PANIC ATTACK! Art In the Punk Years: At The Barbican + review + tickets competition!

In the current BBC series punk was deemed important enough to be one of the ‘Seven Ages of Rock’ and one which the directors of that programme decided should be presented as ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, London and New York of course. Regarding punk we especially need all these anniversaries because the actual event (or series of events) was over so quickly that only the very smallest number of people witnessed it first hand, although it is the shock waves and ramifications that followed which contained the more important cultural creativity.

Despite claims to the contrary there must have only been 200 people who saw The Sex Pistols at The 100 Club. I recently calculated with some other Artrockers how long the ‘New Rock’n’Roll’ revolution took to have it’s impact, when The Strokes arrived in January 2001 and White Stripes a month or two later to the culmination of the dominance of these non-UK bands at Reading Festival in August 2002. That festival featured The Strokes, White Stripes, Hives, Bellrays, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, International Noise Conspiracy, The Pattern, The D4, The Datsuns, amongst others and had shaken things up to make possible what was soon to follow, Scotland’s Franz Ferdinand and UK artrock. Punk itself was gone within twelve months of it’s arrival, a period which spans the useful double incidents of The Queen’s Silver Jubliee and the release of The Sex Pistols ‘God Save The Queen’ single in June 1977.

‘Panic Attack!’ admits the brevity of punk as a musical movement, although it does also stretch it out to include the slightly earlier emergence of a New York scene, which included The Ramones, Patti Smith, and Television. This exhibition defines the ‘punk years’ as 1974 to 1984 in order to encompass the surge of activity within British and American youth culture recognised in hindsight as ‘post-punk’. ‘Panic Attack!’ sets out to identify artists who adopted many of punk music’s influences, aims and targets. The exhibition attempts to point out such artistic parallels between the music and the art as ‘social commentary’ especially within an urban landscape and as such also focuses on London and New York. It also features artists who explored themes of empowerment through sexuality and violence, and artists who aimed to subvert mainstream media images, the most obvious being Jamie Reid’s appropriation of the Queen’s image for the iconographic Sex Pistols artwork. It includes artists who employed DIY methods of creation and dissemination and which reflected the rise of the independent music scene. And because the rise of punk itself demonstrated the power of youth culture there were artists who set out to document and draw on alternative subcultures for inspiration and as voices of dissent.

Heady stuff to attach to twelve UK months of high powered and energised live rock’n’roll but it is the analytical theorising as well as romanticising of anniversary-remembered events that is necessary for retrospectives such as ‘Panic Attack!’ to take place at all. Ironic then that in a week in which The Artrocker Club itself celebrates fives years of weekly club nights at The Buffalo Bar it also features it’s first ever ‘retro’ gig with Suicide playing to celebrate the re-release of their thirty year-old debut album.

It is only a few months since I was disappointed by The ICA’s ‘The Secret Public’ exhibition which focused on British Underground art 1978 – 88. Many of the same themes were examined there and I was far from impressed with the strength of the work and proposed that the most dynamic creative activity of those times was focused on music making. The list of artists included in ‘Panic Attack!’ is outstanding although it could be argued that ‘the punk years’ didn’t seem to throw up so-called ‘giants’ of the art world but it could be just as easy to point out that this truly reflected the ‘anti-heroic’ spirit adopted by punk.

In this exhibition, the choice of Jamie Reid’s ‘God Save The Queen’ cover artwork as an icon of dissent is perfect and the inclusion of other music imagery from the vast amount available would constitute another exhibition. No matter how many times you have seen this image reproduced, to see the original ‘cut and pasted’ version is quite a thrill, especially next to a similar but discarded ‘second choice’. It is only much later in the exhibition that the inventive photomontages of Linder are displayed opposite video work by American performance artist Hannah Wilke. Even in the seventies photomontage was a dated format but it is one that seems to be constantly reinvented through the use of contemporary images. Linder’s is familiar because of their use on record sleeves by The Buzzcocks while John Stezaker film still collages and photomontages of Piccadilly Circus postcards are perhaps less well known outside the art world but every bit as striking. Stezaker shares a room here with a scratchy film by American artist Gordon Matta-Clark of an architectural intervention. All of Matta-Clark’s films are stunning, from his exploration of New York’s underground sewage system to his famous slicing in half of a suburban house. Shown here is ‘Day’s End’ in which huge shapes are cut from the walls and ceilings of an abandoned warehouse.

There are images by The Coum Transmissions group, who featured future Throbbing Gristle members, from their controversial 1976 performances at The ICA and Cosy Fanni-Tutti’s appearances in numerous pornographic magazines. The resulting wealth of outraged newspaper columns are fascinating reading and in fact Throbbing Gristle’s ‘The Wreckers of Civilisation’ was an considered alternative title for this exhibition!

DIY and street culture, which accompanied punk music in the form of fanzines and fly-posting, is much paralleled. Originally New York street artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring are both featured as well as Barbara Kruger’s posters which use advertising slogan’s and styles and Jenny Holzer’s appropriation of signage and promotion with her ‘Inflammatory Essays’ fly posters. Raymond Pettibon’s early satirical cartoon art is also here and we are reminded of his images used on the 1978 Black Flag album ‘Nervous Breakdown’. Subcultural scenes are strongly represented too by the often brutal photos of Nan Goldin and similarly autobiographical photos by Mark Morrisroe. Not surprisingly, Cerith Wyn Evans’ film and Stephen Willats documentary collage-sculptures showing the emerging London Club scene of Blitz also featured in the aforementioned ICA exhibition. The photos of Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe, who became an accomplished portraitist and whose iconic and androgynous image of Patti Smith is included here, represent the changing face of New York at the time and especially its gay performance scene.

This too was a period of DIY filmmaking and the handful shown are some of the strongest work in the exhibition. Whether or not you saw the excellent Gilbert and George retrospective, ‘The World of Gilbert and George’ contains many of the themes and imagery that have dominated their work. It is witty and stylish. But the most memorable imagery was from the stunning slow motion frames of Derek Jarman’s film ‘Jordan’s Dance’. Produced in 1977, a year before his punk film ‘Jubilee’ it features iconic punk Jordan, famous for her association with Mclaren and Westward and The Sex Pistols, with her makeup but dressed as a ballerina, and dancing around a bonfire of furniture and books in an urban industrial wasteland. Other ghoulishly masked figures are introduced and the imagery is at once surreal, brutal and beautiful. Martha Rosler’s 1980 film ‘Secrets from The Street’ of a predominantly Latino neighbourhood in San Francisco left me with poignant thoughts about how street culture has it’s own language, especially within a dispossessed community, from which the all powerful media is barred or excluded.

Panic Attack! is not an ‘easy’ exhibition of work that is especially beautiful in the traditional sense. The work is provocative even twenty years later and demands an open-minded approach. Some of the included work does indeed seem to reflect the punk spirit while much is also an appropriate response to times when new radical culture was needed.

Panic Attack runs at the Barbican until the 9th September. You can win tickets to this excellent exhibition by answering the following question:
Who was the artist behind the 'Inflammatory Essay's flyposters featured in Panic Attack? Was it:

a)Jenny Holzer
b)Damien Hirst
c)Rolf Harris

Answers in an email to : Dave