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HISTORY OF DISBAND, 1978-1982, 2008-2021

My friend Marvin Taylor, founder of the Downtown Collection at NYU, said, “Everybody was in three bands.”  This was certainly true for the very first members of DISBAND, Daile Kaplan and Barbara Ess (except Martha Wilson).  Daile was also in Rhys Chatham’s band, the Gynecologists, and Barbara Ess was in Glenn Branca’s band, Static, as well as founding her own all-girl band, Y-Pants.  Other bands around in the late 70s were the Theoretical Girls, Bush Tetras, James White and the Blacks, Tone Death, Con Iced, A-Band, Daily Life, the Idiot Orchestra, the Diplomat Samurai Band, the Love of Life Orchestra.  Bands played at the Mudd Club, Tr3, AREA, CBGBs, Tonic.  But they all knew how to play instruments and I didn’t, so I called up artist girlfriends who were long on concept and short on skills, and in 1978, DISBAND, the all-girl band of artists who couldn’t play any instruments, was born.

In Franklin Furnace I had a loft that was big enough for wild and crazy rehearsals.  Honestly, we didn’t rehearse all that much—mostly we gossiped and ate dinner together.  In the earliest meetings, I remember April Gornik and Ingrid Sischy sitting on the floor, taking it all in.  April left but Ingrid stayed.  Barbara Kruger wrote two wonderful songs, “The End” and “Fashions,” before leaving around the summer of 1979.  Then Diane, the dancer and outspoken activist, brought in fellow live-wire Ilona Granet, a ranter in her own right and singer for Con Iced, adding a dose of “silly” to the brew.  The composition of the band stabilized for awhile with Ilona Granet; Donna Henes, known by all as the Urban Shaman; Ingrid Sischy, then-Editor of ARTFORUM; Diane Torr, and Martha Wilson, Founding Director of Franklin Furnace as its members. 

On October 21, 1979, we were invited to perform for the “Sound Show” at P.S. 1 in Queens.  The song list included “Get Rebel,” “Hey Baby,” “NYC, “Iran-y,” “Five More Years,” “Hudson Street,” “Fashions” and “The End.” My band name was Mickey Angelo or Lov Storey, and later when we became members of Ronald Reagan’s cabinet for “DISBAND in the Dustbowl” at the Kitchen, Alexander M. Plague, Jr.; Ilona was variously Pinky or Pansy I-Rock, and later, James Watts-a-Tree; Ingrid was Susan; Diane was mostly Dianatone; and Donna was happiest as Sorpresa Cheeka, the Hispanic troublemaker.

DISBAND was a big hit in feminist art circles.  In 1980, we were invited to perform at the newly inaugurated Feminist Art Institute on Spring Street, and Lucy Lippard invited us to entertain guests at her 40^th birthday party.  Also in 1980, we were invited to perform in Italy as part of a performance art festival that included Laurie Anderson, Chris Burden, Julia Heyward, Paul McCarthy, and Richard Newton.  In Florence, we did our hit song, “Look at My Dick,” not knowing that every town in Italy has its own name for this appendage, so dicks are taken very seriously indeed.  When we got to Rome, our performance had been cancelled.  Then it was reinstated because we had already been paid.  So Ilona (who later became famous for her guerrilla street signs) made poster-board signs for us bearing the legend, SCIOPERO, “On Strike” in Italian.  Our performance was a strike, with chanting and singing.  Yikes!  The Italian public takes strikes even more seriously than they take dicks.  The whole place erupted into arguments about whether we had the right to strike or not, with people lining up for microphone time with questions and vituperation.  Was there even a translator?  We later performed to enthusiastic crowds at a lesbian bar. 

2008 Reunion Concerts-2021

Video of DISBAND shot in 1979 at P.S. 1 was included in “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” organized in 2007 by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, by curator Connie Butler. This exhibition toured to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D. C.; P.S. 1 Museum, Queens, NY; and the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. Canada; but before it came to P.S. 1, Martha Wilson got a call from Connie Butler asking if DISBAND would like to do a reunion concert for the opening of “WACK!” at P.S. 1?  She called Ingrid Sischy, who said, “I will never get my fat ass up before an audience again.”  However, the other members of DISBAND were game; we started rehearsing and performed to a standing-room-only audience on February 17, 2008.  In the audience was Heng-Gil Han, curator of The 21^st Century Show for the Incneon Women Artists Biennale, in Incheon, Korea.   He invited DISBAND to perform on August 1, 2009, and we got our second wind!  We have subsequently performed at Vox Aux and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia; at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York; and the Salzburg Museum of Modern Art, in Salzburg, Austria, among other venues.   What we have found is that the concerns of our songs—women’s empowerment, the environment, and political life—are still relevant nearly 40 years later. 

Now it is 2021 and DISBAND is re-launching its website, originally built by Sarah Reynolds, and re-built by Arantxa Araujo with the assistance of Nina Fletcher.  A few things have happened:  Ingrid Sischy died on July 24, 2015 from breast cancer.  Diane Torr died on May 31, 2017 of a brain tumor.  Both kept their sense of humor and humanity to the end: DISBAND was in residence at the MacDowell Colony in August of 2016, when after looking at a schedule on the wall, Diane remarked, “I can tell that’s wrong—and I’m the one with a brain tumor!”

— Martha Wilson, 2021