Punk Art Gallery Exhibition: Anti-Pampe in the White Cube

In the blinding white neon light, the speckled pig sits on a pedestal and grins. An anarchic sow, a metaphor for the capitalist pig system? “No, it’s written above,” replies gallerist Kai Erdmann. “Beer crate + Bandsoli into the sow,” the A in Sow is circled. Ah, so it’s simply the petit-bourgeois piggy bank of “Boy Division.” The Hamburg punk band, whose repertoire consists entirely of cover songs—a bit of Nouvelle Vague for can-drinkers—had played for the opening.

“And then a dog also pooped in the gallery, which fit nicely, unfortunately we only noticed it after it had already been trodden flat,” reports Jakob Schäfer, actually the director of the Eigen+Art Lab in Mitte. Together with Erdmann he curated the show “Vernissage (Exhibition on Punk)” in Erdmann’s Berlin collaboration space Nizza.

The contradiction of the undertaking, crumpled anti-pampe being squeezed into the White Cube—and sold—seems to be obvious to them, at least the exhibition title suggests as much, as it is finally referenced in the eponymous song by the Hoyerswerda-based band Pisse: “Wie sie alle nuckeln/ An ihren Sektflöten/ Du stehst in ihrer Mitte/ Und willst sie alle töten/ Labert die dich voll/ Doch ihre Zunge riecht nach Arsch/ Von dem edlen Prinz/ Der das Ganze hier bezahlt/ Vernissage/ Oh Vernissage.”

Already above the door frame in the gallery’s stairwell looms a large “Fuck you.” The artist Kerstin Podbiel has drawn it with ink on paper, the font so aggressively constructed that it inevitably calls Ed Ruscha to mind—a line that probably deserves a full-on “fuck you.” Seventeen pieces have Erdmann and Schäfer gathered, with the exception of one borrowed work by the late British legend Genesis P-Orridge, who passed away in 2020; all works are contemporary, even though many of them, in the classical bearing of the genre, exude a nostalgically almost anachronistic longing for the past.

Art Brut Meets the Academy

There are installations made from remnants, such as a remarkable lamp crafted from beverage cartons by Aleen Solari, charmingly copied band posters by Andrew Gilbert, and alluringly smeared paintings by Hannes Berwig, the singer of the Berlin band Die Verlierer, which softly nod toward Jean Dubuffet.

Overall, Art Brut is omnipresent here. And even in the proper art, freshly from the UdK, student Mascha Naumann’s works call the underdogs to attention: In “Sunday Monday,” she combines brutal steel hooks with speckled ribbed undershirts she wore while working at a bar in a techno club, along with a slick video in a social-media format full of Jack Halberstam quotes about “Queer Subjects.” Beside it, a painted index finger by Jody Korbach: words painted on beer labels in white enamel read, “At some point you need to grow up and betray your ideals.”

Far from the aspirational corner, Antonius Arzt’s works feel like a youthful autodidact who has welded the trash of the world, the desiccated treasures of civilization, and materialized symbols of the inner self into delightfully grotesque vacuum-sealed packages: thus “Perso” consists of a laminated butt plug and a crushed Marlboro box, mounted on a document cover.

That piece can trigger so many associations that it’s completely unclear why the work is still for sale. By the artist’s not-quite-academic background, it isn’t priced very high, either. Whether this is pure punk or perhaps the opposite remains unclear. A gallery remains a gallery—even with dog poop.