The Punk & Post-Punk journal has recently published several new Fast Track articles that can be accessed by journal subscribers via the Ingenta Connect portal in advance of final publication. These articles will be published within issue 9.3 and 10.1 of the full journal.
Aylwyn Walsh – Manifesting desire and anarchy as method: The problem of Inside Pussy Riot
My aim is to consider how anarchy reads and resists punitive regimes in performance, particularly in ‘immersive performance’. Punk troupe Pussy Riot forms a starting point, via Riot Days in 2017–18, with a sustained consideration on Inside Pussy Riot at the Saatchi Gallery in 2017, produced by Les Enfants Terrible. I concentrate on claims for authenticity that seem to lend theatre and performance legitimacy in relation to social change, to critique theatrical work with claims to producing agency, legitimizing hope for social transformation that is predicated on an ‘empowered’ spectator-participant. In the wake of these concerns, questions that bleed through this material relate to the limits of participation in performance and how and whether representations serve to dismantle state institutions. I consider whether the force of replications of cells, yards or gulags enables or disintegrates any activist, anarchist potential in performance. I take a wide-ranging view of anarchism beyond political theory to consider anarchism modelled in performance terms. Building from the example of Pussy Riot, the article defines performance critique through desire and anarchism, ‘manifesting desire’ or ‘anarchy as method’.
Ian Trowell – Counter-realities and conflicted place: Gee Vaucher’s The Feeding of the Five Thousand in the punk art tradition
This article celebrates and critically examines Gee Vaucher’s artwork for the Crass album The Feeding of the Five Thousand (1978), drawing upon the enduring fascination that the work retains. Vaucher’s work is complex, disconcerting and mesmeric, and my intention is to pin down the facets of the work that achieve these qualities. The work sits in a tradition of collage and montage taken up in British punk and post-punk scenes, and I examine a selection of classic punk artworks in comparison to Dada artworks that represent the origins of radical montage art. Whilst acknowledging the established mode of interpreting this work through indexical context of elements and the force of juxtaposition (e.g. Linder Stirling’s punk work), I argue that Vaucher’s work achieves something more and requires additional methods of analysis. By developing a formalist approach of illusion-istic harmony and integrity, I consider the space of the picture plane, as a tradi-tional art concept and the space and place of the depicted behind the picture plane. Vaucher’s work offers an enduring feeling of a conflicted, disrupted and corrupted space – you feel you can step into a real space within the picture but prefer to hover on the safe side of the picture plane. This property embodies what the author Mark Fisher calls the ‘weird and the eerie’. I then examine a number of artworks from within and around the canon of art – Alison and Peter Smithson, Martha Rosler and Tish Murtha – finding images that I feel have a strong resonance with Vaucher’s work in terms of the spaces they construct and the mode of construc-tion. These canonical works offer some developed critical dialogue to bring to bear on Vaucher’s work in order to fully understand the power of this iconic record sleeve.
Justus Grebe & Robert A. Winkler – Putting the ‘Punk’ back into Pop-Punk
Writing on pop-punk, the melodic branch of punk that rose to fame in the mid-tolate-1990s, usually centres on the pop aspect of the genre: its popularity, polished sound and commercialization. Defining punk as a culture of deviance, this article in contrast examines the punk aspect of pop-punk by analysing the ways deviance is presented in the music videos ‘All the Small Things’ by blink-182, ‘In Too Deep’ by Sum 41, and ‘Original Prankster’ by the Offspring, all released at the turn of the millennium. Understanding music videos as media advertising a song, an album and an artist and analysing the interplay of visuals, music and lyrics therein, we argue that blink-182 and Sum 41 present themselves as deviant by staging a notion of authenticity, ridiculing mainstream pop and appropriating the ‘prankster’ stereotype, while the Offspring take a more nuanced stance on the matter of pranking. Concluding, we attribute this difference to the generational gap between the bands and briefly identify the different waves of pop-punk.
Cibrán Tenreiro Uzal – From scene films to scene videos: communities documenting communities
The activity of local music scenes has at times been documented by members of those communities in films that differ from commercial audio-visual products in their mode of production, their aesthetics and the way they represent the reality of musical activities. The collaborative character of local scenes and the DIY ethos of many of them help shape these works, where artistic intentions and experimentation coexist with their use for self-learning or the construction of personal memories. This article identifies the features of these scene films, both in documentary and fiction, and explores how technological changes and the digital age have influenced them.
The above articles together with another six Fast Track articles and all back issues of the journal can be accessed via Ingenta Connect at https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/punk/pre-prints