^JULIANA:

^WALT:

I was very active in the Hardcore Punk scene in the 1980s before I fell in with the Club Kids in 1991.  I grew up openly queer, and my mom was a bartender along with my Aunt Ernestine in the local gay bars in Norfolk, Virginia, which was probably my first evidence of a safe queer space.  I discovered Hardcore shows and started hanging out with punk kids on the beach.  Having come from a broken family, I was greatly impacted by the chosen family that I found in the other punks, skinheads and skaters that were a part of that scene.

I was frequently attacked all during high school, punched in the face, and so on, but because I had a tribe of my own to retreat into outside of school, that gave me power and strength, which grew over time.  I was empowered on many levels, especially by the DIY energy around starting bands, making fanzines and community codes of hanging out.  That became my creative foundation, which I still pull from today.  I was a political punk too, so I consistently participated in actions with different groups such as Greenpeace, PETA, National Organization of Women and Anti-Nuclear groups — being so close to DC.

I was in the street a lot, so any group of like minded outsiders, hanging out, became a safe space. I’ve said before that Punk gave me my skeleton and the Club Kids gave me my flesh.  When I got to NYC, everything I had evolved into as a punk kid got amplified.  All of a sudden, instead of humble music venues and the street scene, there were these huge mega club spaces that had budgets to fund whatever idea we could come up with. 

As Club Kids, we worked tirelessly to build our own special world.  Having vast spaces, budgets, art crews and club staff to help support us, really changed the game in comparison with suburban Hardcore experience.  There were some fantastic photographers documenting everything too. Documentation is always key.  If it’s not documented, then it doesn’t exist in the long run.  And the PR teams that worked for the mega clubs, helped us take what we were doing to the American public through television appearances, newspaper headlines and magazine editorials. 

The internal machinery of these mega clubs operated as a self supporting system of many parts.  The more we did, the more we got photographed and the more we appeared in the media. Suburban kids would leave their rural homes to come to NYC to play with the Club Kids, and there was this lovely ripple effect.  It just kept building and growing, which was thrilling to be a part of.

^{Club Culture and Personal Identity}

_Juliana:

Club culture serves as a commons. Although not synonymous with raves, there is an aspect, at least in the clubs I have and currently frequent, that is community driven. Clubs have served against the myopic, isolated forms of sociality that are encouraged by technologically assisted social media. Clubs have opened me to others, and I learn to be in community, to care for others when they need something. The illegality of raves, different from clubs, requires that community serve as an alternative to state structures of care, protection, etc. So I have learned to exist in a  sort liminal space where we must develop our own resources.

Theres a DIY aspect, particularly to raves, that has informed my artwork in particular. The economy of clubs and raves, largely off the books and even .when on the books, driven by the purchases of people who come, is transparent and democratic in a way that art cannot be, because it is a speculative asset economy run by the interests of unchecked wealth. I am grateful to have space creatively and financially to be free from plutocrats.

Clubs have also taught me to fend for myself in the face of promoters who parasitically feed off of young and struggling talent… I have worked for purportedly reputable promoters who exploit aspects of club and rave cultures to essentially function like mob bosses, with no benefit to those who are loyal to them. I really had to learn my worth and get it together because there is a scary relationship between parasitic promoters and vulnerable and/or sycophantic talent in New York… this is especially true of club contexts.

_Walt:

My first club job was at BUILDING, where I was hired to paint decor for the VIP lounge.  The club allowed me to use the attic as a studio and I was also invited to do my first exhibition inside of LIMELIGHT.  So you can imagine, to my 18 year old mind, I was living and thought I had really made it, having my own studio and my first exhibition in the two hottest clubs in town.  I had changed my name to Waltpaper, and that was a great experience too. 

I had realized that identity could be a liberating creative medium through punk, but with the Club Kids there was an additional realization that identity could also be a brand.  At that time, no one was using business language like “branding”.  This was the era when being too commercial meant that you had “sold out”.  There was often a lot of guilt around the idea of success within alternative communities.

It was quite forward thinking of the Club Kids to be so business savvy.  By changing my name, I set in motion a life and identity that was completely of my own making, and it was clearly marked with the name change.  I became my own context.  It was at this intersection that I became an interdisciplinary artist, not just a painter and illustrator.  Just being a painter, locked away in a studio alone, felt very one dimensional and boring with all these new spaces that needed to be filled with creativity. 

My relationship to Waltpaper has grown and changed over time.  I now use Waltpaper as my pen name for my writing, and view him and his story less as a personal experience and more as the journey of an archetypal Club Kid; a masthead for a certain type of cultural energy, which I am now steering towards a fiction project called HOTGLUE.

_WALT:

While I have bounced around from the nightlife and music communities, to the art world, and then design and fashion, I never “played to the crowd”.  My punk roots would not allow me to do that.  I was born an outsider, and that’s all I really know how to be.  I was never the chosen one.  I’ve always had to build my experience from the ground up, alone or with my friends, outside of all the boxes.  There has been a tremendous amount of liberation in carrying this outsider posture.  I’ve chosen to create heat independently and then let the moths come to the flame.  I didn’t understand what I was doing, until recently — it was just my intuitive spirit guiding me.  I’ve never asked permission to be myself.

_Juliana:

The benefit is that I can be an artist in the broadest truest sense of what that means, and not a careerist. Artists are often pushed into one career pathway even if that path isnt reflective of the free flow of their interests or creative desires. I love that I can truly follow the whims of my spirit creatively. This does create a tension in expectations, especially in an era where we are all encouraged to package and market ourselves into easily digestible “content”, a term I have come to resent deeply.

I look up to people who paved the way before I was here like Walt, who makes beautiful, brilliant, engaged work no matter the medium or setting. Its important to push against the current content streamlining of any all artistic field and make space for peoples curiosities to unfold without regard to careerism.

_Walt:

I ran into challenges later in life being interdisciplinary, trying to find my place in the art and gallery world, where they tend to prefer you do one thing and keep doing it over and over because at that point you are saddled with making collectors feel “safe”.  Collectors feel safer with consistency.  There is a lot of fear in the art world.  I find a bit more freedom in the design world where the tempo is faster and they tend to reward a changing and constantly evolving voice.

I created Walt Cassidy Studio as a conceptual casing for the more design leaning stuff that I do.  Going back to creating one’s own context, I felt the need to create my own output apparatus, one in which I could create in endless forms, without guilt or anxiety.  I handle my own business, sales and promotion instead of relying on galleries, agents and so forth.  It’s not an easy road, but at the end of the day, I feel pure and true, and that’s what is most important to me.

^{Power of Combining Art Forms}

_Juliana:

Of all the artistic mediums, I feel that music has the opportunity to approach a sort of total-art practice, in the sense that music, unlike any other medium, is distributed through and contextualized by film, text, sound, image. The process of releasing an album involves incorporating every imaginable art form and medium. And I think it has held its ground as one of if not the indisputably preeminent art form as a result. Working in my band has been revelatory in this sense, It is a combination of all art forms working together to create sound.

_Walt: 

For me, my first book, NEW YORK: CLUB KIDS is a pretty powerful testament of cross pollinating creative mediums and how such creative expression can affect the greater public, culture at large and history. 

_JULIANA:

I find value in the process of making art itself, and in seeing a work come to life. That is what drives me, that is what pushes me. Integrity is deeply important to me and a strive for independence accompanies that. Centering what brings me joy, not what provides social validation in the moment is important. People will catch up eventually. Knowing that I’m true to the drives within me is what fortifies my resistance to trends or careerist capitulations.

_{“I love that I can truly follow the whims of my spirit creatively. This does create a tension in expectations, especially in an era where we are all encouraged to package and market ourselves into easily digestible “content”, a term I have come to resent deeply.”}

_{Balancing Recognition and Authenticity}

_WALT:

I’m maniacally autonomous when it comes to creativity.  For me, democracy, too many voices, sabotages the creative process.  I allow myself to be isolated and self obsessed in my creativity, because that seems to be the only way to keep what I do authentic.  I like to walk alone and not answer to anyone.  I never aspired to have money or be famous, my goal has always been to have a unique voice of my own, however small or large it may be.  My audience is not vast, I don’t think.  I’d say it’s mostly comprised of insiders, more than the general public.  I don’t have a massive following.  So I don’t feel much need to micromanage the pedestrian response to what I do. 

It does, however, seem like my audience is comprised of people who have huge audiences themselves or work for people or brands that have huge audiences, and those influential personalities seem to pay close attention to what I do.  I’ve often seen my energy manifested via 2nd and 3rd generation output.  I’ve appeared on a lot of mood boards, I’m told.  It’s a bit like skipping a stone along the surface of a pond.  I toss the stone, and it just kinda keeps radiating and bouncing along. I hope that doesn’t read as too arrogant, but I do feel that it is true.

^{Art's Impact on Social Conversations}

_Juliana:

If you look at how the events defining this historical moment are framed, we are already being addressed on these terms. There is a meltdown over reproductive rights and language pushed by trans people regarding state and medical classifications. Global conflicts are invariably framed along the lines of cultural, ethnic and religious redemption against erasure or absorptions into an imposed national or supra-national identity.

There is so much more at play here, and while identitarian discourse can be used in nefarious ways, I hope my art seduces via these frameworks into a different approach, to understand the material shifts happening in culture and society. My work deals with so many things that could never be reduced to identity, identity is the analogue through which the questions are provoked and I hope that this dynamic can spill over into how people engage each other outside of art. To dissolve myopia through the very structures that frame the limits of vision.

_Walt: 

I was raised with the quote, “Resolve to be thyself; and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.” 

- Matthew Arnold

I used that quote in the opening of my book.  It was my father’s wish for me, and I extend that wish to all other people, especially creatives.  My personal and professional aspirations are just to find peace and continue to participate in the world on my own terms.  I believe that my life, and how I live it as an individual, has been the most fruitful medium available to me. The things I make, objects and so on, are residue of that one master work; my life.  I see artists as map makers.  Resonant creative work has the ability to lead us in and out of our mental and emotional wilderness.

_{“I really had to learn my worth and get it together because there is a scary relationship between parasitic promoters and vulnerable and/or sycophantic talent in New York… this is especially true of club contexts.”} 

- Juliana Huxtable

There is no responsibility inherent to art to me. I also reject the idea that any and all artists should speak to the political issues of our time. Many if not most artists dont have that capability and I wouldn’t inflict the tragedy of many artists illiteracy on the already burdened public. Art (fine art, art supported by insitutions) is already so marginal in the larger political discourse, exacerbated by the opaque economics of the industry and the capitulation of Galerist, curators, etc to those interests. I tend to believe that politics already exists in everything that falls under its ambit. I think artists have a responsibility for honesty and in that honesty, the ways in which social and political forces shape that work will be apparent wether or not the artist chooses to ‘take a stand’ in the performative form that often takes.

Provoking Discussion through Art

Could you discuss a specific piece or project where you aimed to provoke thought and discussion around a particular social or cultural issue?

_Juliana:

My last New York solo show, Interfertility Industrial Complex, deals with the interspecies dynamic as a springboard to process everything from industrial agriculture to beastiality.

_Walt: 

Looking at the Club Kids as a form of societal performance art — us confronting the American public through our appearances on daytime talk shows.  The tv shows were always framed under this notion of “the youth gone wild” and “do you know where your kids are at night?” …but those public confrontations brought to the surface some healthy and fun debates about identity, gender and the value of hedonism and safe space, while sending intentional smoke signals out to all the queers hiding under rocks across the country, beckoning them to liberate and join us.

Future of Club Culture 

^WALT:

That’s really up to the young people filling those spaces, they are the leaders now.  I know that club culture tends to germinate ideas before the greater public gets a hold of them, and that has been the case throughout history, be it the Roaring 20s, Weimar Berlin, the Abstract Expressionist at Cedar Tavern, the Factory in the 60s, Punk and Disco in the 70s or the Club Kids in the 90s.  Young people are always going to find a way to hang out and breed ideas.  If someone wants to be close to that kind of bubbling source energy, I would advise them to spend some time clubbing.

^JULIANA:

The same rules should apply to everyone in the industry. People should be paid, people should be as safe as they can be, people should be able to work together to create economies of excess within clubbing which is very much possible.

_{“I love that I can truly follow the whims of my spirit creatively. This does create a tension in expectations, especially in an era where we are all encouraged to package and market ourselves into easily digestible “content”, a term I have come to resent deeply.”}

Artistic Journeys and Future Aspirations

How do you see your artistic journeys evolving in the coming years, and what are your goals and aspirations for your future creative projects?

_Juliana:

I hope to keep my fire bright and am excited to expand what I’m doing in music!

_Walt:

What I learned in doing my first book, NEW YORK: CLUB KIDS is that the power at the end of the day, goes to the story teller.  The process of making that book sparked an interest in self publishing — taking me back to my punk days — which I intend to pursue through the imprint that I’ve created for Walt Cassidy Studio, called HOTGLUE. 

I am releasing a 2nd edition paperback reader version of NEW YORK: CLUB KIDS, which I’ve retitled, THE CLUB KIDS, this November on the 4 year anniversary of the first book launch.  This will be the first HOTGLUE title. I’m hoping with this 2nd edition to bounce around and do some readings and sell some t-shirts, since the first edition sold out during lockdown before I got the chance to enjoy the journey of having a successful book.  After I get THE CLUB KIDS out this Fall, I intend to turn my attention back to working on my fiction project for HOTGLUE.  My updates can always be found at waltcassidy.com