On Monday, February 5, 2023, from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM, inside the bookstore ‘Modo Infoshop,’ the book ‘Naked Punk,’ published by Rizosfera in November 2023, will be presented. Discussing the book and the reflections and trajectories it offers, along with image and sound projections, will be Federico Montanari (preface writer of ‘Naked Punk,’ former bassist of Bacteria, an HC punk band from Bologna, and Unimore professor of Visual and Media Studies), Paolo Davoli (curator of the book, with Gabriele Fantuzzi, for Rizosfera), and Letizia Rustichelli (translator and editor of ‘Naked Punk’ for Rizosfera).
“’Naked Punk’ is a volume that has no equal on the international scene and fits well with the retrospective exhibition on CCCP, for a (already paranoid) Emilia reflecting on urgencies of yesterday and today, connections between avant-gardes, didactic needs, and projections into a hypermedial future.” – Vittore Baroni (Blow Up)
“This book on punk is spectacular, a dizzying array of colors and images that leaves you breathless. A volume that is a wonderful handbook of punk culture and aesthetics in every respect. Congratulations on this vibrant work!” – Aldo Chimenti (Rockerilla)
From the back cover of ‘Naked Punk’:
“Against the predominant idea that punk was exclusively a musical phenomenon, ‘Naked Punk’ proposes a new genealogy of the phenomenon, situated in the world of art and, in particular, in those extreme aesthetic forms that propose a cancellation of the boundaries between life conduct and expressive practices. Seen from this visual and existential perspective, punk takes on more the connotation of an artistic movement of rupture, similar to Dada and Situationism. At the center of the becoming-punk as a general condition of the late 20th-century Western urban proletariat, there is therefore a diffuse core of visual imprint, an explosive focus of artist thought and anti-cultural insolence that draws nourishment both from the historical and performative avant-gardes of the 20th century and from the pop world of graphics and fashion. The becoming-art of punk, with its anti-intellectual poses, calculated nonchalance, parresiastic manifestations, and amoral insolences, thus completes a trajectory already evident in the figures of rupture of modern art in which the performative event emancipates art from the artwork itself.”
The artists featured in the book, including Alan Bermowitz (Alan Vega and Suicide), Roberta Bayley (Ramones and Richard Hell), Arturo Vega (Ramones), Helen Wellington-Lloyd and Jamie Reid (Sex Pistols), Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood (Sex and Seditionaries), Gee Vaucher (Crass), Linder Sterling (Buzzcocks, Ludus), Barney Bubbles (Generation X, Damned), have bent, counterfeited, reworked the art of the 20th century to transform it into the precious aesthetic ally of punk’s attack on forms of knowledge and forces of power.
