metropolis m

‘Shakedown 1979, cool kids never have the time.’ Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins sang it in his characteristic, somewhat lachrymose style, in the song 1979, his ode to youth. In the accompanying video, teenagers are horsing around, joyriding, getting rowdier, and are finally confronted with the arm of the law, by which – being adolescents – they are not in the least impressed. The wanton shiftlessness of the 17-year-olds in the Smashing Pumpkins’ hit coloured the atmosphere of the years evoked by the title, the late 1970s, as if the video clip could be the perfect symbol of that moment, a period that was so in need of change, but with no idea of how to bring it about. The 1970s: how sadly they ended, after such a promising beginning. They dawned in the light of Woodstock and ended in a bitter grey cloud. By 1979, everyone wanted out of the decade, out of the sadness of the moment, out of the growing social and economic unrest and rising unemployment heralded by the dramatic loss of the welfare state and the left-wing politics that had underwritten it. In Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher came to power, and Ronald Reagan followed suit in the United States, but only after they stood helplessly by to watch as the Shah was driven out of Iran and replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini. Two years earlier, punk had already put its finger on the wound of the era. Punk brutally confronted the 1970s with its own oppressive self-satisfaction, ruthlessly throwing it back on itself with the resounding expletive, ‘No Future’. Punk assassinated the ideals of the last surviving hippies and, cynical and mocking as it was, proposed the opposite. Averse to any fantasy of the future, its desire was to live for the moment, energetic and nihilistic. They called it ‘dancing on the volcano’.An oh-so-recalcitrant punk movement had no desire to rescue society from the helplessness of those years, perhaps because, black and decadent, it was itself too much a by-product of that helplessness. The most dramatic symbol of that failure was the death of Sid Vicious, the famous Sex Pistols bassist, who died of a heroin overdose in 1979 months after his girlfriend was stabbed to death. Alex Cox later produced a film about them, Sid & Nancy. After Vicious’s death, in a single stroke, the entire movement was in its death throes, at least in terms of any avant-garde pretensions it might have had. In the years that followed, step-by-step, the movement became politicized, with some segments being absorbed by the squatters’ movement, which, compared to the vague nihilism of the previous years’ cultural punk, wanted clarity. Their famous creed was, ‘No Home, No Coronation’, referring to the upcoming coronation of Queen Beatrix in April of 1980. During all these years, visual art had quietly continued on its way, living in its own vacuum, one that it had created for itself over the preceding years. In 1979, the visual arts were more autonomous than ever. These were the latter days of fundamental painting. Visual art was completely preoccupied with itself, with its own achievements, its own history. There was a great deal of reaching back, taking up positions that had first been established in the past, especially the 1960s, and it was reflected in the programs of the Netherlands’ most important art institutions. The Van Abbe Museum, under Rudi Fuchs, presented major solo exhibitions with such 1960s icons as Douglas Huebler, Donald Judd, Armando and Richard Long. At the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Wim Beeren recapitulated his own glory days in the documentary exhibition, Action, Reality and Fiction in the Art of the 1960s. At the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, Wim Crouwel was able to devote broad attention to his own design for the museum, alongside René Lucassen, the Dutch New Realist. Finally, the Kröller-Müller Museum mounted yet another presentation by land artist Michael Heizer, now with drawings, as well as an exhibition of the work of Eva Hesse, who died in 1970. Only the Groninger Museum was looking ahead, as it always had under director Frans Haks. In 1979, the Groninger Museum exhibited work by Georg Baselitz, the German expressionist painter who was then in the process of becoming the most important point of reference for a new generation of painters, the later Neue Wilden (New Fauves or Neo-Expressionists). After the fact, it can be said that in the artistic sense, 1979 was a typical transition year, without important events of its own. Institutional Holland was looking for something, but did not know where to start. It was typical of that year that the Museum Journal would publish a single article about punk, for the first time since the movement began in 1977, to quickly pull back to the heroes of yesteryear: body art, Toon Verhoef and Rob van Koningsbruggen. Few people had ever heard of René Daniëls, despite the fact that he had exhibited his first works based on punk back in 1977.Given the resigned, rather powerless state of mind of Dutch institutions where looking ahead was concerned, it should be no surprise that at the Institute of Art History in Utrecht, a few young students rose to the task of establishing a magazine that – as its first issue declared – aimed to take a stand, with a strong ‘policy’, something that was sorely missed at their own institute. What was needed in this time of institutional complacency was vision. This was what Rob Smolders, Arjen Kok and Alex de Vries hoped to present in their new METROPOLIS M magazine. Domeniek Ruyters translation: Mari Shields