Thursday, June 12, 2008

An Hour Inside the Museum

Last Thursday was the monthly open admissions day at the Berkeley Art Museum. A show of Bruce Conner's photographs of Mabuhay Gardens Punk scene had just opened. So three blocks up Bancroft I went shortly after mid-day. The town has that refreshed feeling in June. The multitudes of students have cleared out and all the trees are abundantly in leaf.
Down through the sculpture garden, I came around to the back entrance. This was the way to glimpse the cool photo show in the hallway by the theater. Vivid images from the 1968 Paris student uprising by Serge Hambourg were on exhibit. As I moved by they reached out with a pang for what might have been.

On the main floor everything seemed visible the minute I walked in. Ropes had been strung like nets in the open space between the oddly obtruding floors of the cavernous museum. I could hear idiosyncratic sounds and music in the margins of awareness. There were Matrix series greatest hits and quirky MFA pieces on the floor below; on this level, there were satellite photo blow-ups and a billboard covered in reproductions of early punk rock fliers from San Francisco.

Loosely on assignment for Search and Destroy magazine, Conner photographed the larval Punk movement at the Fab Mab in 1978. When I moved here in January of 1979, not only was the Mab going, but new venues had come on. One of them was the Temple Beautiful in a ruined synagogue next door to the former Peoples' Temple. The Clash played their second ever concert in the U.S. at the Temple unadvertised. I had seen them at their first concert the night before in the Berkeley Civic Auditorium. It was a pure and wholesome adrenaline rush and a call to dig what the new breed said. I listened to it all and took part with my own band and my own zine.
The ethos was do it yourself, to try to subvert the culture markets.
This was just after the Peoples' Temple suicide-massacre in Guyana, and right after the mayor and beloved supervisor had been shot in City Hall as well. I had no foreknowledge of the SF scene, the bands had been under the radar in the NYC-Boston Punk world I had experienced. But San Francisco was Punk. It had a stylish, underground, home-grown Punk culture. San Francisco was Punk in the same way it was Noir. It was a culture that was nervous and disillusioned, but whose spirit of resistance was unbreakable. After I got my own place in SF later that year, I voted for Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys for mayor. This was miles ahead of the East Coast Punks.

On my way up, I passed a gallery where diffuse black and white film images drifted across a large grid of LED lights. It suggested a drive-in theater for machines. This was Jim Campbell's "Home Movies". It was the same lineage of altered-state-of-conscious-inducing art as Bruce Conner's own film and optical illusion experiments.

But this show of Conner's work was straight-on black and white photography. It is the subjects of the photographs who provide the phantasmic effects. The fact that these Punk bands are generally in such frantic motion itself does lead to several striking optical effects, captured on the very high speed film he used in the dark club. One entitled "Suspended Animation" shows a beer bottle upright in mid-air while globes of beer orbit around it and a few nearby subterraneans don't even notice.
After thirty years the images of German-Expression-esque De Detroit biting her nails or wrapped in mummy tape writhing on stage, or of the death-defying exhibitionism of Roz still make a feral kind of sense. Conner's action-capture style, and the obscurity of the musicians, tend to make into anonymous archetypes, hieroglyphs of Punk.
Punk may have been that last Bohemian type that escaped instant commercialization. After the Beat movement in 1957, the Psychedelic movement in 1967, came the Punk movement in 1977. After that youth movements were too quickly defined by the identity-marketing media for an underground type to gestate for long.
The movement and the early SF scene could be the subject of a long memoir. I expect to write more about it in the future. But just then I moved on from this gallery, and passed by two middle-aged moms. They looked interested but confused by these images of neurotic youth, unleashed in outrageous attire. I remarked "We knew how to have fun in those days."

Appropriately, the next gallery up was a hall of Buddhas with representations from distant lands of the human realization of peace .

The visit continues after a pause.

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