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Week 28: I AM A CLICHE: Echoes of the Punk Aesthetic

So last week I was in the south of France, sunning myself and swimming in the sea. And listening to lots of Tunes, but ahem…not attending any gigs… But, faithful readers, I did pop along to Les Recontres d’Arles – the huge annual photography exhibition in Arles, which takes over churches, industrial parks and pretty much any viable venue. And as luck would have it, live music was high on the agenda.

One of the flagship exhibitions was I am a Cliché: Echoes of the Punk Asthetic. With loads of photos, audio and video footage, as well as a purpose built punk listening room filled with vinyl, it traced the music and images of punk, from Patti Smith and the Ramones, through to the Sex Pistols and the Clash, and all documented by Jamie Reid, the legendary Dennis Morris and Wolfgang Tillmans, (obviously to name just a few - I could go on forever!)

With the rough and ready images of the 100 Club on Oxford Street back in the day, as well as the beautiful young things in the 1970s NYC scene, it made me really wish I was around when punk was first tearing shreds of the musical landscape; when the passion for something Real was so intense and (to my clearly idealised and nostalgic mind!), making music seemed a knee-jerk political reaction for anyone who had something to say. And of course, when it comes down to it, they created some damn good tunes.

It also means that since I’ve been home, I’ve been digging out the old tunes again: Patti, the Ramones, the Clash and the Talking Heads.


Here’s a few words from the exhibition curator, Emma Lavigne, curator of contemporary art at the Musée National d’Art Moderne/CCI Centre Pompidou, who put things much better than I can!

“Punk might be the ‘Great Rock and Roll Swindle’ described by Malcolm McLaren, but it was also a movement whose fundamentals, postulates and iconography defined an aesthetic. The biographer of punk, Jon Savage, describes it as ‘marginal, international, dark, tribal, alienated, foreign, full of black humour’. This aesthetics of insurrectional violence is now espoused all the more vigorously as it addresses the contemporary emphasis on the quest for the extreme and its staging.

“At a time when rock seems to have been hijacked and watered down, the energy of punk, with its mix of humour and subversion, is being reactivated by many artists. What these works transmit is the creative energy of a musical and artistic movement whose façade of nihilism has long masked its aesthetic validity and heritage.”

(Photos courtesy of HotBlog.)