Vienna. Can the outbreak of an entire youth revolution really be traced back to Malcolm McLaren’s talent for manipulation? Did the typical sound and look of the Sex Pistols really establish a kind of rock-bottom starting point from which a movement could unfurl that was as devoid of a past as it was of a future, a movement that was focused solely on the here and now, and that indeed primarily with a negative twist? And haven’t we already heard this myth many times over – reason enough to finally consider a more fragmented and differentiated history of punk?
There was not exactly a dearth of exhibitions over the last few years seeking one way or another to do justice to this history. Greil Marcus’ now canonical book »Lipstick Traces« probably started the whole thing off, followed from the mid-1990s on by various oral histories that concentrated on reconstructing individual punk scenes. Taking these works as their point of departure, exhibitions such as »Zurück zum Beton« (2002) (»Züruck zum Beton. The Beginnings of Punk and New Wave in Germany«), »East Village U.S.A.« (2004) or, also with reference to New York, »The Downtown Scene« (2006) inspected crossover milieus clearly demarcated in time and space, the aim being to make the interdisciplinary aspect of punk – or actually, the way in which punk shatters the idea of distinct disciplines to smithereens – tangible. Other undertakings, such as »Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years« (2007) based their approach on the simultaneous existence of music and specific types of art production, in order to highlight more or less plausible connections between the two.
»Punk – No One Is Innocent«, the most recent exemplar of a series of music-related exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, seeks in a sense to cast all these forerunners in the same mould. The show does not seek to be a music exhibition and yet cannot quite avoid having a cross section of 1970s punk hits resonating through the stairwell. »No One Is Innocent« has just as little interest in engaging in unadulterated cultural history, in other words, in depicting the milieu-related and social conditions in which something like punk as a movement (and not merely a stylistic embellishment derived from the realm of either fashion or music) could emerge. Finally however, the exhibition did not become exclusively a display of art – and that for good reason – although the partially redundant sheets of images found in the photographs by Mark Morrisroe or the large-format works by Salomé signal a slight over-emphasis in that direction.
The approach adopted by »Punk – No One Is Innocent« proves to be best suited to its subject-matter whenever it attempts to maintain a balance between everyday culture and artistic activities, that is to say, whenever graphic design, fanzines, »autonomous« production of images, fashion design, and examples from the world of film or video, to cite but a few examples, are shown as being embedded in a relationship based on mutual exchanges. This is most pronounced in the showcases based on archive material from Jon Savage and Linder Sterling, in the collection associated with Martin Kippenberger’s activities in Berlin’s S.O. 36, as well as in the collection of artefacts assembled by musician Gudrun Gut. It becomes apparent here that punk should be understood not so much as a stylistic or formal element, but rather as a singular stance that is experienced or lived-out and which left its mark right across the board in all conceivable spheres.
Elsewhere »Punk – No One Is Innocent« looks a little as if the focus – given the aforementioned efforts to cast all the various players in the same mould – were at one and the same time both too narrow and too broad. Too narrow, as it is difficult to justify reducing the focus to the three arenas of New York, London und Berlin given what was actually a much more fragmented punk cartography; this once again perpetuates the myth of purportedly hegemonic epicentres of music and style. Even if one thinks only of Germany, the scenes in Düsseldorf or Hamburg would have been just as deserving of attention, not to mention East Berlin, which recently had the spotlight turned on it in the documentary »Ost-Punk«. This dilemma becomes quite apparent in the context of Great Britain if one considers that an important proponent of the highly autonomous Manchester scene, Linder Sterling, is ascribed to the London scene.
However, the chosen focus also seems too narrow in terms of (on the whole absent) artistic genealogies and how the show is embedded in social history. Greil Marcus gives a comprehensive account of how the movement can be traced back to Dada and Situationism and that may explain why that ground is not covered here, as most likely there was no desire to rehash this explanation. Nonetheless some examples – for example, indicating the sources drawn on by Linder’s cut-up montages, which were not so entirely without role models – could have helped to open up insights into punk’s own distinctive artistic and visual value. At the same time it would definitely have taken several works such as the wonderful photo series by Jon Savage on the concrete deserts of London in the mid-Seventies to convey even an approximate understanding of the kind of urban environment that contributed to shaping the attitudes of defence and negation so typical of punk.
In contrast, works such as Johnny Rozsa’s photographic portraits of heroes of the New Romantic movement or indeed Richard Kern’s sexploitation farce, »Fingered«, from the mid-eighties seem to extend the concept of punk ad infinitum, obliterating any reference to a more tightly framed chrono-topical framework of the type the exhibition claims to be examining.
Perhaps however this is actually the covert strategy of the exhibition, identifying punk as a moment that in principle cannot be grasped, something that begins increasingly to evaporate in the countless artistic repercussions and at some point simply becomes a sketchy imitation of itself. However, even that would not necessary have called for the zillionth homage to Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood and their realm at King’s Road 430.
Translated by Helen Ferguson