The Punk exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art had giant, dazed, passive crowds the day I went (Sunday, May 19). Everyone was searching for the secret of Punk, which of course was missing. Why? Perhaps the essence of this movement isn’t in its clothing.
Punk was prophetic. The world we live in now, where random violence of faintly-political import strikes at Mother’s Day parades in New Orleans and running marathons in Boston, is not the World of Disco. Neither is it a dreamy Woodstock Festival. Sid Vicious is King of America today.
In one wall text, Sid himself explains that safety pins were adopted as fashion because everyone’s clothes were falling apart. Punk is, above all else, a document of the ingenuity of the poor. The most brilliant suggestion of "Chaos to Couture" is that Punks in 1970s England began eco-fashion, by recycling plastic bags into clothes. Their anarchic art was based on "found objects" in the postindustrial cityscape.
The genius of this exhibit is that it avoids the roaring, painful music of Punk. Most of the piped-in sounds are interviews; in one room, a string quartet plays. Music was not essential to this aesthetic, contrary to our assumptions. Punk was, at its essence, a blind stab at bliss. Its practitioners, in their loose, torn clothing, were closest to the sadhus of India, itinerant holy men and freelance nuns.
The biggest mistake of the show is emphasizing the work of designers, including the ingenious provocateur Vivienne Westwood. Punk was collective and anonymous — closer in spirit to Egyptian art than Victorian painting. A community of spirited thinkers produced this culture together, in many nations at once. It encompassed every art form, and is still evolving. The hippies "dropped out," but Punks drop away, into basements and forests. Punks laugh at the Metropolitan Museum, with its solemn search for Sex Pistols influences in John Galliano’s frocks.
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