//My essay on Malcolm For Mayor with stickers by Scott King and Matthew Worley//
“The sticker may be the most efficient art form ever invented”
Jeffrey Deitch, 2019
I have an essay in DB Burkeman’s just-published follow-up to his 2010 survey of the use of audacious and eye-catching stickers in art, design, fashion, music and social activism.
//Window display for Impresario at the New Museum, Sept 16 – Nov 20, 1988. Image from the New Museum Digital Archive//
//Introduction to the show. Image from the New Museum Digital Archive//
My biography of the late Malcolm McLaren will now be published in April 2020, exactly 10 years after his premature death at the age of 64.
In my twin capacities as “biographer” of The Face and curator of last year’s British independent magazine exhibition PRINT!, I’ve been asked publicly and privately for my thoughts on the imminent online relaunch of the title (the plan is that the quarterly physical edition will follow in August, carrying a September dateline).
So here they are:
It’s interesting that the greatest anticipation for the magazine’s return is being generated for and by the fashion community. The PRs, writers, stylists and students who kept the flame alive after the publication’s 2004 demise are now busily banging the drum in response to the relaunch’s oddly one-note Instagram branding exercise, filling their feeds with excited content.
Two decades apart, the editors of the American and British editions of Condé Nast’s Vogue began their respective careers with modest contributions to prominent independent youth culture publications of their day.
There were more 150 art schools in this country in the mid-1960s. Most of them are now closed or absorbed into other institutions and the buildings repurposed, remodelled or demolished. What did it mean to have an art school in every town and what can we learn by discovering their fate?
Exhibition notes for The Art Schools Of North West England, 2018
I’m playing catch-up, having been distracted by a big project, but wanted to plug this great exhibition which is on at Liverpool’s prestigious gallery Bluecoat until March next year.
//Richard Boch, 4am, Mudd basement, 1980. Photo: Lynette Bean Kral//
//Fab 5 Freddy Brathwaite, The Times Square Show, 1980. Photo: Bobby Grossman//
Tonight’s DJ appearance at Manhattan’s’ Soho Grand by the city’s clubland legend Richard Boch – who will be joined on the decks by none less than Fab 5 Freddy and Club 57’s Dany Johnson – affords an opportunity to champion one of my favourite books of the year.
//Judy Nylon and transient tattoos, 1979. Photo: Lisa Genet//
//Cookie Mueller, 1979. Photo: Bobby Grossman//
Boch’s The Mudd Club is a visual and literary orgy of delight, packed full of striking images and tales of glory and excess from the late 70s/early 80s nightclub where he was the kingpin doorman and communed on many levels with the good, the bad, the deviant and the simply deranged of popular culture.
//Clockwise from top left: Vicki Pedersen’s membership card; staff member Debi Mazar by Rhonda Paster Corte; ID card flipside; Cookie Mueller, 1979 by Billy Sullivan; Lisa Rosen 1980 by Maripol; Richard Sohl + Richard Boch in Montauk by Ron Beck; Kate Simon’s ID card 1980//
//Clockwise from top left: Vicki Pedersen/Joan Crawford Mother’s Day Event 1979 by Marcia Resnick; Nan Goldin Night School at Mudd 1979 by Billy Sullivan; Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong 1980 by Robin Schanzenbach; Hal Ludacer 1979 by Eileen Polk; Eric Mitchell and Amos Poe 1979 by Marcia Resnick; Anya Phillips and James Chance, Mudd dance floor 1979 by Chris Stein//
You want to know how David Bowie corralled Joey Arias and Klaus Nomi to back him on Saturday Night Live? Read it here, along with hundred of other yarns to make your hair stand on end.
//Poison Ivy Rorschach post performance. Photo: Alan Kleinberg//
//Damita with cowgirl tattoo, 1980. Photo: Ebet Roberts//
Gossipy and jaw-dropping with a tone which is by turns sardonic and dewy-eyed for times long gone, The Mudd Club is a must-have.
The Mudd Club is published by Feral House; copies available here.
Festivities at the Soho Grand’s Club Room, 310 W Broadway, New York, NY 10013, kick off at 9pm tonight. No cover. Details here.
//The first vitrine contains original copies of Blast 2 (1915), Crash! 1 (1997) and gal-dem 2 (2017). Photo: @hellenelleliang//
//Enjoying browsing the magazines on the PRINT! newsstand. Photo: @jasonthien//
//Contributor Alpa Depani talking about her zine Romp with members of the New Architecture Writers group. Photo: @paul_g0rm4n//
PRINT! Tearing It Up, the exhibition about the resurgence and history of independent progressive British magazines, has entered its final week at central London’s Somerset House.
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British law firm Charles Russell Speechlys, which supports the exhibitions at Somerset House’s Terrace Rooms, has produced a short film about PRINT! Tearing It Up, the show which I have organised at the gallery with SH senior curator Claire Catterall.
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//The PRINT! Mind Map currently in the Terrace Rooms of Somerset House. Photo: Doug Peters/PA Wire//
//First rough draft, February 2018//
One of the most popular elements of PRINT! Tearing It Up – the celebration of independent magazines currently at Somerset House – is the giant mind map of British publishing which occupies an entire wall in the Terrace Rooms gallery.
“It’s like reconstructing the debris of old pop paraphernalia… what’s exciting about it is that you no longer need to buy guitars. You can choose a friend up the road, put your decks together with a beatbox and make your own records, demoralising [sic] the pop myth and beginning to find a way of using material yourself .”
On November 19 1982, the UK’s national weekly youth music programme The Tube included a segment marking the occasion when the terms (and concepts of) “scratching”, “break-dancing” and “hip-hop” were introduced to a mass British audience for the first time.
| Paul Gorman is a writer. This is his blog: art, books, conversation, cults, dancing, design, encounters, environments, events, film, galleries, groups, individuals, invitations, magazines, music, opinions, performance, photography, places, press, privacy, spaces, style, thoughts + views. |
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