work. The shows just won some kind of first prize for exhibitions in Germany. I am still surprised after years of being forgotten.

What was it like seeing the Nova Convention film?

Heyward: I was taken back to the ’70s, which was nice. I think Laurie and I brought the future to the event, as did Ed Sanders, with our focus on electronics. His performance [of the “Hymn to Aphrodite” while playing the pulse-lyre] was astounding, and he can actually sing.

What did the term “no wave” mean to you?

Heyward: It is a reaction to the banality of disco. It was also a reaction to machine music, which disco represented. If we used technology, we weren’t enslaved to it like the drum machine music.