The Punk movement provided excitement in the form of acceptance and anarchism for individuals who were excluded from the mainstream society. There existed a do-it-yourself attitude, which was used not only to fanzines and music, but may well be any number of additional events, objects, and forms and ideas of community and political action10. The main goal of both Dada and Punk was to alter the attitudes of their various societies, and this was manifested in the designs of both movements. They used a number of similar design methods to call forth their audiences in order to accomplish their objectives.
One of the main characteristics that were shared by the Punk and Dada movements was the shock factor, which refers to making an effort to force to move away from complacency and engage them in questioning things. One of the major leaders of the Dadaism was Hannah Hoch. She was a famous German artist and was among the pioneers of the Dada movement. Her best work remains the renowned Cut with The Kitchen Knife (See Figure 1), which is one of her largest collages. She is well-known for her incisively political photomontage and collage works11.
The artist used beer and kitchen knife to indicate that that piece of work was a social commentary regarding gender issues in post war Germany1213. Figure 1: Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the First Epoch of the Weimar Beer-Belly Culture, 1919 To offend and provoke was also the intentional objective of Jamie Reid, who was a famous Punk designer. He was the main visual imagery or designer for ‘The Sex Pistols’ band, a typical example of the Punk music band14. The poster design by Reid for the Sex Pistol band’s single titled Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) is one of his four notable examples of his work (See Figure 2).
Just like his other works, Never Mind the Bollocks was influenced by the Dada movement, the photographic collages15. Reid places visual strength on typography. The artistic, visual and social influence of this work was much longer and productive than the Punk movement itself. Punk represented a cultural revolution more than a music style16. Figure 2: Jamie Reid, Never Mind the Bollocks, Album Cover, 1977, lithographic proof print with overlay and collage. A number of the artworks from the Punk and Dada eras involved elements of found objects, images or familiar artworks.
The photomontage technique, which was formulated by the Dadaist group from Berlin, concerned pasting items from reproductions or photographs obtained from the press. The mass media offered numerous materials that were used by the Dadaist to mount art of society and traditional art17. Hannah Hoch used photomontage to create the Cut with The Kitchen Knife image. The design of her image is a controversial and cynical representation of the heavy handed and bloated nature of the male dominated German military and Weimer republic.
She cut out pieces of text and images found in journals, newspaper, advertisements, and magazines. She then cautiously pieced all the clippings together in a manner that made sense to her and as she perceived suitably served her intention of critical evaluation. Shocking and dramatic and mismatched letters typography of Dada had a strong influence on the work of Jamie Reid18. Reid used this design style in the Never Mind the Bollocks poster for the Sex Pistol band. The do-it-yourself attitude associated with Punk implied that designers kept away from using production equipment in their designs and rather used inexpensive and accessible devices such as hand lettering, found type, photocopiers, and typewriters19.
In both Dada and Punk eras, type was arranged in confusing and chaotic way. Artists would frequently set type vertically, horizontally, and diagonally and experiment with letter spacing and line spacing to the verge of illegibility. The chaotic use of type was a means of protesting against the mainstream society because it was the mainstream society that had developed typographic rules and standardized them.
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