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- Volume 9, Issue 3, 2020
Punk & Post-Punk - Volume 9, Issue 3, 2020
Volume 9, Issue 3, 2020
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Counter-realities and conflicted place: Gee Vaucher’s The Feeding of the Five Thousand in the punk art tradition
By Ian TrowellAbstractThis article celebrates and critically examines Gee Vaucher’s artwork for the Crass album The Feeding of the Five Thousand (1978), drawing upon the enduring fascination that the work retains. Vaucher’s work is complex, disconcerting and mesmeric, and my intention is to pin down the facets of the work that achieve these qualities. The work sits in a tradition of collage and montage taken up in British punk and post-punk scenes, and I examine a selection of classic punk artworks in comparison to Dada artworks that represent the origins of radical montage art. Whilst acknowledging the established mode of interpreting this work through indexical context of elements and the force of juxtaposition (e.g. Linder Stirling’s punk work), I argue that Vaucher’s work achieves something more and requires additional methods of analysis. By developing a formalist approach of illusionistic harmony and integrity, I consider the space of the picture plane, as a traditional art concept and the space and place of the depicted behind the picture plane. Vaucher’s work offers an enduring feeling of a conflicted, disrupted and corrupted space – you feel you can step into a real space within the picture but prefer to hover on the safe side of the picture plane. This property embodies what the author Mark Fisher calls the ‘weird and the eerie’. I then examine a number of artworks from within and around the canon of art – Alison and Peter Smithson, Martha Rosler and Tish Murtha – finding images that I feel have a strong resonance with Vaucher’s work in terms of the spaces they construct and the mode of construction. These canonical works offer some developed critical dialogue to bring to bear on Vaucher’s work in order to fully understand the power of this iconic record sleeve.
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Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Lower East Side: Post-punk feminist art and New York’s Club 57
More LessAbstractThis article analyses the feminist art that emerged from New York City’s short-lived, post-punk venue Club 57 (1978–83), where music mixed with visual art, experimental film, performance and politics. A hub of New York’s ‘downtown scene’, Club 57 exemplified ways in which artists’ increasingly promiscuous experiments across media led them to abandon galleries and museums in favour of nightclubs, discos and bars. This tendency dovetailed with the practices of an emergent generation of feminist artists eager to both break out of the sexist art world and engage with popular culture and audiences. A look at the work of Club 57’s manager Ann Magnuson, the performances and collectives she organized there and at other downtown clubs and other significant women whose work Club 57 supported provides a snapshot of the feminist artists in post-punk New York City, many of whose art and activism continue into the present.
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The 1979 American Punk Art dispute: Visions of punk art between sensationalism, street art and social practice
More LessAbstractIn May 1979, a conflict arose in Amsterdam: the makers of the exhibition American Punk Art clashed with local artists, who disagreed with how the curators portrayed the punk movement in their promotion of the show. The conflict lays open many of the inherent (self-) contradictory aspects of punk art. It was not merely the ubiquitous ‘hard school vs. art school’ punk dispute, but that the Amsterdam punk group responsible for the letter and the Americans preparing the exhibition had different visions of what punk art was or should be in respect to content and agency. Drawing on interviews with the protagonists themselves and research in their private archives, this article compares those visions, considering topics like institutionalism vs. street art, avantgarde history vs. tabloid contemporality and political vs. apolitical stances. The article shows how the involved protagonists from New York and Amsterdam drew on different art historical backgrounds, each rooted in the 1960s: Pop Art, especially Andy Warhol, played a significant role in New York, whereas the signature poetic-social art of CoBrA and the anarchistic activity of the Provos were influential in Amsterdam. The analysis reflects how punk manifested differently in different cultural spheres, but it also points to a common ground, which might be easier to see from today’s distance of more than forty years.
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Designing fascism: The evolution of a neo-Nazi punk aesthetic
Authors: Ana Raposo and Russ BestleyAbstractThis article explores the design strategies of four record labels associated with the growth of an explicitly far-right sub-genre of punk in the United Kingdom between 1979 and the early 2000s: Rock-O-Rama Records, White Noise Records, Rebelles Européens and ISD Records. While Rock-O-Rama saw the inclusion of the genre as simply an extension of their existing business model, the other labels were established specifically to support the activities of a small number of explicitly far-right groups who were blacklisted by mainstream producers and distributors within the music industry. These labels were also able to develop independent, do-it-yourself approaches to marketing, promotion and distribution that bear striking similarity to other sub-genres of punk and post-punk in the United Kingdom and Europe, particularly the politically activist hardcore and anarcho-punk scenes. Earlier examples of record covers that employed ambiguous visual metaphors to evoke a mythical Aryan identity were eventually superseded by the emergence of a more extreme form of visual communication that utilized overtly racist images alongside symbols with specific coded meanings to demonstrate a commitment to the white nationalist cause. These visual strategies were to become more explicit as far-right punk scenes moved to embrace fascist ideologies in the 1990s and beyond, as connotations of brotherhood, persecution, endurance, Norse mythology and the nation eventually gave way to direct calls-to-arms and pledges of allegiance with White Power and neo-Nazi terrorist groups.
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Of other spaces: ‘Punk art’ and its wider contexts
More LessAbstractThis article explores the connection between punk culture and artistic expression, drawing on a series of interviews with contemporary artists and designers who reflect the notion of ‘punk art’ and featuring their work to show how this continues to thrive in an independent context through music graphics, fanzines, comics, posters and flyers, professional work practices, such as tattoo design, and the art world. It outlines the prominent, established names in punk art and design before looking beyond it to a selection of people whose lived experience of punk is reflected in their work. This article draws out what connection, if any, there is between punk politics, values and ideals and various forms of artistic expression, while issues of high vs. low, commercial vs. DIY and collaborative vs. individualistic forms of practice provide recurrent themes throughout.
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Stencils: Past, Present, and Crass!, Dave King (2020)
By Rich CrossAbstractStencils: Past, Present, and Crass!, Dave King (2020)
Berkeley and Los Angeles: Gingko Press and Kill Your Idols, 200 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-58423-720-4, p/bk, $35.00
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Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die: Punk & Post Punk Graphics 1976–1986, Andrew Krivine (2020)
More LessAbstractToo Fast to Live Too Young to Die: Punk & Post Punk Graphics 1976–1986, Andrew Krivine (2020)
London: Pavilion Books, 352 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-91164-136-0, h/bk, £30
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Warhol: A Life as Art, Blake Gopnik (2020)
By Steve FinbowAbstractWarhol: A Life as Art, Blake Gopnik (2020)
London: Penguin UK, 976 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-24100-338-1, h/bk, £35.00
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Young Punks, Sheila Rock (2020)
By Russ BestleyAbstractYoung Punks, Sheila Rock (2020)
London: Omnibus, 288 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-91317-215-2, h/bk, £25.00
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When Midnight Comes Around, Gary Green (2020)
By Russ BestleyAbstractWhen Midnight Comes Around, Gary Green (2020)
London: Stanley/Barker, 72 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-91328-807-5, p/bk, £25.00
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Punk Now!! Contemporary Perspectives on Punk, Matt Grimes and Mike Dines (eds) (2020)
More LessAbstractPunk Now!! Contemporary Perspectives on Punk, Matt Grimes and Mike Dines (eds) (2020)
Bristol: Intellect, 230 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-78938-174-0, h/bk, £80.00
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