Reid also designed artwork for Berkeley’s Point-Blank! group, and published a comic-book version of a pseudo-SI/pseudo-Reichian text on sexual liberation. On one page, seven mounted cowboys discourse simultaneously on their wish to “Do away with the roles and identities handed out by the phallos.” The vagueness of the picture barely kept the metaphor alive, but the discontinuity regained its poetic tension: why were these people talking about this? In 1974, working with London boutique-owner Malcolm McLaren (whose designs had included T-shirts emblazoned with slogans from May ’68), Reid helped design and publish Christopher Gray’s Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (London: Free Fall, 1974), the first English-language anthology of situationist texts. The next year, they launched the Sex Pistols.
The Sex Pistols were an SI-inspired art project mean to activate the reversible connecting factor: “to eradicate the hierarchy that ran rock,” as Dave Marsh put it; “ultimately, to eradicate hierarchy, period.” Reid designed the band’s record sleeves, posters, handbills, and, in 1977, Anarchy in the U.K., a promotional tabloid named after the Sex Pistols’ first single and produced in imitation of the fanzines that had already sprung up around the group. On the page devoted to the Sex Pistols’ Paris shows (“Je suis un anarchiste”), Reid returned to secret language for a homage: “Anarchy needs co-ordination,” read a scrawl on the bottom left corner, “Where is Durutti?” The Cowboy Philosopher was invisible, but still talking–if only in code.
The code became babble with McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s pornographic T-shirt, here modeled by Sex Pistol Sid Vicious; legends on the shirt read, “for soldiers prostitutes dykes & punks,” and, for the cowboy dialogue, “Ello Joe, Been anywhere lately?” “Nah, It’s all played aht Bill Getting to straight.” The drawing may have been lifted from a gay magazine; given McLaren’s connections with Reid and Christopher Gray, the reference to the Cowboy Philosopher is unmistakable. And the dialogue neatly sums up where the cowboy has been for the last decade: nowhere.
MANCHESTER, 1978
Figure 4. After 12 years in the wilderness, the Cowboy Philosopher returns. SI fan Tony Wilson, inspired by the pop music bricolage set in motion by the Sex Pistols, started Factory Records, and released a sampler EP. In a punk context (i.e., the redirection of rock ‘n’ roll away from managed entertainment toward a nihilist critique of everyday life), the discontinuities of the Strasbourg cowboy, even in French (or precisely because they are communicated in French, which in the UK, and with the cowboy appearing as a blind reference, is the basic discontinuity), seem to promise absolute possibility.
Later, Wilson covered the walls of the Factory rehearsal studio with huge blowups of Bertrand’s Cowboy Philosopher, as a talisman of what he meant his bands to accomplish. After that, he opened a nightclub in Manchester: the Hacienda.
LONDON, 1979
Figure 5. With the Sex Pistols, defunct as of January 1978, only a memory, others took up their project. The Gang of Four, from Leeds, England, included guitarist Andy Gill, a student of art-history professor T.J. Clark, himself formerly a member of the SI. On the sleeve of the first Gang of Four lp, the Cowboy Philosopher (seemingly John Wayne, in silhouette, in three progressively zoomed panels, until his whited-out face is head-to-head with the Indian’s redded-out face) reappears, and with new force. The legend surrounding the panels reads, “The Indian smiles, he thinks that the cowboy is his friend. The cowboy smiles, he is glad the Indian is fooled. Now he can exploit him.” If the various permutations of the Cowboy Philosopher metaphor up to this point were like rock ‘n’ roll cover versions, this is the first answer record. The Gang of Four argue that the actions of the cowboy–not just Bertrand’s hero, but John Wayne’s cowboy, the culturally empowered, iconically representative agent of the dominant structures of reification–are inherently philosophical; no matter what the cowboy does, Gill and Gang of Four signer Jon King are saying, he represents power. The cheap use of the Cowboy Philosopher by the Conseil pour le maintien des occupations comes home–and, for the first time, the Cowboy Philosopher stands on his head.
LONDON, 1982
Figure 6. Disseminated everywhere as a mystery in the late ‘60s, by the early ‘80s, when the revolutrionary transformation of life that the Cowboy Philosopher was supposed to spark had become a joke, and the punk carrier of the notion had become an arcane reference to the pop charts that punk had failed to conquer, the Cowboy Philosopher became a joke as well. Working according to SI precepts of détournement, the satirical comics group Biff turns the Cowboy Philosopher into a satire of himself. Thus reconstructed, the metaphor was sold across the West as a postcard, a poster, and a T-shirt. Paradoxically, as a joke, the metaphor stays in the saddle.