Wednesday 3 May 2023 :: Punk Attack 2 @ UNIMORE, Reggio Emilia, Palazzo Dossetti, Via Allegri n. 6, H. 16.00
Second episode of the seminar dedicated to Punk, whose title is Punk Attack. In the second edition of ‘Punk Attack’, the focus will be on the group Sex Pistols and in particular on the ‘abstract machine’ developed by the pair of young fashion designers Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood in which revolt, style, street neo-situationism, pop language and hyper rock’n’roll for the last time, perhaps, mix and crash against the social, political and media establishment of Great Britain. All this will be narrated from the visual perspective that is the real focus of the seminar – narrating punk from a visual, non-musical point of view.
Abstract of Punk Attack I :
Against the predominant idea that punk was an exclusively musical phenomenon, Punk Attack proposes another genealogy of the phenomenon this time located in the world of art and, in particular, in those extreme aesthetic forms that propose an erasure of the boundaries between life forms and art forms. Seen from this visual and existential perspective, punk increasingly takes on the connotation of an artistic movement of rupture, more akin to Dada and Situationism than to the Rolling Stones or Elvis Presley. At the heart of the becoming-punk is thus a diffuse nucleus of visual imprint that draws its nourishment from both painting and graphics and from the historical and performative avant-garde of the 20th century.
The artists who will be presented – Alan Bermowitz (Suicide), Roberta Bailey and Arturo Vega (Ramones), Raymond Pettibon (Black Flag), Gee Vaucher (Crass), Linder Sterling (Buzzcocks, Ludus), Geoff Leigh (Ultravox), Kate Simon and Caroline Coon (Clash), Barney Bubbles (Generation X, Damned), Helen Wallington-Lloyd (Sex Pistols) – have bent art into the valuable aesthetic ally of the punk attack on the forms of knowledge and the forces of power.
Abstract of Punk Attack II :
Marxist conspiracy as Fred Vermorel claims? Rock’n’roll’s greatest swindle as ascertained by Malcolm McLaren? Creative pseudo-situationist cultural contestation as Jon Savage writes? Expression of a generation that first felt the End of Progress as Giuliano Santoro claims? The greatest cultural revolution of the 20th century as asserted by Giovanni Catellani? All this and more were the Sex Pistols, who almost 50 years later refer to an obscure galaxy of meanings in flight from Capital and the Ordinary that still shake the symbols of Power, the Good Sense of Knowledge and the Morality of the Western world from their foundations. That all of this coincides with the Punk event is one of those space-time mysteries that Punk Attack 2 will take on by making the images ‘speak’ and ‘listen’ to the posters, outfits and scandals that that style of existence enacted in such provocative and outrageous ways as a conscious Sabotage of the Spectacle.
Timetable of the dense afternoon
H.14.00 – 16.00 Alessandro Sarti
H. 16.00 – 18.00 Gabriele Fantuzzi, Paolo Davoli, Giovanni Catellani
