In the exhibition Run To Me – opening tomorrow at Old Street’s Charlie Smith London – curator Faye Dowling presents a quizzical visual exchange between painter Sam Jackson and photographer Derek Ridgers.
Eight Young Photographers: David Parkinson’s mould-breaking contribution to the 1971 exhibition
Eight Young Photographers was the third exhibition to be held at the newly-opened Photographers Gallery at its original premises in Great Newport Street in London’s West End.
The gallery opened in January 1971 with a group show entitled The Concerned Photographer featuring, among others, Robert Capa, and followed that by simultaneously staging three exhibits, including a display of Polaroids taken by Andy Warhol.
Visitors to Eight Young Photographers, which ran during April and into early May that year, recall it as being an important staging post in the acceptance of photography as a subject worthy of artistic appreciation. Among the contributors was the late David Parkinson, about whom I have written often. He showed work alongside Mark Edwards, Meira Hand, Roger Birt, Sylvester Jacobs, Tim Stevens, Bob Mazzer and Mark Trompeteler (who has kindly retrieved the catalogue/poster for me from his archive).
McLaren – A New Type Of Artist: Subject of my talk last night to CSM fine art students
Last night I gave a talk to fine art students at Central Saint Martins as part of the London art and design college’s Monday Guest Lecture series.
The title – Malcolm McLaren: A New Type Of Artist – stemmed from the catalogue introduction by the late Paul Taylor to Impresario, the 1988 New York New Museum show he curated about McLaren’s activities.
Taylor wrote:
Clearly, Malcolm McLaren is a “bad guy” of contemporary pop culture, a reputation that in these times makes him all the more appealing. To many in the worlds of art and social criticism, however, McLaren is like a new type of artist. A “producer” in more than one sense of the word, he has literally orchestrated new musical events and created provocative “cultural texts” within the mass-media. He has also shown that art in the post-avant-garde era is a matter of synthesis, of combining elements from radically different sources. . . . McLaren is a populariser, which is to say that he is a pioneer.
Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges catalogue published this Friday
The catalogue for exhibition Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges: Joining The Dots From The Situationist International To Malcolm McLaren is published on Friday (November 13).
Derek Boshier: Rethink/Re-entry – Works of the 1970s/Recent films & collages at Flowers Cork Street this autumn
To coincide with the publication of the Derek Boshier monograph Rethink/Re-entry, writer/curator Guy Brett and I are putting together an exhibition of the same name which will be held at Flowers Gallery in Cork Street, Central London this autumn.
‘A booby trap in Pop Art’: The tits tee featured in 1972 Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue
Congratulations to our pal Johnny Deluxe for this fantastic spot; he happened upon this kitsch sketch of an original tits t-shirt while leafing through an early 70s Frederick’s Of Hollywood catalogue.
Seven works by Barney Bubbles feature in Making Music Modern: Design For The Eye & Ear at MoMA
//Left: Poster, 30 x 20″, one of a series of four, for Generation X residency at The Marque, Soho, London, September 1977. Right: Poster, 60 x 40″, one of a series of five for Stiff Records package tour of UK, October/November, 1977. Design (c) Barney Bubbles Estate//
New York’s Museum Of Modern Art is featuring seven works by the late graphics maestro Barney Bubbles in the current exhibition Making Music Modern: Design For The Eye & Ear.
Die Kunst ist in Gefahr – Blessed & Blasted is back! Art Is In Danger, 1925
“Today’s artist, if he does not want to run down and become an antiquated dud, has the choice between technology and class warfare propaganda. In both cases he must give up ‘pure art’.
Either he enrolls as an architect, engineer or advertising artist in the army (unfortunately very feudalistically organized) which develops industrial powers and exploits the world; or as a reporter and critic reflecting the face of our times.”
From Last Round, the conclusion to Art Is In Danger
Today I’m returning to Blessed & Blasted – my occasional series about art manifestos – with Art Is In Danger, issued as a small book in 1925 by George Grosz and John Heartfield’s brother Wieland Hertzfelde.
This choice has been triggered by a charity shop acquisition of the catalogue for the 1979 London exhibition Neue Schachlichkeit And German Realism Of The Twenties, an examination of the so-called “New Objectivity” which arose as a reaction to the establishment of Weimar Germany.
Mr Freedom designs at the V&A: ‘When what has been considered bad taste is suddenly found to be invigorating’
“There is a moment when ‘good taste’ becomes dead; what has been considered ‘bad’ is suddenly found to be invigorating. Fashion today has little to do with la mode and the tacky is often accepted as an essential part of the necessary ‘total’ look. It can be fun.”
Cecil Beaton, introduction to the catalogue for the 1971 V&A exhibition Fashion: An Anthology
Recent visits to the V&A’s Archive of Art & Design have proved fruitful, particularly a viewing earlier this week of the collection of Pop Art clothing sold through London boutique Mr Freedom in the late 60s and early 70s.
Another of Mr Freedom’s ‘monstrous oddities’: Sue + Simon Haynes’ giant blue fun-fur gorilla
From the archive of the late Tommy Roberts, this image from British teen fashion magazine Mirabelle shows a particularly outré commission from fashion’s master of flamboyant retailing: a 7ft high rendition of a King Kong-style gorilla in blue fun fur created by the design team Sue and Simon Haynes.
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