Born in 1972, Meredyth Sparks lives and works in New York. Her way of working brings real brio to tweaking images and reappropriating photographs that often date from the decade she was born in—a decade that saw the apogee and decline of utopian politics and the counter- culture. Carving up Roxy Music album covers to bring out their glorified, glam-rock/sexual liberation female bodies, and remixing Mick Rock’s Aladdin Sane photos of David Bowie with all the rigour of a Constructivist, Sparks reactivates punk’s visual strategies from Do-It-Yourself jubilation to precise historical quotation, from image subverted to image irreducibly seductive. Interviewed by Nicolas Bourriaud in her 2009 monograph (Monografik Editions), she commented, ‘The counterculture and its alleged disappearance is a complex issue that implies all first-generation “punk” and/or “post-punk” movements functioned as a collective, monolithic whole. What I remember coming of age in the 1980s and early 1990s is that, here in the States, there were a variety of political and sub-cultural movements, each with their own complicated politics, visual iconography, and idiosyncrasies. For instance, many of the movements under the Punk banner (hardcore, glam, straight-edge, British and Labor-based punk, etc.) often seemed more pitted against each other than against the collective powers that be (to say nothing of one’s attempt to make sense of the Sex Pistols, the Clash and Crass all within a single meta-narrative), but I agree with you that the allure of this period involves the way in which these artists helped to foreground a politics and notion of resistance in ways that haven’t been seen since I think my collages often emphasize the distance I felt from these movements during my adolescence. Though there was a punk scene of sorts in Knoxville, TN, it was a far cry from the fashion and politics of New York or L.A. In that sense, a punk or countercultural ideology always appeared to me, and to many I would assume, as always already mediated and filtered through a historical and cultural lens. The records and fanzines I collected supplied me with an ersatz form of connection to these communities, but these media (especially in their design) seemed already to be historicized and distanced somewhat from my own experience. Thus, the grids that you reference in my work may be a way of recuperating, closing off the historical distance, or creating a more coherent system of meaning that I feel in relation to these figures, but I hope they don’t imply a simple reductive nostalgia.’
