The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition on fashion, Punk: Chaos to Couture, raises a basic
question about the modus operandi under which the MET and other museums
operate: is the museum a place to contemplate or to be titillated?
For contemplation of the influence of the punk style on high
fashion is impossible in this installation, which unfolds as a noisy maze of
blinking lights set to an aural wall of the crude clashes and pulsations of
punk rock. Each room seems like a different movie version of not a punk
gathering, but a psychedelic party of the 1960s. Viewers parade down narrow
passageways which turn back on themselves and see dress after dress hanging on
mannequins with overblown punk-like wigs that look more like dust mops teased
into a chaotic but freestanding mess. The display of fashion wear is broken up
with large screen videos of punk-looking men playing musical instruments. I can only assume they are former punk rock
stars.
Because the display rooms are narrow and unidirectional, the
light pulsations so incessant and the walls all textured or covered with
imagery, walking through the exhibit seems like a trip through an elaborate
“fright night” at an amusement park. Instead of a new ghost or goblin suddenly
appearing, it’s a new but still raucous beat or a new combination of bright
colors. If you like the music, it’s an
easy five to twenty minutes of floating among phenomena of a former youth
culture.
But it was impossible to study that youth culture, or that
culture’s effect on designers of expensive clothes for rich folk. The best you could get was a sensation or two
before your sensations were numbed by the totality of sensations coming at you
at one time.
The exhibit will attract the fan of amusement parks like
Universal Studios or Epcot Center, but what does it have to do with the mission
of the museum or even that of its notable costume department? That mission, by the way, is “to collect, preserve, study, exhibit, and stimulate
appreciation for and advance knowledge of works of art that collectively
represent the broadest spectrum of human achievement at the highest level of
quality, all in the service of the public and in accordance with the highest
professional standards.”
While the Punk: Chaos to Couture
exhibition collects and preserves period costume (which may or may not
represent “human achievement at the highest level of quality”), it does not
give us any way to appreciate it except through crude titillation. What small nuggets of knowledge found in the
exhibition, such as the influence of graffiti or of the “do-it-yourself” aesthetic,
are completely overwhelmed by the sensory overload.
This exhibit could mark another watershed in the dumbing
down of America. It’s one thing for both the history and the science museums in
a provincial capital such as Pittsburgh to focus on sports. It’s quite another
for the flagship museum of the cultural center of the United States, if not the
world, to create an exhibition in which it is impossible to engage with the
artifacts on display in any intellectual or even any sensual way. (I can only
wonder what the Roman poet Horace would have said; he was the one who
postulated that all great art must educate as well as amuse.)
We have not even considered the question of cost. To erect
this collection entailed far more than arranging bricolage in displays and
hanging clothes on mannequins. The textured walls, music rights, over-teased
wigs and elaborate AV and acoustical system must have driven up costs. But then
again, the MET enjoyed the sponsorship of a fashion design house and a major
publisher.
What is so interesting about the exhibit is that it’s as
false as the fashion it portrays. The
punk mentality was one of crude, do-it-yourself grunginess. Yet fashion
designers imitated it to produce expensive goods for a very exclusive clientele
that basically lived in luxury, so that punk haute couture is really a form of
slumming, a favored pastime of the ruling elite for millennia. In a similar
way, the elaborate walls and halls of the Punk:
Chaos to Couture exhibition are meant to bring the punk mentality alive.
Instead they come off as a homogenized scrubbing away of the grit and with it
the meaning behind the grit, leaving behind a few empty gestures—style without
substance.
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