OVERLOAD: Punk Lowbrow Postmodernism

OVERLOAD– Punk Lowbrow Postmodernism

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Published by Barbican Arts Centre Silk St, Barbican, London EC2Y 8DS www.barbican.org.uk Editor: Dr Michael Connerty Book Design: Ruairi Walsh Set in Supply Regular 12pt First printing April 2020 Copyright © 2020 Barbican All images used with artists’ permission ISBN 978–55–43921–06–1

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Contents

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Cultures of Authenticity and Deconstruction

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Lowbrow Art’s influence on Punk Visual Culture

Contemporary Lowbrow

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Postmodernist Punk

Detail from Chrome, Smoke & Fire album cover, Robert Williams, 1991

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Cultures of Authenticity and Deconstruction 11

The two distinct ways in which Punk has responded to the condition of Postmodernity In this paper, I argue that the subculture and musical genre known as punk responds to “the condition of postmodernity� in two seemingly contradictory ways.

The first identifies a homology between Postmodernism and Punk performance, attitude, and style. Suffused with self-reflexive irony, these punks have recycled cultural images and fragments for purposes of parody and shocking juxtaposition, thereby deconstructing the dominant meanings and simulations which saturate social space.

Sometimes, especially in Britain and the New York scene, this postmodern aesthetic has been created by musicians originally trained in schools of art (Frith & Horne, 1987). More often, it can simply be understood as the response of young people raised within a mass-mediated, consumer-driven environment who have turned signs and spectacles against themselves, as a means of waging war on society.

Furthermore, many of these punk rock bands have personified the boredom and purposelessness of suburban youth socialized to be spectators and consumers, and the spastic flow of their music and musical careers dramatizes that fragmentation of experience. Thus, I argue that this semiotic assault

of punk is both constrained and made possible by the socioeconomic changes which have erased the industrial system of Fordism while accelerating the stream of images, symbols, and commodities in everyday life. This structural transformation has particularly affected young people, who are constantly solicited through the media and entertainment industries and possess no memories of the previous social order.

The second way in which punk subcultures have responded to postmodern society has involved a quest for authenticity and independence from the culture industry, thus altogether renouncing the prevailing culture of media, image, and hypercommercialism.

Whereas the first response to postmodernity appropriates signs, symbols, and style for the purposes of shock and semiotic disruption, the second attempts to go “underground” and insulate punk subculture from the superficiality of postmodern culture. Punk musicians and fans in search of authenticity have established local institutions of alternative media outside the culture industry (such as independently owned record labels and selfproduced magazines, or “fanzines”) while elevating musical production above fashion and appearance as the only sincere basis of creative expression. Within punk subcultures, the process of creating independent media and interpersonal networks in opposition to the corporate media is referred to as the “do-it-yourself,” or DIY, ethic.

While both variations of subcultural practice are evident throughout the history of the punk genre, the first (which I call the “culture of deconstruction”) was more prevalent during the initial explosion of punk in the 1970s, while the second (or “culture of authenticity”) is more characteristic of the “hardcore” or “straight-edge” subcultures which emerged during the 1980s, especially in the United States.

These two strategies have often formed the basis for debate and rivalry within punk subcultures, but I argue that they are simply different responses to the same system of social conditions.

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It is not my intention to argue that either the “culture of deconstruction” or the “culture of authenticity” is more effective or politically progressive than the other. Rather, my analysis identifies both empowering possibilities and regressive limitations within each of punk’s responses to the condition of postmodernity.

The culture of deconstruction has allowed some punk performers to enact dramatic refusals and parodies of power, periodically capturing the media spotlight and inspiring further acts of defiance among the young and disaffected. But these gestures of resistance have typically proven to be as fleeting and ephemeral as postmodern culture at large. Moreover, punk’s spirit of negation lacks a utopian counterpart,

Both variations of subcultural practice are evident throughout the history of the punk genre, the first (which I call the “culture of deconstruction”) was more prevalent during the initial explosion of punk in the 1970s, while the second (or “culture of authenticity”) is more characteristic of the “hardcore” or “straight-edge” subcultures which emerged during the 1980s, especially in the United States.

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and as a consequence its aggressive nihilism occasionally expresses itself as an attack upon the powerless rather than the powerful.

The culture of authenticity and the do-ityourself ethic, on the other hand, have led to the creation of relatively durable communities and alternative media, which have not only maintained a measure of autonomy from the culture industry but sometimes also served as a forum for facilitating political critique and action.

Yet even the most political hardcore subcultures have typically fetishized the imagined purity of commercial independence as an end in itself, and as a result they have willingly reinforced their own marginality rather than attempt to make subversive inroads into the dominant culture. Likewise, the pursuit of purity has often led hard-core subcultures to enforce a startling homogeneity of dress and sound, which effectively stifles artistic creativity and obstructs the participation of various types of “outsiders.�

Screamers gig poster, Gary Panter, 1979

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Hardcore California, 1977-84 There was no local punk scene in the Los Angeles area prior to the events of 1977, but thousands of young malcontents in the region were certainly prepared to embrace the new sound and style once it came to town.

In proper LA fashion, a couple of fans started a fanzine called Slash before there was anything to really write about (“We were pretending there was an LA scene when there was no scene whatsoever”), and then reality eventually caught up with the media (“Within a few months there was a snowball effect: suddenly there were more bands than we knew what to do with”) (quoted in Savage, 1992, p. 437).

The local punk scene was initially centered in Hollywood, with bands like X, the Weirdos, the Screamers, and the Germs. A number of Chicano punk bands formed across Southern California, including the Zeros (one of whom later assumed the identity of El Vez, the self-proclaimed “Mexican Elvis”), the Plugz, and Los Illegals, the latter of whom once described themselves as “Tito Puente takes LSD and hangs out with The Clash, or hangs out with existential Marxist theorists” (quoted in Loza, 1993, p. 221).

Ultimately, however, the epicenter of Southern California punk rock in the 1980s was neither Hollywood nor East LA, but rather the suburbs and beach towns of the South Bay and Orange County. These areas had once been shining examples of postwar suburbanization, but by the time punk rock arrived they had become sites of widening social polarities and Darwinist ideologies.

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Slash Magazine cover featuring Jimbo, Gary Panter, 1979

In 1978, groups of suburban homeowners and right-wing activists working in conjunction with the regional antibusing campaign successfully passed Proposition 13, which dammed the flow of suburban property taxes to be used for county services and education. The legislation reversed fiscal efforts for progressive redistribution during a period of unprecedented inflation in the regional real estate market, thus allowing homeowners to pocket magical windfalls of wealth at the expense of underfunded schools and services.

Perhaps more importantly, the campaign mobilized a new conservative constituency through “an implicit promise to halt the threatening encroachment of innercity populations on suburbia” and “the inflammatory image of the family homestead taxed to extinction in order to finance the integration of public education and other social programs obnoxious to white suburbanites” (Davis, 1992, p. 183). Two years later, former California governor Ronald Reagan was elected president on the strength of a similar brand of rhetoric. In London, punks had witnessed the breakdown of the liberal consensus and mocked its passage down the River Thames, costuming themselves as the empire’s degenerate offspring.

In the suburbs of Los Angeles, where a similar groundswell of anxious conservatism and greed had opened the doors of the White House to a former Hollywood actor, who then cleared the way for a glossier but even more merciless form of capitalism, the symptom and the response was hardcore.

Hardcore is a variation of punk music and subculture which grew out of the suburban garages of California in the early 1980s, and it embodied a different, and in some ways larger, spectrum of contradictions and possibilities. Indeed, Southern California hardcore was generally more nihilistic than British punk, its shows were plagued by violence and machismo, its sentiments were sometimes shamelessly racist, misogynist, and homophobic, and its rebellion was routinely defused by apathetic resignation and cynical fatalism.

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These tendencies dramatized, exaggerated, and in some cases parodied the condition of young suburbanites who are raised as spectators to an endless parade of meaningless images and taught to unleash their frustrations upon the powerless. But other strains embedded within the same hardcore subcultures personified more socially engaged and constructive possibilities, delivering some of the most piercing criticism of the political and economic order of the 1980s while creating an even more extensive network of do-it-yourself practices and institutions. This critique also formed in oppositional relation to commercial media and consumer culture, and its internal contradictions typically germinated from an all-encompassing insistence on purity and authenticity. In other words, Los Angeles, which had arguably emerged as the capital city of the condition of postmodernity, hosted even more extreme forms of both the culture of deconstruction and the culture of authenticity as they had been developing within punk music and style.

Black Flag, a band started in 1978 by surfers and skaters from Hermosa Beach, was among the first of its genre and quickly became one of the most popular groups which defined the nihilist sensibilities of Southern California hardcore. In songs like “Nerv ous Breakdown,” “Wasted,” “No Values,” and their football chorus tribute to beer, “Six Pack,” Black Flag spoke for young white suburbanites lacking morals or a sense of purpose to the point of self-parody, or more specifically to the point where it was impossible to tell whether they were a parody, the real thing, or somehow both.

They were joined in this respect by Fear, whose singer became a celebrity in the LA punk scene by taunting his audience to the point of onstage violence and issuing calculated but nasty insults against women, homosexuals, Jews, etc. Fear’s repertoire of songs included “I Don’t Care about You/Fuck You,” “Let’s Have a War/So You Can All Die,” and “We Destroy the Family.”

Suburban hardcore immediately begat subgenres of what has been called “brat-core” or “snot-core.”

This refers to groups of young men who flaunt their

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immaturity and idiocy while making high-speed but very melodic music, which might be described as the sonic equivalent of being teased by an annoying child. The Ramones had fathered this approach in New York, and it caught on quickly in the suburbs of Southern California.

The Dickies, residents of the San Fernando Valley, were the first of these in the LA scene, releasing an album called The Incredible Shrinking Dickies in 1979.

Singer Keith Morris founded the Circle Jerks (a reference to group masturbation) after leaving Black Flag, and their records Group Sex (1980), Wild in the Streets (1982), and A Golden Shower of Hits (1983) instantly made the Jerks one of LA’s most popular punk bands.

The Adolescents, an aptly named group from Orange County, characterized themselves as “just a wrecking crew/Bored boys with nothing to do” in 1981, and then followed that declaration with a barrage of verbal abuse aimed at women, gays, and racial minorities. The Descendents dumbed the Beach Boys’ melodies down to fry-cook anthems such as “I Like Food,” “My Dad Sucks,” “I’m Not a Loser,” “Weinerschnitzel,” and the taunting sing-along, “Suburban Home.”

The regression to sophomoric idiocy is a rebellion against authority, or at the very least an attempt to evade responsibility by playing dumb, but it is a rebellion which can also support reactionary and authoritarian ends. It flees not only from the demands of work, the law, family, and etiquette, but also from allaccountability to anyone but oneself and one’s immediate wants. All social forces larger than the self are indiscriminately reviled as intrusions and constraints. Thus, punk’s capacity for parody and semiotic attack could be put in the service of misogyny, racism, and homophobia.

As Greil Marcus has written of the Adolescents’ music: “Attacked, one may side with one’s attacker, and accept the terms of the attack . . . Contempt for and a wish to exterminate the other is presented here as a rebellion against the smooth surface of everyday life, but it may be more truly a violent, spectacular accommodation to America’s worst instincts” (1993, p.

185). In this sense, the temper tantrums of brat-core

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punk served as a fitting soundtrack to Proposition 13 and the tax “revolts” of 1978, when homeowners in the valley and Orange County organized to rid themselves of responsibility for other people’s education and other people’s children.

The regressive persona of suburbia forms as a convergence of liberal individualism and pre-Oedipal narcissism, both of which have a long history in social life but which are further intensified by post-Fordist methods of production and consumption. Those employed in the retail and service sectors have few opportunities for vertical mobility or career advancement, are entrusted with only minimal responsibilities, and rarely establish a lasting rapport with co-workers or the customers they serve. The type of work performed is not likely to inspire feelings of achievement or satisfaction, and the worker often drifts from job to job without a sense of direction or purpose. Meanwhile, advertising encourages its viewers to think of consumptive desires as primordial instincts, to sublimate existential dissatisfaction with purchasing power, and shrug off those who stand in the way of a good time.

Time and memory have been similarly disrupted as the spasmodic flows of television programming, video games, and commercial amusements dissect everyday life into a succession of moments enclosed within long periods of senseless repetition and boredom.

Again it was Black Flag who articulated this condition of bored young suburbanites in their frathouse anthem “T.V. Party,” where they parodied themselves as beer-guzzling couch surfers who stay glued to the television because they are terrified by the prospect of having to go into, or even just talk about, the outside world; “T.V. Party” invites the audience to sing and clap along with the chorus, “We’ve got/Nothing better to do/ Than watch T.V./And have a couple of brews/Don’t talk about anything else/We don’t want to know!/We’re dedicated/To our favorite shows.”

And yet Black Flag was also at the center of an even stronger do-it-yourself ethic within Southern California hardcore, and in this regard they straddle the

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extraordinary contradictions and multiple possibilities of punk rock. Two members of the group started SST Records in 1978 initially in order to release the music of Black Flag, and throughout the 1980s SST was the single most important independent label of American hardcore, releasing the music of the Minutemen, the Descendents, Hüsker Dü, the Meat Puppets, Bad Brains, Sonic Youth, Firehose, the Screaming Trees, Dinosaur Jr., and Soundgarden, among others. With a network of independent labels, touring punk bands, low-budget fanzines, and college radio stations, the West Coast and other regions of North America developed the culture of authenticity into an infrastructure for performance and participation, and in some cases also as an outlet for political dissent.

In Berkeley, three activists formerly involved with the New Left counterculture started a fanzine called Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll, a dense black-and-white periodical packed with tiny print and minimal advertising space, consisting of pages and pages of generally unedited letters sent in by readers debating one another about punk and politics.

Time and memory have been similarly disrupted as the spasmodic flows of television programming, video games, and commercial amusements dissect everyday life into a succession of moments enclosed within long periods of senseless repetition and boredom.

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“We’ve got/ Nothing better t Than watch TV/ And have a coupl Don’t talk about else/ We don’t want to We’re dedicated/ To our favorite

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to do/

le of brews/ t anything

o know!/ / shows.”

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Lowbrow Postmodernism

Fast Food Purgatory, Robert Williams, 2015

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Lowbrow Art’s influence on Punk Visual Culture 29

A movement born of rejected artforms was the perfect aesthetic match for Punk Lowbrow art is an art movement that emerged in Los Angeles and Southern California in the late 1970s.

It emerged from various contemporary street and subcultures such as underground comix, punk rock, hot rod ‘Kustom Kulture’, tattooing, graffiti and tiki culture (Kordic). As one might expect due to the large range of influences and cultures which shaped the Lowbrow movement, an exact formal style, or even a collectively agreed upon name for the movement remains difficult to pinpoint (Andersen, 6).

The term ‘Lowbrow’ does however suggest an opposition to a ‘Highbrow’ cultural status quo, especially within the art world and academic art criticism. As Larry Reid (5) observes, the “...disconnected public was eager to embrace a movement that left behind the condescension and pretension of previous developments in fine art”, thereby situating Lowbrow as something of a populist art movement.

Lowbrow art also represents an interest in reusing mainstream pop culture imagery (that itself may have been considered to be of a lower cultural merit, such as comic books) to subvert meaning and expectation, particularly when the audience for

Lowbrow art was, at least initially, primarily from a punk/underground cultural scene. These ideas suggest that Lowbrow is an art movement that can be said to be particularly reflective of Postmodern theories regarding the consumption and re-use of media.

The focus of this essay is on the influence that Lowbrow artists have had in shaping the visual language of Punk and Alternative Rock music in the 1980s and 1990s. These genres (punk in particular) had a strong emphasis on independence and a DIY ethos which extended beyond music and into culture in general (Chute, 240). These genres can also be interpreted as Postmodern themselves, with Rock & Roll commonly being described as the result of a fusion of Country and Western music with Rhythm and Blues music (Strinati, 222). Similarly, Punk represented another stylistic change that built upon Rock & Roll but incorporated new influences to create a unique identity.

The vast and disparate cultures (and their associated visual representations/languages) which shaped the Lowbrow movement may be best understood in opposition to what is deemed as highbrow art.

The artist Robert Williams is said to have coined the term Lowbrow art when he titled a 1982 book of his paintings The Lowbrow Art of Robt. Williams (Kordic).

Williams claims to have been derogatorily referred to as an ‘illustrator’ by fellow students and instructors in the California Institute of the Arts for his technical skills as a draftsman at a time when abstract expressionism was in vogue in academic art circles (Campion).

Williams further described the Lowbrow art movement as being influenced by what he terms as “... egalitarian art forms...” (Williams, 13) which were “simply dismissed and treated with condescension by the formal art authorities” (Williams, 13). Another facet of Williams contention with the art establishment lies in what he terms as the “elimination” of representational art as a valid form of visual communication in the period after the Second World War (Williams, 14).

From these strong views regarding the “world’s fine art power brokers” (Williams, 14), it is perhaps not

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A disconnected public was eager to embrace a movement that left behind the condescension and pretension of previous developments in fine art

The Word “What” Used To Suggest Intellectual Investigation, Robert Williams, 2018

surprising that Williams gravitated towards artistic work and markets that existed outside the traditional gallery and museum milieu.

Williams worked as an art director for hot rod designer and artist Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth after leaving art school and became part of the underground comix scene in the late 1960s in San Francisco as a contributor to Zap Comix. Williams later became an enthusiastic participant in the California punk scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and here he and artists (who also had backgrounds in comics) such as Gary Panter and Charles Burns contributed to gallery shows, zines, fliers and album covers for the punk scene (Knudde).

Williams most notable contribution to Rock visual culture came when the LA rock band Guns N’ Roses used Williams’ 1978 oil painting Appetite for Destruction on the cover of their 1987 debut album (which itself was named after the painting). Williams noted that he was only paid a small licensing fee for the use of his art for the album (which would go on to sell 20 million copies (Stafford)) and that he thought they were just another punk rock band.

The painting depicts a young woman on the ground whose dress has been torn open, and a robot figure standing over her (dressed in a style that may have been inspired by Williams’ Zap Comix colleague Robert Crumb). Leaping over a fence and towards this robot figure is a large red creature adorned with knives and hands outstretched towards the robot figure.

The imagery of the art was deemed controversial when the album initially came out, with some music chains in the US and UK refusing to stock it (Stafford).

The band and Geffen Records eventually relented and changed the cover, but chose to include the original sleeve art by Williams inside the album’s inner booklet (Stafford).

The painting itself is a good example of a style which Williams termed ‘Super Cartoons’. Williams saw cartooning as the most direct and accessible visual communication of abstract thought, and therefore included narrative elements in his paintings, seen in

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Appetite For Destrucion, Robert Williams, 1978

Chrome, Smoke & Fire, Robert Williams, 1990

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this piece as what Williams describes as a story of ‘vengeance and justice’ (Heching).

In terms of influence, Appetite for Destruction can be seen to draw from sources such as the Rat Fink character created by Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth (the red creature with its huge tongue and exaggerated monstrous features). In the painting, Williams also incorporates cartooning visual shorthand into the medium of oil painting, seen in the motion lines of the red creature and the circular explosion motif behind the robot figure’s head. The notion of a representational oil painting painted with the technical skill and ability of an Old Master incorporating popular culture imagery of cartooning and hot rods particularly evokes the Postmodern idea of the remix, and the breaking down of barriers between high and low culture.

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A Confusion over Time & Space Perhaps the defining element of Lowbrow art above all else is this emphasis on borrowing imagery and styles from the past and re-using and interpreting them for a new audience. Art critic Carlo McCormick (10) terms this the mining of a shared ‘...topography of cultural detritus’.

This is a useful interpretation in which to examine how Lowbrow art fits into Postmodern theory, which Strinati (213) sees as something which has blurred the lines between art and popular culture. Strinati (213) further notes that Postmodern popular culture further breaks down the distinction between art and pop culture due to its refusal to abide by the pretentions of the art world, another element evident in Lowbrow art.

Lowbrow art’s mining of such ‘cultural detritus’ may be seen in the work of comics creator and illustrator Charles Burns. With its precise brush inking style, Burns’ work is visually suggestive of a bygone era in comics, most notably Golden Age horror and romance comics. This suggests another facet of Postmodern theory, the confusion over time and space, wherein the popular culture of the past is mixed with the present, culminating in an end product where one struggles to identify a definitive time period or setting (Strinati, 215).

The content of Burns’ work, often disturbing and reflective of contemporary issues, becomes stranger and more distant due to this filtering through a ‘dated’ style.

Crucifix (310) notes that Burns has employed the use of a ‘swipe file’ throughout his career. Within this swipe file, Burns catalogues panels from other comics, often redrawing them in his own style, and uses them as either

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A Marraige made in Hell, Charles Burns, 1984

Sub Pop 200 compilation cover, Charles Burns, 1984

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inspiration for his work or employs their compositions and imagery directly in his comics (Crucifix, 310).

For many creators and artists, the notion of copying another artist’s work and presenting it as one’s own would not be something that people would like to be public knowledge, but Burns is open about the practice (Crucifix, 310). Crucifix (329) notes that in doing so Burns has forced critical opinion to re-evaluate areas of comics visual history, such as romance comics, that have been overlooked. This notion of a forced critical re-evaluation can be seen in the response to many other Lowbrow artists work such as Robert Williams.

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Charles Burns’ most well-known contribution to Punk record sleeve design was for Iggy Pop’s 1990 album Brick by Brick. Much of the lyrical content of the album relates to a sense of cultural decay in America, for example the titular track of Brick by Brick contains lyrics, such as ‘I wanna build a house where an ad don’t scream’ (Iggy Pop), suggesting a sense of anxiety regarding the proliferation of media and its intrusion into one’s mind.

The album cover depicts a large group of figures in a city landscape. Among the figures are monsters such as a zombie, a cyclops, a wolfman and a disembodied floating brain. Also in the scene are more stylized cartoon-like figures such as a small flying bee character and an anthropomorphic cat reminiscent of Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat character. In the foreground, a blue skinned man appears to be in agony and great distress, while a female figure on the right foreground appears concerned looking at him. By exhibiting such a range of influences, from underground comics to monster B movies, Burns creates an image of the Postmodern media saturated psyche.

The agonized blue figure perhaps embodies a certain ennui regarding this oversaturation of media, a sentiment art critic Carlo McCormick (11) suggests this sentiment when discussing the shared imagery that unites the Lowbrow movement: “We are media-damaged beyond recognition and have taken rampant appropriation to a frenzied level of mashed-up multitasking”.

We are media-damaged beyond recognition and have taken rampant appropriation to a frenzied level of mashed-up multitasking

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Iggy Pop Brick by Brick album cover, Charles Burns, 1990

Intertextuality & Commodification It is interesting to note that while the punk scene that Williams and Burns were connected to was thought of as a movement that was a counter response to mainstream culture, the influences of popular culture remain crucial to interpreting and understanding their work, and indeed the landscape of punk as a whole.

Another artist who worked in the intersection between Lowbrow art, comics and punk was Gary Panter. Charles Burns indeed described Panter as having defined the aesthetic of ‘...punk comics’ for him (Chute, 251). Panter’s work, like that of Burns and Williams, can also be seen to borrow from both lowbrow and highbrow culture, as exemplified by works such as Jimbo’s Inferno (2006) in which Panter creates an adaptation of Dante’s Inferno using his punk rock comic character Jimbo (Chute, 265).

A good example of the postmodern aspects of Panter’s work can be found in a one-page Jimbo comic strip published in LA Punk magazine Slash. Among the references to other media in the strip are a title treatment rendered in a faux computer/video game pixel art style, a pasted in receipt from fast food restaurant Burger King, and the classic Nancy comic strip character.

Panter subverts Nancy by having her speak intelligently defending her strip as a ‘buffer against future shock for a tired & technology torn species’ (Chute, 253).

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Page from Jimbo’s Inferno, Gary Panter, 2006

This kind of intertextuality and breaking of the fourth wall highlights just how Postmodern Panter’s work can be, especially when in the end the last panel the Nancy character even questions how “punk” Slash magazine even is. Aesthetically, Panter describes his work as being ‘analogous to punk’ due to his embrace of imperfection and the mistakes in his linework.

In conclusion therefore, there exists a strong parallel between the worlds of Lowbrow art and Punk and Alternative music. The Postmodern idea of re-using a myriad of ideas and influences and combining them into something that has its own distinct identity can be observed in both the Punk and Lowbrow art movements.

A commonality between Punk and Lowbrow also appears to be an ideology that questions the status quo and the notion of a definitive ‘highbrow’ culture. Both movements can be soon however to embrace aspects of both ‘high’ culture and popular culture without distinction, another hallmark of Postmodernism.

All three artists discussed in this essay have gone on to achieve mainstream success in a variety of formats, for example Panter received three Emmy awards for his set designs for children’s TV programme Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, Burns has designed sets for ballet and illustrated covers for Time magazine. The art journal Juxtapoz which Williams founded is now the best-selling art magazine in America. This perhaps demonstrates the Postmodern idea of art or underground culture eventually becoming commodified and integrated into the economy (Strinati, 214). Interestingly, Panter identified this a goal in his 1980 Rozz-Tox Manifesto (text reproduced in this catalogue), observing that ‘... we are building a business-based art movement’ (Chute, 264), and saw the ‘infiltration’ of mainstream popular culture as a goal. This perhaps indicates a knowledge of the Postmodern aspects of the Punk and Lowbrow art movements by some of their practitioners.

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Page from Jimbo strip in Slash Magazine, Gary Panter, 1979

“I wanna build a ad don’t scream/ I wanna live in So get off my di I’m building it brick/ Brick by Brick.”

/

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house where an

peace–quietly/ ick/ brick by

”

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Rozz-Tox Manifesto

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1.

The avant-garde is no corpus. It merely lies in shock after an unfortunate bout with its own petard. It feigns sleep but one eye glitters and an involuntary twitch in the corner of the mouth belies a suppressed snicker. The giggle of coming awake at one’s own funeral dressed in atomic TV beatnik furniture. A mutant with a mission.

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2.

There are twenty years left in the twentieth century. Twenty years to reap the rewards and calamities that have been put in motion in this period. At this time a current of aesthetic function is emerging: the inevitable culmination of concepts and experiments pioneered and conducted in this century. We declare society an amusement park and one to be dead reckoned with.

3.

A deadly texture and tone have taken the cereal Nirvana: a misanthrope born of capitol realities, tendencies, and interoffice memos. Sightless businessmen-posedentertainers shovel up tons of soulless Saturday morning animation. Would that you could make cost effective the rubbery genius that was the Saturday morning of our youth.

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4.

We say enough to the instigators of game show design for we are sick and dizzy. Show us the backs of these monstrous facades, for even bare plywood is a healthier texture.

Oh you seekers of the new who run terrified from history into the clutches of an eternal life where no electric shaver can be built to last.

5.

Close the bars! We require well lit media centers that serve soft drinks and milk. We require that top-40 radio stop it. And this for extant executive entertainers: We know when to laugh. Machines don’t, and it is irritation to hear them laugh at the wrong time. They laugh at nothing and nothing isn’t funny.

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6.

Find the evil doers, the merchant peddlers of Pavlovia who use our unmentionable parts against us. Will you hide behind a scrim of two-dimensional phosphorescence when Biology exacts its reward?

7.

Profound faith in glamour is a surefire way to not see that you kill what you eat. We believe and worship a two-dimensional world.

No god printers save us when we stand naked and brainless before an uncompromising and impartial physicality. We are sick now/get wise to the media. Join the art police. We call for posting of cow pictures in every fast food franchise. And for vegetarians, recordings of screaming vegetables at every salad bar.

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8.

Beautiful and effective communicative marketing and aesthetic media are not innately evil; merely seductive. However, seductive aesthetics and media are prone to undermine common sense and vision in a capitalistic culture. Our own creations have shamed us. Teaching us that the hand and opinion of the individual are not as legitimate as that of opinion transmuted and inflated by broadcast ... especially when that opinion is on 80-pound coated stock, in full color ... or when that opinion steals invisibly and incomprehensibly into a box in our homes. Would that society reveled in certain varieties of vandalism and disarray.

May we mow our lawns and remain civilized.

9.

It is unfortunate and unacceptable what vile and lazy do-nothings are given unwarranted credence for mouthing such foul and mean cliches as “rip-off” and “sell-out.” They have no understanding of our economy and the time it takes society to go. Confess and shut up! Capitalism good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim. Inspiration has always been born of recombination.

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10. In a capitalistic society such as the in which we live, aesthetics as an endeavor flows thorough a body which is built of free enterprise and various illnesses. In boom times art may be supported by wildcat speculation or my excess funds in form of grants from the state or patronship as a tax write-off. Currently we are suffering from a lean economy. By necessity we must infiltrate popular mediums. We are building a business-based art movement. This is not new. Admitting it is.

11. Business 1. To create a pseudo-avantgarde that is cost effective. 2. To create merchandising platforms on popular communications and entertainment media. 3.

To extensively mine our recent and ancient past for icons worth remembering and permutating: recombo archaeology.

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12. Waiting for art talent scouts? There are no art talent scouts. Face it, no one will seek you out. No one gives a shit.

13. Market saturation was reached in the sixties - everyone knows that. Fine Elitist Art is of diminishing utility. There is not more reward for maintaining or joining an elite and sterile crew.

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14. Elitist art cannot help the emergent complex through its painful and potentially stupidly dangerous adolescence. Start or support primitive industry, propaganda to no dogma, and environmental jarrs.

15. Law: If you want better media, go make it.

Note: Capitalism for good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim, and stocks the supermarket.

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16. We are born capitalists and manufacturers of alternative goods and services. We are made propagandists and propose an antimedia to no dogma. We call for popular environmental manipulators, primitive industry, an avantgarde placed squarely in the entertainment field, for archaeologists and synthesizers.

17. A call for mutant intuition and wrestling is real. A current that synthesizes ideas and entertainment .. an antimedia that creates, participates, and services and broader-based lunatic fringe and one that is capable of finishing the century outright. An avantgarde that has no mean diversion and stocks the supermarket.

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18. Our lack of popularity in high school was led us to think and thinking has lead us to this. No war is waged here; only a strain, a virus, a toxoid, a Rozz-Toxoid. The emergent complex asks for just twenty years of your time. Now, stand and sing ...

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Contemporary Lowbrow

We Were All To Be Kings III, Victor Castillo, 2017

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Academic and institutional acceptance of Lowbrow – has it resulted in dilution?

In its beginnings, Lowbrow art was completely underground. But, as has happened to so many movements before, Lowbrow began to gain some popularity – publications such as Robert Wiliams’ Juxtapoz magazine, as well as Hi Fructose magazine, popularized Lowbrow and helped incease its visibility.

The result was that the number of individuals identifying their work as Lowbrow began to grow.

However, the other result was that, with this enlargement of Lowbrow artists, some started to go beyond the Lowbrow style – raw, unpolished and simple – and to change it towards a more sophisticated and refined one. A new sub-scene began to emerge, consisting of academically and formally trained professionals that possessed academic painting and drafting skills, but were still attached to Lowbrow’s inherent characteristics and motifs. In other words, the movement saw an increased number of creatives that were able to produce technically masterful and beautiful paintings, while retaining the underground comix and punk rock motifs. This style became known as Pop Surrealism, and some consider the artist Kenny Scharf to be the “godfather” of this

term. Scharf described his inspiration for the name as follows: “Surrealism is about the unconscious, and I feel my work is about the unconscious. The images come from the unconscious except that my unconscious is filled with pop imagery. My unconscious is pop, therefore the art would be Pop Surrealism”.

Pop Surrealism appears to have married two stances in art that tackle very different topics. While Surrealism was based on dreams and the unconscious, Pop art depicted the mundane and the superficial.

What this movement within a movement did was to create satirical works that delivered fantastical popular imagery that also suggested the deeper Postmodern impact of how pop culture imagery influences the modern psyche. With such relatable content depicted with some remarkable artistic skills, Pop Surrealism reached an audience that was not necessarily interested or formally educated in art. Moreover, the members of the Pop Surrealism art movement often referenced other great painters in history, such as Van Gogh or Picasso, which only brought their creations closer to the acceptance the of “high art” establishment.

As Pop Surrealism gave its artists a chance to experiment within the fields of two elaborate creative fields, this is exactly what they did. For many of them, it came as a logical next step in their career, like in the case of Todd Schorr, who successfully merged his two great loves: comics and Old Master paintings. His early Lowbrow paintings and, subsequently illustrations, evoke a unique kind of complexity oozing in metaphors.

Similarly, Chilean artist Victor Castillo employs imagery based on the cartoons from his childhood that he infuses with scenes of violence and destruction, and somewhere underneath it all, a careful eye might notice subtle references to painters like Goya and Velàsquez.

A fan of the allegorical, Alex Gross paints modern interpretations of works by Hieronymous Bosch, while his Japanese colleague Naoto Hattori draws on the influence of Surrealism of the 1920s and 30s. Still more than accessible to a wide audience, Lowbrow has found its way towards “mainstream” art galleries, respected

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Surrealism is about the unconscious, and I feel my work is about the unconscious. The images come from the unconscious except that my unconscious is filled with pop imagery. My unconscious is pop, therefore the art would be Pop Surrealism Atomic Vacation, Todd Schorr, 2010

auction houses and curious collectors alike. Furthermore, many from other contemporary art fields who did not necessarily identify as Lowbrow artists were however attracted by its aesthetics and visions. With an evergrowing roster of artists, it is perhaps safe to say that this art movement is surely here to stay.

Along with this increasing commercial and institutional acceptance, however, comes something of a disconnection from outsider movements like Punk that first accepted and embraced Lowbrow. Paintings from Pop Surrealist artists like James Jean and Takashi Murakami now fetch seven-figure sums at auction.

As a result, the work is arguably no longer relevant to a Punk ethos that prided itself on independence and being contrary to mainstream acceptance. Any artwork produced by Pop Surrealist artists for small punk bands and musicians (such as the artwork for the group Mangchi Hammer by James Jean) are genreally passion projects and a stronger link is now evident in Pop visual culture ( see Takashi Murakami’s cover artwork for several Kanye West music releases). This does however further cement the Postmodern course that Lowbrow art has taken, with the end result being the commodification and dilution of the initial aims and ethos of an outsider culture into a fully integrated facet of the global economy.

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Eye Cat, Naoto Hattori, 2010 Mangchi Hammer, James Jeam, 2014 Graduation, Takashi Murakami, 2007

Works Cited/ Bibliography Print Anderson, Kristen. Pop Surrealism: The Rise of Underground Art. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2009. Print.

Crucifix, Benoît. “Cut-Up and Redrawn: Reading Charles Burns’s Swipe Files”. Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society. Volume 1, Issue 3, Fall 2017. Pp. 309-333.

Journal.

McCormick, Carlo. “Notes on the Underground” in Pop Surrealism: The Rise of Underground Art. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2009. Print.

Reid, Larry. “Mid-century Dementia and Bad Ass Low Brow” in Pop Surrealism: The Rise of Underground Art. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2009. Print.

Strinati, Dominic. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Williams, Robert. “Dumbing Down to DaVinci” in Pop Surrealism: The Rise of Underground Art. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2009. Print.

Web Campion, Chris. “Robert Williams: ‘My stuff is way kitsch – to an abstract level’”. The Guardian. 1 April 2015.

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Chute, Hillary. Why Comics?: From Underground to Everywhere. New York City: HarperCollins Gilger, Lauren. “Zombies, Pinups and Punk Rock: How Robert Williams made it in the Academic art world”.

KJZZ. 8 September 2017.

Heching, Dan. “Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction: 7 things you didn’t know about the racy album art”.

Entertainment Weekly. 24 July, 2017.

Knudde, Kjell. “Charles Burns – Lambiek Comiclopedia”.

Lambiek. Article last updated 26 January 2020.

Kordic, Angie. “What is the Lowbrow Art Movement?

When Surrealism took over Pop”. Widewalls. 4 July 2016.

Manders, Hayden. “The story behind some of the 90s’ coolest band posters”. Nylon Magazine. 21 July 2016.

Martinez, Ricardo. “From Pop Surrealism to Lowbrow – Something got lost in translation”. Widewalls. December 5 2015.

Stafford, James. “Cover Stories: Guns N’ Roses ‘Appetite for Destruction’”. Loudwire. 3 July 2015.

Music Greg Ginn. “TV Party”. TV Party, SST Records, 1982.

Iggy Pop. “Brick by Brick”. Brick by Brick, Virgin Records, 1990.

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