Just Another Asshole

Edited by photographer and musician Barbara Ess from 1978 to 1987, Just Another Asshole was a seminal and now legendary series of publications that helped define New York’s No Wave community. Each issue took a different form: zine, LP record, large-format tabloid, magazine, exhibition catalog and paperback book.

Just Another Asshole number six was the famous fiction issue, designed in the style of a pulp paperback. It was co-edited with composer Glenn Branca and contained a diverse mix of artists, musicians and writers from the early ‘80s downtown scene―among them Kathy Acker, Lynn Tillman, Cookie Mueller, Richard Prince, Judy Rifka, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith, Lee Ranaldo, David Wojnarowicz and Michael Gira.

The work in the publication was transgressive, unapologetic and unrelenting in its style and subject matter. Today it presents a bleak yet romantic view of life in New York City before the AIDS crisis, before gentrification, before Rudy Giuliani and before the real-estate boom pushed the underground out of Lower Manhattan.