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What likely will be the blockbuster show of the season opened last Wednesday at the Metropolitan Museum. I arrived right after the museum opened today and advise you to also arrive early in the morning to avoid the madding crowds. Anglomania, the craze for all things English, has again gripped this side of the Atlantic in a show that oscillates between 70's punk and British tradition, rethinking and recasting the English period rooms and their objects that date back almost 300 years with a postmodern veneer.
Right at the entrance you're immediately aware of this dichotomy, with a red wool suit from the mid-18th century to your left and a punk shock wardrobe made infamous by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood in the seventies to your right. Step inside the darkened entrance, and the first object to greet you is an Alexander McQueen tattered Union Jack frock coat worn by David Bowie atop a model with a shock-shellac orange hairdo. The very notion of Britishness stands on its ear here, which fortunately shocks the visitor into a realization that the very wide pantheon of what constitutes Englishness will be displayed in full panorama here, a bit like visualizing the multiheaded Hindu deity Vishvarupa. You proceed on to the English Garden, with the sound of burbling water in the background, lovely ladies in traditional English costume, along with a stunning frilly pink dress with of hundreds of nylon rosettes standing atop a poufy bed-like mound strewn with rose petals.
I won't describe all the rooms and costumes—allow yourself to be pleasantly surprised and shocked—but a number of smashing details stick out: In The Hunt, the paintings by Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds in the context of the permanent collection they become superfluous, indeed just wallpaper, given the shock value of enormous fiberglass horses and hunting dogs and models in transgressive dress atop the long table.
Gentlemen's Club includes a tartan blazer worn by Johnny Rotten, a/k/a Johnny Lydon, who threw a hissy fit at the show's opening last week because he was seated at the end of a long dining table. Lydon recently sounded off on the Indie 103.1 fm show Jonesy's Jukebox with his old Sex Pistols mate Steve Jones. Seen in the context of recently-released third edition of Re/Search's Punk '77 about the San Francisco scene, the snarling photo of Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten all seems so quaint 30 years later, somehow so weirdly English as chintz and tartan. That a Sex Pistol now also sells his line of clothes is—well, it's so very English. Curious that punks who previously were adamant about anticommercial principles now fixate on revenue.
In the Empire and Monarchy room, Vivienne Westwood has created a stunning ensemble aside a painting of the virgin queen Elizabeth I from Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. How a pro pos to see the Renaissance inscription (from Caxton, I think) propped on a chair beside a pair of gloves:
The fiend that goth a-night
Woman full oft to guile;
Incubus is named by right,
And guileth men other while
Succubus is that wight.
Indeed. With its motifs of peculiar aquatic creatures that evoke Renaissance imagery, the Westwood dress is especially stunning, along with the virgin queen's orange bouffant hairdo, backlit by a flickering fireplace. Meanwhile, at The Deathbed, the extraordinary Shaun Leane and Alexander McQueen dress with spine corset suggests perhaps Blade Runner meets punk rock, an exoskeleton to inflict mortal injury while in the mosh pit. And then you notice the astounding memento mori necklace of bird claws, rabbit skulls, wooden beads, Victorian jet and crystal by Simon Costin. Meanwhile, you won't miss the Stephen Jones raven headdress, the Manolo Blahnik black satin shoes or the Galliano black silk taffeta dress in the Francomania room, because the crowing ravens beckon you in. But I digress.
What could more epitomize the clash of cultures; the appropriation of punk rock by British fashionistas; and the intransigent vs the intractable? Why it's The Gentleman's Club room, where a mohawked punker wearing a t-shirt with silkscreened breasts has just bashed another punk's head with his Doc Martens boots. The other punk has a mohawk made of a translucent Doc Martens sole, his own head having apparently cracked apart a plate. At this point, you become rather oblivious to the furnishings, the ceilings and other period pieces and simply focus on the 'hawks: one made of dolls' legs, another of cut-up 45 r.p.m. records, yet another of barbed wire, and one of newspaper emblazoned with the headline "punk rock". And of course, another with the ubiquitous Union Jack (see photo). Despite the shock and awe factor of the mannequin yobs—which also include, for example, a Tom of Finland x-rated t-shirt—the entire exhibit is surprisingly family-friendly, perhaps underscoring yet again how punk was so successfully co-opted and regurgitated by the brilliant houses of haute couture. Ars vt artem falleret, perhaps.
Coupled with The Hunt Ball room—astounding confections by Galliano, McQueen, Westwood et al contrasting against the staid backdrop of, for example, a gorgeous mantel from Chesterfield House in London bedecked with caryatids—you walk away and wonder, "Is anyone looking at the art?" I put this question to a guard, just wondering what her casual observations were. "I really don't know," she slyly replied. Earlier I'd spotted the dapper guard I'd seen last week setting up the Cai Guo-Qiang rooftop exhibit. He was instructing two other guards about this exhibit, which likely poses a crowd-control challenge in the cramped and narrow rooms. With so many fancy, cotton-candy colored puffed up hairdos (heavily reliant on traditional punk materials of glue, hairspray, shellac), the visual candy becomes nearly hallucinatory and subsumes the furnishings. Which of course turns the traditional theatrics topsy-turvy. Call it a postmodern Masque of Blackness, if you will.
Exiting the exhibit, you are deposited back in the American Wing, whereupon you float back to earth, and have to make a left turn into the American Wing to reach the Anglomania Sales Desk. Unlike the other two big exhibits right now—Hatsheput and Tibetan Warriors —fortunately this part of the Met wasn't rejiggered solely to create a shop. Were it so, perhaps Trash & Vaudeville could have supplied the merchandise. (photo credit: johnlydon.com)
Tags:
alexander mcqueen, anglomania, cai guo qiang, francomania, galliano, john lydon, johnny rotten, manolo blahnik, met, sex pistols, vivienne westwood
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Posted on 5/7/2006
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