ART & ARCHITECTURE INTERVIEWS for FIVE BOOKS, ESSAYS, FIELD NOTES

No. 6 - Art, Politics & Punk Rock

INTERVIEW | In Conversation with Kevin Mattson| 27.01.21

Punk Rock (in 80s America)

Punk is more than just a musical genre. It is an ethos. Channelling one’s anger against the triteness of the culture industry’s offerings can be a spontaneous and creative act of resistance and rebellion. Moreover, as Kevin Mattson shows in this selection of books about punk, attending a rock concert by a band like the Dead Kennedys in the era of Reagan was a formative political experience for a generation of citizens, akin to attending a rally or a party convention. It was a spirit of constructive anarchy that can still channel the political anger of the alienated in the twenty first century.

WHAT’S CAUGHT MY EYE & CROSSED MY SCREEN

Politics: the Entertainment Division of the Military Industrial Complex

Ronald Reagan came close to embodying Frank Zappa’s famous quote about politics — a Hollywood actor as Commander in Chief. But Donald Trump arguably became the apotheosis of Entertainer in Chief. The tragicomic pantomime of governance that was the Trump administration generated much anger and stoked many grievances, leading to fully fledged constitutional crisis. Art thrives in times of crisis, or so the saying goes. How did American art do under Trump?

Not well, in large part for its obviousness, according to this survey, ‘Making Art Bad Again’. There’s been some well turned caricature from figurative painters like Eric Fischl or Adrien Ghenie. Provocateur par excellence Marizio Cattelan inistalled America, his solid gold toilet, at the Guggenheim NY timed neatly to coincide with the early days of the former administration. Critics look for relevance in art, but perhaps relevance — and at least political or social relevance — is overrated?

Social media has been replete with bad political art, attempts at artistic expression which indulge the very qualities they seek to deride: shock, vulgarity, self-obsession. How do you parody something that embodies the parodic? The underlying question is what do we mean by good art?

Second-rate art is quick to please, the sure sign of shallow work, argues Karl Ove Knausgaard in a newly published collection of essays about art. Great art retains its mystery, even after countless viewings. That’s the crux of an argument replete with fascinating asides — and a wonderful review of Sally Man'n’s photography — by someone who writes with precision and poise. In those qualities alone this essay stands in stark contrast with the confusion and cacophony we’ve endured in cultural and political domains.

How to Battle Narcissism? Anonymously

If art that shouts ‘Look at me!’ falls flat, indistinguishable from the carnival of confusion that was our collective experience these last few years, it has been hard to find compelling statements of artistic resistance. What better way to contest vacuous narcissism than by protesting anonymously? When so much protest art is little more than grandstanding and virtue signalling, Sault is the real deal. This anonymous collective of musicians take the distressing and depressing headlines of the day and create a thing of beauty, delivering the harrowing truth of injustices with a paradoxical and beguiling mix of R&B, jazz, afrobeat and disco. Add to their musical allure the quiet authority of their minimalist album covers, all the more compelling for being so discrete. Play, listen, repeat.

Lose Your Illusions

As political debate became increasingly unhinged in recent years, I would sometimes console myself with the thought that the virulence is a sure sign that we are witnessing the death throes of a colonial patriarchal order. Central to the mythology that undergirds that order, at least in America, is the Western. ‘What is a Western but a tale that turns genocide into a parable of resilience in which white suffering is placed at the center?’ asks John Freeman in an exceptional essay about the myth of the American West.

The cosplay escapade that was the Capitol Hill insurrection was chock full of costumes of wannabe cowboys and rugged individualists. An episode like this compels us to examine the myths that shape our civic ideals, not to mention the myths behind the many outdated modes of masculinity that still condition what is considered acceptable male behavior.

The US Capitol insurrection may be the wildest and weirdest thing we’ve witnessed in American politics in living memory, but Goya’s new exhibit at the Met in NY reminds us that scenes like this are not without historic precedent. Watch this space for more on Goya, the subject of a forthcoming Five Books interview, soon.

What Are Statues Good For?

If the Capitol assault was a desecration, it’s fair to ask, what is it that we hold sacred after all? Statuary since ancient times has put our ideals on a pedestal, as a reminder and an aspiration. ‘To the minds of people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, public art had a very clear purpose, which seems to have been forgotten in the minds of many people today. Rather than teaching history, or even celebrating the memory of a particular person, so much of the art that still dots our public places was explicitly about inculcating virtue – good morals, and good habits…. Thus, in 1895 Bristol, the statue of slave trader Edward Colston was erected because he was a centuries-dead example of someone who had given a lot to charity. To them, he was an uncontroversial paragon of philanthropy…. But he is not. If we are to take the context of such statues seriously, then the fact that they have become so controversial is a clear sign that they have failed.’

If statues are insignificant, empty idols—mere masonry—why the uproar about the destruction of ancient artefacts like the Buddha of Bamiyan by the Taliban? ‘The value accorded these artifacts by the international community was plausibly criticized as outweighing any concern for the desperate humanitarian conditions in the region. By bestowing such significance upon artifacts, the West effectively affirmed for the Taliban the statues’ idolatrous potential, and in so doing revealed its own, secularized form of image-enchantment.’ We need to be mindful of the statues we erect, or allow to remain standing. They stand for our ideals, for the sort of society which we aspire to be.

As a teen attending St. Joseph’s Preparatory School in inner city Philadelphia during the Reagan era - with Cold Warriors for parents - I gravitated to punk rock. Although I had no turntable at home, friends of mine would routinely be grounded when their parents discovered albums like the Dead Kennedys’ ’Too Drunk to F*ck’ under their beds. We would skip gym class to go skateboarding, dreaming of the day we would be old enough to see our favourite bands live.

Long ago my stepson appropriated my Dead Kennedys and Metallica t-shirts, and now my teenage daughters wear my AC/DC and Led Zeppelin t-shirts much more often than I do (I even catch them wearing The Ramones, which is unforgivable). None of them listen to this music, but that doesn’t seem to matter. One generation’s icons become another’s brand logos. Doc Martens’ recently announced IPO betrays both the original vision of functional footwear for the trades, and its later appropriation an anti-establishment marker. It is merely a branding device now, devoid of any meaning outside a marketplace for consumer identities. That’s the way it works in the Society of the Spectacle.

‘Anger is an energy’, sang Public Image Ltd in 1984. Almost forty years later, there is still plenty to be angry about, and The Spectacle is more mesmerising than ever. We carry it around with us on our phones wherever we go. What cultural movement is the lightning rod for political rebellion and creative energy today?

In the United States - the quintessential Society of Spectacle - we could all watch in real-time the desecration of revered political monuments on Capitol Hill. There’s anger here all right, and plenty of energy, but it’s hard to qualify any of it as creative. What is it that we hold sacred and why? Statuary since ancient times has served as a societal mission statement, carved from stone or cast in bronze, embodying ideals that could be religious or secular, a godlike human or a golden calf.

The only statue of Frank Zappa anywhere in the world was erected in 1992 in Vilnius. Why Vilnius? Reasons remain obscure, and may have been a secondary consideration even for the fans who commissioned it. It’s a monument that retains its mystery, perhaps like all the best art.

Those who tell the stories rule society. It’s a healthy critical impulse to question the motives of our storytellers. Received wisdom is often indeed wise, but as punk rock showed, it is creative iconoclasm that forges new epics behind which we can rally our collective efforts and consciousness in an effort to achieve the unprecedented.

Thank you for taking the time to read this issue.

Romas Tauras