In almost every large city in America, there are vestiges of flyer art on traffic and light poles, the sides of buildings, cramped record store spaces, and just about anywhere that one can use glue, wheat paste, tacks, thumbnails, tape, and staples. These works, whether intact or ripped, shredded or faded, embody a living, not-so-secret visual history of a generation, and sometimes reflect months, even years of diligent, ongoing work on the part of artists and bands; hence, one can peel back the past like a sequence of skins [2]. The works, whether punk, rave, or heavy metal, are the ephemera of popular culture. They chronicle and mirror shifts, such as technological and cultural convolutions, in historic reality. As a means to an end, they embody different graphic forms, and as social texts, they pay witnesses to punk's ceaseless and potent tenant- Do-It-Yourself- a metaphor for punk's challenge to watered down corporate mentality, and its identification with change, hope, irony, and humor.

Normal Mailer once called graffiti "their text on our text," meaning that by the 1970's and 1980's young urban Americans had recaptured inner city argot from the not-so-clean octopus hands of business, trade, and commerce. Though not exactly an indictment of the advanced technological Superstate, graffiti forced people to realize that the eyes and hands of the sub-proletariat - wild kids, banditos - were right around the corner with spray cans, ready to delineate America's underbelly. Graffiti was often abhorred by the authorities, and even neighborhood residents, as the reckless and ferocious habits of the natives, but in the eyes of some artists and critics, it was a functioning code and custom that ran counter to the direction of conquest. In punk rock terms, it was a way of defending a vulnerable sense of one's self from the mummifying trends of consumer society. The squiggles and looping lettering- immediate, crowded, strident, even sensual- formed a new urban babelogue that no one could forestall or crush. Taggers cropped up everywhere and refused subjugation; meanwhile, blue chip art was re-born when Basquiat and Haring married graffiti to the inevitable capitalistic ends of their work. Still, graffiti was the poetry of predominately working class, electric boogie kids scrawled on the brick and steel papyrus of cities for a generation raised on parachute pants, microwave milkshakes, and Oliver North. [3]

Whether on the side of a subway or garbage dumpsters, on bridges or on the nice walls of a renovated condo, graffiti was a blunt reminder that two worlds existed simultaneously, and not very independent of one another. The dichotomies were plain. Cities were the topography of privilege, of locked gates that spoke of maid service and architecture that froze time and space in the form of credit cards and stocks. Graffiti was less a comment on social struggles for power, and more a form of resilient, outsider assertiveness, a kinetic language that was unwrapped on top of the other. [3] It created wailing walls that announced gangs, crews, rappers, taggers, breakers, graffiteros, and the names of the dead. It suggested that modern consumerism had certain edges, or tensions, that Reagan-era false trickledown economics could not gloss over.

But how do flyers represent a similar kind of visual aesthetic within the subculture of punk? From the early years of 1975 (almost synchronous with early rap), punk took on outward-looking stance against the Teflon-coated autonomy of government and corporate enterprise, and catalyzed social, political, and aesthetic concerns in England and America. As a loose-knit community, it too responded by grafting its own accessible stylings on top of the architecture it disdained, thus evoking the relationship between modes of power and the vulnerability of individuals in a rapidly accelerating society.

Even today, punk still actively promotes DIY ethics, action-oriented politics (though most often realized only in spectacle, not in concrete terms), and a keen underdog psychology. Flyers belong to no one and everyone, and in cities that have laws on the books that try and curb the spread of flyer art on and around public spaces, the art is often the hallmarks of anonymous artists working in the subterfuge of night. Therefore the act is tinged with the sacred and sometimes ugly romance of breaking rules, both legal and aesthetic. This further magnifies punk's sense of outsider-ness, even while many of its aesthetics and concerns seem co-opted and acculturated.

While graffiti may have seemed bright, garish, and at times soft as 60's psychedelia, punk was much more about tatters, appendages, splotches, and cut-ups. It was a visual counterpoint to the flawless mechanism of modern consumerism, where all roughness was glossed over in favor of spry, advertisement friendly, near-lampoons of American life (prime time TV, boxed dinners, the Inquirer). Punk, however hackneyed and trite it sounds, intuitively yearned to elicit and touch the bristling, uncosmetic side of (un)popular culture. It practiced, like the fin-de-siecle bohemians of the late 1800's, a romantic and willful sense of decay that manifested itself in the post-Vietnam and Watergate late 1970's. Punk was the insolent leer hidden behind Jimmy Carter's smile. While most artists passively played mute witness to society's multileveled disintegration, punk turned ennui into a sonic assault, a rock n roll Mt. Vesuvius. It was fueled by a metaphor of deliverance, of burying the past.

In many ways, the rise of photocopy machines was a watershed for punk artists, simply because it provided a cost effective and efficient means to mass produce their product with consistent punk qualities, such as untidiness and coarseness. Unlike offset presses, run-of-the-mill copy machines produced what appeared to be grainy second or third generation copies; often times, work was fuzzy, ill shaded, rough, but also evocative and emphatic. A lack of crispness and density of the reproductions did not dissuade artists like Raymond Pettibon (Black Flag and Minutemen flyers), whose fierce sexual nihilism did not need to mirror Mondrians' static, almost mechanical lines. Rather than treat his viewers as passive and neutral, Pettibon's photocopied punk graphics resemble very dark, aggressive, post-modern Sunday morning comics, with all the crude coloring and reproduction intact. He gave us Batman, Superman and J. Edgar Hoover, and captured "real life suffering but only as filtered through films, detective novels, science, the Bible, and People magazine." [4] The drawings on the flyers were interrogators in our space, the familiar made unfamiliar.

Oddly enough, photocopy companies like Xerox Corp were also targets of punk mistrust, for they were monolithic, multinational corporations that bands like MDC and Crass railed against in very absolute terms- they were, like or not, the heart of evil. Yet, they produced machines that freed punk graphic artists from the demands of money, time, and energy by handing them a machine that could act as a Trojan horse, inside of which thousands of punk flyers from around the world would be produced. Some flyers, a critic can argue, even eventually bore into the very way that Xerox and like companies saw themselves.

In the1990's, it was very common to find commercial advertising that looked remarkably punk in terms of its editing and content- as if punk worked less as a blitzkrieg, and more like a permanent, slowly modulating, ongoing revolution that eventually partially dictated the aesthetic terms of a new generation that was raised on the vitriolic music of Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Green Day. Flyers are not just a means to an end, not solely a way of getting information to audiences through graphic means. The format of the work- the choice of media, the use of language as primary visual element, the unusual setting- echoes the styles of pithy and sometimes truculent contemporary artists like the Guerilla Girls and Barbara Kruger. Flyers are a way of re-seeing band information as a total aesthetic miniature- the page as totality- in which the styles, theories, and practices of a culture, even in a hodgepodge or piecemeal manner, can undergo a revitalization, even resurrection. [5]

In America's intensely logo-centric culture, one always has to ask: What is the image/signifier? What is representation and what is represented? The hand-printed, screened posters of 1950's and 1960's rock n roll bands mostly relied on photographed images of the artists and solid, block printed lettering that feels both flat and clean, giving it feel of pure, unadulterated information. But by the sixties artists had began molding the space around the information, filling it with graphics that could visually reshape the meaning inherent in the words. More and more, the style of the work mattered more than the information it conveyed. For instance, on Velvet Underground and MC5 (both seminal, proto-punk bands) posters, the artists sometimes eschewed the image of the band altogether, and the names of the bands and venues are submerged into a web, or better yet, a miasma of psychedelic lettering that re-imagined the curvy natural lines of early Art Deco posters. The artists constructed a strangely harmonious, fluid world in the midst of an era battered by the Vietnam War and race riots, an off-kilter Eden, an imaginative fiefdom, a bewildering eye socket that rejects gloomy perspectives.

To people outside of the youth culture, the art might have seemed an almost insignificant gesture, but to the musicians and their followers, the posters marked a self-imposed insularity. Ironically, though, the artists needed the collision and intervention of "others", say mothers and schoolteachers, to make it a place not of collective confinement, but a place where communal gestures could provide a kind of liberation from the strictures of "normal", middle-class, Protestant upbringing. Without ample friction and context, punk flyers are mute.

Early English punk flyers were ragtag, hasty, barebones affairs, and were spread like germ warfare. Essentially both a threat and a mirror, they disavowed the popular culture (welfare state culture) of the day, and promoted a maximum tour-de-force of mostly young outsider art. They were a single facet of an ongoing fashion trend, partly epitomized by Malcolm Mclaren's and Vivien Westwood's Sex Shop, in which French Internationalist-type placards and axioms were co-opted and revitalized for a new generation of Londoners who did not experience the Paris revolts of 1968, but were inundated by the growing disenfranchisement and go-nowhere stigmas of housing projects and unemployment lines.

In New York, where some argue that punk ripened first, and under the helm of early fanzines like PUNK, flyers, even in their initial stages, had more of a two tract framework. One was a cartoonish, Harry Crumb leaning, mondo B-movie feel, while the other, epitomized by Patti Smith, Television, and others, reflected a more straightforward aesthetic that directly embodied the 1950's rock n roll approach. The flyers looked like components of a future punk A&R kit, well-shot "arty" photos and slightly offbeat lettering, a neutral ground where the bands were punk, but the design rather conventional. Though Television or Richard Hell added verses by Verlaine to their flyers, they didn't re-imagine typography or the space itself. There were obvious exceptions, especially the hand drawn splatter expressionism of Suicide flyers, but it was in California (especially San Francisco, the Jerusalem of hippie culture) that the punk visual boom made a more indelible and arresting impact on graphic artists. It makes sense, not only because the Performance Art program at Cal State and similar programs at The San Francisco Art Institute were booming and supplied much impetus and energy, but according to East Bay Ray, because "a lot of bands changed punk rock for themselves from the media circus started by Malcolm McClaren and the Sex Pistols to something more personal and local, more about experimentation and tolerance." Fanzines like Search and Destroy and later Slash documented the upsurge of the vitriolic underground scene. New bands were rampant. Crime posed themselves in police uniforms and chose heavy metal-inspired lettering to announce their shows; the Screamers adopted stark, black and white, flat, one-perspective, mutated wood-cut looking flyers; the Dils blended agit-prop and minimalism; X produced punk folk art heavily influenced by Hispanic culture, while later bands like Septic Death absorbed and promoted a morbid, fantasy inspired death culture. "Computers were out of reach," Jello Biafra reminds us, "rub-on letters were a luxury, so we improvised. Aping Jamie Reid's (Sex Pistol) cut-out art was step one. Our own dark retakes on the plastic Amerika that spawned us came next. Without knowing it, we learned that putting any picture or collage on a punk flyer could make that image more ridiculous- or sinister- than ever." [1]

In places throughout America punk took hold, usually drawing from the art, rock n roll, and gay communities, obviously appealing to those, who as Hart Crane succinctly wrote a hundred years earlier, were searching for "new anatomies, new thresholds." Youth were seeking kicks that could somehow defend them against the deluge of Linda Ronstadt and Leif Garret copycats. Punk (new wave, no-wave, hardcore or whatever its permutations) was a bulwark, a way of resistance meant to offend, repel, and call to arms. In Chicago, Athens, and Austin, like in San Francisco, universities and art schools supplied a steady supply of cadres, and one by one clubs staked their ground for, but mostly against, this trend.

Punks, for a least a few years during their formal or informal education, were test tubes for art theory and were versed not only in the major players like Rimbaud, Baudelarie, Wilde, Duchamp, and Breton (all widely respected margin walkers), but also the schools o thoughts and trends that followed, including structuralism, deconstruction, Be-Ins and Happenings, the Living and Bread/Puppet theatres, performance art, and a myriad number of others. Galleries in most places were elitist and off-limits, but punk signifiers were avidly worn on the body as mobile physical codes in the form of homemade clothes and buttons. Artists could turn any street corner or record store pegboard into an conceptual space, a place of blurred, intriguing possibilities. On one hand, each poster was mired in the precarious identity of its creator and by music that offered self-absorbed validation and purpose. On the other hand, almost any location that could pay witness to flyers could also contribute to the transformation of culture that would take 25 years to fully engage and mold public taste. The later was masturbatory, the latter a dialogue. Granted, as Winston Smith recalls, "Most were lame- either intentionally vapid from an artistic point of view or just sheer inept design." But some radiated and haunted. [1]

As punk took hold throughout suburbia, the art behind flyers and record covers became less and less about ideas, and more about rigid conventions and codes. Hardcore cemented this when the music became less open to individual and experimental styles (for instance, keyboards became totally associated with new wave, horns with ska) and practically militarized the way punks saw themselves: Punk enveloped divisions and classifications, and infrequently transgressed them. One cartoon in Maximum Rock N Roll from mid-1980's personifies this clique syndrome. One on one side, it shows a peace punk modeled on the Crass variety, with anarchy signs and spiked hair as the chosen regalia, while the other side depicts an Agnostic Front-type skinhead replete with tight rolled up jeans, white t-shirt, and tattoos. They were two worlds, often hostile to one another, that converged in the punk sphere. In D.C. and sometimes Boston, punks were often pigeonholed as straight-edge, while in L.A. they were deemed Circle Jerk skankers and skateboarders. Every region, from Madison, WI to Tuscon, AR had a seemingly different trademark musical style that could easily be classified into a punk index. But one has to remember the stranglehold that TV had on this same generation, a consumer magic wand that makes, according to Barbara Kruger, "difference the enemy...(It) focuses on the moment and not the process, the individual not the scene, the figure and not the body. Current events, national struggles, and sexualities are created, renewed, or cancelled like sitcoms." [6] And the greatest TV network of all was MTV, branded by Greil Marcus as "the stupor of reification...So ugly, so directly productive of esthetic and moral shame, as to be fundamentally obscene." [7] So if punk was sometimes inflexible, overwrought, and its own worst enemy, it was partly due to a gripping siege mentality.

Yet, as Vic Bondi hints in his liner notes included with the Articles of Faith re-issue album from Germany's Lost and Found Records, hardcore was about a kind of honor code that overlapped into community building. The strategy insisted that people, especially teenagers, could not be bought and sold, and that consumer society could not easily absorb youth rebellion, especially one that was, at least on the surface, so consistently pitted against the hegemony that threatened to squander it. Still, punk mirrored the hegemony's same dictatorial trends (that is good, that is not...buy this, not that...wear the t-shirt, hand over cash) and dark and vapid romance of music. Punks mused about the deaths of Sid Vicious, Darby Crash and Stiv Bators like they were Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix. Punk too often repeated and was obsessed with the same crash courses that regular rock n roll suffered. The Dead Kennedys, with their egos, squabbles and lawsuits, resemble a combined comedy and tragedy, and appear no different than Fleetwood Mac. Still, according to writers like Gina Arnold, punk persevered until the mid-1990's because it preserved:

...an honest voice, a musical lack of pretense, and a sound that cried havoc...Punks play with ideas of outlawry and rebellion...It pretends it's not sincere, but it is, at bottom, as committed to its cause as anything that came before it, positing an ideology that's devoted to freedom and kindness as any world religion...Punk must feel righteous, not popular; alone, not nurtured, it has to be embattled to exist at all. [8]

And sometimes the battle was with itself.
Lastly, in the 1990's color photocopying and computers made a widespread, de-facto assault on the way punk marketed itself to others and its own community. Every kid could practically be his/her own recording studio and graphic arts design firm, making home the new end-game of commerce. Granted, there was something inherently democratic (at least for the technological haves, but not the have-nots) in this trajectory towards total independence, but also something isolating and confusing as well. Young people could totally sever themselves from an actual, concrete community and any means of inclusion, which is right where MTV wants a person, at home, gobbling down its visual pastries, unattached, and unresponsive to the outside world. That tends to make any music within that realm masturbatory, inverted, and finally- unpunk. And the computer-aided flyer compositions tended to be far more polished and hyper-technical, quickly leaving old pages of magazines, pens and markers, and rub-on letters in the dust. Technology replaced the gritty, hands-on process of flyer production with binary code.