Ways of See(th)ing: A Record of Visual Punk Practice

No art activity is to be understood apart from the codes and practices of the society which contains it; art in use is bracketed ineluctably within ideology.
 

––Victor Burgin, 1972

One of my earliest memories of punk takes me back to the age of thirteen. Unfolding the cover of anarcho-punk band Crass’ album Yes Sir, I Will, I am confronted with the image of horrifically burned Falklands War veteran Simon Weston in conversation with Prince Charles. The caption of their exchange reads: “‘Get well soon,’ the Prince said. And the heroic soldier replied ‘Yes sir, I will.'” Over twenty years have passed since its release, but one can still cite Crass’ recontextualization of Weston’s face, forever marked by Thatcherism, as a prime example of punk visual practice. While many people of a certain age can readily identify Jamie Reid’s various remappings of Queen Elizabeth’s portrait in 1977 (one of the many examples of British artists jamming her Silver Jubilee), Crass’ livid invective is equally confrontational, equally punk: punk and post-punk culture is a “symbol of and an adequate response to the ravaged times” (Sladen 10). As Rosetta Brooks writes, Georges Didi-Huberman argues that “the image as image can be revealed only by a violation of the image. . . . in fact, one is only aware of the image as image by its being violated or cut” (45). Crass’ DIY “violation” displays the uncomfortable slippage between multiple meanings, and the need to affix intent. Are we to read the image to show suffering projected onto the nationalistic project, or should we be taken aback because the Prince’s well-wishes (as symbolic of Empire and stifling class relations) are greeted with a polite, duty-bound reply?
 
The act of disassembling and rearranging the false sanctity of the image, gesture, or utterance demonstrates how ideology “brackets,” as Victor Burgin says. In the Barbicon’s attendant publication to their 2007 show Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years, this process is reevaluated through a multidisciplinary survey of the field. The text features works by iconic and lesser-known artists from New York, London, and Los Angeles, and is supplemented with lively essays by Mark Sladen, Rosetta Brooks, David Bussel, Carlo McCormick, Tracey Warr, Andrew Wilson, Ariella Yedgar, and Stephen Willats. The essays, which often read as a conversation between curator, critic of popular culture, and disillusioned kid who rethinks the utility of both box cutter and safety pin, are organized around four central themes (which function with considerable overlap):
 

art with overt political intent that uses the inner city as a symbol of social breakdown; the body as a site to explore transgressive ideas of sexuality, violence and abjection; do-it-yourself aesthetics, collage and appropriation as alternative means of visual communication; and the underground scene as a radical social space and ground for artistic cross-fertilization.
 

(7)

 
Panic Attack! is a highly suggestive title, speaking simultaneously to an agitated individual state and to the clashing forces of chaos and order (categories that, as the essays demonstrate, require each other in order to be meaningful). Panic implies small and large-scale intrusions into the manufactured sense of wholeness that capitalist ideology requires: in its refusals and refutations, punk’s pathogenic threat is fully displayed as an abject mass of disruptive bodies, words and visuals. This is beautifully illustrated in Mark Sladen’s introduction, which reproduces a Throbbing Gristle press flyer as representative of society’s resultant “moral panic” in the face of subcultures (9). The flyer appropriates a quote from Conservative MPP Nicholas Fairbairn who, appalled after seeing COUM Transmissions’ 1976 exhibit Prostitution, states, “These people are the wreckers of civilisation” (qtd. in Sladen 9).
 
The delicious irony of Fairbairn’s statement notwithstanding, it goes without saying that “these people” does not refer solely to Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti, but rather to the whole of a group who strove to expose the naturalization of the civilized/barbaric binary on the canvas, image, and body. Punk was still a force to be reckoned with during the reign of Thatcher and Reagan; as the text argues, the policies of Reagan and Thatcher exacerbated the already deep-rooted alienation caused by, in the British context, a highly organized class structure, and in the American, the myth of a classless society.
 

The citizenry first came adrift from a belief in democratic government in the punk years . . . . Such political disillusion is commonplace now, but in the 1970s it was new. In the post-war period people had briefly tasted and believed in the ludicrous notion that the role of democratic government was to move the populace collectively towards equity and civil rights.
 

(116)

 
The rejection of binaries and their reach into the politics of race, gender, sexuality, class and the segregation of urban space activated a movement that sought to disembowel the concept of power itself. Ariella Yedgar’s essay, “The Exploded Image,” elaborates this point; she assiduously documents punk’s Dadaist, Futurist, Surrealist and Situationist influences. Her analysis speaks to an important point: despite the surfeit of information on punk, including numerous academic studies, first-person accounts, archival collections and documentary films, punk is often subject to an oddly reductive analysis, focusing on a limited number of events from an even more limited group of people. It is most commonly explained in terms of music and style, but it also took root in performance, installation art, photography, graffiti, collage, graphic design and assemblage. Panic Attack! expands the definition of punk by examining a wide range of artists who, while not necessarily adopting its commonly accepted definition of fashion sense, most certainly apply its tenets to their work. Further, the ways the political and social intricacies of the artists’ class, race, gender and sexuality result in refusals that are, as McCormick says about media, “symbiotically connected within the social fabric of very particular communities” (95).
 
Photography is an ideal medium in which to examine the importance of place (or the pain of being without place), partly because it works well within a DIY aesthetic (which is given careful attention in Stephen Willat’s essay, “Intervention and Audience”), but also because, as David Bussel contends in “Post-Conceptual Photography and Strategies of Dissent,” it is a medium that can be used actively, rather than “a supposedly neutral form of documentation” (70). He states that
 

the artists broke away from the imperatives of Conceptual and Minimalist art to claim a new ground—the politics of representation—through the redefinition of photography and its potential “uses” for socially engaged, critical intervention. This intervention . . . shifted the terrain of activity for many artists from an “aesthetics of administration” to aesthetic politics as part of a larger shift in the very terms of cultural production itself within the Postmodern condition.
 

(73)

 
A few examples of this strategy stand out. David Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-9) is described in Tracey Warr’s “Feral City” as a semi-autobiographical series that draws from “his own experience as a homeless, runaway rent boy,” but obscures a tidy self-referential reading through its subject, a friend in a blurry Rimbaud mask in various locations and states of abjection throughout New York:
 

The impassive pallor of the mask jars with the living flesh of the body shooting up or masturbating. “Rimbaud” is both immersed in New York, taking it all in, and a displaced and dispassionate alien observing it. We expect at any moment that he will break out of his impassivity and give us his observations on this city, this life, but he remains mute and uncommunicative—a mere surface.
 

(118)

 
Andrew Wilson’s analysis of Victor Burgin’s UK76 in his essay, “Modernity Killed Every Night,” is particularly compelling. He states that the series functions as a
 

sequence of images that . . . depict views of Britain’s post-imperial and post-industrial decline. On one level, each of the work’s panels presents a different pictorial gloss on this view: different types of urban spaces that portray a particular take on the projections of national identity; a sense of movement through these spaces in which people are presented as more or less detached; different forms of nostalgia, whether it be the attraction of the picture-book country cottage or the workplace . . . ; and the manipulation of sight through pictorial composition and the rule of the gaze in constructing gendered representation.
 

(145)

 
The commodification of nostalgia and the fictions of national identity are further exemplified in Mark Sladen’s analysis of Gilbert and George’s Dirty Words Pictures (1977):
 

In these works the artists spliced together photographs of subjects that include the dismal remnants of Victorian London and the modern London of tower blocks, the trading floors of the City and the milling multiracial crowds of the impoverished East End . . . . Such images are joined by graffiti that scream out such words as CUNT and QUEER, completing a cursed landscape of London in the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee.
 

(12)

 
The image of “a cursed landscape,” of “cunts” and “queers,” offers an ideal segue to another key aspect in understanding visual practice during the punk era. The text pays particular attention to artists who take the body as a medium, and deploy it as a site of resistance, making public the private messiness of the gendered, racialized, and sexualized subject. Distancing themselves from the “dispassionate neutrality of Minimalism and Conceptualism,” several artists featured in the text work at “rupturing that clean space with the living, breathing, messy body” (119). By displaying the body’s circulation in a vast array of subject/object relations, these artists make the body another weapon in the DIY chest, offering an ironic reworking of the stifling confines of, and elucidating the complex relationships between, femininity and heterosexism. Feminist artists such as Linder, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman, and Hannah Wilke are duly represented in the text.
 
The era is also characterized by a powerful insertion of the queer body into contemporary art, exemplified by Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, and David Wojnarowicz. Evacuating the pervasive stereotype of punk visual practice as a straight boy’s game, its “mainstream disaffection through bodily adornment . . . [its] reliance upon the visual—its earnest insistence upon the body as a canvas for self-expression-cum-visual terrorism—made it a logical home . . . for the performative, visually strategic tactics of contemporary queer culture” (Rosenfeld). The above excerpt comes from Kathryn Rosenfeld’s “The End of Everything Was 20 Years Ago Today: Punk Nostalgia,” which points to one of the text’s key strengths: while Panic Attack! looks back to an era now over twenty years gone, it offers some salient and decidedly current questions, further demonstrating that punk’s noise is still heard in contemporary art and critical theory. It asks us to rethink how punk was initially analyzed, and how we might rethink it now.
 
The study of youth-based culture is rooted in the important work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), which examined primarily androcentric subversions of mass culture in post-war Britain (in the case of punk, Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, which offered a more semiotic than sociological reading, remains one of the most influential and commonly cited studies of punk aesthetics and politics, a presence that is certainly felt in Panic Attack!). In the last decade or so, there has been a palpable shift away from CCCS’ “heroic” model of subculture, situating subcultural studies as a post-discipline; repositioning it, as Hebdige states, as “neither simply affirmation nor refusal” (35). According to Rupert Weinzierl and David Muggleton, post-subcultural analyses allow us to
 

move from an “inherently” radical notion of subculture, coupled to a monolithic conception of dominant culture, to a position that recognizes the differentiation and multiplicity of points of power in society and the way that various cultural formations and elements articulate within and across these constellations of power in complex and non-linear ways to produce contingent and modificatory outcomes.
 

(13)

 
The move to post-subcultural analysis has also created a space for harsh criticisms of punk as nothing more than another marketing campaign, emphasizing the fact that the relationship between subculture and mass culture may be closer than comfortable, if not entirely codependent. Rosetta Brooks’s “Rip It Up, Cut It Off, Rend It Asunder” addresses this view succinctly:
 

Rather than disrupting or exposing the violence of the commodity in the act of consumption, as many of its followers and a cartload of cultural studies professors would have us believe, punk reinforced the implicit violence of the commodity and the commodity image . . . . It was a deliberate, strategic interruption that recognized the dialectic between violence and pleasure in consumption. Punk’s fashion and music—for those who were responsible for them––were aimed at nothing more than a corner of the market.
 

(48)

 
While Panic Attack! opens up possibilities for conceptualizing punk, it is not afraid, as Brooks’s statement demonstrates, to put limits on a highly idealized era (it also addresses the fact that the explosion of countercultural art in the East Village led to its gentrification, forcing many artists out of their homes and studios). Andrew Wilson’s “Modernity Killed Every Night” offers an effervescent neo-Hebdigian analysis of Malcolm McLaren’s branding of punk, and in particular, his embrace of the Situationist détournment and the appropriation of Richard Hell’s sartorial sense:
 

McLaren’s discovery of Hell as a ‘distressed, strange thing’ gave fuel to his long-standing vision of the creation of a style of refusal that might incorporate both the styled rebellion of rock music and a fashion-inflected poetics of transgression in which the banality of contemporary life became the target for his play of subversion.
 

(147)

 
Wilson describes McLaren’s genealogy and evolution as something traceable only according to “whichever mythology one cares to subscribe to” (146). This telling phrase accomplishes two things: on one hand, it can speak to the reductive analysis of McLaren as metonym of punk, but it also derails the need to affix origins, a seemingly incongruous move when discussing a mode of artistic practice known for its profound distrust of the discourses of truth and empirical verifiability.
 
Carlo McCormick states that “all cultural phenomena leave evidence that remains just a bit too messy or is perhaps even irrelevant to the formal needs of history” (95). While it would be difficult to argue otherwise, the text accomplishes its task of formally documenting and discussing a purposefully combative, messy era. Some may sniff at binding and indexing a text about punk’s contributions to visual practice, but Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years is a highly accessible, exciting, and immediate account of an era whose reverberations are still felt in contemporary art.