from chaos to haute couture…
I took my 16-year-old (a huge music fan) to the Met on Saturday to see the Punk: Chaos to Couture exhibit. I was a little skeptical, having been pretty into punk rock as a teenager.
It was really bizarre to be at The Met, looking at how punk rock influenced high fashion. In fact, it was kind of ridiculous. (Hello, $100 designer “punk rock” shirts in the Museum Shop.) Everyone kept getting in trouble for photographing things (which of course only made me want to photograph them more). My daughter kept admonishing me to stop.
I would have preferred an exhibit about punk rock over one on high fashion, but it was cool that I kept overhearing mothers around my age explaining to their daughters “yes, back when I was a teenager….” or “I used to wear this kind of thing back when…” Of course they were not talking about high fashion, but about the real live stuff we used to get from the thrift shops and modify into something new. In my home town we were normally about 10 years behind the times, and we didn’t discover punk rock till the 80s, but oh well. Back then we didn’t have cable or the Internet, and punk rock was not available at the mall. We had to find inspiration wherever we could.
The background information about the Chaos to Couture exhibit explained that the difference between British punk and American punk was that Brit punk was a sociopolitical reaction of the working class and US punk was more an intellectual-artistic movement. I have to say, though, that in Indiana in the 1980s, we were rebelling against the boredom and status quo of life in general. We weren’t politically engaged, intellectual, or particularly artistic; we just felt like misfits and knew something was not quite right. We didn’t want to be like the people around us.
The Met exhibit credits the punk DIY attitude for spawning some of the current approaches in tech and social media today. (DIY is wonderfully chronicled, by the way, in the excellent book “Our Band Could Be Your Life” which covers the 80s DIY music movement in the US, including chapters on some of my favorites: The Butthole Surfers, Black Flag, The Minutemen, and Sonic Youth).
A good friend of mine and I semi-jokingly talk about wanting to do PunkICT4D. We’ve mused about starting the #ICT4Anarchy hashtag based on the definition below from Noam Chomsky. (We’ll be exploring some of this in December at ICTD2013 during a panel with a high brow, academic, not very punk sounding title: “Appropriating ICTs for Developing Critical Consciousness and Structural Social Change.”)
[Noam says] Well, anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics. Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them. Their authority is not self-justifying. They have to give a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just. And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency. It takes different forms at different times….
In doing a little reading on the exhibit at the Met, I found this rather blind statement (my bold).
In the 1970s, Punk was so much more than a fashion statement. In Britain, it was a reaction to sky-high unemployment, to the Thatcher administration’s closing of the mines, and to the pervasive feeling of hopelessness. Andrew Bolton, the British curator of the show, talked about how that political tinderbox could never be recreated today, although the fashions could be referenced and reworked.
On the one hand, duh. We all know that punk became another watered down, mass-produced, corporate-sponsored commodity. On the other hand, no. Punk’s not dead. The best part of the exhibit was this, scrawled on one of the walls:
Courtesy of @umairh’s Twitter feed because the museum guards were watching, and I couldn’t get any more photos.
Wait... What? 