EZ Kilim
Carpet tape, digital print, acrylic paint on plastic packaging, 90x80cm
F(E)D(E)XT(E)XT(E)
Carpet & aluminium tape, digital print on plastic packaging, 80x82cm
B(O)D(E)NSH(I)FT(E)R
Carpet & aluminium tape, digital print on plastic packaging, 89x55cm
A 4.5 metre paper tapestry
Fragments of functional statements associated with the typeface Arial Black, printed/photocopied on to white printer paper, woven and collaged, held together with carpet tape.
Titles: Read Only Memory, Chromosome Damage, Rocket USA, TV as Eyes, Sato-Sato, Insect Human, American Supreme 2022
Acrylic, Paper, Thread, Heat Pressed Plastic on bleached denim substrate.
DIck Hebdige
DICK HEBDIGE, SUBCULTURE THE MEANING OF STYLE
The Bricoleur
[Bricolage] refers to the means by which the non-literate, non-technical mind of so-called ‘primitive’ man responds to the world around him. The process involves a ‘science of the concrete’ (as opposed to our ‘civilised’ science of the ‘abstract’) which far from lacking logic, in fact carefully and precisely orders, classifies and arranges into structures the minutiae of the physical world in all their profusion by means of a ‘logic’ which is not our own. The structures, ‘improvised’ or made up (these are rough translations of the process of bricoler) as ad hoc responses to an environment, then serve to establish homologies and analogies between the ordering of nature and that of society, and so satisfactorily ‘explain’ the world and make it able to be lived in. (Hawkes, 1977)
Fetishism
Objects borrowed from the most sordid of contexts found a place in the punks’ ensembles: lavatory chains were draped in graceful arcs across chests encased in plastic bin-liners. Safety pins were taken out of their domestic ‘utility’ context and worn as gruesome ornaments through the cheek, ear or lip. ‘Cheap’ trashy fabrics (PVC, plastic, lurex, etc.) in vulgar designs (e.g. mock leopard skin) and ‘nasty’ colours, long discarded by the quality end of the fashion industry as obsolete kitsch, were salvaged by the punks and turned into garments (fly boy drainpipes, ‘common’ miniskirts) which offered self-conscious commentaries on the notions of modernity and taste. Conventional ideas of prettiness were jettisoned along with the traditional feminine lore of cosmetics. Contrary to the advice of every woman’s magazine, make-up for both boys and girls was worn to be seen. Faces became abstract portraits: sharply observed and meticulously executed studies in alienation. Hair was obviously dyed (hay yellow, jet black, or bright orange with tufts of green or bleached in question marks), and T-shirts and trousers told the story of their own construction with multiple zips and outside seams clearly displayed. Similarly, fragments of school uniform (white brinylon shirts, school ties) were symbolically defiled (the shirts covered in graffiti, or fake blood; the ties left undone) and juxtaposed against leather drains or shocking pink mohair tops. The perverse and the abnormal were valued intrinsically. In particular, the illicit iconography of sexual fetishism was used to predictable effect. Rapist masks and rubber wear, leather bodices and fishnet stockings, implausibly pointed stiletto heeled shoes, the whole paraphernalia of bondage – the belts, straps and chains – were exhumed from the boudoir, closet and the pornographic film and placed on the street where they retained their forbidden connotations. Some young punks even donned the dirty raincoat – that most prosaic symbol of sexual ‘kinkiness’ – and hence expressed their deviance in suitably proletarian terms.
Kristeva
& Punk as a Signifying Practice
the signifying practices embodied in punk were ‘radical’ in Kristeva’ sense: that they gestured towards a ‘nowhere’ and actively sought to remain silent, illegible…
We can now look more closely at the relationship between experience, expression and signification in subculture; at the whole question of style and our reading of style. To return to our example, we have seen how the punk style fitted to gether homologically precisely through its lack of fit (hole tee-shirt::spitting:applause::bin- liner:garment::anarchy: order) – by its refusal to cohere around a readily identifiable set of central values. It cohered, instead, elliptically through a chain of conspicuous absences. It was characterized by its unlocatedness – its blankness…
…punks dislocated themselves from the parent culture and were positioned instead on the outside: beyond the comprehension of the average (wo) man in the street in a science fiction future. They played up their otherness, ‘happening’ on the world as aliens, inscrutables. Though punk rituals, accents and objects were deliberately used to signify workingclassness, the exact origins of individual punks were disguised or symbolically disfigured by the make-up, masks and aliases which seem to have been used, like Breton’s art, as ploys ‘to escape the principle of identity’.
This workingclassness therefore tended to retain, even in practice, even in its concretized forms, the dimensions of an idea. It was abstract, disembodied, decontextualized. Bereft of the necessary details – a name, a home, a history – it refused to make sense, to be grounded, ‘read back’ to its origins. It stood in violent contradiction to that other great punk signifier – sexual ‘kinkiness’. The two forms of deviance – social and sexual – were juxtaposed to give an impression of multiple warping which was guaranteed to disconcert the most liberal of observers, to challenge the glib assertions of sociologists no matter how radical. In this way, although the punks referred continually to the realities of school, work, family and class, these references only made sense at one remove: they were passed through the fractured circuitry of punk style and re-presented as ‘noise’, disturbance, entropy…
Sideways 