Someday all the Adults Will Die – Punk Graphics 1971-1984 at the Hayward Gallery

Exhibition: Someday all the Adults Will Die – Punk Graphics 1971-1984, Hayward Gallery Project Space, London, until November 4 2012

“Get-up-and-get-on-with-it eyeball-pleasers” is how Johan Kugelberg, the co-curator of this overview of punk graphic design from way back, describes the splurge of homemade cassettes, fanzines, posters, handbills, recordings and clothing.

Anarcho-punk artist Gee Vaucher and Sex Pistols illustrator Jamie Reid are among those adding to the hundreds of items, expressing a glimmer of the youthful rebellion and anti-authority verve of an era embedded in fashion and graphic design.

They include flyers for Joy Division gigs, adverts for a documentary about the Pistols, dusted-off 7” records, Black Flag prints and clothing dreamed up by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren.

“If you don't like the culture you are spoon-fed, you can make your own,” says Kugelberg, who founded the hip-hop history and punk history archives at Cornell University, runs a New York Gallery and wrote the book The Velvet Underground: New York Art.

“It worked wonders at the end of the seventies, and all these jagged, chiaro-scuro urgent masterpieces of graphic design, executed by art school masters alongside anguished adolescents, continue to reverberate.”

• Open 10am-6pm (8pm Thursday and Friday). Admission free. The accompanying book, Punk: An Aesthetic, is edited by Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage and published by Rizzoli. Find out more about the book.

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