Punk Is Dead by Richard Cabut

Author:Richard Cabut [Cabut, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78535-347-5
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2017-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

When I was at school, on certain afternoons we all had to do what was called Labour — weeding, sweeping, sawing logs for the boiler-room, that sort of thing; but if you had a chit from Matron you were let off to spend the afternoon messing about in the Art Room. Labour or Art. And you’ve got a chit for life?

This, I suspect, is how these guerrilla artists saw themselves: unruly kids running amok in the nursery of modern art — with a chit for life.

Bazooka’s group ethos placed them squarely in the avant-garde tradition: ‘All hail the graphic arts dictatorship,’ trumpeted one of their most infamous slogans, reflecting a marked penchant for Suprematism (Lissitzky), Constructivism (Rodchenko) and totalitarian propaganda. They also functioned like a rock band, of course, wielding Rotring pens and paintbrushes in lieu of guitars. Their communal modus operandi was even carried into their living arrangements. Most of the members dwelt poetically, sharing a series of large Parisian apartments which were part Warholian Factory, part Bauhaus-style powerhouse. Fuelled by drugs, they worked night and day while musicians drifted in and out. Once described as the Parisian Edie Sedgwick, Dominique Fury embodied the restless creative spirit of this milieu. After leaving L.U.V. — a shadowy all-girl punk band — she moved in with the rest of the gang, having been attracted by the ‘sheer intensity of their production,’ and soon found herself embroiled in a convoluted ménage à trois with two Bazookas of either gender (Olivia Clavel and Loulou Picasso). There is a stunning picture showing her flanked by Kenny Morris and John McKay of Siouxsie and the Banshees sporting T-shirts she had just produced. Speed and acid led to Bazooka’s Stakhanovist output, ranging from countless record sleeves to the opening credits of TV programmes via an issue of NME. The switch to heroin soon slowed them down, heralding the group’s demise in 1980.

If Bazooka are remembered in Britain for designing the cover of Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces (1979), they first shot to infamy during the summer of 1977 when they were invited to (dis)grace the pages of Libération. The self-styled ‘graphic commando’ mounted a series of nocturnal art attacks, over a six-month period, adding increasingly provocative artwork, slogans and comments on every inch of space available. Sometimes they even went as far as doctoring the content of articles or changing the layout. This was usually done at the eleventh hour — just before the daily paper went to press — so that nobody could foil their subversive plans. Environmentalists, who embodied the hippy lifestyle, were obvious targets (vide Métal Urbain’s ‘E202’). An anti-nuclear militant who had just been killed during a demonstration, thereby achieving instant martyrdom in the eyes of the paper’s core constituency, was branded a ‘dead tosser’ by Kiki Picasso. The following year, Loulou Picasso would celebrate the Amoco Cadiz oil spill, off the coast of Brittany, with images and texts (‘Smother my body in petrol’) that seemed to anticipate Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015). Bazooka were a Burroughsian virus — the poison in the media machine.

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