PUNK! The Revolution of Everyday Life

With Karl Kraus, Alfred Jarry, DADA, Lettrism, Situationist International, Black Mask & UAW/MF, King Mob, CRASS, Riot Grrrl, Queercore and David Graeber.

“If there is one area where the achievement of consciousness comes into its own as a truly essential act, it is in the realm of everyday life, where every passing instant reveals once again that the dice are loaded and that as per usual we are being taken for a ride.”
—The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raoul Vaneigem

Kounosuke Kawakami Laboratory, as part of Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts, is pleased to announce the exhibition PUNK! The Revolution of Everyday Life.

Punk is usually associated with raw, dissonant sound and image, and a riotous attitude, rebelling against social norms and prevailing powers. Tracing back its lineage, punk was neither solely an angry youth culture of the 1970s, nor a subculture in the traditional sense: it inspired an underground scene which persists today and became a set of shared beliefs, ideas, and moral attitudes which attained more widespread acceptance in society. Although derived from visual art and rock music, punk can be described as a progenitor in the resistance of cultural hegemony and movements towards greater inclusion and equality in sexuality, race and class.

This exhibition will examine the affinity with contemporary art and the synergy between the two by looking at the practice and criticality with which punk has addressed various social issues. It will further investigate how the movement formed an autonomous space through music and for everyday life, revealing an underlying ethic of mutual aid, non-hierarchical collaboration, DIY, positive liberty, and self-organisation through independent publishing and record labels.

PUNK! The Revolution of Everyday Life explores the development of punk cultural and historical references with Karl Klaus, a writer and journalist, Alfred Jarry, French playwright, DADA, Lettrism, Situationist International, King Mob, Black Mask & Up Against the Wall Mother Fucker. At the same time, we will refer to punk rockers CRASS, Riot Grrrl, and Queercore who have followed the punk trajectory since the Sex Pistols. The late anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber’s essay will develop this perspective.

Kounosuke Kawakami is an artist, researcher, curator, and currently lecturer at the Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts. His curatorial approach focuses on: artists or collective practices; re-interpreting historical contexts into the contemporary via the exhibition format; and looking at artists who question current political and social conditions and perceptions through art. In particular, his research on Gekijo no Sanka, the first avant-garde art movement in Japan of the 1920s, along with Japanese proletarian art movements from the 1920s to ’30s, examine how overlooked pre-war art has relevance today. Exhibitions include: Guerrilla Girls, Reinventing the ‘F’ Word – Feminism! (2020); Ho Rui An, Solar: A Meltdown (2020); Anton Vidokle, Russian Cosmism: Trilogy (2019); Thomas Hirschhorn & Santiago Sierra, Radical Democracy (2016); The Third Entity (2015) with Mikhail Karikis, Héctor Zamora, Taka Atsugi, Toki Okamoto.

Supported by Motoya United Co., Ltd.