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.
And Taylor’s view was reinforced by the Swiss art book publisher Lionel Bovier more than 20 years later, when he wrote in the foreword to the catalogue for the group show Musical Paintings:
Malcolm McLaren is and has been an artist in the purest sense for his entire adult life.
That art practice and an understanding of art history were key to McLaren’s work was borne out by his correspondence.
During last night’s presentation I showed excerpts from postcards McLaren wrote to his friend Fred Vermorel in the 60s. These referenced kaleidoscopic artistic interests, from Renaissance painter Massaccio, the father of Baroque sculpture Bernini and post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne to 20th century German/Danish printmaker Emil Nolde, avant-garde drama group The Living Theatre, new wave filmmakers Godard and Truffaut and a film he called “Jagnat” (possibly 1950’s Shri Jagannatha directed by Chitta Ranjan Mitra).
Vermorel discusses McLaren’s postcards and lifelong art zealotry in his essay in the catalogue to recent exhibition Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges at Southampton’s John Hansard Gallery.
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.