Can boredom be art? Can good art be boring? When a work of art is deemed boring, it’s usually an automatic, accepted pejorative. After all, who would want to be bored by art? Yet some artists have actually imagined positive, counterintuitive answers to those seemingly obvious questions. In some particularly vital cases, those answers themselves were inspired by boredom – by the creativity that can arise out of being bored, and desperately wanting to do something about it.
The boredom that infected the intersecting music and film scenes called no wave was a distinct product of time and place. New York City in the late 1970s was empty, dangerous and practically cost-free – a bombed-out wasteland open to anyone fearless enough to squat in an abandoned building and siphon electricity from street lights. In their confrontational, rule-rejecting work, no wave artists reacted to the recent past – the bloating of rock music, the homogenization of cinema, the staid pretension of the art world – but also dealt with their numbing present. They faced a gaping hole created by the droves fleeing Manhattan, and a “blank generation” that punk started but didn’t complete. It was up to no wave to blast away the remaining rubble.
This was both an opportunity and a burden, because no wave artists were, at their core, bored. They were bored by conventional art, bored by dead streets and abandoned blocks, bored by being broke and living in squalor, sitting around in decaying apartments with little to do besides scream their frustration into widening voids. One of the most inspiring aspects of no wave was that its participants didn’t just create art to fill this void – they used the void itself as the subject for and product of their art.
No wave artists made art that was about boredom, that dared to bore people, and that attacked people for being bored – jolting them out of complacency to confront the fact that convention was sedation. In the process, they insisted boredom could be interesting. It’s a radical idea, striking directly at the accepted notion that art must entertain, creating a new path previously unheard or unconsidered. Boredom is also a way to reject the tyranny of audience-pleasing – and perhaps the only sane reaction to the stifling deadness that surrounded these artists in New York.
No wave’s Attack of the Bored shone most vividly in two of the scene’s best groups. Lydia Lunch and her trio Teenage Jesus and the Jerks performed their ennui by standing still on stage, refusing to coax audiences or do anything other than play their music. They looked bored, and they were (one of their songs was called “Popularity Is So Boring”). But they were also rejecting the trained-seal concert game. Lunch’s penetrating stare was like a wordless lecture: “We’re bored, and we’re going to make you deal with it.”
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