translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville,
260508: Kunsthalle Wien: Punk - No One is Innocent
Kunsthalle Wien: Punk – No One is Innocent
Creative craters
Punk at a museum - this is definitely one of the loudest performative contradictions offered within the cultural purview. At least at first sight, when destruction is faced with conservation, the proletariat with the bourgeoisie, and garbage with culture.
The catalogue of the exhibit begins with a quote by the anarchist Michail Bakunin on the creative power of destruction. This exhibit in the Kunsthalle, however, presents the opposite: the destructive power of creativity. The curator of the exhibit Thomas Mießgang, mainly refers to one of Pop theoretician Greil Marcus’ theses: that there was a connection between the artistic avant-garde and punk. The show not only focuses on the beginnings in the late 1970s in London, Berlin (West) and New York, but also on the first two terms of the punk exhibit subtitle “Art – Style – Revolt”.
Jon Savage, the eloquent chronicler of this movement, contributed a series of black and white Pentax photographies. They depict those today already gentrified city-centre “craters” (Savage), in and out of which punk had developed. This was the starting point from which subculture and the art scene, fashion and music all flowed into one another. Inevitably one of the pieces exhibited is the “Stahlschlagzeug, ca. 1980” (steel percussions, around 1980) of the Berlin-based band “Einstürzende Neubauten” (collapsing new buildings). One does need group objects to visualize group rituals. And anyhow – no one is innocent.
Kunsthalle Wien
1070 Vienna, Museumsplatz 1, until 07.09.2008
www.kunsthallewien.at
260508
Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier
1070 Wien, Museumsplatz 1
Tel: +43 1 521 89-0
Email: office@kunsthallewien.at
http://www.kunsthallewien.at
Öffnungszeiten: Di-So 10-19, Do 11-21 h
Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier
1070 Wien, Museumsplatz 1
Tel: +43 1 521 89-0
Email: office@kunsthallewien.at
http://www.kunsthallewien.at
Öffnungszeiten: Di-So 10-19, Do 11-21 h