It was David Cameron on Radio 4's Today programme a few weeks ago who used the phrase "anarchy in the UK", although I doubt that Cameron - who was born in 1966 - was intending to pay homage to punk in general, or the Sex Pistols in particular. Yet, for me anarchy in the UK brought back happy memories, rather than conjuring up a sense of impending doom and disaster. This week I have again been refreshed by the spirit of '76 at the Barbican, where the exhibition Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years is in its final few days.
Punk was for me - as it probably was for most adolescent boys in 1976 - a way of connecting some very personal feelings of alienation and disaffectedness, with a wider, cultural sense of unease and change. It was a way of seeing anarchy in your bedroom, at school, with your parents and sometimes even with yourself as part of the ongoing anarchy in the UK, at a time of economic depression prompted by the oil crisis, and indeed connected overseas to the east coast of America, and in particular, New York. It was a time when postmodernism seemed to be real, rather than simply the stuff of cultural theory seminars, and when what it meant to be young, British, male, female, white, black - and all the other modernist labels - were up for grabs and demanded obliteration.
Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years tries to capture some of this sense of the personal, the national and the global by bringing together a wide range of art, photography and film, which, for better or worse, represents the dissent, alienation and rebellion that made the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen the most popular single at the time of the Queen's Silver Jubilee in June 1977, although the "punk years" are defined within the exhibition rather loosely as the decade between 1974-1984.
All the usual suspects are here, from Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring's graffiti and chalk drawings, to Jamie Reid's collage, the photography of Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe, and the films of Derek Jarman, Martha Rosler, Cerith Wyn Evans and Paul McCarthy.
But does any of this stand the test of time, or is this simply an exhibition that uses the cosy nostalgia for punk, which is in danger of becoming a favourite "naughty uncle", to get, by now, middle aged, middle class punters through the doors? Does art from the punk years have any relevance to how we live our lives now, or should it instead simply be dismissed as inconsequential ephemera?
It has to be said that there are some particularly weak exhibits that now look decidedly thin, and of these Stephen Willats' (1982) Are You Good Enough for the Cha Cha Cha?, which rather camply and theatrically documents life from London's New Romantic club scene, seems to be archly superficial and almost embarrassingly incomplete. Indeed almost like New Romantic music itself.
So too the artist group Coum Transmissions, whose retrospective at the ICA in October 1976, entitled Prostitution, which was made famous by a series of magazine action pieces by Cosey Fanni Tutti, appropriated from porn magazines for which she had appeared, would now hardly cause a ripple of interest on YouTube, despite the almost pleading warnings on the entry to the exhibit.
In fact many of the paintings, photographs, or films that use gender, sex or sexuality as their theme - whether from the perspective of coming out and charting the contours of the landscape of a gay sub-culture in the 1970s, or from a more straight tradition of what it means to be male or female - now seem all very passé. Mapplethorpe's "sex pictures" have long since become the stuff of coffee-table books and advertising, and Paul McCarthy's video Rocky (1976), in which the artist appears naked, wearing boxing gloves and repeatedly punching himself is simply too long, rather than disturbing. Even so, on the day that I visited, an elderly man lay on the floor intently watching the action, and barely managed to cover his erection with his Tesco bag.
Yet the exhibition does seem relevant when the work itself is stronger and more substantial, and perhaps we should also remember that a number of these artists died as a result of HIV, and thus paid the ultimate price for their personal rebellions. The photographs of Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989), for example, remain extraordinarily moving and sincere. So too Derek Jarman's (1942-1994) Super-8 film Jordan's Dance (1977), parts of which were used in his feature film Jubilee and which saw the punk icon Jordan, dressed in a tutu, dancing round a bonfire. These remained, 30 years later, arresting, disturbing, beautiful and fascinating.
Several of the artists shown here were of course concerned with the changing the urban landscape in which they lived - changing in part because of the economic recession - and which would usher in rightwing governments on both sides of the Atlantic. It is these artists who, for me, still seem to be most relevant to our current preoccupations. These preoccupations are centred on the changing night time economy of our towns and cities and its associated advertising and youth cultures, which has largely been prompted by the disappearance of light and heavy industry and manufacturing to the globalised economy of the developing world.
In particular the work of Stephen Willats (born 1943) and Martha Rosler (born 1943), which, respectively, focus on lives being lived on a housing estate in an impoverished suburb west of London and a predominantly Latino neighbourhood in San Francisco, speak volumes about the alienation and rebellion that was happening then, and which is, in all likelihood, happening now.
How are we to recognise these current rebellions? As Rosler says in her voice-over "you can see its facts, but you can't see its meaning," and so perhaps we'll simply have to wait another 30 years before a retrospective of "hoodie" or "chav" or "Asbo" art appears at the Barbican, and tells us what it was like to live through the Blair years if you were young, dispossessed and policed. Or how this might change if Cameron comes to power. Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years was, for me, much more than a cosy walk down memory lane. It was a powerful reminder that young people can - if they choose - cause anarchy in the UK and that that is not necessarily a bad thing.
