Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years

The first art work that the visitor to 'Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years', an exhibition opening in London next week, will see is Jamie Reid's cover for 'God Save the Queen', the single most iconic image of the punk era. Be warned, though: it is a false alarm. Indeed, anyone arriving at the Barbican expecting a survey of punk-related graphics, from record sleeves to posters, fanzines to T-shirt designs, will be deeply disappointed. The thrust of this wilfully subversive show is towards artists who, as co-curator Mark Sladen, puts it in his introductory catalogue essay, 'embody the punk zeitgeist'.

Sean O'Hagan
Sunday June 3, 2007
The Observer

Punk rock burst into the mainstream during the feverish summer of 1977, and was the most explosive movement in popular culture since the birth of rock 'n' roll in the Fifties. But, as a new exhibition illustrates, its underground ethos and shock tactics were reflected as much in the art world as in its music

In October 1976, a British art group called COUM Transmissions staged a show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. It was called 'Prostitution'. Among its exhibits were sculptures made from used tampons and a series of pornographic photo-graphs of one of the group's members, the wonderfully named Cosey Fanni Tutti, who had an extracurricular career as a model for Playbirds magazine.
COUM Transmissions were an offshoot of a vaguely notorious East London art-pop band called Throbbing Gristle, pioneers of what came to be known as industrial rock. I remember attending one of their live shows in a suitably dingy venue in east London. Before they came on stage, a rumour spread through the audience that they would be deploying subsonic frequencies in their music that would cause the audience to turn aggressive and beat one another up. The group's desire to turn their performance into a kind of hellish ritual of endurance was fulfilled, but perhaps not in the way they intended. What ensued was more like a prolonged spell in purgatory: droning noises, repetitive beats and wilfully confrontational songs about sexual deviance and concentration camps. There were no fights, but lots of disaffected muttering.

At the ICA, though, the shock tactics worked. Any comment 'Prostitution' might have been making about the exploitative nature of the art world was lost amid the ensuing chorus of moral outrage. The exhibition lasted a mere eight days and was described in the newspapers as 'sickening', 'depraved', 'obscene', and even 'evil'. The loudest voice of disgust belonged to the Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn, who famously dubbed Throbbing Gristle 'wreckers of civilisation'.
With hindsight, though, that moral panic signalled the more prolonged chorus of outrage provoked by punk. A month after the opening, the Sex Pistols made their infamous, expletive-strewn appearance on Bill Grundy's tea-time television show. Punk went overground in a blaze of tabloid disgust and the world of pop seemed, for a brief moment, to shift on its axis. The outrage reached a crescendo the following year with the release of the group's second single, 'God Save the Queen', a sneering riposte to the Silver Jubilee.

The first art work that the visitor to 'Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years', an exhibition opening in London next week, will see is Jamie Reid's cover for 'God Save the Queen', the single most iconic image of the punk era. Be warned, though: it is a false alarm. Indeed, anyone arriving at the Barbican expecting a survey of punk-related graphics, from record sleeves to posters, fanzines to T-shirt designs, will be deeply disappointed. The thrust of this wilfully subversive show is towards artists who, as co-curator Mark Sladen, puts it in his introductory catalogue essay, 'embody the punk zeitgeist'.

That, as it turns out, is a very broad church indeed, and includes artists as disparate as Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Derek Jarman and Cindy Sherman. Even Gilbert & George have slipped in here among much less well known British artists such as Victor Burgin and Stephen Willats. The timespan of the show is roughly the mid-Seventies to the mid-Eighties, which also stretches the notion of the 'punk zeitgeist' somewhat.

'The show argues that punk was the defining spirit of that period in British and American art as well as music,' says Sladen. 'Artists, mainly those working in London and New York, were exploring many of the same themes as punk musicians: the notion of the city as an alienating but empowering place, the notion of transgressive performance. Plus many of the actual techniques are similar, the whole DIY idea of collage and the use of image overlaid with text.'

Many of the issues and tactics that punk brought briefly into the mainstream, then, had been present in certain strands of British and American art, though more often as undercurrents than as big statements. In this context, it is illuminating to encounter the work of Victor Burgin, one of the overlooked pioneers of British conceptualism. Burgin was born in 1941, and made his strongest work in the Seventies. His core ideas and style seem extraordinarily prescient, not just in his use of photography overlaid with text, but in the way his work signals the coming commodification of culture by advertising and information technology.

All the work in 'Panic Attack!' was made in the pre-digital, pre-mass information age. One of the strongest subtexts of the show is the sense that every artist, from Burgin to Basquiat, was operating in what, even by the mid-Eighties, was a bona fide underground. They tended to live and work amid run-down inner-city landscapes which were often violent and in constant danger of social implosion: Manhattan's Lower East Side before it became terminally trendy; London's Docklands before it became a yuppie redevelopment zone.

Many of the artists featured in the show were also part of loosely defined subcultures based around notions of outsiderdom. That sense of alienation from the mainstream is a recurring motif, though the art is not always transgressive in the hard-hitting sense that one automatically associates with all things punk. There is no sign of Karen Finley, for instance, though she was arguably the most confrontational performance artist of the early Eighties.

The shock value is provided by those infamous tampons, and by some of Robert Mapplethorpe's more extreme depictions of hardcore gay S&M sex, which, 20 years on, are still not for the faint-hearted or easily offended. Mapplethorpe is a pivotal presence, and not just for his iconic black-and-white portrait of an angelic and androgynous Patti Smith, which graced her debut album, Horses, in 1975. His work is emblematic of many of the themes of the show. He arrived out of a definable cultural milieu, and embodied a cultural attitude, that might best be described as Lower East Side 'cool'. That attitude tended to be edgy, wilfully controversial, and, in the extremity of its vision, directly political. A decade after 'Prostitution', and right at the beginning of the ascendancy of America's fundamentalist right, Mapplethorpe's images were shown in an exhibition that toured America and provoked a furore that led some galleries to capitulate to media pressure and refuse to show them. In all this, then, Mapplethorpe could be said to embody the punk ethos even if his often formally beautiful images were the antithesis of, say, Jamie Reid's cut-and-paste confrontations.

Personally, I prefer Peter Hujar's photographs, which are even more evocative of another time. On one level, he is a kind of street photographer, though the streets are often dark and desolate. His best known image, Candy Darling on Her Death Bed, is a stylised depiction of Warhol's most famous superstar drag queen in a pose of formal languor. It is both a celebration and an elegy - for her, and for her time.

The image harks back to the Factory years, and to Candy's canonisation in song by Lou Reed on 'Walk on the Wild Side'. It also unwittingly looks forward to the mid-Eighties when Aids ravaged New York's gay community. Several of the artists here, including Derek Jarman, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz and Mapplethorpe, died of the disease. Hujar's picture of Candy was recently chosen to adorn the sleeve of Antony & the Johnsons' album I Am a Bird Now which, incidentally, features a cameo by Reed. If you wanted an image that illustrates the interconnected cultural undercurrents of the 'punk zeitgeist' as elaborated in this bitty, but intriguing, show, this, even more than Reid or Mapplethorpe, would be the one.

One of the most intriguing questions raised by 'Panic Attack!' is what happened to the art underground? Well, money for a start. The boom in the property and art markets in the mid-Eighties signalled the end of the New York underground of the Lower East Side. A decade later, a similar boom propelled the YBAs into the mainstream, and, in many cases, into incredible wealth.

As this show illustrates, though, there is something to be said for recession as a catalyst for creativity. Derek Jarman's most hallucinatory Super 8 films were made on a shoestring, and are still oddly entrancing. Gilbert & George's 1981 film The World of Gilbert & George is a fractured psycho-geography of another, already disappeared East End of run-down buildings and disenchanted youths, a glimpse of Thatcher's Britain in poetic monochrome.

Back then, long before the coming of the internet and the mobile phone, information about what was cool and happening was exchanged word-of-mouth, or through the more hip magazines. Artists and musicians who worked on the cutting edge could remain out there on the margins for a long time. There is too much money sluicing around the art world these days, and the political engagement that fired the transgressive artists of the Seventies and early Eighties has been replaced by, at one extreme, a kind of unapologetic vulgarity, and, at the other, an ironic detachment and smugness that has long since congealed into enervation.

Put simply, no one resists any more. Instead they queue up to be canonised by another empty awards ceremony, and rush headlong towards mainstream acceptance with indecent haste. Something has been lost in that rush: meaning, maybe, and certainly a degree of credibility. In the end, 'Panic Attack!' intrigues as a series of reminders of what has been not so much lost as surrendered.

· Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years is at the Barbican Art Gallery, London EC2, from Tuesday until 9 September.