Sub-Rural #54, Punked Up Milwaukee

The “Gig’s Up: 50 Years of Milwaukee Punk Posters” exhibition at Real Tinsel Gallery argues zealously for more critical attention to the era of Milwaukee’s alternative rock foundations shown in its vast promotional optic co-narrative. If you’re already familiar with the city’s remarkable, diverse rock music scene now papering the adventurous Mitchel St. Gallery, re-indulge yourself with a vivid flash-back. If you missed a decade or so listening to unplugged, socially disconnected music download “Taking the City By Storm: The Birth of Milwaukee’s Punk Scene” on YouTube, for some remedial entertainment.

“Tinsel’s”’ outré public postings advocate, rather than just pay homage, to decades of improvisational, collaborative, and self-determining local music phenomenon related in the above documentary. Floor-to-ceiling performance data spins copious dimensions of punkdom and replicates a snapshot rhythm rejoining area’s former, nonaligned, carnal, and carnivalesque music community.

If you’re game, order a copy of “Brick Through the Window,” a 600 page hardcore-scholarly episodic tome of the era that defines the music and experience in thorny detail. Both documents are perfect for underscoring the nature of Midwest alternative culture rarely explored with much openness and agency. Scores of musicians divulge where and how they lived, labored and erupted in the 80s by way of a serious, sometimes hilarious and often self deprecating discussion about a league of musicians in the other essential city on the lake.”Through the Window” is, perhaps accidentally, a sly Joycean parody – 600 bloody pages, dismissing time and resolution, that can be entered at any chapter or page. The project’s flood of confessional anecdotes was assembled and edited by musicians, DJs, and journalists that also sponser the collection and its exhiibition.

The show is an archaeological lattice of the music charted in a club-like laboratory. Of course, not all the posted circular’s designs share the collaborative funk-vernacularism, turbulence, and complexity as the music. Some are intensely graphic, disorienting, and virulent, parading humor, hedonism, and peppery Sturm and Drang. Others just pun on pulp-fiction graphics or 50s era comics, conflated with promises of hair-trigger performance trauma.

As for the influence of language, scores of stand-out flyers unsurprisingly feature the freshest band names. In a Hot Coma, Oil Tasters, and Die Kreuzen rocked clubs between 1980 and 1993, and launched viral EPs that were widely embraced by their virtually nihilistic fan-base. Mockery of middle-class tedium and hypocrisy, for example, was unchecked in Die Kreuzen’s famous thrashing “Cows and Beer” recording. In a Hot Coma would include portraits of Mao Tse Tung and Vladimir Lenin as part of their standard stage paraphernalia, provoking irony sure to amuse Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Punk writers also insist on skewering literature for having borders, and for narratives that must “always be closing.” MKE’s hard-core fliers and posters preferred the freedom and experimentalism of their sequestered dystopia, even if it stymied national attention.

Flyers for Milwaukee’s early punk and new wave music, known for their budget DIY sensibility and blunted graphic expression, were designed via cut-and-paste craft and copy machine formalism. But something pretty epic happens en masse, an experience much closer to the pulse of progressive rock bands than just an elaborate poster in love with itself.  Single sheet flyers, on the other hand, were there for the event, not as shellacked self-mythologizing trophies. They vetoed spectacle, and pretentious prose, spurned arena-normative, corporate kitsch, and Euro-pop dross. The subsequent exhibition is a concentration of discrete typographic sound-images, foregrounding names and dates with “brave new” abstractions, a frantic class portrait composite hanging on thin air white wall grid.

The scope of the installation underlines how the original promotional pieces were in sync with graffiti, partnering in otherwise anonymous urban spaces while influencing other public art forms in their sub-genre. Punk’s pictorial DNA was also part of fine art print portfolios and Pop Art installations that observed familiar forms of abridged market commodities like beer, cigarettes and pop music. Robert Rauschenberg’s installations of found objects, Fluxus mail art, and ultimately Andy Warhol’s gendered appropriation of low budget cinema pitch equivalent punk idioms from the mid-century American heteroglot.

The imposing alto sax player and vocalist James Chance began his career in Milwaukee. He attended the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music and was one of its most famous students, second only to Liberace. Though his association with performance art and free jazz were attained after moving to New York he missed the energy and experimentalism of local bands which he thought as radical as anywhere. Milwaukee’s hybrid anti-aesthetic protest environment spawned a good-enough amount of furious deadpan graphics to complement music like Chance’s and other tribalist rhythms. Many flyers are ridiculous, post-Brechtian, and clannish, blending Dada theater with canny tributes to rock-a-billy and rural blues.

A clear graphic standout is the series of posters made by Violent Femmes, Haskels, and Oil Tasters drummer Guy Hoffman. His completely demented Summer Fest cow stare centered on an oversized red and white grid is folk/constructivist genius. It unscrambles all the atonal noise of a Chance free sax run on a Femmes’ sandwich and serves up a decade of syncopated, cross disciplinary, progressive rock leading up to the Oil Tasters and other daunting jazz-tinged No Wavers.

“Gig’s UP” was curated by Clancy Carroll, Dave Luhrssen, and WMSE’s Paul Host and Tim Noble and closes December 21^st. A hardbound exhibition book of posters and flyers with notes from Dave Luhrssen, Paul Host, Clancy Carrol, and Gallery Director Shane McAdams, published by Real Tinsel, is available at the gallery .

[1]Nodine, Steven, and Eric Beaumont, Clancy Carroll, and David Luhrsson. Brick Through the Window: An Oral History of Punk Rock, New Wave and Noise in Milwaukee, 1964 – 1984. Brickboys, 2017.