#wolvesdressedaswolves

Beyond offering me an opening premise, I see Suburbia is a useful precedent for the project in it’s often unflattering depiction of these reprehensible attitudes while also genuinely conveying why the subculture could be so comforting to these lost kids in the first place

project concept exploration poster 001

In Angelo Wasko’s The Game the Game, players are thrust into the world of pickup artists, seeing the experience through the eyes of a wome being harassed by then. While the subject matter is different, Wasko’ ability to engage an emotional response out of an aubsurd yet potentially violent community encourages me to think about all mediums in formulating this idea.

Samantha Kutner’s Proud Boys incident map over shows the reach of the far-right group across the united states. The Proud Boys, classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a men’s group of self identified “proud western chauvinists” formed by Gavin McInnes, who was one of the founding members of Vice magazine before becoming a popular figure in the Alt-Right. In Vice and later, McInnes made his name on couching offensive rhetoric in layers of irony and absurdity, and the Proud Boys employs the same technique. Despite an assortment of in-jokes and silly customs– the group is named in reference to a song from Disney’s Aladdin, they take a vow of no masturbation, one of the initiation steps is being punched while naming breakfast cereals–  the group have been repeatedly involved in violent incidents over the last two years. By laying out the information plainly, Kutner helps visualize the expanse of a dangerous group that has been, at times, treated with ridicule rather than as a genuine threat.

 I wish I could say I was surprised- but to be honest I wasn’t. I don’t think Mishka are nazis or even nazi sympathizers, but I do think they courted the controversy and taboo nature of using this imagery to give them some kind of edge or sense of danger. This is often what Pierce himself claims- that the use of Third Reich imagery is provocation rather than proclamation - and who knows, maybe that's true- I certainly hoped it was for a long time, as a fan of the band myself for a long time- but I came to realize that intention can only get you so far. If you are putting out Nazi imagery and Nazis like your music, does it matter that you are supposedly only playing pretend?

Photographers Syd Shelton and Ian McKell both captured the UK punk movement in its early days, providing a window into the fluidity and complicated nuances of the subculture even then. Above in Shelton’s shot, three Black skinheads are shown enjoying a Specials show in Leeds. The concert was part of the Rock Against Racism series that had sprung up in opposition to the National Front’s Rock Against Communism (RAC) movement which promoted far-right “race rock” bands as champions of the working class. In McKell’s photo, a young women gets ready in her bedroom at a skinhead squat in London, her mirror adorned with National Front distributed nationalist propaganda sharing space with an ad for One Step Beyond, the debut album by Madness, a band inexplicably popular with the RAC crowd despite joining the Specials as labelmates on the explicitly anti-racist Two Tone record label.

To understand the relationship between far-right radicalization and extreme music, it's important to understand the opposition to it, especially noting the ways that they aesthetically influenced each other. Aesthetics are so important to subcultures, but rarely translate outside of them, so they often come off as frivolous, even though their impact is anything but. Taken from a 1989 interview Anti Racist Action members did with the punk magazine Maximumrocknroll.

Bank’s Violette’s 2002 installation Arroyo Grande 7.22.95  gets at something hard to express in this exploration. The installation is Inspired by a violent 1995 murder carried out by three teenage heavy metal fans in Arroyo Grande, CA and blamed in court on heavy metal lyrics, specifically the extreme metal band Slayer. Using two distinct areas, Violette builds out blackened fantasy world, a physical manifestation of the evil influence the perpetrators were supposedly under, contrasting it with a second fantasy world of filled with lightness, representing the young female victim. The didacticism conveys the absurdity of such simple cause and effect reasoning, but he also captures something honest snd chilling about the relationship between this male fantasy of aggression and real violence.