Punk and Pose—On Media Aesthetics between Image, Text and Performance

The aesthetic tradition of punk is, at its core, one that is characterised by the technique of montage of what has gone before and, on the other hand, by the will to express oneself, to show oneself. Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren were the first to develop a genuine visual identity for punk. They pointed out the American punk of groups like The New York Dolls and The Damned in the form of a concise and eclectic fashion aesthetic and, last but not least, the music of the Sex Pistols, managed by McLaren, and thus made it consumable in a larger context. In this way, a seemingly fragile visual sign system emerged that was held together in particular—and this is another characteristic of punk—among other things by the pose and the will to self-dramatise. For this reason, the following remarks will attempt to probe the concept of the pose in greater depth—following Aby Warburg's notion of the pathos formula as an expression of “heightened physical or mental expression”, among other things—in relation to the specific aesthetics of punk and thus penetrate to the core of what could be described as one of the most important caesuras in pop culture.