Punk: An Aesthetic

From Debbie Harry oozing sex appeal to Johnny Rotten in a plane over Sweden, seminal New York curator, gallerist and writer Johan Kugelberg teams up with music historian Jon Savage to collate a series of iconic images from the heyday of punk. Intended as a visual companion to Savage’s acclaimed 1991 tome England's Dreaming, their forthcoming Rizzoli book Punk: An Aesthetic presents an unrivaled collection of rare punk art and ephemera drawn from private and public archives from around the world alongside essays from cyberpunk novelist William Gibson and artist Linder Sterling. “Punk is important because it makes us get on with it. It makes us ‘do it yourself,’” explains Kugelberg. “It doesn’t matter if you’re eight years old or 80, it’s all city, all country, everywhere.” The pair have co-curated an accompanying exhibition called Some Day All the Adults Will Die! Punk Graphics 1971–1984, which opens at the Hayward Gallery next Friday and offers unprecedented access to the artifacts on show, with banks of fanzines, record covers and posters that visitors can engage with. “We didn’t want to preach from the pulpit,” explains Kugelberg of the exhibition. “We wanted to do something different, for there to be a real connection to the history. To experience it.”