Reclaiming a stripped radical aesthetic can restore politics emptied from it by advertising

Evidence

Savage Messiah deploys anachronism as a weapon. At first sight, at first touch – and tactility is crucial to the experience: the zine doesn’t feel the same when it’s JPEGed on screen – Savage Messiah seems like something familiar. The form itself, the mix of photographs, typeface-text and drawings, the use of scissors and glue rather than digital cut and paste; all of this make Savage Messiah seem out of time, which is not to say out of date. There were deliberate echoes of the para-art found on punk and postpunk record sleeves and fanzines from the 1970s and 1980s. Most insistently, I’m reminded of Gee Vaucher, who produced the paradoxically photorealistically delirious record covers and posters for anarcho-punk collective Crass. ‘I think with the look of the zine I was trying to restore radical politics to an aesthetic that had been rendered anodyne by advertising campaigns, Shoreditch club nights etc.,’ Ford says. ‘That anarcho-punk look was everywhere but totally emptied of its radical critique. It seemed important to go back to that moment of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s to a point where there was social upheaval, where there were riots and strikes, exciting cultural scenes and ruptures in the fabric of everyday life.’ The ‘return’ to the postpunk moment is the route to an alternative present. Yet this is a return only to a certain ensemble of styles and methods – nothing quite like Savage Messiah actually existed back then. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 474

Categorization

• DEFINE: Fisher’s hauntology claim in miniature: the postpunk look was co-opted and drained of critique; returning to its form is a time-war tactic, not nostalgia.
• SEED: Essay angle: visual subcultures get emptied of radical content by advertising and gentrification; the aesthetic return is a route to an alternative present rather than nostalgia.
• XREF: connects to: Avant-garde iconoclasm gets commodified into advertising — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 113; Postwar ads co-opted counterculture authenticity to sell conformity — Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love:…, 376; Moral and political engagement can drain the creative source that justified it — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 493

Broader Connections

• Postwar ads co-opted counterculture authenticity to sell conformity #exemplifies (0.85) — Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love, 376
• Avant-garde iconoclasm gets commodified into advertising #complicates (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 113
• Moral and political engagement can drain the creative source that justified it #qualifies (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 493