The Queen Said I’m Aghast:
Punk as Fashion had reemerged in 1994 in a way that seemed ironic at first;
Chanel safety pins, Versace bondage trousers, etc., until one reexamined the stylistic basis for the London movement in the first place: rebellious STYLE at 430 The King’s Road.
As a young teenager, the Punk graphics of Jamie Reid excited me; they were raw, visceral, and the antithesis of the slick Modernism that disco/dance music was purveying. I liked both, though. One was full of style and violence, the other full of….well…gay desire. Later, in the early 1980s, as that same bored teenager from a suburban bedroom, I fell in love with the maudlin Smith’s.
This show of prints and paintings and color copies of color copies referenced all of the aforementioned. Queens were obliterated and enlarged; graphics and lyrics stolen, not borrowed, from 1978-1985. A retro-trip as an antidote to the times. Pretty, and pretty vacant those buses — headed to Nowhere, or Boredom.
