The Guild We Build
A salute to the student editors and intro to the ten-year retro(spective) issue of Mission at Tenth
By Randall Babtkis
This publication was born out of curiosity and out of hope.
– Claude Bessy, Founding Editor, Slash
Artists, visible and invisible, have a knack for disturbances. My former neighbors, Claude Bessy and Philomena Winstanley, created a slightly disturbing weekly zine dedicated to the sweet, short set of early punk years in Los Angeles. Down the hallway from Philomena and Claude, in our Venice, CA studio apartments that I thought of as a small guild, I DIY’d a dial-a-work-of-art phone line. My brother found a commercial grade answering machine, which handled a few hundred calls a day, each triggering a multitude of loud clicks. We wired the machinery into the closet over my rollaway bed. I dreamt of clicks. The format was simple: acoustical sounds, music, and words capable of being heard from any telephone on earth. I rented a post office box for submissions and correspondence, asked friends, strangers, and musicians to perform audio work, over which I casually banged a toy keyboard and drum set. Sometimes I hummed or whispered a few spoken words. And in the morning, I went to my day job.
Some years later, one bright autumn afternoon in 2008, Cindy Shearer invited me to start up an inter-arts magazine at CIIS. I felt uniquely suited. "Art can be DIY, confrontational," Cindy laughed, and showed me an example of a manifesto sewn into a book jacket of another magazine. Cindy's attitude, I understood, was punk.
In a guild-like atmosphere, working on Volume I of Mission at Tenth with our MFA students Aileen Beno, Laura Cedillo, José Antonio Torres, and Orlonda Uffre, things came together quickly. Fast-forward eight months. Open the pages of Volume I, and your eyes want to adjust to its super-spiked-up letters, bleeding to the edges of each page. Someone told me Aileen Beno's cover, "The Leaky Pen Issue," was “disturbing” and “punk.” I proudly share the badge. Inside was a mash-up of dazzling artwork, poems, essays, stories, missives and work-in-progress.
Enter Art Director Neil Freese to help us with Volume II, the "Hieroglyph Issue," and the grand event of Tony Phillips' "To Figure the Riddle” cover. That book jacket features a naked sphinx crossing paths with a dwarfed-in-her-shadow man. Charcoal clouds, golden fields, and a red sports car, door flung open at the ready, vrooom! Neil knew how to make sure that cover got heard. Contributing Editors Steven Armstrong, Leslie Johnston, Christie Lee, Angela Moran, Pauline Reif, and April Serr cranked up the volume and produced an ephemeral 150-page book filled with an odd collection of eminences like choreographer Alonzo King and polymath Rabindranath Tagore, plus QR code to help unlock certain content, a multitude of poetry translations, several crystalline stories and Angelica Muro’s "Agricultural Workers in Gucci,” each offering their own offbeat disturbances.
By Volume III, our “Double Helix” issue, Mission at Tenth’s growing tribe included its biggest-ever group of Contributing Editors: Franceska Alexander, Christine Falcone, Hannah Ferris, Deborah Gaines, Mansa Gills, Haldane King, Karina Knowles, Carol Morey, Marika O’Baire-Kark, Lois Smith, and iyara fumilayo (Michelle Webster). Together, these guild members produced a décollage of inter-arts work that featured Barbara Parmet’s transcendent French-flap cover, from her “Veiled Woman” series. On closer look, I hear my own punk soundtrack, The Slits: "Typical girls try to be. Typical girls very well.” Not-to-be-missed: the hidden—as well as visible—memoranda and cartography tucked inside Volume III. This includes some troublemaking from another working guild—the members of “Invisible Venue” with Christian Frock.
Volume IV was destined to hold Mildred Howard's work on the cover before we even saw it coming. I’d been an admirer of Mildred’s glasswork for years and when she sent us the plate from "Island People on Blue Mountain," the image lit up the board table. Contributing Editors Yael Villafranca, Ahmunet Jordon, and Elizabeth Bishop, together with Student Interns Nicole Henares and Sampath Ramanujan pulled much more work together that was as striking and diverse as our collective aspirations. Of course with that much material coming in, the cuts were excruciating. Sometimes we held conversations so painful I couldn’t bear to be in them. Among the treasures, an early essay by Queen Sugar author Natalie Baszile on “Frogging” in Louisiana, Wendell White’s subversive “Schools for the Colored” B&W photo essay, new “Robot Poems” from Margaret Rhee, the you-have-to-read-it-to-understand-it-just-read-it work of Bhanu Kapil, and QR code to unlock a disturbing film, courtesy of performance artist Chris Sullivan.
Volume V reaches epic disturbance force. It includes the “Made of Iron” cover by Mary Lou Zelazny. That knockout image features an iron maiden of sorts who surveys a gorgeously despoiled urban landscape with lines of parked cars waiting to enter, or escape, or just wait within its marvelous confines, a maybe already dead zone. Inside, readers discover a lineup of stars, stars-in-waiting, works-in-progress, and genius misfit collaborations. Contributing editors Gerardo Medina, Nicole Henares, Melvina Hayes, Collette McGruder, Tiara Shafiq, Ryan Albright, and Jeffrey Scott brought in work from their favorite writers, artists, poets and provocateurs. Just take a look at Volume V, to see what our Contributing Editors brought out of those guild meetings!
In Volume VI, we were finally able to share with our readers some gorgeous photographic work by Neil Freese, Mission at Tenth's Art Director. The images contained in Neil's shimmering “Streets, Phnom Penh” wrap-around cover tell a dozen or more stories—just to get things started. Contributing Editors Sampath Ramanujan, Hope Casareno, and Devin Montgomery, along with Managing Editor Cheryl Derricotte, introduced more brave new work from fire artist and sculptor Kal Spelletich, writer Carolina De Robertis, artist Truong Tran (with some re-purposed, subversive images), new Luis Cernuda translations from poet Stephen Kessler, and a collection of return appearances by beloved contributors Bhanu Kapil, Tony Phillips, Pireeni Sundaralingam, and others.
Volume VII locates us precisely where we are now: in a homeless city, nearly surrounded by water, with the uneven feel of the visible and invisible and disturbances all around us. The works herein arouse and expand the concept of human experience and consciousness. Contributing editors Lily Black, Shawnte Dutschke, Nina Ramos Harrison, Paula Junn, Heidi Kraay, Alaura O’Dell and then-Managing Editor Julie Levak (along with Editor Carolyn Cooke) did everything punk. The book itself covers almost 350 pages of intense, gritty, this-is-who-we-are San Francisco. I have also, incidentally, discovered Volume VII makes a great doorstop under the threat of a gale force wind. Inside: a storm of work, including composer/Throbbing Gristle founder, vocalist, Genesis P-Orridge, a new play by Erik Ehn, and important artwork by Mark Harris and William Rhodes.
To the readers of this retrospective issue of Mission at Tenth, out of curiosity and out of hope and respect for disturbance, bravo. To the young editors searching out work in different forms, mediums, stages of production and pulling those works together in a seriously fun, germane, intensifying way, bravo. To The Sex Pistols, The Slits, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, The Clash, The Fall, Swell Maps, The Screamers, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and especially to an old friend now gone, Claude Bessy, and his surviving partner, Philomena Winstanley, my salute.
"God Save the Queen. We mean it man.”
Randall Babtkis
Founding Editor, Mission at Tenth InterArts Journal
