Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art

By Daniel Wojcik

Book Overview

Punk body adornment, the most notorious, pervasive, and celebrated of rebellious youth cultural styles, emerged in the mid-1970s and persists to the present day in various updated forms.

This luminously illustrated study explores the confrontational aesthetics and symbolic meanings of punk and neo-tribal body art. Like members of previous youth subcultures, punk rockers created a fragmented but coherent and stylized system of adornment calculated to disturb the general public; simultaneously, such unruly bodily expressions signaled fervent identities and an ongoing commitment to the disruption of everyday norms. The punk aesthetic of shock, negation, and fetish reflects themes of nihilism, anarchic tendencies, and deep pessimism, as well as anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist views. These attitudes are revealed not only through adornment but also through music, art, dance, fanzines, and other do-it-yourself expressive forms. Also, punk's carnivalesque underbelly--with its emphasis on parody, the grotesque body, symbolic inversion, and gender confusion--expresses blatant resistance to dominant ideologies, the staid monoculture, and oppressive societal strictures. As mainstream society and the fashion industry has incorporated such subcultural styles, the vanguard of shock aesthetics has now created ever-new forms of subversion and outrage in order to remain authentic in the face of such incessant appropriation.

Daniel Wojcik offers a seminal analysis of the punk subculture by surveying myriad distinctive styles that have been influenced by punk's explosive aesthetic. In doing so, he focuses on Perry Farrell, transformative singer of Jane's Addiction, who has utilized forms of adornment inspired by non-Western body art and modification, including tattooing, piercing, and scarification. A self-taught artist and musician who once lived on the streets of Los Angeles, who metamorphosed to create the iconic, circus-like Lollapalooza festival, this pivotal figure of alternative culture single-handedly embodies the limitless appeal of transgressive body art. In the lens of Wojcik, Farrell becomes a metaphor for a restless, discontent generation.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0878057358
• ISBN13: 9780878057351
• Release Date: May 1995
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 8.3" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Punk Promises

My two fascinations come together in this informative book: Punk culture and Body Art. If you enjoy these as well, I recomend. The only problem is that it is getting older by the day...copyright 1995. Good for old school review but nothing current available in the past 12yrs.

great pictures and reasoning behind punk and tribal style

It was very informative as far as the philosophies behind the punk and neo tribal style. There is a big section on Perry Farrel (lead singer for Janes Addiction) and his reasoning behind punk and neo tribal style. It really makes you think. You don't have to be punk to enjow this book and it's contents. I would definetely recommend this book!