“We've entered a world where it's increasingly less about left versus right, and more about top versus bottom”
Nonetheless, Thaemlitz is most widely known as a recording and performing artist whose earlier works appeared on the German electronic music label Mille Plateaux, and more recently on Tokyo’s Mule Musiq and the Parisian label Skylax Records, while his own imprint Comatonse Recordings has always been the main platform for her writings and less conventional projects. Most recent additions to his discography include the 76-track full-length ”Comp x Comp” (2019), and a multimedia album that consists of audio, video and text, “Deproduction” (2017).
https://comatonse.bandcamp.com/album/comp-x-comp
http://comatonse.com/releases/c027.html
Her house DJ alias, DJ Sprinkles, became popular in the international club and festival circuit over the past decade or so, most notably after the release of his highly acclaimed Midtown 120 Blues album in 2008, followed by an RA Podcast mix that brought him substantially wider international exposure.
The use of mixed pronouns here may cause slight confusion and distress, but it’s intentional. As a transgender person, Thaemlitz was never comfortable with using one pronoun. At the same time, she rejects using third-gender pronouns because, “they don’t resolve gender crises under patriarchy. They’re not going to bring me any comfort. They might bring comfort to the reader, but I’m more interested in the reader sharing in my own gender discomfort under patriarchy.”
Being an immigrant in Japan
This spring marks the 20th anniversary of Thaemlitz’ relocation to Japan from her home country, the U.S.A. We had an extended conversation over Zoom between his countryside farm house in Chiba, Japan and my current home in Berlin. Myself being a Japanese person who has lived in Australia and Germany for almost 20 years in total, there is almost a reverse correlation between our immigration paths.
Japan is usually not the first choice for relocation if you’re involved in art or non-commercial music. There is very little support from the public sector or wider general public. But she points out that her residing in Japan is motivated by something that many of us completely take for granted – physical safety.
“I came here as a transgendered person from the United States. In the US it’s all this kind of ‘fuck you’ individualist culture, where if people don’t like you, they immediately feel entitled to voice it. In my day they felt entitled to just spit, throw things, punch you, or do whatever. Whereas in Japan, if they don’t like you, the worst thing they will do is ignore you. So based on how I was socialised in the US, the silence in Japan for me is golden. I can deal with people who don’t like me leaving me the fuck alone. I don’t get beaten up here. But I wouldn’t romanticise living here, either. I think the world is a pretty shit place. As a result of growing up with a lot of bashing in the US, I’ve tried to reduce my engagements with the violence around me.”
The silence he could appreciate in Japan is often perceived as politeness, or in some cases even as a ‘zen’ attitude by outsiders, but she is well aware that it is also a form of social suppression that can suffocate the most vulnerable behind its calm façade.
“On a surface level daily life here is incredibly polite and friendly, due to the ways that the culture and the language function, and the ways that people develop their minds around concepts of communication… or the lack thereof. That lack is also why they have such a high suicide rate here. I think people here don’t really come to terms with the concept of repression, and the damage it can do.” When asked why she chose to live in Japan despite an awareness of such problems, Thaemlitz replies, “I think most people misconstrue what immigration is about. In most cases, immigration or moving to another country is more about getting away from a situation, and less about following dreams. You work within whatever options are available, and hope for the best.”
Against the sense of becoming
As the world occasionally witnesses some of the numerous ‘inappropriate’ remarks about women or LGBTQ people made by Japanese politicians and high-ranking public figures, recently illustrated by the Tokyo Olympic chief Mori and the newly appointed ‘women empowerment and gender equality minister’ Tamayo Marukawa, one can easily imagine that his current home doesn’t exactly offer an ideal social environment to be in. After all, in terms of gender equality Japan is ranked in a dreadful 121st place among 153 countries (by the World Economic Forum 2020). Its increasingly conservative-leaning social climate is not only reviving but enhancing outdated patriarchal views. Yet it is because of such a backdrop that her non-conforming existence and practices as an expressive critic gain more significance than ever before.
https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2020.pdf
“I would say my approach towards my status as an immigrant in Japan is paralleled by, and informed by, my anti-essentialism towards my own gender and sexuality. I don’t set out to be a foreigner speaking with authority on Japan or my experiences in Japan. Rather than professing to having become acclimated to Japan, I think about how the experience of immigration helps me un-become certain things that I was in America. I think that those processes of unbecoming are the things that I can speak about with more authority, and be more precise and more informative about. In general, for me, it’s more useful to speak about processes of unbecoming, rather than becoming. And I think that’s something which began when I lived in the US, in terms of my queer and non-essentialist transgenderism, and how it’s never been about a course of coming out into singularity, or like transitioning from A to B. I’ve always been more interested in how we can complicate our connections to painful socialisation systems, and things that we wish to separate from – as opposed to aligning with something else. Now, the dominant language around immigration, like most language around transgenderism, sexuality and ‘coming out’, is always in the populist sense about ‘becoming’.”
He continues to elaborate the potential dangers of complying with the sense of becoming, as it relates to reconciliation with dominant social power structures, which also provides a context to her earlier comments on pronouns. “For me, that emphasis on reconciliation and visibility is really a disservice, and something that stops us from thinking about the complexities of social relations. Instead, what it does is it throws us into the language of identity politics, which quickly becomes very essentialist. People start attributing identities – socially constructed identities – with the power of ‘nature’. And that, for me, is dangerous. That, for me, is where a lot of bias and violence stems from.”
During Monheim Triennale 2025, he will be presenting two separate solo performances – an electroacoustic set and a piano set. She has developed various modes of artistic and intellectual practices over the years, but it’s worth revisiting how he began playing as a DJ in a particularly influential time and place.
DJ Sprinkles
Her association with this form of expression is rooted in a definitive context that is hinted at in deep and delicately textured sounds. His selection and mixing are aimed for a prolonged introspective and reflective musical journey rather than an instantly gratifying ‘party with friends’.
“I started out as a DJ in a very specific moment, between ‘88 and ‘92. I was providing mixtapes for people to play during the gay pride parade in New York. Then I ended up becoming a resident at a club called Sally’s II, which was a Latina and African American transsexual sex worker club. I was doing four shows a week, including two with Dorian Corey, who was one of the old school, original, really important performers in the New York ball scene. She was in Paris Is Burning and all that. It was when house music and deep house music were emerging from New Jersey and the Lower East Side in New York. At the same time that I was playing within this very explicitly queer, transsexual sex club, I was also involved with ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power). Culturally, there was a huge surge of identity politics coming out at that time.”
In the period when the pride movement was crystallising, and everyone was ‘out loud and proud’, Terre felt more at home at Sally’s and associated closer with the queerness she found there, where he describes sexual orientations and desires were shared in much more discreet and less empowering ways.
“The thing that I really was grateful about at Sally’s II was that it was more in line with what my understanding and experience as a ‘queer’ was. I came from Missouri, where basically the only gay bar that we had was a kind of Western bar that you go in, and maybe you see two guys in their 60s with their wedding rings on. You know that they have their wives with kids out in the countryside. And they’re just there at that bar able to hold hands and share a whiskey before going home to their wives and kids. It is a global reality that most sex between men does not happen between two self-actualised, out loud and proud men. It usually happens where one or neither are identifying as gay. That’s the traditional paradigm for male on male sex. So that’s where I came from, and why I understand that strategies of the closet, secrecy and invisibility offer means of protection, and are not simply sites of emotional trauma that must be considered taboo like mainstream PrideTM culture insists. That’s also part of the DJ Sprinkles projects, and how they’re related to a model of queerness that is critical of the concepts and construction of PrideTM, as it relates to the commodification of our sexualities.”
Clubs – a place for organising and education
Therefore, the club environment DJ Sprinkles emerged from represented and meant something wildly different from today’s common notion of clubs as strictly sites for pleasure and entertainment. Her focus, and how he perceives the function of clubs as a social space, are far beyond ‘good vibes’ and hedonism.
“For example, in the US there’s no social healthcare and most people don’t have insurance – especially if they’re homeless trans kids who were thrown out of their houses and disowned by their families. So basically, the house scene and those clubs functioned as sites where people could educate each other about hormone dosage, which transitional therapies work and didn’t work, which doctors were safe, which ones weren’t… And they also could help share medicine. Like, the drug dealer at Sally’s II wasn’t just selling cocaine, but also selling hormones and prescription stuff. It was very much a site for organising, education and sex work, as well as the dancing hedonism and conventional club world blah, blah.”
As he finds less and less spaces like that these days, her forms of expression have diversified to cater to different occasions, and also to earn a living.
“There’s usually no space for aggressive criticality in club settings, where everybody is either high or drunk. So I use my writings and interviews to try and get across the problems, difficulties, hypocrisies, and contradictions that are impossible to convey in a club setting. I also try and complicate how we think of our participation in those situations. For me, they are sites of employment. To be honest, I don’t want to go and DJ at a festival in Europe if I can avoid it. They have nothing to do with the roots of where I was DJing, and what interested me about being a DJ in New York at a very specific moment in time. Also, these days I almost never get asked to DJ at queer events because they generally don’t have the budgets to fly somebody from Japan halfway across the world. So I’m constantly playing for the wrong audiences. But I need to do that for economic reasons. Similarly, I’m forced to perform my ‘non-performative’ electroacoustic works on stages and things. So these are serious compromises for me. I try to be open about how problematic it is, and have basically made that my overarching project – to see how far one can go while actually being open about the problems and contradictions of the types of employment we’re restricted to.”
Terre Thaemlitz electroacoustic “performance”
One of the programmes he is presenting at the Monheim Triennale 2025 will be an electroacoustic DJ set played as Terre Thaemlitz in a similar style to the set played at The Prequel last year. She explains how it’s rather unusual to perform in an improvisational festival, and how he sees it as an opportunity to raise questions about today’s performance-centred economy.
“Usually, when I’m brought into festivals for a ‘Terre Thaemlitz’ show, I’m performing a specific project like “Deproduction”, or “Soulessness” or those sorts of things. But in this case, Monheim has asked me to do something I haven’t done in many, many years – an ambient DJ set. So that will also be a throwback to the early nineties, where I was DJing ambient stuff in clubs too. But it is also a deliberate request of the Monheim bookers, because the festival is all about improvisation, and my usual performances are structured to be non-performative in ways that Monheim isn’t interested in. My usual performances are, in a way, like conventional early electroacoustic tape playback pieces where I press play, the video goes, and I basically sit there for an hour without doing anything. On the one hand, it is a reference to bringing traditional academic electroacoustic tape performance into a commercial performance sphere, but on the other hand as a drag queen it’s a rejection of the conventional transgendered stage which is about camp, performativity, flamboyancy and gesticulation. So I’m critical of performativity as it relates to the transgendered stage, too. That’s why I prefer stillness on stage.”
Here, she poses a question of what constitutes a performance. And he is prepared to embody that question during her time at Monheim as performance-based festival.
“We are culturally more and more enslaved to models of improvisation and live performativity that are precious to Monheim, but basically what my entire career has been critically against. I think that’s why I’ve been invited, as a kind of curatorial contrast, because Monheim has such a heavy emphasis on improvisation, spontaneity, and this kind of communal cooperation with artists and musicians being super excited to have access to each other and work together. I think they know that I’m the opposite of all that. And basically, I have spent my career being critical of that kind of entertainment-based liberal communalism which I feel can rob people of the cultural capacity for criticality. When they first approached me I had talks with some of the staff and really said, like, ‘Hey, I want to be sure you understand that I’m not going to be coming with enthusiasm. That’s not my thing. I don’t come with excitement, I don’t come with energy, and I’m not going to be cooperating in terms of being excited to do spontaneous collaborations or improv one-offs.”’
Amid the global pandemic when many of us ‘missed’ such live performances and communal experiences in their absence, her concerns about the impossibility for cultural spaces focusing on non-performative work is growing stronger.
“I think the direction of where we’re going is clear. We can see it in the technology, which is all focused on live streams and surrogate performance systems. It’s further crystallising and making it concrete: the cultural investment into models of live performance, models of authenticity, models of improvisation, models of audience versus performers. And it’s completely conservative, radically conservative, radically boring.”
The way she engages different contexts with different aliases and various forms of activities is also a strategy for resisting essentialism and singularity. In a world where everything is condensed into a logo, a thumbnail, a headline or a short bio, he forces us to puzzle and accept the complexity of it all.
“Working in different genres, and working under different aliases, parallels my critical interest in avoiding the public projection of an essential essence or a singular artistic vision, ‘a truth of being’ or ‘who who is Terre Thaemlitz?’ As if there’s one fucking stupid answer. So that kind of fragmentation – going into grays, getting away from black and white, away from a singular artistic identity, a singularity of origin for creative process, the singularity of authorship, something being authentically mine, or all of that – is why I work in sound collage and sampling. Things that don’t start from a purist musicological or compositional authenticity or anything like that. Fuck all that stuff. That’s what I’m set up against.”
Queer calculus and a call for confrontation
And she has no intention to make it easier for you. “If somebody happens to go to a Terre Thaemlitz event, or a DJ Sprinkles event, or they pick up an album, or they read an interview, and if it becomes a gateway into their learning more about something, that’s fine. But I’m less concerned with the idea of providing outreach to beginners, because on the culturally minor level that kind of constant appeal to the mainstream is what also stops us from cultivating more in-depth and precise means of talking and conversing around culturally minor issues and crises. The mainstream is focused on a kind of expansionist concept, a very Western globalist and capitalist idea that we need as big an audience as possible, and the more people we can reach the better. That notion of applying dominant populist models of distribution to very minor and culturally specific forms of media can be a mistake, and doesn’t serve my interest.”
He uses mathematics as a metaphor to further explain the necessity of unabbreviated interactions. “We’re forced to always speak in terms of arithmetic, and addition and subtraction, when in fact, we’re dealing with calculus level problems. I would rather be a person who presents works that hit the audience with calculus. Just hit them with queer calculus.”
As I was about to wrap it up, while trying to embrace the calculus of Terre Thaemlitz, I almost unconsciously sought for a way to end our conversation on a positive note like I always do. She responded with one big final slap.
“I’m a nihilist; I think we’re fucked. We’re all socially conditioned to feel like we have to end on an optimistic note, but no. This is all fucking shit. Always going bad. We’ve entered a world where it’s increasingly less about left versus right, and more about top versus bottom. That also echoes the power dynamics of sexuality and gender. That’s the world we’re in. And we need to start confronting it, we need to stop dreaming about good shit, and start allowing ourselves to feel urgency around the violence and destruction going on around us. Violence that is being facilitated at every turn. Instead of putting hope in any of this shit, we need to really get away from hope and be like, ‘Holy fuck!’ take off the rose-colored glasses. It’s okay to panic.”
Coming back to this interview after four years, and reading where he left off, you can’t help but think that it was almost prophetic – although Terre would argue it is simply realism. Our world has surely reached much closer to the state of panic, and after experiencing her two shows at The Prequel last year, where he persistently made a commentary on the festival’s “Code of Conduct” public statement during her performances, I have accumulated many more questions I had to ask.
So, we virtually sat together, Terre from his home in Chiba and me from my home in Berlin once again. This was a few days after I attended an International Women’s Day march in Berlin, where German police brutality against the pro-Palestine protesters that consisted of largely immigrant background women of colour was witnessed, filmed and went viral on social media.
I began our conversation by asking her what he is planning to do at this year’s Monheim Triennale. “I’m doing something similar to last year (The Prequel) – an electroacoustic kind of DJ set and also a piano piece. Last year, I did an hour long rendition of Bill Evans’ Peace Piece, but this year will be a new piece that I’m composing for the event. But I don’t want to spoil it, and I also don’t want to describe something that ends up not happening if I do something different due to my own technical limitations on the piano… Since my first release in 1993 I have always played with the fine line between no talent and genius that a lot of improvisation rides upon. In visual art history there’s a tendency to view abstraction as something you only arrive at after mastering representational art. Similarly, in music, it’s like you get the right to improvise after you’ve learned your instrument in the proper way. If improvisation is supposed to be something that is against traditional musicology, we actually find it totally entwined back into traditional musicology by saying you don’t even really have the right or ability to play abstractly unless you’re actually a pro in the normal ways.”
Terre is, in fact, the only signature artist who has made it very clear from the beginning that he has no intention to collaborate with other fellow artists during or between the festival periods, citing among other things a lack of technical ability to improvise in realtime with traditional musicians. So, did she choose to present this piano piece with an improvisational approach specifically to challenge such expectations, or to provoke, by performing alongside such highly trained professional instrumentalists?
“I don’t think a performance can really result in actual provocation. It never does within the context of these festival things. Nothing is actually allowed to provoke. We also know that from the censorship guidelines issued last year around the festival. And then this year, things in Germany are even fucking crazier, so there’s not going to be anything provocative happening. If we think about actual social problems, I think it’s quite naive to speak of the things that we’ll be doing at Monheim as if they would present social challenges, because they’re nothing compared to – what we can’t even fucking say in this interview.”
Yet, he was the only artist who has made any commentary on the topic of freedom of expression and censorship, and criticised the Monheim Triennale “Code of Conduct” issued by Mayor Daniel Zimmerman and Festival Director Reiner Michalke just prior to last year’s Prequel. Thaemlitz included public readings of the Code of Conduct in both of her shows, to ensure the audience was aware of the statement and able to consider how it framed all of the performances.
“It’s sad, if you feel my performances last year were setting a kind of benchmark, because I think what I was doing was quite lame. I think we should describe it for people who weren’t there. For example, in my electroacoustic set I had a digitally edited recording of the Code of Conduct, which I understand was issued in reaction to performers at another nearby festival voicing support for Palestinians on stage. Everyone knew the Code of Conduct was specifically about prohibiting performers from mentioning Gaza. I cut up and repeated passages from the Code that I found troubling, such as the oddly phrased actual quote, ‘On the stages of Monheim Triennale, however, freedom of speech finds a limit where statements must be understood as anti-Semitic, Islam-ophobic, racist, or in any way inhumane.’ The next day when I saw the festival director, his reaction was like, ‘Oh, it was great!’ – as if my repeating the words from an official statement by him and the mayor on stage was in some way proving that their stages were spaces where we could say anything – which goes back to this thing that I’ve said since I was a teenager in art school, that anything we do in these kinds of institutional festivals or art spaces or galleries can never be more than ‘critique affirming its object.’ Anything ‘challenging’ we say goes to prove the benevolence of the patrons who grant us platform – whether we are cryptic or screaming through a bullhorn. That’s why I always approach these things as a critic demonstrating these limitations from within, and not as anyone who ever believes that I’m actually achieving anything by performing in a ‘radical’ or ‘provocative’ sense. It is an impossibility. And my whole career has been about demonstrating this impossibility.
The festival statement terrified us all. It made myself and every other performer I spoke with uncomfortable. We felt trapped and, like, should we even fucking be here? I don’t know a single person who was cool with it. Sure, I brought it up in my performances, because that’s my job, right? That’s generally why curators bring me in, and why people hire me: to do and say something that they can’t say because they’re employed by the institution. That’s how my career has functioned in general. I’m brought in as someone who’s probably going to say the thing that people want to bring up but can’t. But I also felt like the issue of censorship really needed to be hit way harder than anything I did.”
Free speech and disagreement
Frankly, I myself never imagined I would have to grapple with concepts such as freedom of expression and censorship by taking part in an experimental and progressive music festival in Germany when I took on this position in the curatorial team. Yet it became the main concern within everything I’ve been doing since the end of 2023. Terre shares her take on free speech:
“I’m super ‘American’ in the way that my concept of free speech is that I will always fight for someone’s right to say something I’m totally opposed to, rather than try to censor them. No matter how much I disagree with them. That is the only way to culturally ensure my own right to speak and respond. Free speech means nothing if you’re not willing to fight for it at the cost of defending people who say things you dislike. So, I’m very opposed to today’s ‘thought police’ Orwellian nightmare that’s been going on – the European model of censorship, where the idea is that ‘too much free speech is what brings fascism.’
We can see how America, and the Democratic Party in particular, has recently adapted that model with Russiagate, Trump lawfare, and all of that, and are now like, ‘see, if you give too much free speech you end up with Trump.’ No, we’ve ended up with Trump because people were crushed by what had been going on prior to him. He’s not what most people want. He’s simply an alternative to an ongoing nightmare people feel compelled to reject. And he then, of course, brings other nightmares with him. And that’s where we are. The fact that the only options we have are ‘team globalism’ and ‘team nationalism’ is a real dire crisis of circumstance. And that’s the result of censorship. That’s the result of an inability to have dialogue and communication that would allow us to think in countless other ways – other than being herded into these ridiculous teams that want to censor and hate each other in order to centralize power.
We can connect and work with each other on the things we agree on, while understanding that we don’t have to think alike about everything. I reject this insane model where everybody can only work with the people who agree with them on everything – which means we have to agree with everything others tell us to agree with, or be socially ostracized. Disagreement is vital to any kind of democratic process. In today’s era of affect-driven politics, we need to remember that hurt feelings and being offended are part of democracy.
If you want to tie this into the language of improvisational music, okay, disagreement is like having the ability on stage to do something that the other performers you’re in team with weren’t expecting, and to do so in a way that could fuck things up. That’s the bullshit heroic vision and promise of improvisation, right? But it’s a fallacy. People typically talk about great improv performances in relation to harmony, or people grooving together. You rarely hear people praising shows where some players kept disrupting the other players and making harmony or communication impossible – that makes music impossible. And I think in this particular moment, the sadness of Monheim Triennale is that the improvisation that we’re allowed to do are the kinds that reflect today’s broader cultural conditions of censorship, whether it’s explicit or not. If the improvisational festival happens without incident, then that means it happens within the confines of dominant cultural expectation. And in doing so, it proves its ideals to be nothing but a kind of fallacy. A kind of propaganda.”
Cult moment, censorship and fascism
He continues to spell out the problems we are facing, on our behalf, and provides a sharp insight of how it could be understood by drawing a parallel to cult.
“In a way, we’re talking about a social moment where people are pressured into cult-like behavior, where you either agree with everything or you’re outside the cult. You’re ostracized and branded as “the other” – the enemy – even if that’s not what’s happening at all. If you ask even one question, then you’re either branded a crazy radical rightist, or a crazy radical leftist, whichever.
You are asking me about my thoughts on coming to Monheim this year. It’s difficult to answer, because there are so many ways things could be interpreted, misread or dismissed – in no small part because I am a foreigner, of course. There’s a tendency for people to say, for example, ‘I am a German. So, of course I know more than you about what’s going on in Germany.’ But when we’re in the depth of a kind of cult moment, in a way, our faith in our indoctrinations can mean we know the least. Where people in a cult find order, people on the outside of the cult are more able to identify the absurdities happening. Of course, if you’re outside the cult, you can’t get all the information that the people inside the cult do, but you can get completely different information that the people in the cult don’t get. And then there is a third type of person – the ones I prefer to listen to most – and they are the people who’ve escaped the cult. They tend to be the ones with the most detailed and useful analyses of the cult, because they broke through it. In this case, I am not such a person. I have German heritage, but I am not a German émigré. However, I am aware of these cult dynamics because I grew up in a very deep Catholic family, within an anti-Catholic and radically evangelical town. I worked through leaving a very deeply religious upbringing, while also negotiating my existence between the tensions of my family’s faith and that of the surrounding community. I am just telling you all of this to describe the lens through which I am seeing things.
It’s always, then, very tricky when, for example, going to perform in an environment like that in Germany today. Firstly, it’s not my place to preach anything. Secondly, I’m aware that it’s quite possible that a lot of people in Germany – specifically liberals – don’t really understand how it came to be so fucked right now. This is much in the same way many American liberals respond to Trump and the Republicans by misguidedly pledging deeper allegiance to Democrats. As if they were not two sides to the same coin. In running from the wolves, people often turn to wolves in sheep’s clothing. That clothing is ‘liberalism’. And so there are things that, if I did say what I really am thinking about the conditions of the upcoming performance, I would be branded a lunatic or possibly even a right winger fascist. For example, if I said things that are contrary to the mainstream liberal globalist plan, which, ironically, is taking legal actions against people’s free speech and behaviors in the name of avoiding fascism…
In Germany they are literally doing the kinds of actions that I would consider to be hallmarks of fascism, demonstrated by the degrees of censorship and invasions of privacy, attempts at thought control, all the things that force people to agree not only in their online texts, but in public, in thought… this is all fascistic stuff that they’re, in theory, trying to stop from happening. If we were to talk about these things to someone who’s a liberal German, I don’t know if they quietly would agree, ‘yeah, we get it, we’re fucked.’ Or if they’d be like, ‘Oh, you’re a fucking radical right winger!’ Of course, these problems are not isolated to Germany, but you are specifically asking me about Germany in this interview.
I know from experience that the same information said to different people can bring about very different responses, ranging from alliance to being seen like a lunatic. And that gap is the goal of this societal moment, of what is happening. That is the cultural goal, to make people unable to talk to each other, and just look crazy to each other. It makes solidarity and organizing impossible. That’s a feature, not a bug.”
How to deal with hopelessness and hypocrisy
Speaking to Thaemlitz is a strangely calming experience. I remembered I felt the same way when we conducted our previous interview in 2021. Now, amid the far more urgent state of the world, she seems as collected as he was before.
“This development is not surprising within the realm of how I see human behavior. It’s not ‘off brand’ for humans to behave this way. But of course it’s awful, and it’s really hinged around this dynamic between only having the options of globalism or nationalism. They are our given options because both function in a similarly cult-like fashion. You can be one or the other and still be performing the exact same binary antagonism. ‘Fuck those other people. We get it in our group, and fuck them! What do you mean you don’t agree with me? Well, fuck you!’
Both nationalism and globalist neo-liberal bullshit function in the same way, in terms of how they demand compliance. And that’s why those are the two things that seem to be fighting each other – when in fact they are mirroring each other, and keeping us locked in this binary. Of course, the majority of people as individuals know things are way more complex, but still find themselves turning to the security of that binary out of familiarity because they have culturally been denied other tools to handle hopelessness and hypocrisy.
There is a need to accept the inevitability of hypocrisy if we’re going to actually peacefully live together, and work together, and even communicate together amidst this incredible pressure to either be team A or team B. Today, we’ve lost that ability to just accept people as like… you know, kind of crazy and weird. There was always the pervert at the edge of town, or the crazy old lady next door – The Simpsons’ cat lady for example, you know. That was part of the social framework. You understood and accepted that a society is a kind of chaotic assemblage of people who don’t agree or match each other. In the past, those in power attempted to conceal such differences through Puritanism. Today our actual material differences have been obliterated by social media’s algorithms of artificial, essentialist liberal-humanist identity-based difference. Social media is all about addictive conformity and herding, and a mental brainwashing into homogeneity.
Simultaneously, think about the fact that, despite the bullshit ways societies use propaganda to hold the family as the end-all-be-all, in reality there are so many horrible dynamics that happen between family members and how the majority of us don’t really get along. Also think about sexual expression, and how we can make incredible compromises of character in order to get laid. You know what I mean? We will have sex with people who disgust us, but we won’t labor unionize with someone who has a different stance on abortion or on Ukraine or on NATO or on ecology or Gaza. These absurd, Monty Python-esque hypocrisies are at the core of many life experiences.
It is hopeless. I mean, it always has been and it always will be. So it’s not like suddenly life is hopeless just because of Trump. It’s always been hopeless for centuries, so if you kind of accept that and see the patterns over time, then you become less susceptible to the specific types of hysteria dominant cultures attempt to breed in us at this particular moment for the purposes of centralization and control.
Sadly, most everybody deals with the chaos by using conventional social tools of denial, hope, and faith, you know? Again, going towards cultic and religious frameworks, and the idea that a reward will be waiting for us somewhere else – be it heaven, or the end of an election cycle. And that’s the most common way people try to deal with the reality that where they are is unbearable.
Once you step out of those conventions… well, a lot of people don’t know how to step out of them. In my case, I experienced a weirdly inordinate degree of bullying and things growing up, and that kind of snapped me out of certain types of hope, I think. I know people always say, ‘you have to have hope’ but I really feel like hope is something that derails our urgency in responding to that which is unacceptable in the moment. You can endure if you have hope for tomorrow. And in a way, enduring is the opposite of coming to a breakpoint leading to action today, you know? That’s why the revolution never happens.”
Can music still be a hope that brings people together?
“Well, I would agree that music brings people together, but I think it typically does so in propagandistic ways for already socially predetermined reasons. And I think music festivals in general function as what Foucault called a heteronormative moment. Society relies on heteronormative spaces through which we feel like we slip out of normal time and experience something different that helps us reset our minds to endure more slavery when we come back to normalcy. Traditionally, that would be the function of going to church once a week, or it could be a long earned vacation after working all year. Or it could be music festivals, or raving all night, or Burning Man or whatever. These are ultimately all components of strict social structures that strategically cultivate such moments of release – moments that ‘reinvigorate the soul’ with liberatory freedom that doesn’t exist outside of a restricted and contextual sphere.
And that is a kind of a ruse. It’s a dupe. It’s a kind of scam, and it’s a strategic one. It’s not one that happens necessarily maliciously. It happens because the people in the arts and media behind the organizing of many such heterotopias fall prey to the same propaganda as the audience members. In fact, most artists have fallen prey to it even deeper. They believe in it so much that they commit their lives to it like a fucking cleric, you know? There is, in the end, nothing happening at these events that’s not already sanctioned by the dominant social order. And any radicality that exists within this heterotopic space in this heterochronic time is anticipated. It’s sanctioned to the extent of having state and federal funding supporting it. This is not an underground operation. So, I think we can all just set that bullshit aside. It’s not a shock to say that.
We wouldn’t expect the German government to be supporting something subversive right now. And I would never expect it to be doing it ever. But, you know, European art and music communities have this long tradition of believing that that’s the case. Believing that Europe is so democratic that state funded events actually do enact a kind of freedom that doesn’t exist in America or Japan where there is no public funding for these things.
I feel more upset with people who do a kind of liberal performance of radicality while embracing that funding uncritically, buying into that dream. That is more dangerous. That is being deeper in the cult, you know?”
A common burden to carry?
Admitting my own guilt of believing and operating in that dream for a long time in Europe, it made me wonder what else we have left to collectively hold on to.
“It’s hard when society, when that cult controls dominant culture, and when we all risk losing social contacts, employment, housing, access to banking, access to phones and communication. Of course, that is also how cults work. They create a terror around leaving the collective, and also a kind of brain fog about how else one can survive.
And again, that’s all unsurprising. But that doesn’t make it less heartbreaking. And it doesn’t make it less difficult. That fear and confusion is perhaps one of the core commonalities that exist for people, but we don’t know how to meaningfully connect on that. Still, the awfulness of life offers us much more in common than the joys that bring us together gleefully. I think of Salman Rushdie’s book Shame, which beautifully demonstrates how our identities and everything are much more cultivated out of shame than pride. And yet pride is the thing that everybody’s always talking about. But we’re really more creatures of shame. If we look into how our characters were formulated in youth, people aren’t flooding into therapist offices and popping antidepressants to unpack their pride. They’re going to talk about trauma. That’s a real commonality as a species, as an animal, you know, trauma.”
Then I remember from the last time, how Thaemlitz refused the idea of ending an interview on a positive note.
“Well, weirdly, this could be mistakenly twisted into a positive end note because we’re talking about commonalities. So that’s a likely misreading I don’t feel so comfortable with, but maybe it’s also good for me to feel a little awkward (laughs.)”
This interview was originally conducted in 2021 prior to the artist’s initially planned appearance at Monheim Triennale in 2022. Minimal modifications have been made to the original text, and an additional interview was conducted in 2025, a few months before he is set to perform Monheim Triennale 2025.