//Cut The Cost Of Living, UK76, Victor Burgin, 1976//

The work of artist Victor Burgin is undergoing re-appraisal in the light of two forthcoming exhibitions, one of which starts this week.

London’s Richard Saltoun Gallery is marking the 40th anniversary of Burgin’s photo-text series UK76 by presenting the work in its entirety and in the form in which he showed his art in the 1960s and 70s: pasted onto the wall and scraped away at the end of the exhibition.

Meanwhile, in the New Year, John Hansard Gallery – the Southampton space where David Thorp and I staged the recent show Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges – will be mounting an exploration of Burgin’s engagement with the theories of philosopher Roland Barthes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: David Thorp, John Hansard Gallery, Richard Saltoun Gallery, Roland Barthes, Ubuweb, UK76, Victor Burgin

//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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Adrian hunt, Alexander Trocchi, Cornerhouse Books, David Thorp, Fred Vermorel, Guernica, Guy Debord, John Hansard Gallery, King Mob, Lewis Leathers, Peel + Lift, Picasso, Ros Carter, Sex Pistols, Situationist International, Situationist International: John McCready Archive, Stephen Foster

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).

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Barry Martin, David Thorp, Fred Vermorel, God Save The Queen, I Groaned With Pain, Jane Tankard, John Hansard Gallery, Ros Carter, Stephen Foster

//Top: Anarchy Shirt designed by Malcolm McLaren + Vivienne Westwood, 1976. Worn by Sex Pistols acolytes Jordan (Pamela Rooke) and Simon Barker for performances and TV appearances by the group. Private collection. Above left: screening room for Paris Capital Of The XXIst Century, Malcolm McLaren, 2010; right: vitrines and monitors in gallery 2. Photos: Steve Shrimpton//

Hope you enjoy this selection of installation shots from the exhibition Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges: Joining The Dots From The Situationist International To Malcolm McLaren, currently wowing visitors to Southampton’s John Hansard Gallery.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Alexander Trocchi, Asger Jorn, David Thorp, Guy Debord, John Hansard Gallery, Jordan, King Mob, Liverpool John Moore's University, Paris Capital of the XXIst Century, Simon Barker, Situationist International: John McCready Archive, Steve Shrimpton, William Burroughs

//Viewing exhibits in Gallery 2 at John Hansard Gallery. Pic JHG//

The opening of new exhibition Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges: Joining The Dots From The Situationist International To Malcolm McLaren at the weekend was a great success.

//Visitors Nick Abrahams + Suze Malyon with their dog Mrs Shufflewick//

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Alexander Trocchi, Asger Jorn, Barry Martin, Cath Slessor, David Thorp, Derek Harris, Guy Debord, Jean Francois Carly, John Hansard Gallery, King Mob, Mrs Shufflewick, Nick Abrahams, Richard Cabut, Saaya Nohara, Stephen Foster, Suze Malyon, Tony Drayton, William Burroughs

Today David Thorp and I worked with the team at John Hansard Gallery on the first day of the installation of our forthcoming exhibition Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges: Joining the dots from the Situationist International to Malcolm McLaren.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Alexander Trocchi, Asger Jorn, David Thorp, Desire And Helen, Frances Lengel, I Groaned With Pain, Jamie Reid, John Hansard Gallery, John McCready Archive, King Mob, Liverpool John Moore's University, Paris Capital of the XXIst Century, Shallow 1-21, Situationist International, Snow White & The Sir Punks, William Burroughs

Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges* is the title of the forthcoming exhibition about the creative interplay between a group of remarkable radical artists, poets, writers and activists who initiated, perpetrated and influenced a range of post-war alternatives.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Alexander Trocchi, Asger Jorn, David Thorp, David Wise, Derek Harris, Guy Debord, Hervé Falcou, John Hansard Gallery, King Mob, Nostalgia Of Mud, Paul Burgess, Stuart Wise, William Burroughs

//The t-shirts show the deliberate production of variants within the limited edition designed and written by McLaren and printed on the simple square pattern produced by Vivienne Westwood in 1974. © Malcolm McLaren Estate//

Two of Malcolm McLaren’s t-shirts from the very first production run of I Groaned With Pain – the notorious text design produced with Vivienne Westwood in 1974 – will be featured in Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges, the exhibition I am co-curating with David Thorp at Southampton’s John Hansard Gallery this autumn.

//T-shirt with central tear on light blue jersey with exterior seaming, labelled, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, 1974. 360mm x 375mm. © Malcolm McLaren Estate//

I Groaned With Pain is named after the first four words of the paragraph of text McLaren lifted from beat writer Alexander Trocchi’s erotic novel Helen And Desire (published in 1954 by Olympia Press under the pseudonym Francis Lengel).

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Alexander Trocchi, Antiquarius, Asger Jorn, bernie Rhodes, David Thorp, FRancis Lengel, Guy Debord, Helen And Desire, I Groaned With Pain, John Hansard Gallery, King Mob, Let It Rock, Olympia Press, Parade, The Clash, Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, Vivienne Westwood, William Burroughs

McLaren opened up the frontiers between artistic and wider cultural attitudes by taking fashion and music out of their respective contexts and translating them into new formats that captured the wider popular zeitgeist. A closer look at his seemingly disarticulated, exuberant and streetwise oeuvre shows it to be consistent and, in its own way, profound.

David Thorp

On Wednesday (June 3) I’m introducing a screening of Malcolm McLaren’s Paris: Capital Of The XXIst Century at The Performance Studio in Peckham, south London.

This is a the first-ever opportunity in this country to see the final work, which McLaren completed a matter of weeks before his death in April 2010. A working version was shown here just once, at Newcastle’s Baltic in November 2009.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Alexander Trocchi, Asger Jorn, Baudelaire, David Thorp, Guy Debord, John Hansard Gallery, King Mob, Paris Capital of the XXIst Century, Situationist International, The Performance Studio, Tracey Emin

//Poster 59 x 42cm. Garden Service, Apolonija Šušteršič with Meike Schalk, 2007//

This handsome fold-out poster is for the exhibition Potential Architecture, which opens at London’s Ambika P3 on March 11.

//Clockwise from top right: Pavilion For Vodka Drinking Ceremonies, Alexander Brodsky, 2004; It Was All A Dream, Joar Nango, 2013; Garden Service, Apolonija Šušteršič (co-author Meike Schalk), 2007; Levitation, Sean Griffiths, 2015//

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Alexander Brodsky, Ambika P3, Apolonija Šušteršič, David Thorp, Joar Nango, Sean Griffiths, University of Westminster