Observer article highlights Met’s embarrassing punk flaws
I’m quoted in today’s article in UK Sunday newspaper The Observer about the factual failings surrounding the punk clothing collection of the New York Metropolitan Museum Of Art’s Costume Institute.
These are given added urgency by the fact that the Institute will be drawing on the collection for this spring’s prestigious exhibition Punk: Chaos To Couture.
During his announcement of the show to the world’s press last week, Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton asserted that the eminent British artist Allen Jones was arrested on the grounds of obscenity for wearing Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s notorious Naked Cowboys design in public in the mid-70s. Not so, as confirmed by hundreds of readily available sources, not least Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming and my own book The Look. These make clear it was in fact SEX assistant Alan Jones, who is a regular face these days in punk documentaries.
In isolation this is an embarrassing howler, but when set in context of the multiple errors on the Met’s own website of dating, mis-attribution to the detriment of McLaren’s contribution to his partnership with Westwood and the apparent presence of fake garments, this signifies a humiliating lack of rigour when assessing an increasingly acknowledged area of significance in terms of academic and cultural interest.
This was underlined not only by Bolton’s foregrounding of key punk designs during his presentation, but also by their presence at the very core of this hugely ballyhoo-ed new show.
In the Met collection, for example, the T-shirt design bearing Vivienne Westwood’s rant against Jubilee, the punk art-movie directed by the late Derek ‘Jarmon’ (sic), is dated to 1976. This places it two years before the film came out: shooting of Jubilee did not even begin until well into 1977 and it was not released until 1978.
View examples of the Met’s punk clothing collection here.
See Andrew Bolton’s presentation here.
View Alan Jones – these days a specialist horror film writer – talking about the late Malcolm McLaren here.
Read Edward Helmore’s article on Punk: Chaos To Couture here.