Art Texts

by Mia Jankowicz
Commissioned on the occasion of the Frieze Writer’s Prize 2007
posted on Frieze on October 2007

Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK

The timing and subject matter of ‘Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years’ overlapped distinctly with Kunstverein Munich and the ICA London’s recent show ‘The Secret Public: The Last Days of the British Underground 1978–1988’. Both made much the same arguments: that the subcultures of their respective eras were a highly creative expression of an urgent, nihilistic disillusionment with politics and society. However, ‘The Secret Public’s lens remained more firmly focused on subcultural scenes, and although ‘Panic Attack!’ was book-ended by two works related to the music scene – Jamie Reid’s God Save the Queen (Single Cover) (1977), and Cerith Wyn Evans’ psychedelic film Epiphany (1984) (featuring performance artist Leigh Bowery in a sort of Vishnu-meets-NYPD club get-up) – it quickly became clear that ‘Panic Attack!’ took a much broader view. Its task was twofold, arguing that art was not just the window dresser but the genuine co-conspirator in all that was Punk, and placing them both steadily within a historical context.

Featuring the work of 34 artists, the show’s curators Mark Sladen and Ariella Yedgar held the viewer’s hand firmly through a numbered series of rooms, each prefaced by a lengthy wall text. Across a wide variety of approaches – including Victor Burgin’s considered photo-conceptualism, the body politics of Hannah Wilke, and the handheld film and commentary of Martha Rosler – a sober formality and pedagogy were ever present. However much this jarred with any pre-packaged idea of Punk, it was to the benefit of the viewer. The problems of the Barbican’s many-roomed
upper galleries were negotiated through intelligent pairings of artists, producing mutual historical or thematic contextualisations.

Despite all the reading demanded of the viewer, the work nevertheless spoke for itself, as with, for example, The World of Gilbert & George (1981). The film combines scenes of Gilbert & George’s curiously radical, exaggerated conformism, interviews with touchingly uncomfortable young ne’er-do-wells, and long panning shots of a dismal east London. This collage-like approach refracts the era’s textures and anxieties, communicating a sense of irrevocable schism between an ‘old’ England and its dissolute youth – a tangible evocation of the era’s discontents. In keeping with the show’s orderly fashion, the tendencies and thematics of Punk were given four groupings: ‘The Traumatized City’, ‘Performance and Transgression’. ‘Appropriation and Collage’ and ‘Subcultures’. Naturally, what can be included within these criteria is pretty broad, and the intensity and immediacy of Punk was scattered quite diffusely, surfacing to various degrees in the work. The texts on Jenny Holzer’s public fly posters ‘Inflammatory Essays’ (1979–82) perfectly encapsulate a juddering, incoherent sense of urgency shared with Punk. Based on various impassioned political ideologies, the ‘Essays’ had the potential to elicit the same reactionary ambient fear that the culturally conservative public must have felt in response to punks in public spaces. Paul McCarthy’s film Rocky (1976), featuring his dumbly grotesque, mindlessly violent boxer punching himself in the face, has parallels with the deliberate strategies of Punk to embody precisely what the dominant culture produced as hateful or dirty.

In the case of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End (1975), film documentation of his cutting apart a condemned Manhattan warehouse, there are enough shared concerns – a class critique of property, a destructive or defacing aesthetic, the embracing of abject spaces – to make Punk an interestingly tangential reference point for the work. But the stretch to Adrian Piper’s ‘The Mythic Being: I Am The Locus #1–5’ (1975) seemed a little too far. The rubbed-out photographs of herself, onto which Piper crayons in a macho urban black male, concern themselves with media-generated, gendered and racialized constructions that are too layered and considered to be compared to the tactics of Punk; and besides, it seems disingenuous to claim that Punk was seriously engaged in any form of race politics. The risk here was the implication of Punk as an overarching cross-disciplinary movement in itself, rather than as the kernel of cultural expression where the essence of the era’s concerns concentrated most fervently. Punk, like a hyperactive child at a birthday party, is here credited with an awful lot within a period busy also with Conceptualism and second wave Feminism, and as a result, the inclusion of one or two of the works such as Piper’s, and Cindy Sherman’s ‘Untitled Film Stills’ series (1977–80), risked co-opting tenuously related ideas.

Despite this, it was a relief that the show took itself this seriously. There was absolutely no attempt to create an ersatz Punk experience; no mythologizing sense of ‘look what you missed’. The exhibition functioned by allowing the artists included to voice the immediacy, concerns and sensations of Punk. ‘Panic Attack!’ understood that, in the Punk era, listening to the music was the easy part.

Written by Jonathan Jones
Posted on The Guardian, Monday 31 March 2003

Weaned on a diet of pickled animals and unmade beds, the British public has become remarkably difficult to shock. Could that be why Jake and Dinos Chapman, the enfants terribles of Britart, bought a mint collection of Goya’s most celebrated prints – and set about systematically defacing them? Jonathan Jones on the breaking of art’s ultimate taboo

Defaced?: one of the Chapmans’ ‘rectified’ Goyas.

Poor Goya. In his lifetime he had to put up with deafness, the Spanish Inquisition and the Duke of Wellington. Now he has Jake and Dinos Chapman to contend with. The brothers called one of their earliest tributes to the great Spanish painter, printmaker and visionary Great Deeds Against the Dead – quoting Goya – in which they reproduced one of his horrific images of cruelty as a lifesize tableau featuring a dismembered mannequin impaled on a tree. Their latest work is another great deed against the dead – a desecration of the memory of Goya.

Two years ago, the Chapmans bought a complete set of what has become the most revered series of prints in existence, Goya’s Disasters of War. It is a first-rate, mint condition set of 80 etchings printed from the artist’s plates. In terms of print connoisseurship, in terms of art history, in any terms, this is a treasure – and they have vandalised it.

“We had it sitting around for a couple of years, every so often taking it out and having a look at it,” says Dinos, until they were quite sure what they wanted to do. “We always had the intention of rectifying it, to take that nice word from The Shining, when the butler’s trying to encourage Jack Nicholson to kill his family – to rectify the situation,” interrupts Jake.

“So we’ve gone very systematically through the entire 80 etchings,” continues Dinos, “and changed all the visible victims’ heads to clowns’ heads and puppies’ heads.”

The “new” work is called Insult to Injury. The exhibition in which it will be shown for the first time, at Modern Art Oxford, is called The Rape of Creativity.

Goya’s Disasters of War is a precocious modern masterpiece, a work left by its creator as his final savage bequest to the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries – it was far too anti-clerical and unpatriotic to be published in his lifetime, and the first ever edition came out in 1863, three and a half decades after his death in 1828. From the very start of its public existence, it has been experienced not as a historic but as a contemporary work, its images so urgent and truthful that they function as living, new art.

And it is this colossus whose masterpiece the Chapman brothers have chosen to defile.

“He’s the artist who represents that kind of expressionistic struggle of the Enlightenment with the ancién regime,” says Jake, “so it’s kind of nice to kick its underbelly. Because he has a predilection for violence under the aegis of a moral framework. There’s so much pleasure in his work. To produce the law, one has to transgress it. Not to be too glib in the current conditions, but there’s something quite interesting in the fact that the war of the Peninsula saw Napoleonic forces bringing rationality and enlightenment to a region that was presumed Catholic and marked by superstition and irrationality. And here’s Goya, who’s very cut free from the Church, who embodies this autonomous enlightened being, embodied as a gelatinous dead mass without redemption – then you hear George Bush and Tony Blair talking about democracy as though it has some kind of natural harmony with nature, as though it’s not an ideology.”

Whoah, step back a minute. Defacing a work of art is, perhaps, the last taboo of the liberal, Britart-loving, Tate Modern-going public. The crime novelist Patricia Cornwell’s purchase and destruction of works by the British artist Walter Sickert in pursuit of her theory that the disturbing early-20th century painter of music hall audiences and seedy interiors was Jack the Ripper nauseated many, me included. To destroy a work of art is a genuinely nasty, insane, deviant thing to do.

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By STEVEN A. HOLMES
Published: December 6, 1989 on The New york Times

An angry debate has erupted at the New School for Social Research after a caricature of a black man the school was displaying in an art show was defaced by an instructor who branded the work racist.

While some faculty members and students consider the instructor’s act a legitimate protest against a racist art work, others view its destruction as understandable but unjustified censorship.

At the center of the debate is a question that has been argued in Washington, New York and elsewhere in recent months: Is freedom of expression an inviolable right, or should limits be placed on it when art or speech is offensive. ‘Who Decides What Is Appropriate’

The New School administration used the standard of artistic freedom in allowing the disputed drawing to continue to be displayed, and its actions were supported by many students and faculty.

”I understand the sensitivity of the issue, but by censoring a piece of art, you are setting a precedent for censoring all art,” said Faith Dunn, a white communications design student who is editor of the Parsons Paper, a student newspaper at the Parsons School of Design, one of the New School’s seven colleges in Manhattan and where the exhibition was held.

”If you are going to start defacing art you don’t think is appropriate, where do you stop? And who decides what is appropriate?” Ms. Dunn asked. ‘Strong Passions on All Sides’

Critics say the administration is elevating freedom of expression to too exhalted a position, and that other freedoms, like the right to be free from intolerance and racial bias, should be given equal weight.

”Freedom of expression is no more sacred than freedom from intolerance or bigotry,” said John Jeffries, a black who is the associate dean of the New School’s Graduate School of Management and Urban Professions.

The incident has also forced the New School, a Greenwich Village institution with a reputation for social liberalism, to face accusations that its decision to allow the picture to be displayed has, in effect, institutionalized racism. ”There are strong passions on all sides,” said Jonathan F. Fanton, a white and the New School’s President. ”I’ve heard a lot of things in the last couple of weeks that I don’t like; all the way from very harsh judgments of the person who defaced the work to very harsh judgments of the unversity and me for not having taken it down.”

The incident occurred last month at the Exhibition Center at the Parsons School of Design. On display was a tiny, black and white copy of a drawing of a black man whose face is dominated by the whites of his eyes and white lips. It is a caricature similar to those popular in old minstral shows. The drawing was part of a 1983 advertising campaign for a Japanese soft drink and was created by the Japanese artist Shin Matsunaga. It was one of 350 works by Mr. Matsunaga that were exhibited by the Parson’s gallery from Oct. 18 through Nov. 17.

Three days before the show’s closing, Sekou Sundiata, a musician and poet who teaches at the New School, drew a large blue X across the figure in the print. On the mounting above the picture, he wrote that the poster was racist and signed his name.

”The New School doesn’t have the right to invite someone into my community to insult me,” said Mr. Sundiata, who is black. ”Matsunaga can say or draw whatever he wants, but you don’t have to invite him in.” ‘Deeply Offensive and Racist’

Later, about 40 students showed their approval of Mr. Sundiata’s action by writing their names on the mounting and across the print itself. Students and faculty members also demonstrated outside the gallery and met Mr. Fanton to express their anger over the school’s decision to hang the poster.

Mr. Fanton responded to the defacing of the print by mailing a six-page letter to all students and faculty. In his letter, Mr. Fanton said he felt the print was ”deeply offensive and racist.” But, citing resolutions adopted by the school’s board of directors concerning the free exchange of ideas and artistic freedom, Mr. Fanton stood by the ”decision to leave the offensive piece in the exhibition.”

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