Who is Chris Korda, the punk artist who advocated suicide in consumerist America in the 1990s?

by Jardin April 15, 2019, 4:04am

Artist and musician, Jardin returns to his discovery of Chris Korda, a protean icon to whom the Parisian art venue Goswell Road is currently devoting an exhibition.

Almost 2 years ago, while I was in the living room of my friend, DJ and musician, Madame Patate, an event turned my life upside down. We were arranging his record collection, starting with electronic music, trying as best we could to find a way to organize them. Suddenly, emerging from all these covers spread around us, emerges a work beyond any category: "I Like To Watch" by Chris Korda. It is first of all an image, a collage, that I hold in my hands. The face of a porn actress who licks the World Trade Center tower that a Boeing 767 is about to hit. On the back, another actress, face towards the sky, eyes closed who receives in her mouth one of the suicides of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Potato tells me that Chris Korda is American. Challenged by the radical nature of this cover, I check the publication date on the sumptuous macaroons.

I am already won over by the punk and queer rarity of this object. The music starts, a steady tempo, a confusion of genres between house and electro bass with trance accents which could be released next month. Above all, a synthetic voice, barely melodic, as sunny as it is melancholy, casts a poignant poetry on the violence of the media images of September 11. Korda compares journalistic images to pornographic images that our brains have compulsively sequenced. This visual ejaculation, this flow of images that I like to watch ("I like to watch") while swaying my body to real dancefloor music: the cocktail is extraordinary. Released by Null Records in 2002 just a few months after the most astonishing media event of my generation, this EP will of course be banned in the United States. His video even led to Chris being banned from performing in Holland.

"In real life, he is a boy who is completely normal and who dresses from time to time, to go shopping, like a slightly retro bourgeois girl."

My friend Patate started by buying another album by Chris Korda & The Church Of Euthanasia, released in 1999 on Dj Hell's International Deejay Gigolo Records label. "When I bought the record, I went to see on the internet what Church Of Euthanasia (CoE) was," says Madame Patate. I immediately took my card because it really spoke to me. I think I found myself in all the principles that Church Of Euthanasia defends apart from suicide because I am still alive, but there you go, one day or another I will think about it." In 2003, it was Dj Wet, his partner at the time, who, with his party organization, brought Chris Korda to Batofar. "He was performing live, with a laptop, dressed as Reverend Chris Korda, with his black wig, somewhat classic bob, short skirt, blaser sexy. He sang, adds Patate. He handed out lots of stickers and badges to everyone during the concert. Then I spent three days with him, he wasn't the first gender fluid person I met but he was a particular gender fluid. In real life, he is a boy who is completely normal and who from time to time dresses like a slightly retro bourgeois girl to go shopping." That’s when she hands me this famous vinyl. On the cover, a portrait of Reverend Chris: this attractive groomed face, this brown bangs and this captivating look, subtitled with this sentence: Six Billion Humans Can't Be Wrong. . But who is this artist who has just entered my life?

While I was composing music dedicated to him, I decided to contact Chris via Facebook to invite him to play in Brussels. We start by discussing his next album Akoko Ajeji for which he developed his own software sequencer. And because I want to deepen my e-encounter with this creature from the future, I end up calling him. I fear the language barrier, my ability to humbly and precisely question the work of such a radical and demanding life. From my first question, Chris directs me to archive.org, because describing the genesis of the CoE seems more impactful to him by going back 20 years. When I ask him when music entered his life, he explains to me that he has been a musician since he was 12: he started with the drums and the piano, before taking up the guitar, he studied jazz through the Berkeley College of Music and several groups.

In 1991, Chris "exploded into the unknown" leaving his career as a jazzman and his job as a software developer (only for a while) to discover himself as a transgender person performing, among other things, in competitions and Drag balls in Massachusetts. "Many friendships did not survive my transition into a woman in public space," he remembers. For Chris, in the Chrissy era, cross-dressing allows him to achieve a balance between the masculine and feminine aspects of his personality. It was during this period of profound personal transition that he rubbed shoulders with gay clubs at the height of the advent of deep douse. Still soaked in the residue of the hippie movement, at a time when the Black Bloc were appearing in the northern United States, his deeply ecological concerns were especially echoed by anarchists like the Unabomber. Inhabited by a "punk sensibility", in 1992 he published the best-selling bumper sticker "SAVE THE PLANET KILL YOURSELF". If this message ended up stuck on car bumpers, there is no doubt that today, such a radically squeaky and eco-responsible phrase could find meaning among young people marching for the climate or on the hooded sweatshirts targeted by rains of defensive bullets, GLI-F4s and clouds of tear gas.

If the summer of 1991 corresponds to Chris' transition, it is also the period of birth of the CoE and the beginning of his career in the Techno industry. His first self-produced EP, which he also calls "SAVE THE PLANET KILL YOURSELF", contains the original dream of the CoE. Suicide, Abortion, Sodomy & Cannibalism are the 4 pillars, established around a single commandment for all his disciples: "Thou Shalt Not Procreate". The Church is increasing its actions in the public space, publications, lives, setting up a hotline to help those who want to commit suicide. This first disc received some trans-Atlantic success and would later be re-pressed on Gigolo alongside Jeff Mills, Dopplereffekt and DMX Krew.

With humor, strength and poetry Reverend Chris and his disciples deliver blows for blows to a Pro-Life, consumerist, polluting and homophobic America. Korda says, "Over time, it became clear that music could become a kind of conduit for the messages of the Church. But I didn't anticipate it. I just made the music I felt. The Techno track "Save The Planet Kill Yourself" (1993) was a deeply felt work." This slogan, this sticker, this hit, this statement probably constitutes the genesis of a total work of art which is far from being completed. Never turned off despite the musical silence of Chris Korda between 2003 and 2018, the CoE website reveals a real-time birth counter which continues to update this question: is it really possible that we, Humanity, are wrong to live this life as we live it?

Chris Korda belongs to the first generation of coders. All his first albums were composed and played with the Cakewalk sequencer under DOS. When I ask him if he’s more cyberpunk or cyborg, he replies: "I’m definitely a cyborg. Most people are users of technology, I am a creator of technology - which is very different (...) Not just in the field of music. For example last year in 2018, I worked on a virtual pottery application."

"My position today is very different from the one I had in 1992, but can we expect anything different? It would have been very boring to say the exact same thing 20 years later."

If Korda's sprawling work is so compelling, it is undoubtedly because he tackles global questions head-on, as complex as they are essential: our relationship to images, to technologies, to ecology. All forms of art, so enjoyable and radical, implemented by Chris Korda, oscillate between lightness and violence, seriousness and humor, masculinity and femininity, Humanity and Machine. Today, Chris Korda takes stock of his work and accepts all the developments. "I have produced contradictory fields in my work, there is no doubt about that," he explains. The face of the beginning of the CoE was extremely anti-human (...) My position today is very different from the one I had in 1992, but can we expect anything else? It would have been very boring to say the exact same thing 20 years later. I have evolved, my points of view too, but I don't see a conflict there. The message I am setting out today is ideologically and politically what I call CoE Post Anti-Humanism. It's the idea that at this final level of the game, where Humanity is in deep trouble, it seems quite ridiculous to attack human beings for a mistake they were inevitably going to make. (...) We should rather feel sorry for the humans who persist in dying out in this error because soon we will simply no longer be here. It’s a very Post-Anti-Humanist thought."

Chris Korda continues to seek to take a step back and offers other fictions, other dreams, to understand the violence of our reality. More than 20 years ago, this artist and his band of marginal weirdos took to the streets, went on TV sets, in clubs or on the networks to confront the denial of a majority of the population - our sin of gluttony global, our life filled with excess, defended with exclusionary, phobic and fascist moralities. Dismantling sexual politics, proposing radical ecological alternatives such as birth control and the questioning of capitalism, abolishing the borders between different forms of art to place culture at the center of public debate. What sounded yesterday like the concerns of an artistic-punk micro-cult sounds today like a final message of love or distress that we all could grasp: Save The Planet Kill Yourself.

The exhibition "Chris Korda, The Church of Euthanasia Archives" is being held in Paris from April 11 to 27 at Goswell Road, an art and publication venue.

The preceding is a translation. The original language is here.