FILE Punk
SO THIS SUPERBOOK MAIL WAS ALWAYS GOING TO BE ABOUT THE 1977 SPECIAL PUNK ISSUE OF FILE... AND NOW IT IS!
FILE
was an art magazine edited and published by Canada's conceptual art group General Idea. Each issue of FILE
was a fairly lively postmodern visual media mash up but Vol. 3. No. 4. Fall 1977 - aka - Punk 'Til You Puke!
was/is another thing altogether. The general idea of this issue was that however clever / conceptual / crossover any artist might be, punk rockers were not just more so but much, much less so. Punks were just energy and talent and melody and violence and pain and a really, really good artist might hope only to make an exceptional magazine about them. Which is what General Idea did. Really well.
This rarely happens: we read the right hand page "...Like Tinguely's machines, the punk machine self-destructs, smashing equipment, slashing skin..." We never read anything! It was exhausting!
This issue of FILE
is the best punk magazine for two reasons. Firstly Fall 1977 is late for punk, which of course should count against it but it is early
for New Wave (which it predicts) so that is very much in its favour. As a result it is full of Television, Blondie, Talking Heads, and this extraordinary Patti Smith double page. The text is bootlegged from Rolling Stone
and the photographs are claimed to be taken from Robert Mapplethorpe's dustbin (this, very likely true).
And there is a fashion shoot! A confluence of so many things we love, Seditionaries (of course), Jean Vigo's beautiful film Zero de Conduit, peroxide hair and black lipstick... it is a quite impossibly good art punk new wave newsprint magazine. See more of the issue on this link. Buy on the button below. Go.