Ways of See(th)ing: A Record of Punk Visual Practice 
Stephanie Hart 
York University
shart@yorku.ca 
(c) 2008 Stephanie Hart.
All rights reserved. 

Review of:
Sladen, Mark and Ariella Yedgar, eds. Panic Attack! 
Art in the Punk Years. London: Merrell, 2007. 

No art activity is to be understood apart from the codes 
and practices of the society which contains it; art in use 
is bracketed ineluctably within ideology. 
   --Victor Burgin, 1972 

1. One of my earliest memories of punk takes me back 
to the age of thirteen. Unfolding the cover of anarcho-
punk band Crass' album Yes Sir, I Will, I am confronted 
with the image of horrifically burned Falklands War 
veteran Simon Weston in conversation with Prince Charles. 
The caption of their exchange reads: "'Get well soon,' the 
Prince said. And the heroic soldier replied 'Yes sir, I will.'" 
Over twenty years have passed since its release, but one 
can still cite Crass' recontextualization of Weston's face, 
forever marked by Thatcherism, as a prime example of
punk visual practice. While many people of a certain age 
can readily identify Jamie Reid's various remappings of 
Queen Elizabeth's portrait in 1977 (one of the many 
examples of British artists jamming her Silver Jubilee), 
Crass' livid invective is equally confrontational, equally 
punk: punk and post-punk culture is a "symbol of and 
an adequate response to the ravaged times" (Sladen 10).

2. The image of the Prince and the wounded soldier raises 
the question of what we are allowed to see. As Rosetta 
Brooks writes, Georges Didi-Huberman argues that "the 
image as image can be revealed only by a violation of the 
image. . . . in fact, one is only aware of the image as 
image by its being violated or cut" (45), and moreover, as 
Rose suggests, "something is revealed through its 
resealing" (49). Crass' DIY "violation" displays the 
uncomfortable slippage between multiple meanings, and 
the need to affix intent. Are we to read the image to show 
suffering projected onto the nationalistic project, or should 
we be taken aback because the Prince's well-wishes (as 
symbolic of Empire and stifling class relations) are greeted 
with a polite, duty-bound reply? 

3. The act of disassembling and rearranging the false 
sanctity of the image, gesture, or utterance demonstrates 
how ideology "brackets," as Victor Burgin says. In the 
Barbicon's attendant publication to their 2007 show Panic 
Attack! Art in the Punk Years, this process is reevaluated 
through a multidisciplinary survey of the field. The text 
features works by iconic and lesser-known artists from 
New York, London, and Los Angeles, and is supplemented 
with lively essays by Mark Sladen, Rosetta Brooks, David 
Bussel, Carlo McCormick, Tracey Warr, Andrew Wilson, 
Ariella Yedgar, and Stephen Willats. The essays, which 
often read as a conversation between curator, critic of 
popular culture, and disillusioned kid who rethinks the 
utility of both box cutter and safety pin, are organized 
around four central themes (which function with 
considerable overlap): 

art with overt political intent that uses the inner city as a 
symbol of social breakdown; the body as a site to explore 
transgressive ideas of sexuality, violence and abjection; 
do-it-yourself aesthetics, collage and appropriation as 
alternative means of visual communication; and the 
underground scene as a radical social space and ground 
for artistic cross-fertilization. (7) 

Panic Attack! is a highly suggestive title, speaking 
simultaneously to an agitated individual state and to the 
clashing forces of chaos and order (categories that, as the 
essays demonstrate, require each other in order to be 
meaningful). Panic implies small and large-scale 
intrusions into the manufactured sense of wholeness 
that capitalist ideology requires: in its refusals and 
refutations, punk's pathogenic threat is fully displayed 
as an abject mass of disruptive bodies, words, and visuals. 
This is beautifully illustrated in Mark Sladen's introduction, 
which reproduces a Throbbing Gristle press flyer as 
representative of society's resultant "moral panic" in the 
face of subcultures (9). The flyer appropriates a quote from 
Conservative MPP Nicholas Fairbairn who, appalled after 
seeing COUM Transmissions' 1976 exhibit Prostitution, 
states "these people are the wreckers of civilisation" (qtd. 
in Sladen 9). 

4. The delicious irony of Fairbairn's statement 
notwithstanding, it goes without saying that "these people" 
does not refer solely to Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, 
and Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, but rather to the whole of 
a group who strove to expose the naturalization of the 
civilized/barbaric binary on the canvas, image, and body. 
Punk was at its zenith during the reign of Thatcher and 
Reagan; as the text argues, the policies of Reagan and 
Thatcher exacerbated the already deep-rooted alienation 
caused by, in the British context, a highly organized class 
structure, and in the American, the myth of a classless society. 
The citizenry first came adrift from a belief in democratic 
government in the punk years . . . . Such political disillusion 
is commonplace now, but in the 1970s it was new. In the 
post-war period people had briefly tasted and believed in 
the ludicrous notion that the role of democratic government 
was to move the populace collectively towards equity and 
civil rights. (116) 

The rejection of binaries and their reach into the politics of 
race, gender, sexuality, class, and the segregation of urban 
space activated a movement that sought to disembowel the 
concept of power itself. Ariella Yedgar's essay, "The Exploded 
Image," elaborates this point; she assiduously documents 
punk's Dadaist, Futurist, Surrealist, and Situationist 
influences. Her analysis speaks to an important point: 
despite the surfeit of information on punk, including 
numerous academic studies, first-person accounts, archival 
collections, and documentary films, punk is often subject 
to an oddly reductive analysis, focusing on a limited number 
of events from an even more limited group of people. It is 
most commonly explained in terms of music and style, but 
it also took root in performance, installation art, 
photography, graffiti, collage, graphic design, and 
assemblage. Panic Attack! expands the definition of punk 
by examining a wide range of artists who, while not 
necessarily adopting its commonly accepted definition of 
fashion sense, most certainly apply its tenets to their work. 
Further, the ways the political and social intricacies of the 
artists' class, race, gender, and sexuality result in refusals 
that are, as McCormick says about media, "symbiotically 
connected within the social fabric of very particular 
communities" (95). 

5. Photography is an ideal medium in which to examine 
the importance of place (or the pain of being without place), 
partly because it works well within a DIY aesthetic (which 
is given careful attention in Stephen Willat's essay, 
"Intervention and Audience"), but also because, as David 
Bussel contends in "Post-Conceptual Photography and 
Strategies of Dissent," it is a medium that can be used 
actively, rather than "a supposedly neutral form of 
documentation" (70). He states that: 

	       The artists broke away from the imperatives of 
	       Conceptual and Minimalist art to claim a new 
	       ground--the politics of representation--through 
	       the redefinition of photography and its potential 
	       "uses" for socially engaged, critical intervention. 
	       This intervention . . . shifted the terrain of activity 
	       for many artists from an "aesthetics of 
	       administration" to aesthetic politics as part of a 
	       larger shift in the very terms of cultural production 
	       itself within the Postmodern condition. (73) 

6. A few examples of this strategy stand out. David 
Wojnarowicz's Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-79) is 
described in Tracey Warr's "Feral City" as a semi-
autobiographical series that draws from "his own experience 
as a homeless, runaway rent boy," but obscures a tidy 
self-referential reading through its subject, a friend in a 
blurry Rimbaud mask in various locations and states of 
abjection throughout New York: 

	  The impassive pallor of the mask jars with the living 
	  flesh of the body shooting up or masturbating. 
	  "Rimbaud" is both immersed in New York, taking it 
	  all in, and a displaced and dispassionate alien 
	  observing it. We expect at any moment that he will 
	  break out of his impassivity and give us his 
	  observations on this city, this life, but he remains 
	  mute and uncommunicative--a mere surface. (118)
 
Andrew Wilson's analysis of Victor Burgin's UK76 in his essay, 
"Modernity Killed Every Night," is particularly compelling. 
He states that the series functions as a sequence of images 
that . . . depict views of Britain's post-imperial and post-
industrial decline. On one level, each of the work's panels 
presents a different pictorial gloss on this view: different 
types of urban spaces that portray a particular take on the 
projections of national identity; a sense of movement 
through these spaces in which people are presented as 
more or less detached; different forms of nostalgia, 
whether it be the attraction of the picture-book country 
cottage or the workplace . . . and the manipulation of 
sight through pictorial composition and the rule of the 
gaze in constructing gendered representation. (145) 
The commodification of nostalgia and the fictions of 
national identity are further exemplified in Mark Sladen's 
analysis of Gilbert and George's Dirty Words Pictures 
(1977): 

	In these works the artists spliced together 
	photographs of subjects that include the dismal 
	remnants of Victorian London and the modern 
	London of tower blocks, the trading floors of the 
	City and the milling multiracial crowds of the 
	impoverished East End . . . . Such images are joined 
	by graffiti that scream out such words as CUNT 
	and QUEER, completing a cursed landscape of London 
	in the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee. (12) 

7. The image of "a cursed landscape," of "cunts" and "queers," 
offers an ideal segue to another key aspect in understanding 
visual practice during the punk era. The text pays particular 
attention to artists who take the body as a medium and 
deploy it as a site of resistance, making public the private 
messiness of the gendered, racialized, and sexualized 
subject. Distancing themselves from the "dispassionate 
neutrality of Minimalism and Conceptualism," several 
artists featured in the text work at "rupturing that clean 
space with the living, breathing, messy body" (119). By 
displaying the body's circulation in a vast array of subject/
object relations, these artists make the body another 
weapon in the DIY chest, offering an ironic reworking of 
the stifling confines of, and elucidating the complex 
relationships between, femininity and heterosexism. Feminist 
artists such as Linder, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Cindy 
Sherman, and Hannah Wilke are duly represented in the text.

8. The era is also characterized by a powerful insertion of the 
queer body into contemporary art, exemplified by Robert 
Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, and David 
Wojnarowicz. Evacuating the pervasive stereotype of punk 
visual practice as a straight boy's game, its "mainstream 
disaffection through bodily adornment . . . [its] reliance 
upon the visual--its earnest insistence upon the body as 
a canvas for self-expression-cum-visual terrorism--
made it a logical home . . . for the performative, visually 
strategic tactics of contemporary queer culture" (Rosenfeld). 
The above excerpt comes from Kathryn Rosenfeld's "The 
End of Everything Was 20 Years Ago Today: Punk 
Nostalgia," which points to one of the text's key strengths: 
while Panic Attack! looks back to an era now over twenty 
years gone, it offers some salient and decidedly current 
questions, further demonstrating that punk's noise is 
still heard in contemporary art and critical theory. It 
asks us to rethink how punk was initially analyzed, and 
how we might rethink it now. 

9. The study of youth-based culture is rooted in the 
important work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural 
Studies (CCCS), which examined primarily androcentric 
subversions of mass culture in post-war Britain (in the 
case of punk, Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning 
of Style, which offered a more semiotic than sociological 
reading, remains one of the most influential and 
commonly cited studies of punk aesthetics and politics, 
a presence that is certainly felt in Panic Attack!). In the 
last decade or so, there has been a palpable shift away 
from CCCS' "heroic" model of subculture, situating 
subcultural studies as a post-discipline; repositioning 
it, as Hebdige states, as "neither simply affirmation nor 
refusal" (35). According to Rupert Weinzierl and David 
Muggleton, post-subcultural analyses allow us to 
move from an "inherently" radical notion of subculture, 
coupled to a monolithic conception of dominant culture, 
to a position that recognizes the differentiation and 
multiplicity of points of power in society and the way 
that various cultural formations and elements articulate 
within and across these constellations of power in 
complex and non-linear ways to produce contingent and 
modificatory outcomes. (13) 

10. The move to post-subcultural analysis has also created 
a space for harsh criticisms of punk as nothing more than 
another marketing campaign, emphasizing the fact that the 
relationship between subculture and mass culture may be 
closer than comfortable, if not entirely codependent. 
Rosetta Brooks's "Rip It Up, Cut It Off, Rend It Asunder" 
addresses this view succinctly: 

	  Rather than disrupting or exposing the violence of the 
	  commodity in the act of consumption, as many of its 
	  followers and a cartload of cultural studies professors 
	  would have us believe, punk reinforced the implicit 
	  violence of the commodity and the commodity image 
	  . . . . It was a deliberate, strategic interruption that 
	  recognized the dialectic between violence and pleasure 
	  in consumption. Punk's fashion and music--for those 
	  who were responsible for them--were aimed at nothing 
	  more than a corner of the market. (48) 

While Panic Attack! opens up possibilities for conceptualizing 
punk, it is not afraid, as Brooks's statement demonstrates, to 
put limits on a highly idealized era (it also addresses the fact 
that the explosion of countercultural art in the East Village 
led to its gentrification, forcing many artists out of their 
homes and studios). Andrew Wilson's "Modernity Killed Every 
Night" offers an effervescent, neo-Hebdigian analysis of 
Malcolm McLaren's branding of punk, and in particular, his 
embrace of the Situationist detournment and the 
appropriation of Richard Hell's sartorial sense: 

	      McLaren's discovery of Hell as a "distressed, strange 
	      thing" gave fuel to his long-standing vision of the 
	      creation of a style of refusal that might incorporate 
	      both the styled rebellion of rock music and a fashion-
	      inflected poetics of transgression in which the 
	      banality of contemporary life became the target for 
	      his play of subversion. (147) 

Wilson describes McLaren's genealogy and evolution as 
something traceable only according to "whichever mythology 
one cares to subscribe to" (146). This telling phrase 
accomplishes two things: on one hand, it can speak to the 
reductive analysis of McLaren as metonym of punk, but it 
also derails the need to affix origins, a seemingly incongruous 
move when discussing a mode of artistic practice known for 
its profound distrust of the discourses of truth and empirical 
verifiability. 

11. Carlo McCormick states that "all cultural phenomena leave 
evidence that remains just a bit too messy or is perhaps even 
irrelevant to the formal needs of history" (95). While it would 
be difficult to argue otherwise, the text accomplishes its task 
of formally documenting and discussing a purposefully 
combative, messy era. Some may sniff at binding and indexing 
a text about punk's contributions to visual practice, but Panic 
Attack! Art in the Punk Years is a highly accessible, exciting, 
and immediate account of an era whose reverberations are 
still felt in contemporary art. 

Department of English
York University
shart@yorku.ca 


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Works Cited 
Hebdige, Dick. Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. 
London: Routledge, 1988. 
Rosenfeld, Kathryn. "The End of Everything Was 20 Years 
Ago Today: Punk Nostalgia." New Art Examiner 27:4 (Dec. 
1999 to Jan. 2000): 26-9. 
Weinzierl, Rupert, and David Muggleton, eds. The Post-
Subcultures Reader. Oxford: Berg, 2003.