Sunday, October 22, 2023, 6:30-8pm (BST). Please check your own time zone.

The International Society for the Study of Surrealism is delighted to present this Fall 2023 Book Launch of Punk Art History. Marie Arleth Skov will present her research, highlighting the many links between punks and surrealists. There will be pearl teeth, shaved crowns, lacquer & leather, and, of course, Sex Pistols. There will also be plenty of time for the audience to ask questions and discuss.

While the links between Dada and punk have often been emphasized (and rightfully so), Skov’s analysis shows the significance of surrealist ideas and aesthetics in the punk movement of the 1970s-1980s. Both Surrealism and punk moved between poetry, politics and pain, both revered in sexuality, dreams and violence, both engaged with absurd humor, madness, exorbitance and kitsch. We can also observe a chain of personage from Surrealists to Situationists to ex-Situationists to punks, with the artists group CoBrA playing a key role in Denmark and the Netherlands in particular. King Mob as well as Ben Morea and the Motherf*ckers will appear too.

Dada and Dystopia. Feminism and Futurism. Sadism, Sex, Surrealism. Pain, pop, poetry. The punk movement of the 1970s to early 1980s is examined as an art movement, combining archival research, interviews, and analysis. Marie Arleth Skov draws on personal interviews with artists from London, New York, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Berlin. Punk Art History spans paintings, drawings, collages, posters, zines, installations, sculptures, photographs, Super 8 films, documentation of performances and happenings, Body Art, and street art. Scandalous and spectacular public events are also discussed, like the Prostitution exhibition in London (1976) and Die Große Untergangsshow (The Grand Downfall Show) in West Berlin (1981). Punks were not interested in becoming the next artworld ism—they saw themselves as the rear-guards, not the avant-gardes and they rejected the inherent notion of progress that the term avant-garde brings with it; how could a ‘no future’ movement want to lead the way?

Register through Eventbrite here.

You can purchase the book here (UK) and here (USA).

Marie Arleth Skov is a Danish art historian, writer, and curator, based in Berlin.