‘Destructive Urges’: Sensorial Excess in Punk Art between New York and London, 1969-1978

Abstract

This thesis focuses on sensorial excess in Anglo-American Punk art, understood here as a postmodernist art sensibility that developed in the 1970s in connection with the Punk subculture. It contends that Punk art serves as a minor figure in the history of avant-garde art produced in New York and London in the 1970s. Placing emphasis on the overwhelming, intense and threatening sensory experiences of several examples of Punk art made by artists in New York and London, it examines how artists use excessive sensation in their work to threaten the established boundaries between the body of the viewer, the artwork, and their environment, thereby destabilising the order of the space and creating the potential for new relations or connections to be produced. In this way, the focus on a threatening sensorial excess aligns with Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the disruptive strategy of the minor mode, which they argue is expressed in the intensive and affective qualities of art to push beyond representation towards its limits and to excess so as to recalibrate social and political ideals. Punk art’s minor poetics is thereby performed through its sensorial excess and this sensory focus aims to offer a new way of approaching Punk’s aesthetics of disobedience. Ultimately, the thesis argues for Punk’s art historical significance as a radical, visceral and vital artistic moment. Across the chapters laid out in this thesis, I identify three case studies of artists working at the margins of the Punk and art scenes in New York and London: Alan Vega (1938-2016) in New York; the art group COUM Transmissions (1969-1976) in London; and Derek Jarman (1942-1994) in London. Through extensive archival work in both public and private archives, I trace these artists’ disobedient entanglements in their local Punk and art scenes and study artworks that they made during this time. Focusing on the visceral and multisensory “destructive urges” of their aesthetic, I examine how the artworks discussed in each case study are politically affective and I consider the socio-political motivations of their creative praxis. In the first chapter, I analyse Vega’s formation of Punk band Suicide in 1970 alongside his art practice. Pushing against the conventional narrative of New York Punk’s origins, I locate an earlier Punk sensibility in his involvement in the Downtown alternative arts scene beginning in 1969—one that is driven by his political consciousness and anti-Vietnam War stance. In the second chapter, I focus on COUM Transmissions’ antagonistic association with the Punk scene and examine the visceral sensoriality of their multidisciplinary art practice. I use the concept of noise to examine threatening sensorial excess in their work and engage with queer feminist ethico-political theories of noise to assert a queer feminist reading of COUM Transmissions’ Punk art praxis. Finally, in the third chapter I demonstrate how Derek Jarman’s satirical film Jubilee (1978) offers a contemporaneous critical engagement with the London Punk scene and also envisages a queer mode of Punk that emerges from the ruins of the film’s apocalyptic future metropolis. These case studies have been chosen because of their minor positions within Punk, which probe at existing narratives to expand the definitions of Punk art. By reading for the pleasures and pains that occur beyond the visual in tactile, aural, haptic, and other sensory interactions with Punk art, this thesis argues that Punk art’s disruptive impulse can be found in its excessive, threatening sensoriality.