Punk is back, as part of Neville Brody's Anti Design Festival. Kate Weir celebrates.
Artists nowadays court anarchy by displaying dead animals or lacing their palette with bodily fluids, but this is mere window dressing compared to the French collective Bazooka, a woefully overlooked group of '70s graphic designers and artists whose work came hot on the heels of France’s most turbulent period. As art directors of leftist newspaper Liberation, Bazooka screamed with a proto-punk sensibility and infuriated readers through their direct contact with the Baader Meinhof gang. Perhaps terrorist groups aren’t the best endorsement, but with Bazooka’s rigid work ethic (their ‘factory’ had set working hours, and produced album covers and Swatch collaborations as well as art) and fanatical dedication to graphic art, alongside a desire to visually distil the political torpor of the time, you can see where their latitudes and longitudes collide.
With such a colourful CV, it’s fitting that Bazooka members Kiki and Loulou Picasso, working with Stuart Semple and Neville Brody, have their first show in England as part of the Anti Design Festival at Aubin Gallery, using work selected from their extensive archive and a series of new works entitled Decoration Kit for a Disturbed Teenager.
Bazooka’s work is a mix of painting and collage, echoing Barbara Kruger’s brash slogan work and Sigmar Polke’s media obsessed assemblages, but seen through a kaleidoscopic filter and finished with the look of pseudo-pulp novels. Most of the work is in the form of zines in lurid colours, aping the cheap printing process – or comic book-style drawings garish enough to look like a spiteful Lichtenstein. The most striking pieces in the show are the larger pieces such as Rideau+Studio+Cagoule and Bulles+Vaissale-Robot, which mix a cool palette of sophisticated child portraiture (similar to Sarah Joncas’ work) with frenetic neon scenes of retro-futurist chaos.
It’s easy to draw parallels between Semple’s work and Bazooka's: Semple has also forged a career out of hard graft and controversy, whilst his technicolour work has prompted comments like, “if you cut Semple he bleeds a rainbow”. Semple has also espoused pop art as a valuable method of communication, a form which speaks to the culture-saturated market of today, mingling the language of fine art with the nomenclature of music, TV and film. Bazooka hail from a time when art was still seen as a radical force, so it's unsurprising that the two have joined forces.
In bringing Bazooka out from the liminal, Semple and Brody have not only resurrected an astounding time capsule of punk spirit, but they've also created an exhibition which revitalises the memory of pop art, so often used as a staid go-to for galleries chasing money-spinning shows. Let’s hope there’s more to come and, this reviewer hopes, another gorgeous Swatch series...please?
Bazooka is at Aubin Gallery until 3rd October 2010.
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