Today it is common to relate punk’s break with pop music, as well as new wave and its stylistic spin-off Neue Deutsche Welle (German New Wave), to parallels in the visual arts: Wilde Maler (new savages) and the incorporation of theory and political orientation. But what did they really have in common?
One of the most widely read and cited authors in subcultural circles in those days in the old Federal Republic of Germany was Jean-François Lyotard. His most popular book was the compilation by Merve Publishers titled Intensities. Published in 1978, the formative year of the reception of punk, the book includes a brief text on its back cover that ends with the sentence: “I hope my discourse has some of this intense lack of reputability.”1 Intense lack of reputability – the phrase seemed to hit the nail on the head better than any one of the songs that had come out until then. Yet what did Lyotard, or his youthful readers, mean?
What corresponded to this intense lack of reputability on Lyotard’s part? When one pages through the book that offers this back-cover propagandistic pearl, one finds, among other things, the claim that Cage and Nietzsche raised the challenge for a “politics of intensities”. Lyotard explains: “These are the ‘people of intensification’, the ‘masters’ of today: outsiders, experimental painters, pop artists, hippies and yippies, parasites, the insane, inmates. An hour of their lives contains more intensity (and less intention) than a thousand words from a professional philosopher.”2 It is not unimportant that already in 1972, these “Comments on the Return of Capital”, which Lyotard delivered in a lecture, repeatedly and explicitly refer to music as the place where the fight between good intensity and bad representation most pointedly plays out – as the fight between the musical note and sound.
The note had already lost sound for some time, not only in serial and postserial modern composition, whose electronic Cologne contingent (including Eimert and Stockhausen, among others) had only replaced the notes with even more exact descriptions of the overdetermined intentions of composers – not only in the work of Cage, aleatoric and indeterminate artists, and others who freed sound from the prison of the musical note and its aesthetic considerations. No, in free jazz the note had also had its day: the new sounds of free jazz could no longer be transcribed, but for those musicians the escape of sound was primarily social rather than aesthetic. It was an index of the revolt against white suprematism. Punk had a social index as well: the note as part of the musical order and its regime of technical abilities had become obsolete through aggressive dilettantism and other nonconformities expressed by the anarchy, the chaotic otherness, of sound.
What role did punk have in this theory – beyond the presumed unified front in the fight of sound with the note? Why did it attract people like me, who lived at the time in the milieu of punk and New Painting? Didn’t it call our enemy, namely the hippie, a hero, and wasn’t it exactly the opposite of a theory from 1978, actually the typical theory of 1972, as the fight shifted from college campuses and the street to psychiatry and art? As a youth in 1972, I was, in any case, a full-fledged fan of intensity. Fully unclear, wide-open adventures lay before me, to be determined by nothing, aside from the lasting impression that they should make on me and the impression I wanted to make on all who would accompany me on my adventures: sustained, intense living was the only alternative to not being dead. In 1978 intensity was an irritating and kitschy cliché, a purely nominal claim in a discursive routine, an eternal element of older people’s conversation and a vehicle of ideological anti-intellectualism, something hippies and the average right winger had in common. It was a discursive tool directed against any possibility that a political life, an aggressive counterculture could regenerate itself. On the other hand, in 1978 “lack of reputability” still sounded very interesting.
The talk about intensity was therefore not purely philosophical. It was present in the everyday language with which everyone who turned twenty in the ’70s grew up. The argument about intensity was stronger than any political one; it was the meaning of life to live intensely – on that, religious fanatics and revolutionary anarchists could agree. Indeed the realization of punk’s break with this culture took on two forms: on one hand, rejection of the so-called hippie culture because for all its intensity, it had become silly, thus harmless, and above all, stupid. This oppositional standpoint was decidedly intellectual. One must once again discuss, employ concepts, express things, read books, be explicit. From this standpoint one looked to books published by Merve, only to read in them once again that it is better to exist on the other side of representation – like the hippies who had just been overcome – to exist as an outsider, without concepts. But it was still better to at least read this than – as for so long already – to experience the ideology of hippies and feelings and outsiders as social pressure. If the outsider were registered within a theory, one could see if he was right.
Punk’s second break with this culture was, however, formulated as exactly the opposite. Intensity as a value was not the problem; the once-intense lives of the outsiders were not hopeless, rather they were hardly intense any more – not because they had become weak-minded, but because they had long ago become only representatives of intensity, portrayers of intensity. The discourse of their legitimization was possibly damaged through this shift, so that intensity was no longer discussed from this side either, but its goal and value were not yet canceled out. One strived to give new legs to intense living, in new lifestyles, new ways of being an outsider. In this version the hippies weren’t so guilty of being hippies, but the opposite: their guilt lay in not being hippies anymore – in having betrayed the ideals of the “people of intensification”. These two readings of punk’s break with the culture agreed only on this: that which was praised without risk in 1978-79 as “hippie”, “outsider”, and “experimenter” – once essentially state art and state culture – was to be rejected today.
The reasons for the rejection were diametrically opposed: negation of the principle of intensity as critique of representation on the one hand, negation of contemporary means and forms of intensity and its empirical representatives on the other. Among the ranks of punk, this led to followers and opponents of intensity finding themselves in the same bars, the same concerts, and the same clothing. Because they drank, smoked, took drugs, and listened to music together, but did not discuss concepts, this difference was not dealt with in concepts that could have articulated it, but through aesthetic battles of substitutes. Even I swung between the two positions: I loved text-oriented, manifesto-like, quotational, denotative punk songs because they proceeded anti-intensely (in that, certainly very intensely); I also loved the aesthetics of subjugation, electronic, loud, heavy punk and the industrial impudence because they rescued intensity. People who were well versed in representation and its criticism, such as Malcolm McLaren, seemed worthy of admiration to me, but they also quickly became boring and predictable. Single-minded artist types bored me, but at the same time they were also the only people who could be surprising.
Corresponding to the three musical centers of West German punk culture (West Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf), there were three centers of new savages – in West Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne.3 As the visual artists were closer to a conceptual universe than the punk musicians were (not in the least because they had experienced the conceptual in earlier debates in art – for example, at actual, conceptually based academies such as Düsseldorf or the Cooper Union in New York) here there were the beginnings of explicit confrontations that in music or in everyday life were relegated to differences in taste or to fighting. The Moritzplatz-painters from Berlin, painters like Middendorf or Salomé, were accused of representing only the lifestyles they found attractive, but not transferring them into their own form of painting or art. Images of Rock’n’Roll singers or transvestites or strong women were considered by many to be tautological duplications of already intensely expressive gestures.
On the other hand the Hamburg Group around Werner Büttner and Albert Oehlen pursued a more anti-intense program (in the sense described above) and accused the Berlin artists of being intensity players and prompters of mistakes, which the outsider kitsch of the official, liberal Social Democratic culture also made. Conversely, the Cologne artists around the Gruppe Mülheimer Freiheit (Mülheimer Freiheit Group) – including Walter Dahn, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Peter Bömmels, Hans Peter Adamski, Gerhard Naschberger, and Gerard Kever – were more representatives of the other philosophy, that intensity is only betrayed but still can be rescued if only its contextual conditions could be newly constructed. The references to blues and Beuys in Dahn’s work and to an ideal Africa in Dahn and Dokoupil’s work point to the reconstruction of an intense life as life in art. Later Dokoupil in particular transferred this idea into a rather distanced, smirking postmodern disposition, whereas Bömmels continued painting as a heuristic exploration of individual as well as sociopathic conditions. The group even lost one member to the sect led by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. The Hamburg artists reproached them: “Six young Cologners present a synthesis of Antes and Schröder-Sonnenstern.”4 The Cologne artists accused the Hamburgers once again of pure caricature, of an art completely caught up in humor – without any intensity.
The first reporters to investigate the movement worked for the established magazine art, and for them the whole movement in all of the cities was caught up in the concepts of the “wild”, the “painterly”, and, above all, “unbridled subjectivity”.5 The last term was illustrated, among others, in Werner Büttner’s painting “Selbstbildnis im Kino onanierend” (“Self-portrait Masturbating at the Cinema”) (1980), which presented the helpless (self) criticism of painterly subjectivity as much laconically as allegorically (instead of celebrating it). But also in a funny way he finds a correspondence in a paradox of this historical art text, which namely derives the worldliness and curiosity of new savages painting from the interest in cinema repeatedly expressed by the painters questioned. That this paradox was not felt to be a paradox is stated in ironically intended, aphoristic classics of the period, such as this line from the Fehlfarben: “Ich kenne das Leben / Ich bin im Kino gewesen” (“I know life, I’ve been to the movies”). In the lyrics of the new Hamburg poets like Christoph Derschau and Kiev Stingl and pseudo hard-boiled, trenchcoat-wearing authors from Schwabing such as Jörg Fauser, the cinema was also a wild yet sentimentally atmospheric bar, whose culture of representation was somehow more true than the intensity of past trips to India and improvisational experiences.
The central, negative concept of legitimization in all punk iterations was boredom. The song “Boredom” by the Buzzcocks and the 1978 movie Brennende Langeweile (literally “Burning Boredom”, known in English as Bored Teenagers) by Wolfgang Büld with Ian Moorse and Gaye Advert from the Adverts (and the rest of their band) identified expressively what united the different factions and practices: a feeling of oppressive existential hopelessness that was headed not for catastrophe but rather for a secure yet worthless life. Already as in various Situationist statements, boredom meant something other than the absence of variation and entertainment. It was, rather, the result of too much of it. Neither the remainder of a politicized culture whose representatives had been indistinguishable from the power figures for a long time, nor the completely industrial entertainment-oriented youth and counterculture, could give one the feeling that life decisions in politics or culture would proceed other than without consequences in the production of ordinariness. The consensus of the democrats and their similarly consensual rock culture in state-owned TV programs appeared to be provoked only through consistent negation. It quickly became clear, however, that this negation of boredom could not only be expressive and dramatic, as that was exactly the mode of Rockpalast (Rock Palace)6 rock, that is: the other side. The problem of nothing happening, as seen in Büld’s film, could not be distinguished from the other problem, namely the fact that something happening is always somehow ugly.
Such a criticism of boredom could have been politically driven, as seen in the Situationists and the beginnings of the leftist (at first in the minority) punk school in the direction of Gang of Four and The Mekons, who in Germany corresponded most closely to S.Y.P.H. and Fehlfarben. This approach could, however, also take an existential and anthropological tack, as the search for the essential: representatives of this vein also soon took shape. In the ever more elaborate and artistic fanzines such as Die 80er Jahre (The ’80s) by Jürgen Kramer suddenly authors such as Heidegger and an orientation on Bataille’s anthropology and the recently fashionable Critique of Reason played an ever-greater role.
An even more central, unifying figure, due to the various subscenes, was Nietzsche: the philosopher was newly read by the French, such as Lyotard, Deleuze, and Foucault, who in an affirmative discourse and in the previously mentioned intensification also actually reconciled the formerly differing positions on intensity: even those who accused the hippies of betraying intensity, like those who wanted to obliterate the idea of intensity, could agree on the apodictic, antidemocratic, and aggressive tone that one could learn from Nietzsche. This could be learned completely independently from reading his philosophy from one or the other perspective, completely independently from any positions at all.
I have already pointed out that the varying negative references to intensity played a decisive role in the development of an implicit self-understanding of the different punk cultures – of course, implemented without explicit concepts. In fact nearly all elements of such self-understanding had come into being from the negative – and cannot be translated automatically into the affirmation of its opposite. Indeed one was not truly against everything, and one’s oppositions were not random. But it was very important not to transfer one (often very specific) negation into a position through only a simple act of applied logic. The experience that is suspected to be limited by all as tragic, stopping history in a state of negation, should be drawn out as long as possible, just for this reason. For a few individuals, as Jürgen Teipel reports at times in macabre detail in his book Verschwende Deine Jugend („Squander Your Youth“)7, this moment lasts for a very long time, to this day. However, it is a mistake to deduce from this wish that one should make the moment of negation last as an actual expression of a nihilistic stance.
Rather, the state of negation is much more a state of the greatest control possible: he who rejects everything is not responsible for anything that exists and at the same time has everything else that does not exist open to him in an endless realm of future possibilities. He must only attenuate the moment at which this future will begin. That is the reason for the unbelievable moment of stubborn persistence in all styles of punk (and other movements of negation), expressed aptly in the appropriate self-criticism “Punk makes [your] ass fat” (by, I believe, Peter Hein).
In spite of this, punks also stated what they didn’t want: they could not always remain general. And theoreticians did this, too. Visual artists, although at the time truly in the middle of the two forms of expression – privileged with contact to each – showed this more readily than stating it did. They often expunged methods that one knew and could identify only if one were on the inside of the artists’ circle or knew the artistic context. If one looked at them from the outside, one could only recognize the exactitude with which this expunging went against something, against something specific, without knowing what. That was very impressive.
Today one can once again observe a strategy of artistic production that was common at that time, the avoidance. One has two premises: 1) to deliver material with no similarities at all, no recognizability, legibility; and 2) to produce unconditionally, to produce objects that are materially at hand. What at that time was tested out as impossible subjects and combinations of themes, illegibility attempts to conquer today through formal and material strategies – as one could see, for example, in several works of the so-called new formalism, as presented in the exhibition by the same name („Formalismus“) by the Hamburger Kunstverein in 2004.
In prominent places as well, punks proclaimed above all what they did not want: “No (more) Heroes” (The Stranglers), “No Values” (Black Flag), “No Future” (Sex Pistols). Less prominently: “keine alte Bewegungen” (no old movements) (Fehlfarben), no nature (S.Y.P.H.), no political pretensions, no bourgeois. Of course, there are infinitely more statements that above and beyond these often differ greatly in status: in interviews, song lyrics (ironic), song lyrics (as a manifesto), etc. – but put together, they are very precise and can therefore be discussed in the sense that they permit the positive derivation avoided by their originators. They were, above all, also successful; that is, they were frequently copied. It is interesting that nearly all of these statements were not so clearly intended as they sound.
“No heroes”, as mentioned in The Stranglers’ song “No More Heroes”, is often considered the central punk statement. It reaches into the even more concrete rejection of “No Beatles and Stones”, to which the Clash could agree. Not only songwriters’ explanations – as in my conversation with Hugh Cornwell – but the list of questionable heroes in the song also states that this was not simply a demand, but even more an expression of regret: Leon Trotsky and Sancho Panza, whom the narrator misses in “No (more) Heroes”, were not the heroes of their historical or fictitious contexts; they were each second in line. They are already anti-heroes. Yet they have also disappeared – possibly sacrificed to the heroes, destroyed by the heroes. The chorus of “No (more) Heroes” permits an interpretation of regret as well as demand. The identification with heroes in the punk culture was for a while much stronger than in previous youth and countercultures based on music. Precisely because all possible rules and institutions of cultural production and reception, such as record companies, large concerts, hit parades, and high-tech industry, including the highly visible cult of pop stars, were called into question; figures on a human scale were established as heroes, as a last consistent unity of the culture. A few individuals became completely overtaxed representatives of a lifestyle believed to be held together by nothing material, fixed, or constant (Sid Vicious) or moral (Joe Strummer). This produced not only a disgusting culture of persecution of traitors, but also connected or contributed to the general trend of works of art becoming more defined as agents of an act.
In “No Values” Black Flag communicates a rejection of all, even leftist, values and confesses, of course, inconsequently to a value, namely to the values of anarchism, which is cleaner and without historical flaws. It could neither be held responsible for GULAGs like the historical Communists nor for bureaucracy like Social Democracy. Still the values of anarchism clearly derive from leftist antibourgeois thought. To this day punks all over the world adopt the reverence for anarchy expressed (and at times doubted) relatively elaborately by BF and others, above all by the California bands. The derivation of anarchy from the rejection of values – all values – which one can follow (under the circumstances), if one equates the normative instrumentalization of values through authorities with the values themselves, is generally clear and causes difficulties only for those individuals who want to derive an enduring practice from that. For example. Black Flag, like many others, established a company, namely the SST label, as a first step to control-free space – a classic paradox of the independent culture.
Yet aside from this often discussed problem, the pro-intensity and traitor-persecuting side of punk culture wanted, above all, an especially intimate and intense relationship with their own morality and the values on which it was based. Their sensitivity toward every possible de-intensifying medium between pure morality and behavior refers absolutely to an obsession with morality. And the types of people depicted in that manner could be nothing other than heroes. Punk history, as shown also in Teipel’s Verschwende Deine Jugend, is full of types who collapsed under this pressure or under this contradiction: organization of total negation as total terror of morality.
That punks did not want or foresee a future for themselves doesn’t really add up to the world-famous line by the Sex Pistols, “There is no future in England’s dreaming”. The decided lack of a future in the chorus “for you and me” only refers to our lack of inclusion in a monarchistically transfigured dream of England – which we actually already knew to be so. The current and binding translation of “No Future” in the everyday sociofolklore of the ’80s was: the end of utopia. Punk was the break with that – and let’s call it by its most common name – socialistic utopia. All of its early formulations, as long as they were neither cynical nor radically to the right, were cautious to describe how one could remain (radically) left, without kidding oneself. For that reason, all of us who were young at the time never understood the contortions of all of those who in 1989 for the first time said good-bye to socialism as a concrete hope – neither its value as novelty nor the panicky, hectic pace with which so many “’68ers” absolutely wanted to go to the other side (i.e., the status quo, capitalism) and believed they had to give up criticism with concrete utopia.
Thus the three German examples of negation given above make concrete applications of the common findings in German circumstances: no nature, as in “Zurück zum Beton” („Back to the Concrete“) by S.Y.P.H., was directed against the Green Party, which was just getting established. Punks also already knew at the time that nature cannot rescue us if we give up on society. Fehlfarben directed “keine alten Bewegungen” (No old movements) ambivalently at the ’68ers, but also at the rigid punks and also possibly against those who waited to join all the revivals of the rediscovered old movements of mod, ska, and many others, which started around 1980. The phrase “Was heute zählt ist Sauberkeit” („What counts today is cleanliness”), perhaps the best line in all of German punk culture, also has three interpretations that do not agree: 1) Cleanliness is the repressive norm of the Federal Republic of Germany, against which punk rebelled like earlier anti-repression youth cultures. We note this with sarcastic regret. 2) Cleanliness as individual integrity is the only chance of surviving politically / socially. Moralistic rigor remained the last possibility for staying political, if there were no prospects of organizations, recognized truths, and party lines. At the same time one sought out, of all things, the normative pressure on the individual as the medium – for which the lamented cleanliness of the continually predominant German disciplinary culture still stands. We stand in a kind of ambivalent half-solidarity with this position. 3) Cleanliness as provocation of the likewise empty antibourgeois sentiment of the punks. We are there. Because punk so often referred to its internally directed terror of morality (and its opposite, which it logically always dragged around) and to an ethic of existence as an anticlean, continually drunk, or otherwise radical person but having no external and generally valid representational (e.g., political, socialistic) reasoning for that ethic, punk needed a figure as an enemy whom one could accuse of something other than political or otherwise controversial failure, namely only individual, mistaken living: bourgeois existence and ridiculousness. An infinite number of songs agree on this. It should be about something (also political and especially moral, not to be a traitor) that at the same time could no longer be generally justified. The consequence: hate ad personam. Worse: hate toward losers as another side of hate toward traitors. This problem was also anticipated in a song by Fehlfarben: “Gottseidank nicht in England” (Thank God not in England), in which the world of a person “overtaken by reality” collapses.
Theory – see above – had departed from Marxism (or better, the German translations and their publishers had done so) at the same moment as punk had, in its own implicit way, but now the intensity of existence in an earlier sense was introduced as an antidote, in a sense that must have been recognized by discerning punks as actually hippielike. For this reason (and for many others, for which there is no room here) in the next ten years a synthesis often occurred among the lifestyles shaped by punk and aesthetics (and practices) shaped by intensity-based hippie philosophy (in the forms of industrial music, the music on the 4AD label, etc.). The visual artists had yet another material, another encoded history of negation: the negative reference to the history of the avant-garde, which did not yet exist in the memory of pop music.
In this connection there is also a consensus – the dominant artistic direction to be negated was conceptual art of the ’70s. But there was no consensus about which element or which part of conceptual art was to be negated. If there were one direction that rejected anti-sensualist or anti-retinalist intellectual aspects according to a deeply bourgeois normative ideology of immediacy, there was also another, for which Büttner, Kippenberger, and Oehlen, among others, stand. These artists attained the achievement of abstraction in concept art but did not wish to apply an aesthetic that also exhibited their intellectuality as a mode of representation; they preferred to try out the capacity of artistic work to conceptualize at the apparently most natural opposite pole to conceptual art – in painting.
The problem that presents itself in the context of this latter approach is once again one that painting shares with pop music of the punk period: the longing for a nonmedial medium, the wish to step out of the discussion of mediality and – through a kind of metaphysics of plain language – to grasp something like the artwork itself. Just as anarchism represented a value system that at the same time could be understood as the rejection of all values, media and artistic means that no longer seemed to be media at all were needed. Painting was therefore not considered the medium with which one could express oneself particularly well – it was considered to be the medium that should stand for art itself, in the most unburdened sense in contemporary discussion, and owing to its historical burden in the most encumbered sense. Only in this manner could one realize the intellectual challenge of the demystification of art in material that at first glance sensually concealed the intellectual and conceptual aspects hidden within it.
This (unstated) idea corresponds to the punk rock concept of the famous “three chords”, the simplest form of song and the most traditional musical structures, which do not distract from the essential. It was implicit in the cult of energy, intensity, and an uncorrupted sense of community. But, just as for the painters, the most conventional and most historically laden form was felt to be the most appropriate. It is of course easy to accuse such a naive antiformalism of believing in a so-to-speak reactionary manner that they could ignore the avant-garde’s knowledge of forms and media and their history and legitimacy.
That would be wrong not only because it is too easy but also because it would overlook the aesthetic discovery punk rock and a particular kind of painting made in the late ’70s and early ’80s: that one can employ and display symbols in a new way only when one allows them to function within the most conventional framework possible. The central knowledge of punk rock that, on the one hand, rock and pop music were always about attitude and behavior (cool, speech-analogous, and anti-intense) and, on the other hand, noise and energy (intense) sound freed from notes, called for a simple and recognizable form that was adopted as a support from the history of music only in order to be able to communicate its new discoveries. In painting, nonessential work corresponded to this, using all of the elements of painting considered to be essential and inherent to painting. The work with strokes and methods of application was not based on artistic and aesthetic means but, as symptoms of ways of life, was based on character, psychology, ideology, and politics. This was understood as a radicalization, not as a retraction of the realizations of concept art.
One could of course interpret this decision against advanced form as well as against medial advancement in different ways. For one, it went against the kitsch of self-satisfying skill, against the pseudo-artistry and pomposity of progressive rock, and thus against the belief in the ability to implement artistic forms in general as an untainted means of self-expression. In this respect punk rock and New Painting were also analogous formats as they wanted to accept their artistic means only as damaged or, as it was called then, as “miserable” (elend means such that they are always symptoms of their social and political genealogy, on the most molecular level, in the elements of their artistic expression). For another, there was an aesthetic of simple, democratic language: by implementing the most simple and accessible means with form and medium, one believed to have completely removed an undemocratic barrier to production as well as to reception.
As much as that held true for a certain time and the desired effects of a democratization entered, bands and labels shot up all over. Many groups that had not been allowed entry until then (including women, who were continually excluded in rock, but many musically uneducated, more conceptually oriented artists, working-class youth, and intellectuals) took up the empowering format of punk rock (and a form of painting freed from traditional barriers). In the long term, the overlooked and ignored mediality, the laws of genre, tradition took revenge. Only those who worked on it carefully in their damaged “misery” could, in the long run, keep their work immune from the revenge of the unheeded ones. In other cases, this anti-mediality provided that innumerable painters actually believed, in a reactionary sense, in painting as an unfettered and available historical medium and genre. Consequently, forms of punk rock were reshaped by raucousness and its history and were finally used by the ones who really believed in raucous screaming, experienced as an appropriate expression, and who heard in it not only a symptomatic noise of history that one can bring – paradoxically – to speak about its genesis by mobilizing it as a recognizably dead form of expression.
Related to the tradition of plain language there was also the access that the punk generation found to electronic music: synthesizers became desirable as nonhistorical or forgotten nonmedia that were simply there to serve, not, as in the hippie period, as an ideal means to producing “outrageous” or new sounds. In this respect the cheap, tonally crude Casio keyboards that set the scene were employed more functionally as metronomes. A lot of the Acid House aesthetic from 1988 referred once again to this simplicity and reduction.
But this reevaluation of the synthesizer from an elaborative to a simplifying machine, as it came to be used in work by the early Cabaret Voltaire to Plan, from Human League to DAF, brought forth a new, constructive aesthetic that (as happens so often when a new machine is available) for various reasons wanted to have nothing more to do with history – whether for good or bad futuristic reasons will not be discussed here. Electronic futurism, unlike punk, did not want to connect with history – not even through the negative contact that occurred in working off and producing the energy of noise from junk and breakage, which, however, became fruitful through analysis and insights due to the historicity of the material in punk rock. The great treatments of soul (Dexys Midnight Runners, Scritti Politti – or ska or reggae in the punk generation) were to thank for punk’s sensibility toward the historical – aesthetics built on failure and loss, to which early ’80s synth-pop liked to refer.
Indeed the rededication of the synthesizer into a simple and accessible medium and into something that should primarily serve the production of social energy (and not artistic form) also had a parallel in the German visual arts – in the work of all the artists interested in media art at that time who were still students at the academies, who freed work on and with video and other emerging electronic media from the roles of self-searching introspection, social documentary, or visual novelty. Similar to the means of punk rock and synth-punk, they wanted to employ it in the production of situations and actions. In Hamburg at the time, artist groups such as M. Raskin Stichting Ens. or Minus Delta t, derived attempts at media art (and also many ideas that later became fruitful in Net art as well) from a punk-specific low regard for the autonomy of media. In a dialectic manner they always found the ideal new medium in that which pushed its mediality in front of its perceptibility and ability to mobilize social energy. With the same right (and with a friendly nod to Walter Benjamin) one can attribute exactly this effect to the old, outmoded medium.
Intensities will continue to be mobilized against representations. And one will always ask oneself what one should mobilize against the representation of intensity. This will then remain one good reason to interrupt intensity; the second reason is that the friends of asociality repeatedly land on the right if the context of the left has used itself up socially. These interruptions, reconstructions, and transgressions of parallel projects of emancipation and critique of representation that are mutually friendly only in a limited manner have found in punk a historical focus, a counterpoint to which one can well describe their legitimacy. Punk’s explosive nature exists in that punk – under other, vastly depoliticized contextual conditions – still represents the image of the greatest power that acts of radical cultural self-empowerment could seize in recent decades – and the dangers of this power.
- Jean-François Lyotard, Intensitäten, Berlin: Merve, 1978. ↩︎
- Jean-François Lyotard, „Bemerkungen über die Wiederkehr des Kapitals,“ in Intensitäten, Berlin, Germany: Merve, 1978, 32. ↩︎
- The Düsseldorf bands’ relationship to the visual arts represents a complicated exception: Carmen Knoebel, the owner of the influential label Pure Freude (Pure Joy) and for a time owner of Ratinger Hof, had a close relationship to the visual arts as the wife of Imi Knoebel, considered to be of an earlier artist generation. The painter Markus Oehlen played drums for the most important German band at the time, Mittagspause, but soon moved to Hamburg. It was not until that time that he decided to work primarily as a visual artist. Moritz Reichelt (Moritz Rrrr) of Plan was and is a visual artist but did not belong to the controversial trend of New Painting at the time, rather he owed his ironical style to the Gruppe Normal and Milan Kunc, who were rather singular phenomena. ↩︎
- „Facharbeiterficken,“ in: Markus Oehlen, Ina Barfuß, Werner Büttner, Georg Herold, Albert Oehlen, Thomas Wachweger, Martin Kippenberger, Über sieben Brücken mußt Du gehen – mußten wir auch, Stuttgart, Germany: Galerie Max Hetzler, 1982. ↩︎
- Alfred Nemeczek, „Malerei ’81. Die Sache mit den Wilden,“ in art (Germany), October 1981. ↩︎
- Rockpalast, which exclusively featured live performances, was a very popular TV program in the ’70s. Bands like Little Feat and The Who appeared frequently, but punk was excluded because of its lack of technical skill. ↩︎
- A kind of oral history of German punk history. Jürgen Teipel, Verschwende Deine Jugend, Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 2003. ↩︎