salty air of the modern city leaves the visitor with a David Bowie is,

distinct impression of both real and imagined conti-

nuities between distant eras in Icelandic history. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
MARCH 23–AUGUST 11, 2013

Andrew Goodhouse Art Gallery of Ontario

SEPTEMBER 25–NOVEMBER 27, 2013

Andrew Goodhouse is a graduate intern in publications at

the J. Paul Getty Trust, with training in anthropology and
material culture.
Punk: Chaos to Couture
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
1 E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme,
Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 17, 63. MAY 9–AUGUST 14, 2013
2 George Schöpflin, “The Functions of Myth and a Taxonomy of
Myths,” in Myths and Nationhood, ed. Geoffrey Hosking and George Museum exhibitions devoted to modern popular
Schöpflin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 28–29, 33. culture have an uneven history. When done well, they
3 “The Settlement of Iceland,” Reykjavík 871 ± 2: The Settlement reveal the depth and complexity of familiar pat-
Exhibition, accessed January 15, 2013, http://www.reykjavik871.is/.
terns of life and taste that were often unclear in the
4 Kevin P. Smith, “Landnám: The Settlement of Iceland in
participants’ minds or perhaps too ethereal even to
Archaeological and Historical Perspective,” World Archaeology 26
(1995): 340. have found a name or a form. They are profoundly
memorable if only because they seem like eureka
moments. They are rare, of course, because by
nature popular culture phenomena are constantly
evolving and ephemeral. Also, the curator with an
academic turn of mind is probably the last person to
pick up on subcultures and new social mores, since
he or she is unlikely to move in the circles where they
are generated, flourish briefly, and die. Nowhere
is this more true than in the field of popular music
and the dance and dress styles, hairstyles, argot,
posture, sexuality, and imaginative life that accom-
pany it. The situation has been made all the more
problematic since the rise of urban anthropology
and the celebration of working-class values by the
educated class. Fifty years ago, curators were listing
cylinder seals and classifying ceramic shapes; now
they want to examine youth culture and the various
subversive or sensational positions that the urban
young adopt. The problem is not that youth culture
cannot be examined or exhibited, but that there is
social and professional caché to being part of the
study group, to being “inside” celebrating that style
rather than outside examining how and why it works.
What George Melly once traced as the passage from
“revolt into style,” and what a host of sociologists
and anthropologists have confirmed, to say noth-
ing of the style hounds and media commentariat, is
that popular style is now a serious business and an
essential part of every museum’s portfolio. Not only
does it imply a breadth of interest beyond dead white

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 from looking at a wax mannequin of Diana Ross in
her original dress in Madame Tussauds? Is the same
level of analysis and interpretation being applied to
Kylie’s gold hotpants as to the Great Bed of Ware, or is
the audience just there to gawp? Another element in
this is that the material culture is not the driving force
behind this imagery or its wider meaning. Film, TV,
magazines, and especially pop music videos via MTV,
YouTube, and iPhone are the media that distribute the
imagery and shape its meaning. Those same hotpants
would be just charity shop fodder if they had not been
lovingly lit, worn, choreographed, and filmed for a
promotional video that has been viewed countless
millions of times on television, computer, and smart-
phone. Museum displays, in other words, are not the
format that shapes the meaning, but they get some
kind of vicarious participation and reflected hipness
by showing the items that have been glamorized on
film. It is also a very simple and inexpensive way of
revalorizing the object, the thing itself, the “original”—
something old-school curators are always banging on
about—while bringing in the legions of fans who want
to cast their eyes upon the sacred relic.
David Bowie is in a slightly different position, of
course, in so far as he recognized this process as
Photo-collage by David Bowie of manipulated film stills
from The Man Who Fell to Earth, 1975–76. Film stills by David early as 1970 and incorporated both the mechanisms
James. Courtesy of The David Bowie Archive. Film stills © of stardom and the ironic relationship between style
STUDIOCANAL Films Ltd. Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum.
and content into his work. By that time, Warhol’s pro-
nouncements on fame and exploitation seemed not
males and a rejection of old-fashioned hierarchical only a description of socio-economic processes but
elitism; exhibitions of pop music material are very . . . a mode of working or a tool in the voracious free mar-
well, “popular.” ket of popular culture. If every pop star since then
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has has felt him or herself in some sort of ironic relation-
led the way in making this field both respectable and ship with fame, both participant and observer, Bowie
commercial. In recent years we have seen exhibi- had been there already, and he was generally the
tions devoted to Kylie Minogue, the Supremes, Grace first and best at it.
Kelly, Annie Lennox, and “The Glory Years of British He was also one of the earliest to see the
Rock.” All were perfectly reasonable, in so far as potential of haute couture, theatricality, and other
they were more than a breathless fan’s experience strategies previously regarded as outside the
of the clothes and material culture of their celebrity purview of serious pop music. One should remember
idol. There has always been a hint of doubt, however, that “authenticity” in the late 1960s meant a sup-
about how and why this was being done. In financial posed rejection of the trappings of wealth and fame,
terms, there was no problem—these exhibitions as if faded jeans and a beard made the singer-song-
attract large audiences from a demographic that writer more genuine. Bowie’s use of stage costume,
do not generally visit venerable art museums. That elaborate make-up, dance, mime, androgyny, and
audience also like to shop for souvenirs, so they are out-and-out performativity was, for those who came
good merchandising opportunities. The problems of age when Ziggy Stardust was released, more
arise more in the nature of the experience. How is than just a breath of (not fresh) air; it was a return
looking at Diana Ross’s clothes in the V&A different to fun and spectacle at the weekends.

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 Bowie’s oeuvre lends itself to redisplay in an of film throughout the exhibition serves to reveal
exhibition for a host of reasons beyond the parasitic these additional dimensions rather than merely dem-
relationship with music and film. First of all, the onstrate the visual record of performance and media
costumes and stage shows were quite elaborately distribution.
designed in the first place. Displaying the clothes The curators at the V&A wisely adopted a com-
and the drawings as well as film and video highlights plex use of the exhibition space, drawing the visitor
offers a more complex set of interrelated meanings. through a series of smaller galleries with juxtaposi-
Bowie also took this stuff seriously, so he looked tions of the usual material—record covers, posters,
after it. Some of the outfits that were on display in lyrics, photographs, ephemera, etc.—while allow-
David Bowie is at the V&A (and now at the Art Gallery ing the whole exhibition to revolve around a central
of Ontario) are in pristine condition and are as reveal- atrium-like space of multiple stacked video screens.
ing about their design and manufacture as they are Needless to say, in this area the music drives the
about the performance and record of use. Freddie whole experience. After a few minutes viewing dif-
Burretti’s leather jumpsuit for Ziggy Stardust (1972) ferent filmed performances, however, one can turn
and the spectacular striped bodysuit by Kansai to the dressed mannequins and examples of Bowie’s
Yamamoto for the Aladdin Sane tour of 1973 have an lyric sheets, which use his well-known sub-Dada “cut
almost sculptural presence as objects in their own and paste” technique. It is an immersive experience
right. In addition, Bowie saw the costumes as part of in which the clothing and props are enhanced by
a more elaborately choreographed performance, so this understanding of how several complementary
their appearance as fabric, cut, and tailoring feeds media were marshalled at the time and continue to
into a larger consideration of lighting, movement, and be exploited in the construction of Bowie’s popular
music—closer, in that sense, to stage and opera cos- image. In other words, the objects are interesting,
tumes than fashion alone. Again, the omnipresence but one needs a powerful blast of the songs to bring

Left: Striped bodysuit for the Aladdin Sane tour, 1973.

Design by Kansai Yamamoto. Photograph by Masayoshi
Sukita. © Sukita / The David Bowie Archive.

Right: Quilted two-piece suit, 1972. Designed by Freddie

Burretti for the Ziggy Stardust tour. Courtesy of The David
Bowie Archive. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum.

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it all together. Bowie was (and is) a musician first on private grief. But much of that mainstream criti-
and foremost, and it was the music that ultimately cism was based on false assumptions. There is a
drew millions of young people to him and his work. case to be made that this show perhaps should not
One is grateful, therefore, that the curators kept the have been undertaken, and the launch hype was
music uppermost in their plans while revealing the clearly mishandled. But the criticism from old-school
interaction of various media and art forms. The end music journalists that it “misrepresented” punk
result is an exhibition that seems to have appealed was to distort the stated aim of the curator, Andrew
to fans but tells us all something about taste and Bolton. The exhibition was never intended to record
popular culture over the past forty years. At its most or memorialize a movement that can claim to have
basic, it does the same as the Kylie, Annie Lennox, been the most important influence on white youth
and Supremes exhibitions; but Bowie is a better style since its appearance in the mid-1970s. There
subject for this type of thing, and the curators have is no doubt that punk has been ruthlessly exploited
succeeded in demonstrating the complexity of the and appropriated by high-end clothing designers
material without compromising its core values—fun, with an almost greedy relish from the moment that it
sex, style, and music. stopped being a narrow subculture. Apparently there
After the V&A’s Bowie show, to turn up at the really is nothing that is resistant to “embourgeoise-
Metropolitan Museum’s Punk: Chaos to Couture is ment,” or that cannot be carried over into the great
a bit like coming to a wake after a pop concert. This maw of commodity fetishism and overconsumption.
exhibition received such a mauling from critics in Slashed T-shirts, self-mutilation, do-it-yourself
both the general and the music press that one is bricolage, bondage wear, Royal Stewart tartan, and
inclined to think that perhaps one should not intrude trash bags were all taken up by teenagers because

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 they were offensive to middle-aged, middle-class punk’s basics, however, the exhibition then ushers
taste, and yet now they are paraded down the cat- us straight into the high style, juxtaposing Vivienne
walks of every fashion house from Japan to Califor- Westwood’s screen-printed T-shirts from Sedition-
nia and draped across the window displays of elite aries (1976–80) with various imitations by couture
couturiers in every main street. Not everyone fails in labels and designers of the twenty-first century. This
the headlong rush for reappropriation. Gareth Pugh’s is the weakest room in the exhibition, partly because
“black plastic trash bag ensembles” of the current it brings out the most trivial and exploitative aspects
(2013–14) season are among the most successful of the appropriation. The later rooms, all designed
outfits on display; not only are they entrancing to with a creative use of polystyrene and cheap vacu-
look at, they have a witty and ingenious relationship formed plastic, take us through some of the simple
with their punk sources. and perhaps a little too obvious themes of punk from
The problem with Bolton’s exhibition is not that “D.I.Y. Hardware,” “Graffiti,” “Agitprop,” bondage, and
he set out to trace the penetration of punk style destruction. These seem like a catalogue of punk ico-
into haute couture, which many have felt was a nography, but they do not deepen our understanding
betrayal of the original ethos, though that progress of the movement or its wider dissemination. There
was an undeniable fact. A bigger obstacle is that he are individual ensembles worth a closer look—Alex-
seems to have wanted it both ways: celebrating the ander McQueen’s 1999 dresses of spray-painted cot-
original raw energy of punk that sought to besmirch ton muslin with swelling frontal underskirt of nylon
and tear down everything, then moving on quickly to tulle, or Dolce and Gabbana’s 2008 series of full eve-
the flagrant exploitation of the style by established ning gowns incorporating printed collages of news-
couture houses like Givenchy, Versace, and Burberry, paper scraps—but by this stage there is a dispiriting
often without a hint of irony or embarrassment. The sense of going through the motions to no great effect.
exhibition opens with the famous quotation from One exits at the shop, naturally, where the eager neo-
the English fanzine Sideburns of December 1976 (or, punk can purchase “designer T-shirts” at prices up
depending on your copy, January 1977): “This is a to $120. None of the merchandise is terrible, but one
chord; This is another; This is a third; NOW FORM A
BAND.” It would be hard to find a clearer statement
of the new ethos of improvisation, simplicity, and
engagement. It was not just that talent or ability were
unnecessary; these attributes had been so com-
promised by the previous generation of rock musi-
cians that they had to be expunged from the new
movement, even if it meant that everything would
look, and sound, as Johnny Rotten said, “like shit.”
Ugliness, aggression, crudity, and nihilism would be
rallying calls, at least in the English version of punk
when it was still in the street and the sordid back-
rooms of smelly bars. As the Sex Pistols sang, “We’re
the flowers in the dustbin / We’re the poison in
your human machine.”
To complement this manifesto of filth, the
exhibition offers us a loving period re-creation of
the squalid male bathroom at the Lower East Side
club CBGB, circa 1975. In fact, it was no worse than
many toilets in Manhattan or London bars in the
same period, but this attempt to rub our noses in Opposite: Gallery view, D.I.Y.: Hardware. Photo: © The
punk’s seedy environment is perhaps a reminder Metropolitan Museum of Art.

of how far everyday urban hygiene has improved Above: Gallery view, Facsimile of CBGB bathroom, New York,
over the last forty years. Having dragged us back to 1975. Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Exhibition Reviews  263
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wonders who would want to be seen wearing any of it.
According to the saleswoman I spoke to, the biggest
seller is the $30 exhibition T-shirt which, in imitation
of Jamie Reid’s Never Mind the Bollocks poster and
record cover, proclaims the exhibition title, Punk:
Chaos to Couture, in crude, Day-Glo colors. Who but a
particularly naïve or vindictive aunt would inflict this
on a child?
Having read some of the excoriating reviews at
the time of the exhibition’s opening, I was expecting a
morgue of empty, echoing galleries. Nothing could be
further from the actuality. The exhibition was packed
with people of all ages: young hipsters trying to get
close to the last great “youthquake,” fashion mavens,
Metropolitan regulars, disorientated tourists, and
family groups with the parents regaling their adoles-
cent children with their own teenage experiences of
ripped tights and Doc Martens boots. The Met must
have thought that they could repeat the success of
last year’s Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, which
has reputedly bankrolled the museum for some time
to come. It would take a better exhibition than this,
however, to be a sensation on the same level. It has
been roundly attacked for all the reasons mentioned
above, but it could only be a disappointment to sad
old punks who think that the movement is not dead.
If anything, this exhibition proves that punk is dead,
but also that the public cannot get enough of radical
chic, no matter how imperfect and compromised.

Dominic Paterson

Dominic Paterson is a lecturer in the history of art at the

University of Glasgow.

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