Punk Bunny II
Muslin, silk, label, needle & thread
112 x 9.5 x 92 cms
1997
A framed muslin punk shirt with the Artist’s signature across the front and a silk label reading ‘Gavin Turk 1997’, Punk Bunny I is a homage to the rebellious DIY spirit of punk, the artist's signature is taken off the canvas and onto torn piece of fabric artfully customised with the aid of zips into a shirt. An exemplary piece of DIY couture, this shirt no less a uniform than a military jacket. But is the shirt now art? Or is the artist now a punk? Or is has this shirt, like everything else these days, been commodified and, in its commodification, relegated both punk and art to the realm of the souvenir?
Essays
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Sid Vicious - Jon Savage
SHOW
Sid Vicious - Jon Savage
In every generation there are the brave ones: the artists, stylists, intellectuals, the street kids who heedlessly launch themselves into the future, who refuse to be trapped by what is known. Within this small group, there is always a figure who doesn’t necessarily produce very much, if anything at all, but whose whole presence defines his or her time and place.
Their every gesture, captured in a photograph or on film, appears to sum up the spirit of an era. In the late 1920’s – the era of the Bright Young Things – it was androgynous socialite Stephen Tennant. In the Warhol Factory it was the elfin, amphetamined Edie Sedgwick, who danced the high wire with consummate grace. In British Punk, it was Sid Vicious.
Sid could have been the front man of the Sex Pistols – and eventually was. He was one of the four Johns – Lydon, Wardle, Beverley and Grey: herberts all from North and East London - who crashed down the Kings Road during 1975, sneering at everything in sight. When McLaren decided to hold an audition for the fledgling “Sex” group, Sid was absent. His friend John Lydon got the call.
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Punk - Jon Savage
SHOW
Punk - Jon Savage
In Gavin Turk’s “Pop”, the artist is cast as Sid Vicious via Warhol’s “Elvis”. While Warhol sourced a still from the 1960 film “Flaming Star” for his silk-screened multiples, Turk reproduces Sid’s most iconic moment: the filmed performance of “My Way”, where the junk-sodden singer in a destroyed white dinner jacket shoots the audience in a climactic spasm of disgust.
Both sources are high Pop. Warhol’s images in their various forms: doubled, tripled, colour, black and white are prime exam-ples of Pop Art, while Sid Vicious’ punk de/construction of the narcissistic night-club standard was a Top Ten hit for the Sex Pistols in summer 1978. But they uncover a level of violence and hostility in pop culture that only the bravest seek to explore.
Before the style went national, London Punk was a British version of Andy Warhol’s high Sixties Factory. Many of the musicians and fans were Velvet Underground obsessives who had followed Lou Reed through 1970’s hits like “Walk On The Wild Side” into his later, more self-destructive “Rock’n Roll Animal” incarnation: pure punk with his plastic clothes, dark shades, and A-head jaw-line.
There was the same self-reinvention into cartoon pseudonyms Siouxsie Sue, Soo Catwoman,