“The sticker may be the most efficient art form ever invented”
Jeffrey Deitch, 2019
I have an essay in DB Burkeman’s just-published follow-up to his 2010 survey of the use of audacious and eye-catching stickers in art, design, fashion, music and social activism.
I’m extremely grateful to artist/designer/photographer Ash Hudson for sending precious photographs and design sketches from the archive of his late mother Ola Hudson, the super-talented fashion designer and costumier best known for providing David Bowie with the formal yet other-worldly collection of garments he wore in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell To Earth and as The Thin White Duke on the subsequent Isolar world tour.
Continue reading Tribute to Ola Hudson: The Woman Who Fell To Earth
There were more 150 art schools in this country in the mid-1960s. Most of them are now closed or absorbed into other institutions and the buildings repurposed, remodelled or demolished. What did it mean to have an art school in every town and what can we learn by discovering their fate?
Exhibition notes for The Art Schools Of North West England, 2018
I’m playing catch-up, having been distracted by a big project, but wanted to plug this great exhibition which is on at Liverpool’s prestigious gallery Bluecoat until March next year.
The third edition of Scott King and Matt Worley’s CRASH! has arrived. Entitled Nostalgia For The Jet Age, it is an “exhibition in a box” which coincides with an actual exhibition of the same name currently being held at Scotland’s Timespan.
Continue reading KRAŜO! 3: Nostalgio Por La Jeto-Aĝo estas skatolo de lertaĵoj *
In November 1971, design legend Barney Bubbles produced a typically audacious promotional item for Hawkwind’s recently released album X In Search Of Space.
Continue reading Cut it out: The astounding story behind Barney Bubbles’ Hawkwind Galactic Tarot
When he was growing up in Minneapolis in the 1950s, the painter Duncan Hannah’s father advised him: “You never know what kind of squirrel cage a man goes home to at the end of the day.”
Hannah’s book 20th Century Boy allows the reader full access to the squirrel cage inhabited by this charming man in 1970s New York.
Continue reading An unblinking look inside the squirrel cage: Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy
Tonight’s DJ appearance at Manhattan’s’ Soho Grand by the city’s clubland legend Richard Boch – who will be joined on the decks by none less than Fab 5 Freddy and Club 57’s Dany Johnson – affords an opportunity to champion one of my favourite books of the year.
Boch’s The Mudd Club is a visual and literary orgy of delight, packed full of striking images and tales of glory and excess from the late 70s/early 80s nightclub where he was the kingpin doorman and communed on many levels with the good, the bad, the deviant and the simply deranged of popular culture.
You want to know how David Bowie corralled Joey Arias and Klaus Nomi to back him on Saturday Night Live? Read it here, along with hundred of other yarns to make your hair stand on end.
Gossipy and jaw-dropping with a tone which is by turns sardonic and dewy-eyed for times long gone, The Mudd Club is a must-have.
The Mudd Club is published by Feral House; copies available here.
Festivities at the Soho Grand’s Club Room, 310 W Broadway, New York, NY 10013, kick off at 9pm tonight. No cover. Details here.
PRINT! Tearing It Up, the exhibition about the resurgence and history of independent progressive British magazines, has entered its final week at central London’s Somerset House.
Continue reading We’re keeping the dialectic open: Final week of PRINT! Tearing It Up at Somerset House
//Outtakes of the eight women featured in London Belles, published in the December 7 1973 issue of West One magazine. Photography © John Bishop. No reproduction without permission//
Although high fashion may be a thing of the past, what has replaced it is individuality and freedom to express. Women like these now make up their own minds about what they are and what they wear. Perhaps the rest of us should get the message and start being living fashion.
West One, December 7, 1973
I’m really honoured that veteran fashion photographer John Bishop has granted me this exclusive to show previously unpublished outtakes from the landmark London Belles feature he shot for the 1970s British magazine West One.
British law firm Charles Russell Speechlys, which supports the exhibitions at Somerset House’s Terrace Rooms, has produced a short film about PRINT! Tearing It Up, the show which I have organised at the gallery with SH senior curator Claire Catterall.
Continue reading ‘The trouble-making and oppositional aspects of this show are what we do so well’: PRINT! Tearing It Up at Somerset House supported by Charles Russell Speechlys