Photo by Ashley Inguanta
these crass unpleasant guys who could barely play their
instruments. It was an experiment that worked. Looking
back, it feels like Donald Trump could be the Sex Pistol’s
political spirit animal.
The band was McLaren’s spectacle. Johnny Lydon was
their leader. He is an intelligent man who like his band
mates was an agitator. Now they are all household names.
Robert Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic was published
in
, the same year as Guy Debord’s Society of the
Spectacle. I can’t find any evidence that Smithson was
After our listening session he told me that he was surprised by how much of it was very funny, and more intelligent than he imagined, and of course a lot of it was not
very thoughtful, and self-conscious, but that’s what you
get in a democracy and with a democratic art form.
The lineage of the movements that I’ve mentioned is a
DIY mindset. Being an outsider can become an advantage,
instead of an obstacle. It’s interesting how many of these
artists and musicians have become consummate insiders.
While the term “think out side the box” has become over-
The idea was that you can feed the
world anything, and they will bite if it’s
presented right.
aware of Debord or visa versa. Smithson died in a plane
crash in while looking for a spot to place his art. Debord
ended his own life in
.
In the early ’s when I was a young man, my father who
was around
at the time, asked me to sit down with him
and play punk rock on my turntable for him, and to explain why I thought it was or wasn’t important. I ended
up playing punk rock, no wave, post punk, and some new
wave for him. I don’t remember exactly what I told him,
but a consistent theme was the DIY attitude. A lot of these
musicians could barely play, some were virtuosos, and a
lot were somewhere in between, the idea was anyone can
be in a band.
Orlando’s Art Scene
used and meaningless, read about those who really did
venture beyond convention. Use them as inspiration, but
don’t play follow the leader. I see so many artists putting
limitations on their art, because of assumptions about the
art market, or projections of the general public’s perception.
If Smithson had not died in his ’s I’m not sure what
direction he would have taken, but I get the feeling that he
would not have felt constricted by the dogma of a movement that he helped form. I think he had too many questions for the world to just settle for one answer.
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