SPIKE ART MAGAZINE

By  Rachel Pronger ​

No Wave Film Icon Beth B on Making Art after Rage

Artist and filmmaker Beth B is a legend of the US underground. In the late 1970s, as musicians, filmmakers, and artists flocked to New York City’s derelict downtown, she became one of the foundational figures of No Wave, a radical, DIY, interdisciplinary movement defined by a nihilistic worldview, stark minimalism, dissonant soundtracks, and a confrontational, “anti-everything” attitude.

Over a forty-five-year career, B – who describes her current practice as “Now Wave” – has straddled mediums and genres with iconoclastic insouciance. Her early no-budget “B Movies" were noisy punk provocations shot on Super 8 and 16mm, while later music videos – such as the racy, banned-from-MTV promo for Dominatrix’s “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight” (1983) – and features, like prescient televangelism satire Salvation! (1987), pushed glossy 80s visual excess to its queasy limits. Through her low-fi documentaries, B has turned an intimate lens on subjects ranging from outsider artists (Lydia Lunch), to drag and burlesque subcultures, to traumatized Vietnam veterans and their children.

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Beth B is an artist who has never stopped raging against society’s limits, and has remained consistent in her key thematic preoccupations – power, sexuality, desire, suffering and, behind the howls of fury, hope.

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