The Milk Gallery
450 West Fifteenth Street
New York, NY 10011
23 January 2008 - 3 February 2008
Preview and Performance: Thursday 24 January 2008, 7-10 pm
As a young man from Northern England in the mid 1970's, I was blissfully in love with David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. On the night of September 13th 1976 I saw a Sex Pistols concert at Quaintways in Chester. My life was never to be the same. I was one of only about 400 Punks in England in 1976. By summer of 1977 Punk was over. That same summer I first visited New York City and saw the subway cars decorated with huge vibrant letters; TAKI 183, SUPER COOL 223 and many more graffiti tags.
This series of paintings is a clash of two rebellious cultures that heavily influenced me as teenager from the 70's, PUNK from London and New York SUBWAY GRAFFITI.
"I am an antichrist
I am an anarchist
Don't know what I want but
I know how to get it
I wanna DESTROY the passer by... "
- The Sex Pistols
These words are tagged in bright colors on the canvas as if taken off the side of subway carriages. Silk screened over the top of the graffiti words in glossy black enamel, are images culled from the Punk era. i.e. Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, the politically naive, riots, and sexually explicit photographs and illustrations.
"Basically when I look around I see us living in a modern day Babylon, full of temptation, sin, distraction, corruption, injustice, and misguided fools being mentally enslaved. It seems to me the only way to wake people up from this kind of numbness is to destroy what they know: Their business, their places of commerce and their biggest place of gathering, the Cities! Put it on their trains, on the lines they take to work, on their rooftops, on their highways, on anything just to make people realize that culture isn't lost and that at the very least, a small group of kids is fighting to keep it alive... "
- Norman Mailer
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