EXHIBITION ESSAY

ONE OF THE HUNDRED PUNKS

The unpretentious talent of these photos, their candid greatness, their layered reminder of what the late 1970’s really was, their artistry. The one of Gerardo Velazquez holding his bus pass with a look of pleasant defiance hits hard. You can research Los Angeles in the 1970’s histories in the archives of all the important institutions and you will never come across a more fearlessly contented image of the working class asserting they too have art in their pocket. The soda can tab earring is all the punk he needed here. No green mohawk on a trust fund kid in the San Fernando Valley could ever compete with the authenticity oozing out of this picture. You either had a bus pass or you didn’t. They call it a Tap Card now and it still is an economic indicator of sorts in the class warfare we call the City of Angels.

Tomorrow's famous faces advertise today
And the studs on their back say
One hundred punks rule
—Billy Idol/Tony James

In a world where one must fight the automatic spell check to inscribe “Immaculate Conseption” as Gerardo or one of his bandmates scrawled it onto the mirror, it is easy to realize how far we have come from a decade where technology took time but expressing your anger just took some paint or mascara. And there it is, a defiant typo from a time when Punk meant more Catholic than Catholic, a broken monstrance during the benediction. Inscribed on a mirror, a dirty, blurry, thick and heavy mirror from the 1920’s installed somewhere unaware Gerardo would avoid defiling the elegant etched flower atop as he spat on his own reflection in the name of art or at least a wail against boredom. Punk had no father and no mother, Gerardo knew just how septic its immaculate conseption must have truly been.

Fitting in wasn’t an option. Technology - the center of our lives today - was a blurry video screen and how many hours turning tricks on the fathers of those Valley punks down on Santa Monica Boulevard to afford a synthesizer, and amplifier? His lips drew them in, drew them closer. It was of course a different time, before the now-forgotten plague. But he bought equipment, understood it intuitively, that every technology was a tool and he was the engineer. He made his mark, and these pictures are the blink of an eye of his untethered genius, not destroyed by art school or theory, success or failure, class struggle or critique. Perpetually nascent, almost forgotten.

A hundred punks run the loaded gun
They look so sharp they look like one
If you ain't got the look you'll never be one
—Generation X, 1977

The plague hit. He went to school, thinning, sweating, swollen. I can walk you to the spot in the Cal State L.A. parking lot where he was waiting for a ride and I was walking toward the bus stop home. The plague was swallowing him but unlike everyone else in the dark turn of 1989 into 1990, it hadn’t yet neutered the creative rage that comes with total freedom. “Condoms are not freedom,” he said, “The only freedom anyone ever felt in Los Angeles was being one of the first one hundred punks.” His ride pulled up. He walked around to get in, “Remember I was in the hundred, one of the first.”

I never saw him again. But I never forgot him. Unrequited genius should anger us but these photos do what art must do, beyond the political and despite the personal, they crystallize the moment they were made; they find an eternal grace of what anyone might be capable of should genius smolder in their eyes, their lips, their bus pass. Unforgettable.

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Mat Gleason