Shunning typical music-industry practices like putting a photo of the band on an album cover, he developed a ransom-note typography for Sex Pistols posters that became popular for punk groups in general. To design the band’s graphic brand, McLaren hired the artist Jamie Reid, who took cues from the French Situationist International group, which emphasized social critique. With their anarchic worldview and ragged look, they quickly became famous and almost immediately inspired numerous other acts. They were theatrically shocking, once spewing profanities on national television. “There was no precedent for them,” Blauvelt says of the group’s musicians. In 1975, McLaren was instrumental in forming the quintessential, if short-lived, punk band the Sex Pistols, recruiting its legendary lead singer, Johnny Rotten, and serving as its manager.
punk magazine existing from 1977 to 1980. Before music, Patti Smith’s primary interests were poetry and drawing. The Talking Heads met as students at Rhode Island School of Design.
Punk groups wanted to revive the original rough-and-tumble sounds of the 1950s and ’60s.Ī lot of punk musicians had art backgrounds. The music was, in part, a reaction to the commercialization of rock and roll by the record industry: long concept albums, grandiose guitar solos, a lot of postproduction work, rock operas. The songs were quick, the sound raw, and the lyrics reflected a suspicion of authority, anticapitalism and anti-consumerism. “Your passion counted more than your chord changes,” Blauvelt notes. The bands typically didn’t have formal music training. The Talking Heads formed around the same time, playing dive clubs on the Lower East Side. Patti Smith was the first punk artist to be signed to a major label, Arista Records. Purists claim it started in 1975 in New York and quickly moved to London, where it exploded. Music historians debate about exactly when and where punk started. The show includes a vibrant array of buttons for bands like the Clash and Blondie. Young designers, often people without formal training, were part of the scene, and they had complete freedom to create a new visual language.” This new language was characterized by rough, DIY collages - often in screaming colors - as well as appropriation and shocking subversion of existing images. “It was what people saw before they listened to an album or went to a show. “Graphic design gave punk its identity,” says Andrew Blauvelt, director of the Cranbrook Art Museum and MAD curator at large for design, who curated the exhibition. In album covers, posters, flyers, zines and the like, young artists, some of whom later became famous, used inventive techniques to capture the movement’s youthful riotousness. “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976–1986,” at New York City’s Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), is the first exhibition to look at the role of graphic design in defining punk, as well as post-punk, the expansive movement that succeeded it. From its inception, punk was deeply intertwined with art and fashion, as well as music. But music was only one part of this 1970s movement, which was defined by youth, rough and fast-paced sounds and antiauthoritarian, anti-commercial attitudes. The Sex Pistols, the Ramones, the Cramps, the Clash - bands like these are synonymous with punk. Top: Installation view of the exhibit (photo by Jenna Bascom). Above: Arturo Vega designed this 1975 poster for the Ramones (image courtesy of Howl! Happening/The Arturo Vega Foundation). May 19, 2019The exhibition “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976–1986,” at New York’s Museum of Art and Design, examines the role of graphic design in punk.
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