Chicks on Speed

Berlin – The first time I heard of the subversive electro-pop band/artists/record label/"glamour girls"/feminist collective Chicks on Speed was when I was introduced to Melissa Logan during a casual dinner at the Markthalle restaurant in Kreuzberg one Sunday night. The Markthalle ("market hall") is my favorite restaurant in Berlin. The food is excellent, especially the wild game. You can order things like boar, which, apparently, runs wild in the outlying suburbs (so in all probability the owner shot it himself, cornering the critter rooting around his backyard). The restaurant is adjacent to an actual market hall with stalls of various kinds offering fresh produce, household goods and specialty food items. The bar-restaurant’s interior is paneled in wood with a long, elegant bar and several large oak tables. Silhouettes of two horned warriors, armed with spears and clothed in animal skins, are on the back wall. It looks like an upscale beer hall–which it is–and the staff is both attentive and friendly. The ghoulishly sardonic Brit waiter is a special favorite of mine. The Markthalle is a popular place, not only for its food but for its basement discotheque, featuring a lot of techno DJs flown in from Detroit. Jörg Buttgereit, the director of the cult film Nekromantik, often spins there.

The night Melissa and I were introduced, Melissa’s boyfriend, Ted Gaier of the band Die Goldenen Zitronen, now in their 20th year, had just finished a set of gigs in Berlin that weekend. Claudia, my girlfriend, was once their roadie back in their early days, tuning their guitars and such, so she and Ted are old friends. They get together whenever he’s in town. His base is in Hamburg. Ted’s an astute guy, very active in the lefty scene here. This is no surprise.

Ted’s mom is Margit Czenki, a robust, middle-aged woman of southern German peasant stock, who is a former member of the June 2nd Movement, a sister cadre to the Red Army Faction, commonly called the Baader-Meinhoff gang. Ted’s radicalizing moment came at the age of five. A team of German police busted into his kindergarten with drawn guns. His mother, along with a group of other hippie moms, had organized an "illegal" daycare center in their Munich commune. It was a defining moment for Margit, too, who joined "the movement," went underground and was later busted for knocking over a bank. The overlap of politics and art is one of the reasons why I love it here.

Though I’m often dubious of other Americans I meet here–usually brain-dead Midwestern tourists or pretentious arty types in berets who think this is the 1920s–Melissa and I begin to talk, exchanging our respective reasons for leaving the U.S. In the course of conversation, I learn she’s in this subversive pop group out of Munich, but they’d moved to Berlin. She, Australian-born Alex Murray-Leslie and Munich native Kiki Moorse have established a new indie label, Chicks on Speed Records (www.chicksonspeed.com), here in Berlin. (They have the European rights to the NYC feminist band Le Tigre.) They just signed a lease on an office in the Mitte section of East Berlin. I asked what kind of music they did. After she described what they did, I replied:

"Oh, sounds like you should call yourselves Hoze on Crack."

Despite my comment, we warm to each other. Melissa has a rich sense of humor, clearly reflected in her work with the trio. Since our first meeting, we often bump into each other at events around Berlin; usually the Wednesday night gigs at Kaffee Burger. A relic of the former German Democratic Republic, the interior of Kaffee Burger looks like it was decorated by a senile grandmother, but it’s Berlin’s leading showcase for underground Russian music and lit. It’s also down the street from the Chicks on Speed office, so you find them there, drinking a blend of Red Bull and absinthe with the new talent they’re grooming for their label.

I was especially surprised to see Melissa at Kaffee Burger for a reading given by the very smart and very funny Stewart Home. He was there to promote the German edition of Blow Job. As it turned out, Stewart’s book Assault on Culture is a primary influence on the Chicks’ approach to art, culture and commerce.

Alex: In New York we could never do what we’re doing here. The rent is too expensive. We would never be able to find a space big enough to do screen printing. Or sleep in, for that matter. We’d be working 12 hours a day just to pay the rent. By the time we got home, we’d be too tired to do screen printing or run a record label or even be able to put out records. This would be impossible in America. For us, Berlin’s really great because the rent’s really cheap and you can get really big spaces.

Kiki: Germany is just one of the most creative places at the moment.

Kiki: I should mention my father. He was a filmmaker and writer. He used to take me to all kinds of gallery openings and bookshops and film festivals when we were children, my brother and me. And then later I was a stylist and fashion editor for Conde Nast publications. That’s when I met Alex and Melissa.

Kiki: Yeah, kind of. He was American. He came over in the late 50s because of the political situation there. He was disinterested about Europe. Actually, he was I guess you could say kind of like a beatnik poet. And then he met my mother in Munich. My mother’s German. He did a lot of music shows in the 70s and 80s. His name was George Norris. He died in 1999. He was a part of this music scene from the 70s. He was a part of that scene then, but later he turned more toward commercial work and he did a lot for tv. But also a lot of cultural programs on all kinds of different topics. My mother was a film producer, she produced a lot of his work until they separated. That was when we were about 12 or 13. My mother wasn’t really into the scene. She was always a little bit conservative. She studied law and tried to bring a little bit of the rational into it. She sort of ran the whole thing, the financial side of it.

Alex: I grew up in Melbourne, Australia. I studied jewelry at Oxford for about three years and got my degree. I worked for this woman, Susan, who was a really tough businesswoman. She designed Ottoman jewelry, which has a lot to do with architecture. I installed exhibitions with her. In the end, I became quite frustrated because you had to be 45 to get any chances as an established artist. We were just not taken seriously for anything. We couldn’t get funding. We were thought of as too young and inexperienced. In Melbourne, this professor from Munich gave a talk. I realized I had to go there and study this man. So I went to Germany, to Munich, and I met him. He said, "No, you’re too young." I was 21. Again it was the same thing. I said no, I want to come there, I’m going to come there. I kept ringing him and hassling him and eventually he said, all right, just come. The irony of the whole thing is I never actually made jewelry. I was always just interested in this topic. I’d take the subject of jewelry and make it into something else.

Melissa: She made a shirt. It said "Ruby Ring" in red writing. That was because of the whole elitist thing in jewelry.

Alex: I learned how to set stones and all these things. I didn’t like to wear jewelry. I just liked to be in this class with these people talking about it. It’s totally not acceptable in the art world. It’s amazing. I like it. But a lot of people can’t understand it. You really have to research and get into it to understand it. It’s on the edge of art. Even in the 19th century, there was always the debate about the difference between crafts and art. Jewelry was never accepted as an art. A lot of writers wrote about that. And the debate still goes on. The jewelry class could put on the best shows. And that’s what I learned.

Alex: Yeah. It was boring in Munich. It was very boring. I actually didn’t mind Munich but then Melissa came along, brought mushrooms and wanted to show them. I thought, "Oh, what a freak, let’s do that."

Melissa: It was a lot of slides and I read stuff.

Melissa: All different kinds. I read weird recipes to them.

Alex: You read stories and–

Melissa: I can’t really remember. That was very long ago, ’94.

Melissa: I had a goat named Spooky. I was born in Spring Valley, NY. Suburbia. When I was four, my dad suddenly decided America was a horrible place to grow up in and we should all live in Europe. So he took the whole family and we moved to Vienna for three years until he decided that Vienna was absolutely more horrible than America.

Melissa: He couldn’t take it anymore. There was no future there for him because he wanted to change everything. And they didn’t want to hear anything about that. So he decided it was time to go back to America, but really pioneer-style. Way upstate New York in this little town. It used to be a ghost town. And then the Rudolf Steiner people bought it up and started making biodynamic farming and all that.

Melissa: Yeah, well, my dad could never define himself as [socialist or communist]. I’m worse than my father. I have to tell him that socialism is way better, even though it’s a failed thing here. It’s still something to fight for. I left America because I couldn’t decide where to study anymore. I was studying art. I had studied for two years in upstate New York, at a very small school affiliated with the School of Visual Arts. After that, I applied to the Chicago Institute of Art, but they didn’t give me a full scholarship. I would still have to take out some loans. That made me mad, to study art with everyone saying, "You’re gonna be so lucky if you become a teacher." That pissed me off because I didn’t want to become a teacher. I wanted to be an artist. That’s when I left, because I wanted to be in a place where education was accessible to everybody. That’s what I really liked at first about Germany. I didn’t even mean to come here and stay. I was just visiting friends and someone was studying at the art academy and it’s a super-romantic art academy. It’s very old and impressive–huge ceilings and big studios. What we noticed later was how macho it was. That’s the sign of tradition in Europe. No place for women in the structure.

Melissa: –a few, but gallerists also complain that there just aren’t enough female artists for them to represent. I don’t really know what happened. It’s not something that’s getting better at all.

Melissa: I had this really romantic idea in my head of what an artist was for a long time. What I hated about the Steiner school is that it’s very unpolitical. Then, also, in art school we were making these esthetic chunks of things that would just get hung up in the BMW building. I felt very confused about who is the audience. Where are they? You spend so much time in your studio and if you have an exhibition, then you look around at the people who come there and look at it. The whole art world just seems so disgusting. It took years to realize I wasn’t making art at all. I was just making products, products to verify the rich people’s control over culture. How money controls culture. That’s basically what art institutions are. So that’s why the banks would invest and also BMW would buy a lot of art and stuff. So they would also have a say in choosing and the distribution of what is art.

Alex: Like little insects they want to squash! We don’t have a gallery. We don’t want a gallery. So we’re not involved in any of that.

Melissa: Except in France we do. We did an installation at this arthouse, and we’re also doing a piece in Toulouse during the art weeks there. That’s actually a pretty big deal, where all of France is there. The thing is, it’s not international, but–

Alex: You’re in a broker position, though–

Melissa: We’re working as musicians and as artists there, so we get paid a fee for our show, but then we also get a budget to work with for the installation. And that’s a real problem with artists, they just get a bit of their costs covered if they’re lucky.

Alex: Anyway, it’s good to come in the back door in the art world. Sometimes we do things because we want to confuse people. Or we want to have fun with it. In America, that would not be accepted. Maybe it’s because there isn’t that history of sabotage. Sometimes people don’t see the humor in what we’re doing, I think. Whereas here it would be fully understood. Look at the works of COUM Transmissions or Throbbing Gristle, stuff like that, just making fun of existing art systems. The pop market is about this superficial thing that you just see the facade, and we want you to look through the facade. You see us looking glamorous, but then you also see us getting our hands dirty. You see us working, getting tired. Running a business.

Melissa: But I think it’s also about freedom. It’s also working in different directions, not just doing music, or just being enslaved in the fashion world or being puppet artists in the gallery scene. That one jumps around to all these different places and never gets caught in any one genre. We do have an interesting project we’re doing, though. We’re inviting all these managers to come to a symposium in this East German theater space. They have two galleries. It’s a symposium for managers to come and learn about strategies from young people, how they work. We decided we would tell them good tricks about marketing, how we do our marketing, so they can copy it. We call it "Feeding the Tiger." Franz Liebel Hess, a cultural studies professor, he uses us as an example of art, commercialism and subculture.

Alex: Art, commerce and subculture–the perfect marketing pyramid!

Melissa: And how we use these three elements as our strategy, to take over the world. It’s always such a problem, because artists always feel ripped off by marketing people.

Melissa (to Alex): Do you remember Roberto Ohrt at the academy? [Ohrt is an art historian who published a book on the Situationist Internationale and modern art called Phantom Avantgarde.]

Alex: He called us freaks.

Melissa: Yeah, he would yell at us, "Out! Freaks!" And me and Alex felt great about that. A half a year later, we were in Scotland and this guy just showed us this book, Assault on Culture. It gave us so much inspiration to build on. The way Stewart writes about these movements also helped us with the idea of infiltration of mainstream culture. I also couldn’t believe he directly quotes Valerie Solanas in his preface. I didn’t see anyone else who took the SCUM Manifesto so seriously. If you read the SCUM Manifesto, there’s all this genius in it. So, because of Assault on Culture, we decided to steal ideas from the mainstream–

Alex: And remake them. Like getting brand clothes from H&M. We get clothes from H&M, remake them and resell them in shops.

Melissa: Because we think H&M should be illegal. They sell clothes so cheaply because of their slave labor. It’s hard to resist, so we decided we would take advantage of it. Buy these clothes, make them into one-off pieces, very expensive, valuable products, and resell them to people, to fashion victim boutiques...

Alex: ...to support our record label.

Melissa: So the idea is that H&M will steal their ideas back because they’re always looking at young designers. Now we see stuff that, like imports of ours, at H&M stores. It’s a strange cycle. We’re not turning into them yet. So now we have copied a Chanel laptop bag.

Alex: But that’s beside the point. Now Prada is playing our music in their chain stores all over the world but without us actually knowing it.

Melissa: We’ve suddenly become part of a Prada image that they have in their stores. That is kind of scary.

Alex: We’d like to infiltrate H&M directly. We’d like to somehow get to design the clothes there or at least model the clothes. It would actually be our clothes but stolen ideas.

Melissa: The most recent experience we had like that was in Switzerland. This young girl, she was about 21, went to art school there and said that we totally helped her position in art school. We’d given her credibility through what were doing, also through the scale of what we do. That it’s not just something that happens in an art environment but also in mainstream culture because of our presence. That was really great to hear.

Alex: Let’s not forget Cocks on Weed. It’s a group of boys who obviously followed our lead. They formed a band and they do parties.

Kiki: They smoked a lot of pot, obviously.

Melissa: They never got around to actually forming their own record company. They saw us doing our own little record company and said, "Oh yeah, we wanted to do that except we were too stoned. That’s why we call ourselves Cocks on Weed."