Ariadne Randall

In some sense, I think my artistic practice has always been about navigating the intransigence of matter. Finding modes of expression that are suitable to the materials. Discovering limitations and dancing with them to create form. If the experience of meaning is articulated through form, that dance is already something.

My first dream was to become a jazz pianist. I studied this, but when I began conservatory, I suffered a terrible injury and was unable to play for years. So, I dedicated myself to electronic music, composition, and singing. I pursued this all the way through to a sound art degree at Bard MFA – a wonderful kind of post-Black Mountain College environment in upstate New York. There was a nice rhyme here: as a teenager, I convinced a British New Music magazine I was a respectable reviewer. Pure chutzpah from a country girl. They sent me weird CDs – and in a way, I spent my early life looking for their source, much of it around the Black Mountain folks. 

So my focus for about a decade was experimental techno and the long tradition of American experimental text/music performance – people like John Giorno, Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley. I studied with and worked alongside people from that world. At the same time, I was making visual art, poetry, and performing in my friends’ pieces – Colin Self, for example. I ran a little radio station and hosted Dreamcrusher, Eartheater, Umfang. It was cunt and DIY.

The other thread was Zen Buddhism, which I apprenticed in for ten years with the intention to teach. The tradition is deep, playful, serious, and not for me to talk about. I’d say it mostly solves the deep human problems and leaves you with living. That might be an improvement. A sidecar to this was a lot of the kind of post-Jungian depth psychology you don’t much find in Europe. (Throw a rock in the woods in Northern California and you’ll hit a monastery and a Jungian, probably at the same time.) I like those weirdos because they actually do some of the things Jung did and had to lie about to stay respectable. Overwhelming visions, mysterious ecstasies, painting, talking to people who aren’t there. (Some call it “Saturday”.) The old Chan masters were also navigating times of change not unlike our own, and their answer was, in a sense: poetry. Maybe they were on to something. Anyway, I had to be an artist and not a teacher or therapist. Soul is ruthless with one’s life. It plays for keeps. Surfboard optional.

Ariadne Randall

Though no one will ever believe me now that she’s involved, the Reverse Cowgirl title actually had nothing to do with her at first. I was at a queer thrift market in Brooklyn, and a friend handed me this really cunty, cut-up, tasseled T-shirt with real country fringes. Bleached onto it, backwards and handwritten, was the word COWGIRL. When I saw it, I had just come out as trans, and I immediately flashed back to my childhood on a farm in Arkansas, in a very conservative, evangelical, apocalyptic religious universe. My life flashed before my eyes, and I thought – Oh, it’s me. I am that. Later that evening, I realized – Of course, I’ve already read McKenzie’s book. I’m doomed. This will be associated with her forever! And at that time, she wasn’t even involved yet.

I agree with you that McKenzie is an important thinker for our times. We don’t need me to say it, but I find she thinks around and through the matters of capital and post-capital in a way that cuts through received niceties and academic formalisms – without lacking rigor. Thinkers like that are rare in any time. It’s bracing work, cutting through, and takes courage and precision. Trans people know about the cut.

Anyway, the first Cowgirl work, Reverse Cowgirl (Beta), was about pre-transition, preparing for transition, what one might leave behind – in my case: a lot of heavy Evangelical things, and things related to masculine presentation. A different cut. When I started working on Reverse Cowgirl II, I realized – Of course, I need to reach out to McKenzie. And I did. We talked, and here we are. For this work, I asked here to write a new text and to read and perform the text. For a variety of practical reasons, this is a filmed contribution, although she will be here that week and we’ll give some lectures.

Ariadne Randall

I think that Raving is an important book for many people now. I feel that her writing about raving and the – let’s not say utopian, but alternative – social possibilities of the rave, particularly from a trans/femme perspective, seem very much to resonate. There is an aspect in my performance that deals with this idea of rave as a space for alterity, for difference, for women, for queer, for trans, for all variety of folk to build a temporary world together. This will be explored in the piece.

There also is a long personal connection. I discovered queer raves early this millenium in the more Breaking-Bad-esque parts of California, trance synths and illegal generators lighting up the desert sky as the sun rose over military bases filled with instruments of death. Later, astonishingly good parties in New York – the Spectrum and Ghetto Gothic parties were around the corner from my flat, and their impact is still everywhere, really. Later, Berlin. I first saw McKenzie in person in these environments as well. Still an egg and with nothing much to show for myself but synthesisers and inchoate longing, I was afraid to talk to her. So it feels a bit like closing a circle.

Ariadne Randall

Something important to me about the piece is the presence of multiple generations of women of different kinds. There’s myself, a middle-aged trans woman. There's McKenzie Wark, a generation older. And my partner in the piece – which is a dance duet and performance duet – is a cisgender woman half my age, Nis Fee Brender. This intergenerational aspect is quite interesting to me. Not only for the implications of motherhood, sisterhood, mentoring, alternate or past selves, doppelgängers, and so on, but because there is a reason there are few trans* and queer elders. You don’t have to visit San Francisco to understand why. Trans history gets its false appearance of novelty, at least in Western culture, largely thanks to some rather local events.

The main dispositive of the piece, and the real trust fall on my part, was the early and deeply frightening decision to make the piece a dance duet between myself and a trained dancer. That’s Nis. Since we met and this project began, I’m really pleased that her own career has developed in ways that resonate with this work. She’s been Romeo Castellucci’s choreography assistant on several of his recent pieces and worked with Jonathan Burrows for her graduation thesis from SEAD in Salzburg. There’s a nice rhyme there. One of my first ways to try to understand the contemporary world of European dance/performance was 52 Portraits. I was fascinated by how Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion come to dance from a musical and almost game-theoretic perspective. It turns out that Nis, long after I asked her to be in this piece, became the first person to create a 53rd Portrait with them. And the first proper piece of European contemporary theatre I ever saw, aside from a Teatr Zar piece at UCLA, was a Romeo epic they somehow shipped over to New Jersey, when my friend Asa was working on the sound. We took the bus and my brain got melted. So those rhymes are delightful. and I'm really excited to be working with her.

Ariadne Randall

It’s been a big journey in itself, accepting the particularities of a voice – just as with the particularities of a body. Is my voice trans enough? What does it mean to be a woman with a baritone voice? What is my ‘own’ voice, what is a ‘character'? Does my voice have to pass? Do I have to pass? Trans folk often go through a period in which they try to lean into whatever the large cultural fantasy of X gender is, and sometimes then they decide that doesn’t quite fit. I recently asked myself a terrifying question: if I were a cis woman, what kind would I be? It’s strange, but one doesn’t ask oneself that until one does. My answer for now is that I wouldn’t look so different. I’d still have a shaved head and esoteric tattoos and wear boots fit for stomping. I’d still appear, perhaps, androgynous. That’s a woman too. One has to self-educate and self-make on this path, I think. The same as happens to anyone when they step away from an off-the-shelf life and towards a hand-made life. 

Self-made, but never alone. Unknown friends will come and seek you. I have a variety of degrees that present me in a certain way, but I was never a good student in any formal context, so I’m mainly self-taught. Maybe that helps me be a better teacher. Or listener, if I’m not monologuing in an interview. Making a voice. Anyway, voice is very present in Reverse Cowgirl II. Four women’s voices. All different. What’s more embodied than a voice? I mean, other than the physical presence of a body itself. Like sound, it’s inescapable.

Ariadne Randall

Well, you know, the last Reverse Cowgirl piece dealt a lot with my personal story. But in a way, I want this new piece to be about the present. Whatever American Gothic aspects my particular past may have is not the point. In the piece, we are women – here and now. Of course, my personal history is unavoidable as a shaping influence. But in general, I’m more interested in the present. Because there’s enough to say about that.

There’s walking down the street in Vienna – who looks at me? Who spits at me? Tells me I’ll go to hell, or worse? Who tells me I shouldn’t be here? Who says things in various languages, thinking I don’t understand? Who finds me exciting? The gay woman at the bar, the gay man at the bar, the straight man at the bar, the straight woman at the bar, none, all, neither? Who is angry if they are attracted to me? Who is confused? Who wants to hurt me when they feel that way? How is all that different from the hate one gets in other places? Who has it a lot worse than I do in all these ways and more?

There’s something about being transgender, in Vienna or most anywhere: whether or not you are interested in spectacle, you can be made to become one. That’s almost unavoidable here in the West. (And if you’re on the runway, babe, give them a show.) It’s partially a matter of statistics. The small percentage of the population that is transgender is quite vulnerable. We face systematic challenges – mental health, access to jobs, health care. We are often disconnected from our families of birth. That makes us an ideal political punching bag for those who want to create a specter.

Ariadne Randall

I’d say each place has its aesthetic markers and goals that can seem totalizing and self-evident. And often, these come from material conditions as well as much cultural factors. I learned that when I failed to make a music documentary in Iceland. I guess I’m both an inside and outside observer, in a way. If you’re totally inside you can’t see a thing but if you’re totally outside you don’t know how it works. In my case I’m totally wrong, so that’s having it both ways. Generalisations are reliably incomplete and misleading.

In the U.S., if we’re talking about large coastal cities – New York, L.A., San Francisco, the places that I spent much of my life in – the material conditions (to be a good Marxist about it) are profoundly different. Even in the before-times when I made these observations. The level of political and personal stress people are under is of a completely different order than what’s present here for most folks. The degree of fundamental insecurity – combined with effectively zero public funding for dance/performance – means that, for better or worse, there’s no middle class of creative work. Except for that which is sustained by academic tenure, adjunct exploitation, and things like that – exhausting. (Meanwhile, those who already have generational wealth ask us to shut our little mouths about it so they’re not embarrassed.) But one result of this rawness is that many people do not rely on outside approval. They build community. This can tend to make art vital. It’s got to be about inner necessity or you couldn’t bear the sacrifices required to get in the room to do it. Some of the best shows and performances I’ve ever played or witnessed happened for free in a basement with a bunch of friends. Maybe it’s been like that since forever – including the birth of opera, with the Florentine Camerata, a small group of people cosplaying as Greeks and making it up as they went. Of course, they were male aristocrats and the women around them were forced to wear bells so their purity could be tracked at all times – but the vibes were still weird. De Tocqueville pointed out the advantages of independent wealth in fostering eccentric art and cultural projects. I’m not for it, but it happens. A lot of what seems indie in the US is secretly funded, anyway: Sonic Youth’s first albums were paid for by Swiss millionaires. Not to mention Abstract Expressionism and the CIA. The pretension to bohemian origins is another kind of cosplay. For the rest of us, there is a lot of work to do. Structural violence runs deep.

Ariadne Randall

Oh, honey. Yes. Always. A girl’s gotta work.

I hope to make two more Reverse Cowgirl pieces. The third, Fresh Out of Forgiveness, will be a trio, including an AMAB dancer. Imagine Dolly Parton meets Versailles in my grandfather’s illegal moonshine bar in the rural American South.

This year, I have some things coming up too. In May, I’ll open a solo exhibition of visual art at my gallery, Peter Gaugy, in Vienna and Brussels. In June, a new multi-channel A/V work alongside the media artist Janine Scheer-Erb at Semmelweisklinik through the Moozak platform. Live 3D visuals, two women’s voices, viola da gamba, experimental synths. In the Fall, I’ll release my next album, Our Mouths Are Spring – a work for voice and modular synthesizer about love, internet infrastructure, commodities, dating apps, and how all these things have become entangled. It is based on a poem I published in New York City and will exist as an album on Oxtail Records, and with Ms. Scheer-Erb as a queer A/V duo performance, online world, and perhaps a physical exhibition. I’m looking forward to that.

Several events with McKenzie will take place during the week of the Brut performance. On April 9th, she and I will present a ludic talk at Museumsquartier called Playing Gender. This talk will incorporate certain game rules as we engage in dialogue through speech and sound. And later that week, on April 11th, we will give a shared lecture at the Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab (AIL). (DJs post-discourse, obviously.) These events are collaborations with the Experimental Game Cultures masters program and the Art x Science School for Transformation, respectively – both at the Angewandte.

Ariadne Randall

Regarding Reverse Cowgirl II, one thing I’d like to add is how grateful and happy I am about the presence of Lau Lukkarila and Luca Bonamore as outside eyes in the piece. It's a vulnerable thing for me because of its movement aspects, its physicality. I’m very glad about their presence. 

Oh – and if you need a stylist, call Nyx Ferrand. While you can. A ride or die collaborator on these works, the whole cowgirl rodeo wears Nyx. It’s fate: they handed me the tasselled shirt that started the whole arc. I praise their poetic, shitposting vision and literary sensitivity. Their brilliant conceptual work is woven deeply into the fabric of the whole Cowgirl series, and it wouldn’t exist without them.