‘Blowing up bridges so there is no way back’: Malcolm McLaren, Situationists + Sex Pistols remembered by Fred Vermorel in new exhibition catalogue
//Front and back cover designs//
//Pages on McLaren including image of the 1977 God Save The Queen muslin top designed with Vivienne Westwood and featuring Jamie Reid’s graphic and lyrics for the Sex Pistols track//
//Vermorel’s memoir includes images of McLaren’s student work such as this mixed media piece produced while on a fine art course at Goldsmith’s College in 1969//
Considered as an artwork, a two-and-a-half year project, and in its own terms, McLaren’s Sex Pistols’ was as seminal and resonant as Picasso’s Guernica.
Only this was a masterpiece made not of paint and canvas but of headlines and scandal, scams and factoids, rumour and fashion, slogans, fantasies and images and (I almost forgot) songs, all in a headlong scramble to auto-destruction.
For it was equally a Situationist treatise-by-example, the unremitting and obdurate core being McLaren’s grasp of the theory of situations as proposed by the SI.
Indeed, the story of the Pistols is a Situationist textbook of how to create situations from which there is no return. You refuse to negotiate, to compromise, to be co-opted, you exacerbate every crisis and recklessly play loser wins and then you blow up all the bridges so then there is no way back.
We are then forced to invent another future. Or maybe simply relish the mess, “the ecstasy of making things worse”.
From Fred Vermorel’s memoir which appears exclusively in the new exhibition catalogue.
The catalogue for the exhibition Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges is now available.
The lavishly illustrated 100-page book includes a foreword by John Hansard Gallery’s Ros Carter and Stephen Foster, my introduction, an essay by co-curator David Thorp and a specially commissioned memoir of Malcolm McLaren and his connections to post-war radicals by his art-school friend and collaborator Fred Vermorel.
//My introduction with photograph of 1995 shirt produced by McLaren for sale in Japan under his Ancien/Dead In England label//
//Thorp’s wide-ranging essay starts with Guy Debord and his psychogeographic work The Naked City//
Designed by Adrian Hunt, the catalogue contains many rare and previously unpublished images of exhibits contributed from such important collections as John McCready’s at Liverpool John Moores University and that owned by Derek Harris of Lewis Leathers. There are also items from the archive of the Malcolm McLaren Estate.
//We included the Japanese label Peel + Lift’s long-sleeved top ‘Drift’, which was based on a post of mine connecting the McLaren/Westwood ‘Cowboys’ t- shirt to a 1966 Situationist pamphlet//
//Derek Harris provided valuable original copies of UK Situationist cell King Mob’s newsletters//
//Tickertape produced by the SI in 1958 addressed: “To the producers of modern art…”//
//SI proclamation against the imprisonment of fellow traveller, the writer Alexander Trocchi, in 1960//
Priced at £12, the catalogue will be listed on amazon.co.uk and on distributor Cornerhouse Books’ website soon. Meantime copies – priced £12 – are available direct from Hannah Collins in the John Hansard Gallery bookshop at H.Collins@soton.ac.uk or by phone on: + 44 (0)23 8059 2158.
