LITMIR.BIZ

      Introduction

      Rhonda Barrett was an obscure but critically acclaimed 21st-century artist. Her life was her work: she painted her biography, sixty words a day, over six giant canvases, before passing away in 2044. These paintings, including the partially completed, largely illegible work from her brief cohabitation with percussionist Bernard Reese, each measuring at least six hundred square feet, provide us with much of her biographical information (The Barrett Trust’s aversion to providing passages for scholarly analysis gratis “in an effort to continue to raise funds for the betterment of young women everywhere” nonwithstanding). Barrett scholars agree on certain key points alluded to on her canvases—her early immersion in chess, her work in the sex service industry, her philanthropy, her subsequent rise to cult status—but the minutiae regarding her life was feared lost forever, as was so much of our digital archive, following the Great Flare five years ago.

      The recent discovery of several boxes of paper artifacts belonging to Bernard Reese, experimental composer and Barrett’s onetime lover, sheds new light on the life of the fascinating artist and her peer group. Among the effects found in a onetime bank vault in Chicago is what appears to be the beginning of a biography of Reese’s former romantic interest, including extensive writing from his journals. I believe that Reese, who kept regular writing hours, began to edit these journal entries into a memoir.

      In addition, sound recordings and transcriptions of interviews with Barrett’s peers from the millennial Freedom Springs art and music scenes expose both the era and the relationships within it. Dr. Rex Vineail, my esteemed colleague here at FSU, speculates that the vault’s lead construction served as a protective barrier, saving audio media from destruction. That said, five microcassettes—fragile magnetic sound capture archives from the 20th century—did not survive the flare. Dr. Vineail was, however, particularly impressed that several compact discs—another 20th/21st century storage medium, read by a laser beam—did survive. Typically, compact discs began to slowly deteriorate once played. Those found in the box, from which I have transcribed many of the documents herein, remained pristine until recently, when Dr. Vineail and I were able not only to play them (with the aid of the FSU Heritage Museum’s stock of early millennial sound equipment), but to save them to New Digital format.

      I have attempted to reconstruct the world of Rhonda Barrett using the recently unearthed documents in conjunction with both her paintings and those precious documents which survived the Great Flare. I am particularly indebted to ArtScene, whose steadfast release of paper periodicals, even when the non-electronic publishing industry was left for dead in the 21st century, has proven to be predictive and visionary.

      Historians and scholars who have worked on and around Barrett and her Freedom Springs peer group have traditionally done so in a linear format. The destruction of so much primary source material now renders attempts to do so virtually impossible. With no disrespect toward my colleagues, though, I must take this opportunity to say that the form never suited discussion of Early Millennial history. It is well-known that the advent andsubsequent proliferation of hand-held internet devices bombarded Early Millennials with a constant (and then unprecedented) stream of information and advertising. In reading the recently discovered transcripts, presumably assembled by Reese, of dis-cussions with Rhonda Barrett’s chess mentors, we see a reflection of this glut of Early Millennial information. Rather than including full interviews from each chess player at Le Petit Chapeau, where Barrett honed her skills, Reese told Barrett’s story as an “oral history”—a collage of distinct voices working together—allowing the players’ viewpoints to combine and reveal details of Barrett’s early life.

      Similarly, we see the Early Millennial time period reflected in the voice of Max Caughin and his Urban Mosaicist paintings. Because Caughin’s work no longer exists, his contributions to Freedom Springs’ art scene have been largely overlooked. Through Reese’s interview transcriptions, we gain a new empathy for Caughin, whose innovative work with, and on, digital and analog media unwittingly became a tragic performance art piece of the highest order.

      To appreciate the Early Millennial era most, we must immerse ourselves in it. For

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