In All Our Decadence People Die
Sun, 10 Mar 2013
I managed to get hold of a copy of the catalogue for the In All Our Decadence People Die exhibition of Crass-relatated materials. The exhibition ran between 30th September and 20th October 2011 at the Boo-Hooray gallery in New York and featured original Crass artwork as well as a selection of the 3,000 or so fanzines the band collected between 1976 and 1984. Many of the fanzines were given to members of Crass at gigs, others were sent to them from around the world. Amazingly, they were kept safe all these years by ex-members of the band at Dial House in Essex.
I've had a long-time interest in so-called 'punk art' and I think it's good to see it being recognised in exhibitions such as this, and last year's Some Day All The Adults Will Die. Punk's strong visual (anti-)aesthetic was as important as the music and adopted the same Do It Yourself attitude. Like the music, some of it was brilliant and some was rubbish. Punk was always both beautiful and ugly, angry and peaceful, often cheap, yet at times very polished. This catalogue demonstrates all these contradictions - from the sophisticated gouache paintings and cut-up collages of Gee Vaucher, to the anonymous Letraset and hand written flyers and posters, and the nasty tabloid-esque shockers of the publication Class War. Some of the work included in the exhibition was most definitely in the realm of 'art', some is certainly not. Ultimately, though, this is not the point, every page says something.
I've taken some pictures of the catalogue and uploaded the to my Flickr page. If you want a copy of the book yourself then it is currently in its 3rd edition and available from Boo-Hooray for a reasonable $40 plus postage. It contains over 100 illustrations and is in a large 11" x 17" format.
