//barneybubbles.com//
The all-new Barney Bubbles website has been launched as part of the celebration to mark what would have been the graphic genius’s 80th birthday this year.
Enough Get Backery! Let’s celebrate Yoko Ono’s 70 years at the vanguard
Feb 9th, 2022
//Painting To Be Stepped On, Yoko Ono, 1961. Photograph: George Maciunas//
“People said Yoko Ono ruined the Beatles, but I think the Beatles ruined her in many ways”
Anne Bean, artist, to The Guardian, 2021.
Saturated as mass culture has recently been by Get Backery, I note the lack of celebration for another significant anniversary: 70 years since Yoko Ono became the first female student to be accepted onto the philosophy course at Tokyo’s Gakushuin University in 1952.
As noted in Inventing Downtown, Melissa Rachleff’s incisive history of New York’s artist-run galleries from the early 50s to the mid-60s, Ono left Gakushuin after two terms to join her parents in Manhattan, where she promptly enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College to study poetry and composition.
Talking Barney Bubbles in the Los Angeles Review of Books
Jan 25th, 2022
I’m featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books in conversation with the journalist and musician Elizabeth Nelson about the life and times of the late graphic designer Barney Bubbles.
Read the LARB piece here.
Nelson has also recorded a tribute to the late graphic artist with her band The Paranoid Style. The track was released yesterday and is available to stream/download via Bandcamp.
Here’s the song lyric video complete with customised Bubbles artworks:
The Wild World of Barney Bubbles, the third edition of my monograph, is published by Thames & Hudson this summer accompanied by specialist imprint Volume’s limited edition A Box of Bubbles. Order your’s here.
A selection from my archive in Subscribe, the exhibition about artists and alternative magazines at the Art Institute of Chicago
Jan 21st, 2022
//Subscribe exhibition ident//
//Artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen (right) featured in The Uniform Backlash, The i-D Bible Part 2, 1989. Photography Daniel Kohlbacher, styling Simon Foxton. Paul Gorman Archive//
Beginning in the early 1970s—as under-represented groups were demanding new forms of visibility following the emergence of political movements such as Black Power and the Stonewall Rebellion—a handful of British and American photo-driven alternative magazines came on the scene.
The Face, i-D, Rags, Out/Look, and other new publications amplified marginalized voices, especially those of queer makers and makers of colour, and made room for those makers to question who and what was accepted as mainstream. These publications introduced a hybrid model within the magazine industry: combining the high production standards and engagement with fashion of “powerhouse” publications such as Vogue and Life with the use of collage in zines and the text/image provocations of underground newspapers. In the end, these alternative magazines transformed their industry.
From the introduction to Subscribe.
Two years ago, just as the enormity of the pandemic was emerging, I met American curators Solveig Nelson and Michal Raz-Russo in London to discuss making a contribution to an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago about the significance of alternative magazines to Western culture.
Creative Review celebrates A Box Of Bubbles
Jan 20th, 2022
British design media outlet Creative Review has reported on the publication of A Box Of Bubbles, the forthcoming limited edition boxed and enhanced edition of the new monograph The Wild World Of Barney Bubbles.
The Rise & Fall of the Music Press: The brilliance of Black Music, Carl Gayle and Alan Lewis
Jan 20th, 2022
Working on my forthcoming book The Rise & Fall Of The Music Press has brought home to me the brilliance of publications and journalists who have been marginalised in the story of the media sector inaugurated by the launch of The Melody Maker (as it was then known) in 1926.
A Box Of Bubbles: Limited edition up for grabs now
Jan 20th, 2022
A Box Of Bubbles is the special edition of the forthcoming book The Wild World of Barney Bubbles.
The Wild World of Barney Bubbles is out this summer
Jan 20th, 2022
My next book, The Wild World of Barney Bubbles, is published around the world this summer by Thames & Hudson.
This is the enhanced and revised third edition of my monograph of the late graphic artist, who died in 1983 and would have been 80 this year.
Too Too Utterly: Malcolm McLaren’s film pitch by fax to James Bond scriptwriters
Oct 31st, 2021
//Fax of treatment sent by Malcolm McLaren to Neal Purvis and Robert Wade on January 9, 1991//
These faded pages constitute a film pitch Malcolm McLaren sent by fax to screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade way back in 1991.
//The first page of the fax shows that this treatment was completed a couple of weeks before it was sent, on December 20, 1990//
//From my transcription of the now-very faded fax//
Purvis and Wade are responsible for many film successes including the astounding run of screenplays for the seven James Bond movies from 1999’s The World Is Not Enough to the recently released No Time To Die. I’ve known them for a while and Neal has mentioned their contact with McLaren during preparations for their first feature Let Him Have It, so made sure it was covered in the hardback edition of The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren.
Where’s Malcolm?! McLaren spotted with downtown punk royalty at the May 1975 Central Park peace rally
Oct 29th, 2021
//Malcolm McLaren between Patti Smith and David Johansen with Cyrinda Foxe and Lenny Kaye, Sheep Meadow, Central Park, May 11, 1975. Photo: Danny Fields//
//Close up: Malcolm McLaren refreshes himself behind Smith and Johansen//
46 years after music manager Danny Fields took the photograph of a group of New York’s 70s demi-monde at the top of this post I’ve spotted the previously unidentified person behind them: the subject of my latest book, Malcolm McLaren (who appears to be chugging a half-bottle of Smirnoff).
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