Barney Bubbles designs go regional at the National Museum Cardiff + Ludlow Fringe Art Trail
The regions are where it’s at these days, so we are told, and naturally Barney Bubbles designs can be found in the thick of it.
Author: Paul Gorman
Malcolm McLaren in Witches trenchcoat on the steps of the British Museum 1983
This portrait of Malcolm McLaren was captured among the columns outside the entrance to London’s august British Museum by Andy Rosen in 1983. In the photograph taken during promotion of the Duck Rock album, which was released at the start of 1983, McLaren sported a rare trenchcoat design from the Witches collection he and Vivienne […]
The Old Man: Philip “Staff” Gorman (April 25, 1903 – June 8, 1980)
“Bad thing for a young man to lose his father” Charles Cheeryble, Nicholas Nickleby My father died 35 years ago today. I was 20 at the time, and witnessed him take his final breath. The narrow world of music and clothes I inhabited was preoccupied with Ian Curtis’s recent suicide; given the fact that my […]
‘A booby trap in Pop Art’: The tits tee featured in 1972 Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue
Congratulations to our pal Johnny Deluxe for this fantastic spot; he happened upon this kitsch sketch of an original tits t-shirt while leafing through an early 70s Frederick’s Of Hollywood catalogue.
A cause for celebration: Digitisation of all 239 issues of Spare Rib
Great news that the British Library has digitised the archive of one of the most important magazines of modern times: Spare Rib. If you don’t know it or haven’t seen the publication, you are in for a treat. As the British Library’s politics and public life curator Polly Russell says, Spare Rib was “funny, irreverent, […]
Derek Boshier’s ‘sardonic fairy tale’ 16 Situations in the spell-binding Land Marks: Structures For A Poetic Universe
I’m pretty late with this but there are still three or so weeks to go, so, if you have the opportunity, I recommend a visit to Hauser + Wirth Somerset, home until June 21 of the contemplative and poised exhibition Land Marks: Structures For A Poetic Universe. Curated by historians Nicholas Olsberg and Markus Lähteenmäki, […]
Introducing first UK screening of Malcolm McLaren’s completed Paris: Capital Of The XXIst Century at The Performance Studio next week
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. […]
Richard Hambleton + Malcolm McLaren = Witches x The Shadow Man
An under-acknowledged art world connection forged by Malcolm McLaren during his fashion design partnership with Vivienne Westwood was to the godfather of street art, conceptual artist Richard Hambleton. During his forays in New York in the early 80s, McLaren was struck by Hambleton’s eerie representations of The Shadow Man figure; there was one on a […]
LP artwork distilled, venue interiors re-appraised and video portraits of Ian Brown, Matt Johnson and Richard Strange at Peter Wilkins’ Lost In Music
In the 21st century, when digital downloads displaced compact discs as the format of consumer choice, music went naked into the world, unadorned by design or packaging. Yet this in turn gave rise to vigorous rear-guard action in the growing appreciation of what was fast disappearing. As if from the dead, vinyl made a comeback […]
It’s a cracker: Jah Wobble x 4 in promo for new song Merry Go Round
Love the clip from Jah Wobble for his cracking new song Merry Go Round.