»Punk Rock: So What?« This was the title of a survey of the cultural legacy of the mid-1970s movement compiled a few years ago.¹ The tenor at the time was that Punk should not simply be consigned to the nostalgia business, but instead was complex enough to justify an analysis going beyond mere reminiscences on past music and trends. Visual art, film, theater, literature, comics and many other areas had participated in the historic shock moment or at least did not emerge unscathed from the confrontation with the last great youth rebellion. Resistant to any form of retro showcasing, Punk was a movement for which adequate forms of critical incorporation are still lacking, and are perhaps condemned to fail out of principle since the moment of lived-out negativity only lends itself to a limited extent to any representative access. This at least seems to be the conclusion reached by the diagnosis that Punk has always managed to elude scholars’ grasp just at the moment they thought they were pinning it down, that it has become a mere pose or an empty shell of something whose radical gesture of negation one could never really get a handle on. On the other hand, the boundaries of the field cannot be demarcated broadly enough in order to encompass all of the cultural niches influenced by Punk – something that makes it even more difficult to make out a kind of core of the movement, let alone to return to it.

The impossibility of return and the aggressive assumption of poses, the original characteristics of Punk itself, thus seem to be the obvious stratagems when it comes to exhibiting this phenomenon – an undertaking that is becoming increasingly popular of late. Taking the bull by the horns in this case means creating daring and irreverent connections, venturing beyond the canonized inventory without paying tribute to the heroism and iconic quality that clings today to certain Punk artifacts. It also apparently means treating the existing material with disdain in order not to blindly fall into the trap of a retrospective auraticization of an iconoclastic stance whose archenemy was the bourgeois culture of the museum and its art-minded brand of contemplation. At the other pole is the no less embarrassing danger of neglecting any traceable connection to the historical epicenters, thus apprehending the original phenomenon only by way of a kind of put-on auxiliary construct, which ultimately remains indifferent as it is applied without risk and from a remote distance.

The exhibition »Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years,« on view last summer at London’s Barbican Centre, seemed to willingly sample from all of the traps described above. It is true that the show, as pointed out by the opulent catalogue,² took in not only music and fashion but the entire dimension of everyday cultural as well. However, the restriction to mostly post-conceptual art of the late 1970s and early 1980s, for example in the selection of »The World of Gilbert & George« or Cindy Sherman’s »Untitled Film Stills,« makes any Punk impetus abruptly implode. Many of the works, such as Victor Burgin’s »From UK76« or Stephen Willats’ »I Don’t Want to Be Like Anyone Else« do furnish welcome sociographic extensions with regard to examining the special cultural environment in which Punk was able to emerge. But the concentration on the all-too-canonical (Jamie Reid, Raymond Pettibon and – who knows what her glossy junk photography is doing here? – Nan Goldin) immediately annuls this endeavor at expanding the field of inquiry. And finally, in terms of the techniques used, for example photomontage in the work of David Wojnarowicz, Linder or John Stezaker, noteworthy similarities definitely can be seen to appear across the most disparate scenes. Yet the trajectory of images here, no matter how narrowly defined its historical framework, nevertheless seems loosely connected and frayed at the edges when it comes to illustrating any specific Punk attitude. These are vague metaphorizations of something that cannot really be named.

Is it then possible at all to take the chronology of the »Punk Years« as a unifying horizon bringing together diverse artistic approaches? How instructive is it to place Tony Cragg’s arrangements of ancient sculptures together with the black-and-white street photography of Peter Hujar in the same ominous Punk context? Another means of access is attempted by an exhibition named after the central concept of the British underground, »The Secret Public,« mounted last year at the Kunstverein Munich and on view this year at the London ICA.³ Featuring some of the same artists as »Panic Attack!«, the show looked instead at a more stringently defined, earlier period (1978–88). Even though it was named after a fanzine, »The Secret Public« likewise largely left out important fields such as graphic design and DIY publishing. Yet the focus on the Thatcher years as social background, which also represent the latent phase before the outbreak of the YBA boom, brought up for discussion much denser and more closely intertwined relationships. The term »secret public« alone already opens up more possibilities than the sensationalist »panic attack« can even hope to suggest.

Punk may still bristle at any form of museum work-up. But the fact that the movement in the meantime is made to serve so many purposes demonstrates how difficult, and perhaps impossible, it is to reconstruct what it was all about from our increasing distance.

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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