If you are going to have an art show on the subject of punk rock, an industrial warehouse in Downtown Los Angeles is a load better than a westside art gallery to make the thing work. And a poster for a Bad Brains gig stripped from a New York Subway Wall and framed for the show greeting you at the door is a stamp of authenticity that the “smart set” of art world thinkers would never think of.
Curating a melange of “art names” as formally diverse as Raymond Pettibon, Thaddeus Strode and Shark Toof with his own work, recent selections from a decidedly fine art photography series of gas stations by Nicole Panter (to explain her credentials here would be to blur the line between initiate and tourist too much) and the “back in the day” photography of Monk Rock, the legendary roadie for Social Distortion, Shanty ditched the art world pretense and allowed the objects to deliver a layered encounter with memory and iconography, literally curating an actual distortion of the social.
Shanty’s own wry paintings recreate punk rock fliers, a hallmark of “having been there”, as stenciled pop art, updating and degrading the genre to ensure that punk’s impulsive contrarian exorcism of purity marches on.
Ever the punk rock nerd I had to strut my encyclopedic recollection of the subculture by pointing out that one of the flyers he had reconstituted as a painting was for a Misfits gig that never took place, as the scheduled venue, Mendiola’s Ballroom, had cancelled all shows with punk bands because of a November 1982 riot. Buck knew quite a bit about those events and there is nothing sappier than two guys with headlights near the half-century mark cruising down memory lane. Fortunately, Buck’s daughter came by to show off her cocktail waitress attire:
Ah, ya gotta love the costumes. Monk and Shanty have aged well, so far avoiding the inevitable mortal lottery that has already taken two original members of S.D. and by the point the opening was filling up, the DeeJay was balancing Brian Eno with the Buzzcocks and the paranoia that there might be people with very old scores to settle started to vibrate. Or perhaps in my old age it was just the low blood sugar calling. It was a great trip to see an attitude, an aesthetic and an era that just won’t die all composed as art wihtout capitualting “art world”. The whole affair rhetorically looked Johnny Thunders in the long-gone eyes and debunked his claim that you can’t put your arms around a memory – you can indeed, especially if you have $500 for one Shanty’s punk-pop anti-masterpieces.
The abandoned industrial gutters of east Downtown are almost unchanged from the pre-Madonna days and nights of beer and cocaine fueled rages into nihilistic oblivion. The drug of choice for lots of us now just happens to be red bull or what Starbux is pushing. But the night is young and seeing Punk resonate yet again with unselfconscious strength inspires me to take the girlfriend out to a nice dinner of all things – how’s that nihilistic urge to scream in an embrace of the ugly? Or it may just have been the damn low blood sugar. Church and State seats us at the bar and sells me a $13 cocktail for her.
I don’t know if I could have kicked the old sauce all those years ago if my world had been as elegant and seductive and (based on her description of the exquisite beverage) beautiful as the bars today. Admiral Ackbar murmurs “It’s a trap” and Garland Jeffries snarls something about running “Wild in the Streets” and we dine but don’t dash as we are not tickled with temptation to taunt the police state Jello predicted thirty years ago.
Walking to the car we pass the old LACE building, the intersection of the punk scene’s most aesthetic and the art world’s least stuffy. You’d call it an edge at one point, but LACE turned into the great art world swindle on its way to Hollywood and the shell of a building does not even house ghosts who can’t get a Getty grant anymore. At the brick and asphalt enclave of Buck Shanty’s one night of punk art, emptiness is the last worry, as the genuine is still the enemy of the self-inflated and a fossil doesn’t need a grant or even permission to be a work of art, on the wall or looking in the mirror, satisfied.
