“A Motherfucker is a Werewolf”: Gang Identity and Avant-Garde Rebellion in Up Against the Wall Motherfucker and the International Werewolf Conspiracy (1968–1970)

In late 1968, a collective from the Lower East Side of New York City started to distribute self-published pamphlets and magazines that outlined the operations of what Alan W. Moore has called an “art gang”. Based upon a redefinition of identity to serve a radical anti-capitalist purpose, the avant-garde group Up Against theWall Motherfucker (UAWMF) and one of its splinter successors, the International Werewolf Conspiracy (IWWC), articulated an intuitive discourse about how to alter the existing conditions of the world. Against the nationalist notions of what it meant to be ‘American’, they mobilized a collage of images that included Native Americans, hippie aesthetics, and futurist-inspired militancy. Along with the development of the organizational concept of “anity group”, UAWMF attempted to redefine the American identity as an individual and collective category, its hybrid cut-up resulting, at first, in the ‘motherfucker’ as an honor-bound member of a gang and, finally, as a monster represented by the figure of the werewolf. At first, the ‘motherfucker’ attempted to enact an open confrontation with the nation state, tying identity to a certain territory and a certain people, but after police crackdowns on gang activity led to the dissolution ofUAWMF, some of its ex-members reformulated the confrontation in conspiratorial terms. The IWWC described its members as revolutionaries in disguise, coming to involve the body in the transformation of an identity whose key elements would be fundamentally opposed to those given by society. This essay will focus on the critiques implied in redefining the identity of an “American” within the framework of avant-garde rejection of society at large, tracing the dierent implications and limitations of creating a new identity wholly opposed to capitalism.