Modernize your old culture! Be up to date! Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges installation well underway
DÉTOURNÉD PAINTING
Intended for the public. Easy reading
Collectors and museums,
be modern
If you have old paintings,
do not despair.
Keep your memories
But detourne them
So they correspond to your time
Why reject the old [paintings]
If one can modernize them?
With a few brushstrokes
Modernize your old culture
Be up to date
and distinguished at the same time
Painting is over
Better give it the final blow
Detourne
Long live painting
Asger Jorn, exhibition catalogue, Galerie Rive Gauche, Paris, May 1959. Translation: Young Kim.
Among the pertinent exhibits of our forthcoming show Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges is the statement disavowing traditional approaches to artistic creation made by the Danish artist and writer Asger Jorn in the late 50s.
//Jorn’s May 1968 poster Vive La Revolution Pasione with 1971 Communist party pamphlet quoting Marx and Engels: “Vive la Commune!”//
//Copy of Jorn + Guy Debord’s Fin de Copenhague on loan from the John McCready Archive at Liverpool John Moore’s University//
//Model poses in Sex design I Groaned With Pain, Parade magazine, 1976; an example of the first run of the McLaren/Westwood design, unlabelled, 1974; copy of Alexander Trocchi’s Helen And Desire, Olympia Press, 1970, open on the pages where the I Groaned paragraph appears; 1962 Imprimerie SIP edition of Desire And Helen, published under Trocchi pseudonym Frances Lengel//
Among those who took up Jorn’s challenge was the former art student Malcolm McLaren, when he applied the methods of détournément to popular culture slogans, ephemera and clothing with gusto after opening the boutique Let It Rock.
This can be seen in the artworks McLaren produced as fashion multiples with his partner Vivienne Westwood at 430 King’s Road as it mutated from Let It Rock through to Worlds End over the decade to 1981.
//Literature from Mclaren’s 1999 campaign to become Mayor Of London with 1974 New Musical Express article on fashion and music and 1976 edition of Gallery International containing McLaren interview//
//2014 Drift t-shirt by Japanese street-fashion brand Peel + Lift makes the cut in the the vitrine showing how McLaren composed the notorious Cowboys t-shirt by drawing on Situationist and outsider – in this case homoerotic – literature//
//John Hansard Gallery’s Julian Grater and Ros Carter installing William Burroughs’ majestic 1988 shotgun work Ten Gauge City//
//Open copy of Mémoires, Jorn’s collaboration with Guy Debord, famously published in 1959 with a sandpaper cover//
//We will be spinning a selection of Bill Burroughs spoken word records during the show//
//Vitrines in place with projector which will show McLaren’s 1969 paintings made for his year-end show while a student at Goldsmith’s in south-east London//
//English-language version of the Internationale Lettriste sticker made in 1955//
The exhibition opens on Saturday (September 26) and runs until November 14.
Find out more here.