3 Teens Kill 4: No Motive
I first learned about David Wojnarowicz when I searched for ‘gay’ and ‘art’ on the Internet. I was 16 and David had died 6 years earlier during the height of the AIDS epidemic. I found passages from his rage-fueled and beautiful manifesto-cum-diary Close to the Knives online. And soon I discovered his incredible body of photos, collages, paintings, films, and performances. A few years later when I was making a film about David, his friend and band mate Julie Hair leant me a copy of their little-known but incredible East Village art-rock band 3 TEENS KILL 4. David, Julie, and their friends Jesse Hultberg, Doug Bressler, and Brian Butterick (AKA Hattie Hathaway) made this music before David was a famous artist implicated in the culture wars.
According to Julie, David ‘sometimes played ‘no-wave’ guitar. Sometimes the little bitty Casio keyboard that came out in the 80’s that was about 8″ long and 2.5″ wide. Mostly he played handheld tape recordings of tapes he made. Sometimes played a can of uncooked beans taped into a can that we used as percussion (hence the song Bean Song) and other percussion. Bean Song literally started with a spontaneous sarcastic remark from David about his can of beans playing abilities.’
I pulled out a book of David’s early photo series ‘Rimbaud in New York’ while listening to the warped record for the first time. David staged these grimy black and white pictures with friends posing around former wastelands of New York. They’re all wearing a crudely photocopied mask of the French symbolist poet, faggot, and dandy outsider Arthur Rimbaud. 3TK4 is the perfect soundtrack. Incorporating tape loops, toy sounds, spoken rants, and allusions to bank robbery, homoeroticism, non-lethal weapons, and xerox machines, 3TK4 meditated on, ‘essential conditions of freedom and happiness.’ Enjoy this post-punk gem and essential slice of ‘80s artfag history.
Available thanks to the generous permission of bandmember Julie Hair.