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Never mind the Pollocks at punk art show
By Ellen Widdup, Evening Standard 04.06.07Thirty years ago this week the Sex Pistols sailed down the Thames playing their single God Save The Queen at full volume.
Now the Barbican Art Gallery is revisiting the era with the largest collection of punk art in Britain.
At the heart of the exhibition is Jamie Reid's cover for God Save The Queen. The image shows her blindfolded and gagged by cut-and-paste lettering in the style of a ransom note. The single, released in the Queen's Silver Jubilee year, was banned by the BBC.
Curator Ariella Yedgar said: "Punk identity was all about making a stand. It was adopted in art as it was in music and those two worlds collide, so it is easy to see why this image remains one of the most well-known."
"Other artists chose to pinpoint certain symbols and use them as representations of the feeling at the time." One of these was Andrew Logan who created a 5ft safety pin, made of tiny pieces of mirror, entitled Homage To The New Wave.
Another artist featured in the show is David Lamelas, who studied at St Martins College in London before moving to Los Angeles. His photographs captured the punk revolution on both sides of the Atlantic and include Violent Tapes, a series of black and white images in 1975, some of them captured on the London Underground.
The work of artist John Stezaker, whose best known work is a collage of shots and old postcards of Eros and Piccadilly Circus, is also on show.
Miss Yedgar said: "We wanted to look at a part of art history which is fairly recent but hugely influential and to mark the strong parallels between scene in the UK and the US.
"A lot of artists and musicians were eager to challenge mainstream perceptions and all wanted to push boundaries. The result was a thought-provoking outpour of creativity which is still relevant in today's climate.
She added: "We hope that by bringing 30 artists together under one roof for the first time, we can draw further comparisons between the urban decay of both London and New York at a time of political unrest and economic inequality."
The exhibition opens 5 June and runs until 9 September.
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