The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “PUNK: Chaos to Couture,” a fashion exhibit organized by the museum’s Costume Institute, will close in a couple of weeks. Though it will retire as a success, financially in the black, its opening elicited thick and hurried brickbats on the Internet and beyond with seemingly everyone evidencing a proprietary feeling about what “punk” is or was, agreeing that the Met’s emphasis on the externals supremely missed the point. I was myself suspicious, but theoretically ascribe to Philip Larkin’s dictate that “At any level that matters, form and content are indivisible,” and went in to viddy well with my own eyes.
The meat of the exhibit is four galleries containing haute couture ensembles draped over mannequins with spiky, multicolored puffball heads. Each gallery is labeled according to the aspect of punk’s legacy exemplified by the outfits therein, which are, in the order that one passes through them: ‘D.I.Y.: Hardware’, ‘D.I.Y.: Bricolage’, ‘D.I.Y.: Graffiti and Agitprop’, and ‘D.I.Y.: Destroy.’
‘Hardware’ emphasizes spikes, chains, extraneous zippers, and pyramid studs, the focus on accessory exemplified by a black crêpe de chine Versace dress held together at the sides with “gold safety pin embellished with crystal.” ‘Bricolage’ is full of works that, per the wall text, “embrace the ephemeral and the everyday,” and in doing so “offer a reappraisal of the definition of value as promoted by large luxury fashion brands.” (Such “reappraisals” never seem to be reflected in the price tag.) While listening to the New York Dolls’ “Trash,” one can inspect pieces by House of Moschino, Gareth Pugh, and Maison Martin Margiela, all of which are made entirely of garbage bags—basically, Mugatu’s Derelicte line from 2001’s Zoolander. ‘Graffiti and Agitprop’ is devoted to wearable action paintings and bumper sticker sloganeering, including a one-piece swimsuit that implores “SAVE OUR SEA.” The piece I liked best was the least fist-in-the-air, a full-length Ann Demeulemeester dress with a ambiguously-meaningful line from Patti Smith’s Woolgathering rendered in black seed-bead text across the midriff. Finally, ‘Destroy’ boasts some genuinely alarming getups, lousy with useless proboscis-like sleeve appendages, made by Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons. John Waters writes delightfully about Kawakubo in his 2010 collection Role Models, quoting aptly from Vogue: “Destruction has its price and it’s not cheap.” (There is also an impressively horrible dress by Kawakubo protégé and former ‘Tokyo Sex Pistols’ frontman Jun Takahashi.)
The wall text anticipates some of the inevitable criticisms—stating, for example, that “high fashion’s co-option of punk inevitably sanitizes it’s anarchic rebelliousness,” or that some of the designers featured in ‘Destroy’ “look to punk’s rips, tears, and slashes for their aesthetic of poverty rather than their political implications”—though this is as far as the curators go toward interrogating what it means to mark up a Jacobin-influenced style for sale to the aristocracy. The ‘Bricolage’ pieces, we’re told, “not only question but also mitigate the distinction between fine art and found art, high culture and popular culture,” while of the ‘Graffiti and Agitprop’ getups, it’s said that “[t]hrough their political and environmental exhortations they seek not only to build awareness but also, like punks, to bring about social revolution by questioning and threatening the status quo.” One such example is a tee-shirt by Vivienne Westwood advocating ‘CLIMATE REVOLUTION,’ also available in the gift shop.
Several vintage Westwood pieces, bearing somewhat more piquant messages, were also on view. These were from Westwood’s London boutique, which she operated with partner, Pistols manager, and future ‘Buffalo Gals’ rapper Malcolm McLaren, a storefront which alternately bore the name Let it Rock, Too Fast to Live, Too Young To Die, Sex, and Seditionaries. One can squint at the closely-packed text on the “Open T-Shirt to Derek Jarman,” a ready-to-wear J’Accuse—this one worn by Adam Ant, in fact—in which Westwood took Jarman to task (“Is that your comment about the street?”) for perceived misrepresentation of punk in his film Jubilee (1978), which boasted a Brian Eno soundtrack, as well as appearances by Wayne County, The Slits, and Siouxsie Sioux, who was then known to sport a swastika armband for shock value. Along the same lines, Westwood and McLaren produced a selection of shirts designed to turn the wearer into a walking affront, which are collected at the Met. The “Cambridge Rapist” tee depicts the leather mask of sexual predator Peter Cook, arrested in 1975, above a picture of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, and text implying that Epstein had died in an S & M mishap; “Two Cowboys,” appropriates a Tom of Finland drawing wherein two cowpokes are depicted pantless and touching dick tips; on ‘Piss Marilyn,’ someone appears to be “taking a slash,” in the UK vernacular, on the face of the star of The Misfits.
Seeing an icon thus used as a urinal puck, one can’t but think of Andres Serrano’s 1987 “Piss Christ,” which has since become shorthand for taboo-targeting art world infamy, today a zero-sum game of one-beneathmanship and a business that needs no NEA money to turn a profit. Speaking of which! From the Met I headed to the Park Avenue Armory for ‘W.S.’ (it stands for ‘White Snow’), the new blockbuster show by painter, sculptor, performer and video artist Paul McCarthy, which is closing this Sunday.
For $15 admission one is afforded entrance to an ersatz Magic Kingdom that McCarthy and his people have constructed in the zeppelin hangar-sized Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Upon entrance, you are greeted by a riotous, animalistic chorus of shrieking, grunting, wailing, laughing, panting, and ululation. Turning around you see the source: On four separate screens, figures made up as Snow White and her dwarves, dress and prosthetics modeled on their appearance in the 1937 Disney film—though there are nine dwarves here, and more than one doppelganger princess—engage in a riotous debauch, swilling liquor from the bottle, impotently pawing one another, and smearing their bodies, in various states of undress, with particularly diarrheic-looking fudge. (The NY Times art critic Holland Cotter describes this as “Pier Paolo Pasolini-style degradation,” which sounds a bit like a “Chicago-style hot dog.”)
Presiding over the scene is a bow-tied figure with a phallic putty nose, toupee, and rodentine overbite—none other than McCarthy himself. He’s billed as “Walt Paul,” evidently meant as a parody of Uncle Walt Disney, but to me he looked rather more like a desiccant, debauched Chef Boyardee. McCarthy has also cultivated a passing resemblance to Hitler, because, of course, you’ve always got to drop Hitler into the mix.* The presence of UCLA sweatshirts on some of the dwarves lends the affair the feeling of a frat party gone awry—I imagine I would’ve seen some butt-chugging on-screen had I stayed long enough, for the complete “film” apparently runs seven hours.
The backdrop of the blow-out is no frat house, however, but a suburban home decked-out in middle-class midcentury décor, replete with a plastic Christmas tree, taxidermied animals, porcelain Disney figurines, milk glass vases, a parlor organ, and a ‘Happy Birthday’ banner hung like a grin across the mantel. Moving forward, one can view the aftermath of the bacchanal, with the ravaged rooms of the abandoned house visible by peeking through apertures that have been rudely sawed into the walls. Discarded issues of ArtForum and candy jimmies litter the fudge-streaked carpet, while a c-stand clamp, as well as three foam-rubber “corpses,” one of which is impaled on a broom, give the impression of the aftermath of a snuff film, a scat porn shoot, a crime scene.
From the house you continue to walk along a narrow path carved through a towering plastic-foam prehistoric forest, done in the style of a Disney World dark ride, and taking up a goodly portion of the hall’s 55,000 square feet. The forest is built on an elevated platform that, symbolically methinks, exposes the supports beneath; nestled inaccessibly in the overgrowth is a ¾ scale replica of McCarthy’s childhood home in Salt Lake City. Emerging, you find essentially the same four-screen set-up from the entrance on the far wall, except here grade school-style desks have been provided for viewers’, uh, comfort. Additionally, the side galleries against the south wall have been made up to accommodate a bank of enclosed screening rooms playing particularly obscene vignettes: “Walt Paul” urinating, “Walt Paul” raping the Snow White actresses’ mouth with a boom mic or grappling with her under the furniture in a parody of sexual struggle, “Prince Charming” indefatigably tugging on his pud. Leaving the drill hall, one can enter one of the Armory’s period rooms which has been set up as a gift shop, an intact remnant of the Gilded Age outfitted in the disheveled style of an overstock store. There you can purchase Disney ephemera which, signed by the artist’s ‘Walt Paul’ alter-ego, has appreciated significantly in value: A Snow White wig goes for $100, a water bottle for $75. In the eyes of whomever wrote the wall text for the ‘PUNK’ show, this would perhaps constitute “self-conscious commentaries not only on the nature of consumerism but also the notion of good taste.”
Per Cotter: “Hollywood and the mechanics of film fantasy are a primary source of [McCarthy’s] art.” I missed the concurrently-running ‘Rebel Dabble Babble’ at Chelsea’s Hauser & Wirth gallery, another collaboration with son Damon McCarthy, which apparently has McCarthy, pere, wearing a prosthetic beak as in ‘W.S.’ but this time assuming the role of Rebel Without a Cause (1955) director Nicholas Ray. McCarthy has been at the bulb-nose schtick for some time; in 1976’s “Rocky,” he “plays” Stallone behind one. I’ve been unable to determine if, in this more recent work, McCarthy’s Ray also flirts with a resemblance to Hitler.
The press release from Hauser & Wirth has it that McCarthy is “charting a territory where our fundamental impulses collide with our most cherished myths and hypocritical societal norms.” If I read this right, the “fundamental impulses” are the eating, shitting, pissing, and fucking that have been sanitized, apparently hypocritically, out of our national myths. This discounts the fact that artistic excisions of this material, an impulse that is hardly unique to modern America, may sometimes be justified not by hygienics or Babbitt hypocrisy, but by the fact that these distractions from the storyteller’s art are so universal as not to demand a viewer’s attention. I do not believe, for example, that Ray’s Rebel is a “compromised” work because at no point in it do we see Sal Mineo whacking off, or Jim Backus on the toilet.
The filling in of censored lacunae is, regardless, not precisely groundbreaking. Among the Westwood-McLaren relics at the Met, there is a ‘Mickey & Minnie’ dress—originally worn by Helen Wellington-Lloyd, the dwarf actress from Jarman’s Jubilee—which depicts Uncle Walt’s famous couple in the midst of enjoying conjugal delights. (If the Internet is any indicator, there are also a great many people interested in similar transgressive imagery of Family Guy‘s Griffith family.) “Using mechanized mannequins,” writes Cotter of McCarthy’s earlier works, “he turned the Wild West, long a staple of America’s televised identity, into a vaudeville of exploitative sex…” But the Western, sacred cow of American masculinity, had been sent off to the abattoir of art long ago—see Andy Warhol’s 1968 Lonesome Cowboys, or Tom of Finland/Westwood’s ‘Two Cowboys,’ for two of a thousand examples. (A Times profile by Randy Kennedy titled “The Demented Imagineer” notes that McCarthy “recently bought a thousand acres of rolling scrubland north of Los Angeles to construct an Old West town for a series of demented westerns he envisions filming, another milepost on what amounts to the creation of his own B-movie studio.”)
That McCarthy’s art essentially offers a funhouse distortion of Tinseltown spectacle, on a scale every bit as grand, is a fact that has not been lost on his admirers—to leave no room for doubt, he hammers it home quite insistently, as in ‘Rebel Dabble Babble’’s upside-down arrangement of the famous ‘HOLLYWOOD’ sign, like an inverted crucifix. In a 2011 visit to McCarthy’s Pasadena studio by The Guardian, the author gapes that “McCarthy has created his own alternative movie studio on a scale to compete with the official ones. You might call it BadDreamWorks.” In the Times profile, McCarthy is described as “the George Lucas of his own maniacal Industrial Light and Magic.”
In these pieces, as in almost all press pertaining to McCarthy, much is made of the 67-year-old’s inspirational tenacity. Although McCarthy steadily practiced his art and accrued degrees from the late ‘60s and through the ‘70s, his uncompromised work didn’t find any commercial success until the 1990s. This not only makes for good copy, but explains the quaint and rather dated quality of the counterculture ideas in ‘W.S.’, which are so past-due as to be taken for freshness—though its massive scale is as of the present prevailing moment as Broadway behemoths and blockbusters of both multiplex and gallery. Those looking for the “irreverent wit” promised on the Armory homepage would do better with the “Fractured Fairy Tales” segments from The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show, while Donald Barthelme and João César Monteiro’s deflowerings of Snow White offer quite a bit more to chew on. A more accurate cinematic reference point for McCarthy than Pasolini might be the Italian Carmelo Bene, heir to the Theater of Cruelty tradition, whom I’ve written about in the past with a sort of awe. Like McCarthy, Bene is a scorched-earth destroyer working on an epic scale—his 1972 Salomè filled a Cinecitta soundstage as ‘W.S.’ fills the Wade Thompson Drill Hall—though the breadth of Bene’s all-out declaration of war, which encompasses the entirety of Western cultural tradition, is far more ambitious than McCarthy’s, and as a performer, visual stylist, and precision assault tactician, he is of incalculably greater interest.
If nothing else, your admission to ‘W.S.’ leaves you free to roam the poshly-appointed building itself. The Park Avenue Armory was dedicated in 1879, in the presence of President Rutherford “Rather Fraud” B. Hayes and Secretary of State William M. Evarts, and was home to the 7th New York Militia Regiment. America had come near to open revolt in 1877—as near perhaps as “Anarchy in the UK” seemed in 1977—and the construction of the Park Avenue Armory was part of a larger nationwide movement, described in Michael A. Bellesiles 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently: “The federal government moved in to supply arms and training to what was now being called the National Guard. The most visible result of the government’s response to the Great Strike of 1877 was the armory movement, which led to the building of massive stone and brick structures in the heart of most American cities—modern fortresses devoted to avoiding a repetition of the Battle for Pittsburgh during the Great Strike.”
In years since the Armories have been used for other purposes, most famously perhaps, for the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, credited as the first and most important large showing of (principally European) modern art in American history, which was held at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Ave. (Today it’s the only Armory in the city that houses live ammunition; those interested in seeing its regiment’s valor mythologized for the screen would do well to watch James Cagney in William Keighley’s 1940 The Fighting 69th.) That McCarthy’s worm of subversion, or Marcel Duchamp’s, could burrow into the heart of repressive martial law is significant of the elasticity and resiliency of the Republic—its ability to make room for both thesis and antithesis, official culture and “pest culture,” in the memorable phrase of J.T. Lhamon.
While McCarthy immodestly refers to his group-grope countermyth as a “program of resistance” against Disney/Bush/Nicholas Ray/Hitler, it has about as much chance of spilling into the streets as Westwood’s ‘CLIMATE REVOLUTION’ does of “questioning and threatening the status quo.” Which is not to doubt art’s ability to make an impact, but to doubt the efficacy of these vehicles. Writing about The Exorcist in the September/ October 2010 issue of Film Comment, Kent Jones emphasized the film’s ability on its first appearance, perhaps incomprehensible today, to send genuine shockwaves through the culture—though the social-historical particulars of 1973 that allowed William Friedkin’s film (and Deep Throat the previous year, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre the following year) to puncture the public consciousness are in many respects entirely unique.
“Outrageous” art today is—as to a certain degree it always has been—a matter of ceremony, a closed circuit where a self-selected audience comprised mostly of apostates can revel in the toppling of Gods that they never believed in to begin with, a symbolic inversion that stands in relation to “mainstream” myths as blaspheming Black Mass does to the church, as McCarthy’s upside-down ‘HOLLYWOOD’ does to the rightside-up one. (This is ever more evident in the era of Netflix recommendations and “If You Like, Try…,” which assure that we won’t step outside the comfort zone of what we think we like and what we think we are like.)
The most perfect example I can recall of the safe bathysphere in which dangerous work is generally viewed is a presentation of Crispin Glover’s underground epic What is It? which I attended at Anthology Film Archive in the fall of 2006. The movie is a scavenger hunt collection of taboos, cast with porn actors and adults with Down’s Syndrome. It features the music of Charles Manson and racist novelty songs that Clifford Joseph Trahan recorded as “Johnny Rebel.” Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey, son of character actor Woodrow Parfrey, shows up in blackface. The image of Shirley Temple masturbating with a riding crop in front of a Nazi flag recurs throughout, and during the discussion that followed the screening, I seem to recall Glover speaking in hushed tones about the mythical proto-fascist “mountain films” of Dr. Arnold Fanck and Leni Riefenstahl. Neither this nor anything in the film, however, elicited a roar or even a peep of protest from the fawning audience. Glover practices a unique distribution model—he attends every screening of What is It?, presenting it between an art slideshow/reading and Q&A—and the resulting prohibitively-expensive ticket price ensures an audience with a sympathetic predisposition to Glover’s provocation, and that we’re all in on the joke.
Myths can stir society, as in the case of Disney’s Snow White and Rebel, as with the Fanck/Riefenstahl mountain films, and at the very least art can affect art. And just as farmers used to burn crop residue to increase the next year’s yields, art needs waves of destruction for its future fecundity. It needs a Carmelo Bene, a Sex Pistols. But viewing McCarthy’s “satire” of Hollywood excess so closely studied as to be indistinguishable from its anti-model, there’s no whiff of purgative smoke—just shit.
*- The “fact” of Walt Disney’s anti-Semitism is, along with the cryogenic freezing of his head, part of most people’s semi-knowledge of the man, though Neal Gabler’s 2006 biography quite convincingly dispels such rumors. Nevertheless, it has given us on of my favorite Simpsons bits: “Roger Meyers, Sr., the gentle genius behind Itchy and Scratchy, loved and cared about almost all the peoples of the world. And he, in turn, was beloved by the world… except in 1938 when he was criticized for his controversial cartoon, Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors.”
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.
