Still from the X-Ray Spex performing “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” circa 1977. From the documentary Punk in London (Metrodome, 1977).

in memoriam Peter Culley

“Punk was not a musical genre; it was a moment in time that took shape as a language anticipating its own destruction.” —Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces

“I’m mad, but I ain’t stressin’.” —Kendrick Lamar

Do you know that great Sappho poem about all the things some people say are so great? “Some say marching cavalry, some say foot soldiers / others call a bunch of ships the most beautiful of sights / offered by the dark earth / but I say it’s whatever you love best.”¹ The rhetorical device Sappho uses to open this poem—“some say…but I say”—is called a priamel, a list of possibilities that the speaker ultimately disdains in favor of her true feeling.

What happens right after this vocal leap can only be described in terms of utopian time travel. A sixteen-year-old white Brit who calls herself Lora Logic blows one long note into a saxophone, a note that stubbornly drones before distorting into a crude statement of the melody. Then Poly Styrene’s voice returns: swinging, furious, perfect. Her sense of timing is extraordinary, stretching out the o of oh just slightly, but long enough that up yours suffers a soft elision. When she screams “up yours!” she has to squeeze the two syllables into one and a half. It’s a little out of step, but so is Poly.

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Is the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Punk: Chaos to Couture the death knell of punk as a social and cultural movement? Certainly, the Met’s assertion that the locus of punk’s importance is in its influence on high fashion would indicate that it is no longer relevant to these larger concerns. The A-list attendees at May’s opening gala were decidedly mainstream and largely advocates for materialistic values. Sarah Jessica Parker, whose iconic Sex and the City character relentlessly equated emancipation with consumption, was the event’s poster child. She drew attention from both art and celebrity gossip media with a fauxhawk designed by Philip Treacy, a milliner whose rise to fame has depended on the support of the same royal family that the Sex Pistols skewered with “God Save the Queen” back in 1977.

Gallery view. 430 King's Road Period Room. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The exhibition makes the pretense of celebrating punk as a historical moment, but it fails to establish historical context. Like the replicas of CBGB’s men’s room and Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s Chelsea boutique, history itself has been sanitized and aired out. Little mention is made of the crushing poverty and urban blight that nearly destroyed both New York and London in the 1970s, prompting young people with few prospects to take up a nihilistic, antagonistic posture symbolized by a violent, abject aesthetic. No mention at all is made of black cultural influence, from Rude Boys to Sharps, on the punk style and ethic.

The parallels with our own era are all too clear. Then, as now, economic and social elites flaunted their wealth while average people struggled to gain education and employment in the shadow of prolonged and expensive overseas wars. People lost faith in government and institutions, revolutions roiled the Global South, and gas prices soared. People of color found their cultural contributions absorbed and erased by the white mainstream. Yet while Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 sparked parody and revolt, last year’s Diamond Jubilee protests were fairly tame and skewed much older. Punk in the 1970s provided an artistic and social outlet for the youth whom society was failing. Today it would seem to be just another fad, notable for its influential style and its innovative materialism but stripped of its conscience.

Gallery view. D.I.Y.: Hardware. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

What is punk’s appeal to couturiers? The Met argues that punk’s use of postindustrial materials and unconventional symmetries inspires fashion designers. However, these elements have their own provenance in Process Art, Dada, Gutai, and Neo-Concretism, all of which are canonical art movements that predate the 1970s. There is a deeper reason why punk has been selected to get the Met’s revisionist treatment, aside from its global appeal as a major movement in rock music and graphic art. Punk’s anti-corporate message and its anarchic ethic have as much pull on the public imagination as ever, and the only bulwark against their power is that public’s collective amnesia. The Met has seized on a perfect narrative, one that defangs punk’s political relevance and frames its influence as limited to specific (Western) geographies and (bygone) eras. By doing so, the museum and the fashion houses it represents here can appeal to the 1% and its appetite for cultural appropriation and regurgitation while rendering an oppositional movement impotent and excising its practitioners from the narrative. It’s no accident that Debbie Harry is the only living punk artist in gala photographs, which feature manufactured celebrities like Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus doing clichéd Sid Vicious impersonations.

Punk was a DIY movement that sprung up in opposition to the hippies but shared many similar values. Among these were communal living in self-organizing “punk house” communes and a post-Marxist quest for connection to the fruits of one’s labor through craft. Making is a critical aspect of the punk ethos, which celebrates individuality and resourcefulness in expressing it. The display of early T-shirts by Vivienne Westwood demonstrates how closely punk was connected to a working-class history of agitprop printmaking. The Met show features dresses made from plastic bags (Maison Martin Margiela, Moschino) or sprayed with paint (Alexander McQueen, Anne Demeulemeester) and adorned with hundreds of safety pins and studs. The look and feel of the clothes is often spot-on, but the sense of acquisitive desire that they invoke in the viewer is antithetical to punk’s call to create rather than consume.

Gallery view. D.I.Y.: Bricolage. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Most importantly, by locating Punk’s significance solely at its origin as a European-American movement of the 1970s, the Met exhibition overlooks punk’s continued value as an egalitarian ethos of the young, opposed to the greed and totalitarianism of the old. Nowhere is punk more relevant today than in the Islamic world. Teens in Indonesia have been subjected to forced head-shaving and re-education for wearing punk fashion in recent years. Inspired by the Riot Grrl stylings of Ukrainian protest group FEMEN, Tunisian feminist activist Amina Sboui created a furor earlier this year for posting images of herself online, topless and sporting a bleached-blond punk haircut à la Wendy O. Williams. Beats for Bangladesh, a compilation featuring US-based Taqwacore and South Asian hip-hop acts, was recently released to benefit survivors of the Rana Plaza fire that brought dismal overseas working conditions in the fashion industry to international attention. These cases make clear that punk is more than a Western cultural export for consumption; it is a wake-up call to youth that they must take their futures into their own hands. Mass protests in Egypt and Turkey are part of the same awakening, prompted by anger at corrupt governments and reactionary beliefs. In the Global South, revolution remains imperative. We may have forgotten why punk was invented, but it’s reinvented every day.

Punk: Chaos to Couture is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 14, 2013.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

Album cover by Vivien Goldman, moderator of last weekend's Punk Panel at Honor Fraser Gallery.

On Saturday, July 16, Honor Fraser Gallery in Culver City hosted a panel on Punk. The panel preceded the openings of two shows, one an earnest exploration into punk’s visual precedents and antecedents, and the other an extravaganza of posters, bills, and graphics from the Punk movement of 1970s Britain. The Punk panel, chaired by Vivien Goldman, who has been a writer, performer, scholar and manager—she’s recently written a book on reggae—included a surprise guest who came in and put his motorcycle helmet on his chair about ten minutes after the panel’s scheduled start time.

Linder, "Pretty Girl I 1977/2006," Pigment print of original artwork, 7 x 9 2/5 inches, Edition 1 of 5. Courtesy Honor Fraser.

This surprise guest was Billy Idol, one of the more accessible of the punk rockers who started out in Britain’s scene. He had his signature leather, sunglasses and spikey hair, and, when the panel finally started, a lady in the front row went on to take a good few hundred photographs of him. A few others were making cell phone videos. But the woman next to me, chicly dressed and probably in her sixties, handed me a paper and asked if I could please write down the name of the man with the sunglasses so she could remember.

Billy Idol does not qualify as obscure, but many of the bands whose posters are plastered to the walls of Honor Fraser—the Slits, for instance—remain utterly unknown in certain circles. But their provocateur posture and moody DIY aesthetic will, I assume, strike most in the Western world as familiar.

A professor I had in grad school used to say all artists are either punks or hippies. My classmates and I spent a lot of time picking out who was who, and it’s harder than it sounds. Are you a hippie just because you use organic shapes and found materials? And are punks more defiant and streamlined? Can you be a concise hippie? Can you be an earthy punk?

George Herms, "The Librarian," 1960.

A show that brings hippies and punks together in a concert of dissonant materials is the George Herms: Xenophilia (Love of the Unknown) exhibition that just opened at MOCA. Herms, a California artist who came up with no-holds-barred assemblage artist Ed Kienholz in the 1960s, has always had a slightly more elegant approach to gritty found object sculpture than his burly peer. The MOCA show puts some his early and later works into conversation with a number of 21^st century artists, among them Amanda Ross Ho, Kaari Upson, Sterling Ruby and Elliott Hundley. Upson and Ruby are definitely punk; the blatant way they use ceramics and plastics feels insidious, unapologetic and almost dirty. Hundley is a hippie. His hanging sculpture is too organic and comfortable with itself. It has no bone to pick, but it’s painfully self-aware. Others, I can’t quite tell. What about the sprawling canvas made by Dan Colen, Agathe Snow and friends that looks like Sam Francis’ take on Warhol’s flowers? Even Ross Ho’s haphazard installation has a hippy-like mood, but a punk resistance to having meaning’s imposed on it. Whichever it is, the Herms show really does have a great, nonsensically collaborative mood to it, and I highly recommend a visit.