For Bushwick Open Studios (BOS) 2012, Go! Push Pops premiered their lesbian-gangsta-erotica ‘Push Porn’ on 2 screens at Homero’s Barbershop, a local business where they filmed a segment of the video with their stylist Ecua. Starring local hustla celeb “Strawberry,” Push Porn is a nastay lucid dream about drugs, popsicles and gentrification at the frontier of the avant-ghetto. The opening party and world premier of the ‘Push Porn’ included scalp design specials by Ecua the official Push Pop barber, free limited edition posters, bootleg porn & beer.

Not Your Typical Pansie-Ass White Cube

While many artists prepared for the largest yet Bushwick Open Studios by white washing their walls and spending a fortune on collector-friendly hors d’oeuvres, the Push Pops spent the months leading up to the 500+ studio strong event earning hood brownie points at a Dominican-style Barbershop on Wilson Ave. During a landmark year for both BOS and the growing (aka rapidly gentrifying) neighborhood of Bushwick, what the popular ArtFagCity Blog calls a year in which “visitors were about as likely to find artists making fairy art as artists with gallery representation,” the Push Pops shaved hearts into their scalps and humped the windows of the barbershop as they promoted the world premier of their bootleg porno.
In a neighborhood increasingly overrun by the ‘privileged poor’ where community life isn’t as integrated as we’d like to think, what began as an act of reckless summer abandon, ultimately served the task of community building and solidarity. Wielding sex appeal that could part the red sea, Go! Push Pops took feminism into the macho lair of the barbers and the macho lair of the barbers into Fine Art. At the end of the day… most of the upper crust culture vultures of the BOS cohort there to peep the artist ghetto wouldn’t dare step foot inside Homero’s despite the jiggly Push Pop junk and aggressive projectile Feminism: Bitch Bow Down! This is off the grid, in your face Lesbian Gangsta Hip Hop Feminism!  We taunted from the front door. Those that did were greeted with wall to wall female produced porn, intoxicated Dominican teenagers with sharp utensils and enough marijuana residual to hotbox a semi.

While we made crossroads into the male barbershop culture, selling porn curbside to passersby as well as those that came to get a shape up, we meanwhile broke up a marriage and rattled several relationships forced to fend off jealous lovers like island mosquitoes. We almost got swallowed up in our own fantasy when rumors started to circulate that we were being spied out for a prostitution ring and we started to believe them. We were called ‘white girls’ although we ain’t all white. Push Pop co-director Crystal, being Chilean born, is bilingual and on a temporary visa which means in some ways she shares more in common with the boys of the barbershop then the MFA-clad hipsters reading her as white. Ultimately, the piece spoke most explicitly to constructions of race and realities of class. It asserted post-colonial prerogatives and posed sexual relations as one aperture in the dominant and historical narratives concerning territory, property, belonging, race, religion and social position.

MORE >>>