Where punk meets art

Dis­sat­is­fac­tion has al­ways dri­ven artists to do new things. Jordi Ben­ito put his life in dan­ger to ex­or­cise anx­i­eties about the op­pres­sion of the in­di­vid­ual by con­ven­tion. His cor­po­real “per­for­mances” were nau­se­at­ing. In 1979, he sac­ri­ficed a cow at the Miró Foun­da­tion and hung it up­side down and al­most suf­fo­cated rolling in its blood. A year ear­lier, he had tried some­thing sim­i­lar with a human corpse at the Cen­tre Georges Pom­pi­dou in Paris.

The rad­i­cal na­ture of this unique artist co­in­cided with the up­surge of punk. Ini­tially with­out any di­rect con­nec­tion, there were nev­er­the­less the same un­der­cur­rents. In fact, the art world was ready for the im­pact of punk and its need to un­der­mine bour­geois val­ues.

More vi­sion­ar­ies emerged re­belling against the com­mer­cial­ism of art, such as Vito Ac­conci, bit­ing his body and mas­tur­bat­ing in pub­lic; Francesc Tor­res, look­ing for his atavis­tic self in drunk­e­ness; Chris Bur­den, flirt­ing with death. Bur­den died sud­denly in 2015, but had time to meet the re­quest of cu­ra­tor David G. Tor­res and de­sign an ex­hi­bi­tion on the in­flu­ence of punk in con­tem­po­rary art. Punk. Els seus ras­tres en l'art con­tem­po­rani (Punk. Its traces in con­tem­po­rary Art) opened in Madrid, went to Vi­to­ria, and was in Barcelona last year. The fans were thrilled: it was the sec­ond most vis­ited ex­hi­bi­tion in the MACBA pro­gramme. It is now in Mex­ico.

Tor­res says he did not go look­ing for artists with any sort of “punk­a­bil­ity”, but rather artists who in­fected him with their ex­treme and rev­o­lu­tion­ary im­pulses. More than in­flu­ence, he prefers to speak of a col­lec­tive mood: “What I wanted to show was the in­ten­sity of this pe­riod in 1977 and how it spread in con­tem­po­rary cre­ation and, in par­tic­u­lar, art. The will­ing­ness to chal­lenge your­self and be chal­lenged con­stantly is the ori­gin of punk and so it is nor­mal to find a res­o­nance in art be­cause it has, through­out the 20th cen­tury, been the space most open to ques­tion­ing,” he ex­plains.

“Punk was the an­swer to mo­ments of an in­tense avant-garde. The CBGB con­cert cen­tre in New York was the '70s ver­sion of Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire [the dadaist Mecca] and the Lon­don shop Sex Lon­don was key in many spon­ta­neous hap­pen­ings,” with a group formed in 1957, an­t­i­cap­i­tal­ist to the bone, which un­der­stood art as the only means of so­cial trans­for­ma­tion. There were even more sur­pris­ing con­nec­tions: “On the cov­ers of some of the iconic punk groups like Fugazi, there are ref­er­ences to Russ­ian Con­struc­tivism and Bauhaus, which in prin­ci­ple had noth­ing to do with punk.”

In­vis­i­ble threads con­nected these mo­ments of cre­ative ex­al­ta­tion. Dada was punk and punk was Dada. Dadaist muse Baroness Elsa von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven walked the streets of New York with cof­fee spoon ear­rings, postage stamps on her cheeks, a shaved head streaked with colours, a fu­neral wreath on her head and her lips painted black.

With this back­ground noise, the punk in­cur­sion pro­vided artists with new stim­uli to ex­press dis­con­tent. “In Cat­alo­nia, many artists in the '80s picked up the torch. De­spite their aca­d­e­mic back­ground, Mabel Palacín, Jordi Colomer, Tres or Mar­cel·lí Antúnez fed off the con­certs of the Sex Pis­tols, Sonic Youth or La Banda Trapera del Río. We have an un­for­tu­nate ten­dency to com­part­men­talise what re­ally is in the same box. It was a caul­dron of shared thought,” says Tor­res. The punk spirit in­ter­twined with Vi­en­nese Ac­tion­ism took Fura dels Baus to the van­guard of a new lan­guage. Their shows went to ex­tremes, with de­struc­tion as free­dom. “With Fura, punk acted as a cat­a­lyst and gave a breadth to global spec­ta­cles that were ours: the cer­cav­ila, the slaugh­ter­ing of the pig, tra­bu­caires ...,” says Tor­res.

What fol­lowed was even grander. In the '90s ap­peared an­other batch of artists im­bued with the same ethics and aes­thet­ics but so­phis­ti­cated, like Joan Morey. “Morey brought us the alien­ated con­di­tion of the in­di­vid­ual in so­ci­ety, the cri­sis of moder­nity, the dark­ness, ...” in a re­gen­er­a­tion of per­for­mance that pro­vides a new and unique cri­tique on the is­sues of gen­der and sex­u­al­ity.

Traces of punk art sur­vive. There are pro­jects like Nuria Güell's that chal­lenge the sys­tem or Vic­tor Jae­nada's ni­hilis­tic in­stal­la­tions. And on an­other level, Damien Hirst and his sharks in formalde­hyde and human skulls en­crusted with di­a­monds. Tor­res ar­gues: “When Hirst says he is a punk artist he is quite aware of what he is say­ing. The Sex Pis­tols reap­peared in 1996 for the Filthy Lucre Tour. Just that, cash in and clean up. Cash­ing in on things, which Duchamp also did, is a per­fect punk at­ti­tude. And Hirst goes there: the best way to go against the sys­tem is to bring it to parox­ysm. The idea of punk as fraud dates back to its ori­gin: it was said that it was a mar­ket­ing strat­egy to get rid of sur­plus leather and chains.”