OFF: Destroy! exhibition

[Andy Gilham]

I was in the vicinity of the Festival Hall (London) this morning so I
stopped in to see the (free) exhibition of punk artwork.  Interesting,
worth a visit if you're in the area (but probably not worth a special
trip).  List relevance is the presence of Barney Bubbles' artwork for Ian
Dury and Elvis Costello (I hadn't realised _Armed Forces_ came in a
fold-out sleeve a la _ISOS_), next to Jamie Reid's more famous stuff; but
overall I thought it suffered from not really having any structure or
contextualisation.  You'd be looking at some Factory stuff, then some X-Ray
Spex, then for no reason at all some bollocks like Haysi Fantayzee ("John
Wayne is Big Leggy").  And while it's obvious that (e.g.) some of the
Siouxsie sleeves owed a debt to Mondrian, it would have been good to see,
for instance, some Dada or Futurist stuff to illustrate those influences on
other pieces.

And an awful lot of the stuff was just crap.  And several of the sleeves
are also in my record collection (and in better nick too! :).

The only bit of contextualisation on offer was a montage of pre-punk record
sleeves to show what they were rebelling against - one was _Some Enchanted
Evening_ - and I half-expected to see one of Barney's Hawkwind sleeves
there too, which would have been ironic (but thankfully no!).  In fact it
would have been illuminating to have put, say _ISOS_ next to the Costello
sleeve to show that there was actaully some continuity between pre- and
post-punk, but that would have been against the thesis of the show (such as
it was).  And _25 Years On_ (one of Barney's, yes, though not typical of
his HW work?) would have been one of the best pieces in the show, had it
been included (and it would have been very relevant for obvious reasons).

Mustn't grumble, it *was* free, but it could have been really interesting
done properly.  Still, it was a real time-warp for me, though, like
browsing in Andy's Records back in '79...

-Andy

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