Tim Bies, James Crump, Anna Johnson, Kevin Mitchell, James Ransweiler, and Steve Shaw Raw Power: Photographs From Garageland and Beyond Curated by Christopher McNamara March 3–26, 1989
“So what’s a visually enticing show like Raw Powerexcept a straightforward and usually deromanticized local coda to the malaise explored in The Decline of Western Civilization, and therefore a homage to the superfluous historicity of one’s lost youth? What are these images lit by if not the entropic afterflow of an aesthetic, that was once, loosely speaking, an “ethic” with socio-political aspirations: anti-nukes, anti-apartheid, animal rights, vegetarianism, etc.
How could punk with its paradoxes, its austerities or expressionist excesses, survive the serial infinitude of commodity consciousness (the media in general), commodity conscience (Live Aid and the rest), or commodity crises (a dime a dozen)?”– Lorenzo Buj
