Oh So Pretty: Punk in Print 1976-80, Rick Poynor

A Punk's Progress, Toby Mott 

pg.17 - 'I appreciated the visual immediacy in punk graphics, which never seemed tired or dated.'

'The Mott Collection - a selection of which appears in the pages of this book - illustrates the energy, boredom, dynamism and diverse political social and class issues that were all part of punk.'

'It includes iconic images by now celebrated names, such as Peter Saville, Jamie Reid and Linder Sterling, but more important are the multitude of flyers and zines crudely cut and pasted by anonymous hands, whose raw, immediate aesthetic represents the urgency of this explosive DIY culture. The ideals of self-empowerment, motivation, action and common cause are evident throughout.'

Graphic Anarchy in the UK, Rick Poynor

pg. 21 - '[Punk's] Its blast of DIY anarchy flushed out the pipes to allow a whoosh of creativity that spread from music into the arts, fashion and media worlds on the 1980s and beyond.'

'This is a record of British printed material.'

'American musicians such as Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, the Ramones, Suicide and Richard Hell feature when they visit the UK, but the graphic interpretations of these acts are done in local styles.'

'Mott concentrates mainly on disposable items - concert and promotional posters, flyers, fanzines, music papers and pop magazines - rather than more lasting artefacts such as record sleeves.'

'Their documentary value as cultural and sociological evidence is obvious enough...these relics give a vivid impression of punk's abrasive and uncompromising style.'

'Yet they are also graphic artefacts now deemed worthy of display in exhibitions and published collections like this one.'

'Punk's telltale devices - rough photocopied images, hand-drawn letters, ransom-note lettering, crudely cut and torn edges - have become a category in the history of graphic style, where they are seen to represent a deliberate flouting of the rules of professional practice.'

'Some of these raucous 'sites of resistance' (as academics have dubbed them) may have looked as they did, not in order to make any particular point, but because that was all that could be achieved using limited reprographic resources.'

'Their makers cared about the subject matter - the bands and the music - rather than the relatively arcane question of the meaning of graphic style.'

'In the early 1980s, graphic design would go seriously murky and textural as designers at labels such as 4AD sought a new aesthetic for visualising the dark, immersive grain of post-punk music.'

'An authentic living culture should have DIY entwined in its DNA.

pg. 22 - [while flyers for gigs - now valuable mementoes] '...are often by unknown hands.'

pg. 23 - '...collage and photomontage were the most potent tools for cutting up reality and constructing revelatory alternatives.'

'Punk was a moment of social and cultural insubordination when the established ways of forming a band, writing a song, dressing in the street, or laying out a page or a flyer were thrown aside.'

'The crucial thing was to participate, to make your own scene and not meekly accept what the market decided you should consume.'

'An authentic living culture should have DIY entwined in its DNA'

[Toby Mott's collection of punk ephemera is] an incitement to seize the moment, reject the obvious choices, find some like-minded collaborators and construct something challenging and new.'