Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years - The Barbican

Spinner.com: "You played in punk bands throughout your adolescence and are known for doing things your own way. Is that a by-product of the punk ethos?"

Bjork: "Well, I've never been into the establishment and the hidden rules that come with that; you're supposed to dress a certain way, sing a certain way, be a certain way, cook a certain way. I don't believe in that. We're all very different. I don't think anybody fits. It's not only me."

With time to spare in the Barbican, I found myself at their exhibition “Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years”.

I wasn’t a punk in 1976. I was 8.

There is a certain kind of muso journo cum cultural commentator, the sort of chap (invariably) who finds himself on Newsnight Review scratching his face and gurning with the sheer effort of being so brilliant,for whom Punk represents some mythical altered state of being, some new Jerusalem, something which somehow defines their very being. To me they just remind me of the fat bald bloke at the party who just has to do the nutty boys dance when a Madness track comes on – creatures of a fake, false remembered childhood, revised, rewritten, a made up lost paradise.

What actually was/is Punk? The exhibition chooses (from necessity) to ignore this question, mentioning only in passing there is some dispute as to the interelationship between the UK version (Sex Pistols, the Clash) and the US (Ramones). It manages to stretch the Punk years (via reference to Post-Punk, an even more illusive concept) up to the mid 1980s.

It starts with Jamie Reid's cover of God Save the Queen, and the early rooms feature various cut-up / collage work, postcards to abandoned warehouses being the objects which are chopped and reconfigured.

Then there is a run of familiar territory - Cosi Fan Tutti's porn interventions, Jarman's early Super8s, Gilbert and George, then a run of famous American artists, Robert Maplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Hering - familiar territory in that they are all artists who somehow became household (if you live in the Finchley LovePalace) names. The terrific finale is a 1984 film by Cerith Wynn Evans featuring Leigh Bowery modelling his "Pakis From Outer Space" look.

Mick Hucknell was a punk. So was Adam Ant.

This was a curate’s egg of a show, or should that be a curator’s egg? Some of the work was very dated, some of it suprisingly contemporary, not in the sense of being ahead of its time, but in the sense of exposing how little some conceptual art has moved on since the 1970s.

The central argument, that somehow all the featured artists were Punk, functioned instead to show up how much internal contradiction there is, unless you reduce Punk to the simple notion of people just getting off their arses and doing stuff.

Who do you believe? Lydon or Mclaren’s narrative? The Sex Pistols as angry working-class boys kicking down the walls, or the product of a svengali media manipulator. Either way leads you to Reality TV.

Many of the artists could easily have been connected by other narratives than Punk. As the artists of the Thatcher/Reagan years (what could be more punk than Norman Tebbit’s call for the unemployed to get on their bikes?). Decentralisation, emphasis on the individual, a push towards small self-help communities rather than state support – the art of the 1980s unconsciously mirrored the socio-economic governmental philosophy it was fighting against. Or as artists of gender / sexuality revolution. Or perhaps as nothing particularly new, just a natural progression from the 1960s. Never mentioned, Warhol looms large over this exhibition – he was making art from junkies and trannies long before this lot. Working class revolutionaries kicking down the doors of the Establishment? Or had the doors already been kicked down by the 1968 riots, by That Was The Week That Was, by Altamont, by the Profumo Affair. Or go even further back, to the Surrealists, Situationists and Dadaists. Duchamp put the urinal in the gallery; the artists of the 1970s just had to add the piss, shit, spit and spunk.

'How do I know all this stuff?' Anonymous Gill would ask if she still read my blog. Yeah, that’s a good question. Because the prevailing culture keeps feeding me all this stuff, even the stuff which purports to be undermining or radicalising the prevailing system. Which makes me wonder? Maybe it was radical once, but it certainly doesn’t feel so any more. It’s been absorbed. What doesn’t kill the system makes it stronger.

Which might explain the absence in the exhibition of that which I most associate with Punk, namely a snarling menace, a sense of impending, random, horrible violence.

The quality of the art is mixed, the narrative flawed, but this has to go down as a must see for the stimulation. It finishes 9th September though.