Ian Andrew Askew profile by Jesse Cameron Alick
It’s the beginning of a heat wave and Ian and I are sitting on a bench in Prospect Park, looking out at the pond, turtles baking on the rocks, just as we are. Our backs are to the Abraham Lincoln statue but as skaters slide back and forth along its base, it’s hard not to look back. “So many black people name their children Lincoln. I love the name Lincoln,” I muse, “even though he didn’t actually do anything to intentionally help black people. But the myth did.” Ian says to me, “It's really robust lies that make themselves true just by getting in enough people's heads. If you make a lie robust enough and get enough people to say it over and over again, it becomes history.” History is not what you think it is. And blackness isn’t either. And punk will never die.
Ian is a multidisciplinary creator who moved to New York City in September 2020. “I'm running headfirst into a quarter life crisis on a lot of planes. And one of them is certainly how to describe what I do and how to align that with what I want to be doing. So yes, I’m a musician and a theater maker. I play drums and make sounds and care about liveness and collaboration. I care a lot about stories from history that disrupt our normative notions of how things happen. I love stories that help explain the present we're living in.”
This is where Ian blows my mind though. “The last thing I always say about my research as an artist is from an article written by Greg Tate where he coined the term ‘contrary negritudes’.” Chunks of my brain explode all over the hot summer sidewalk. “Meaning expressions of pride in one's blackness, expressions of black cultural pride that can completely cut against the grain of what the norm looks like. Black punk as being one version of that.” Growing up black in Montana means that one hears a lot from dominant white culture about the correctness or incorrectness of one's blackness, so I’m already grateful to Greg and Ian both for this amazing concept. “It opens so much space for queerness and all these other expressions of black pride that don't look like whatever the normative expressions often are. Those are things I care about.”
History is of course a fascinating thing - and the way that a sliver of truth can unravel our understanding. We talk about why the western states are all squares, and this having to do with dividing tribal lands and passing them along generations so that they can never be returned again. “Land doesn't become scarce until it's not communally owned.” Ian explains. And I’m starting to see that it’s all about straight lines. “They take wide swaths of American popular music and draw straight lines across it to make it sellable. How do you end up with so many genres of music that are considered black or not black? Genre lines get drawn and black records of a certain kind don't get made. So what's recorded is all the white artists and all of a sudden it becomes this really radical thing for black people to play country.” Or punk!
SLAMDANCE GARAGE is part of a series that Ian has created about punk and blackness, the process by which punk came to be known as a white subculture, and the experience of black people who participated and faced hard times both within and without the community. “Punk becomes a site of what I've started to call racial trespassing, whether it's the long history of white kids running out at night to the black clubs or whether it's black kids in the contemporary emo scene. I was excited about the metaphor of the mosh pit as a chaotic cultural exchange.” There's a world of blackness outside of blackness as something that is legible to whiteness. And on that cutting edge is punk. And we are there too.
by Jesse Cameron Alick
artwork by Brenna O’Brien