One of the most popular elements of PRINT! Tearing It Up – the celebration of independent magazines currently at Somerset House – is the giant mind map of British publishing which occupies an entire wall in the Terrace Rooms gallery.
Continue reading The PRINT! Mind Map: From A4 rough to 40 sq metre vinyl exhibit
Two short films representing the voices of independence in the Somerset House show PRINT! Tearing Up are available online and for visitors to the exhibition.
Continue reading Voices of independence: PRINT! films go live
To mark the opening earlier this month of the new Sonos store in Berlin – the home leisure company’s first retail presence in continental Europe – I was invited to organise a display of photography relevant to David Bowie’s creative connections to the city.
Continue reading Sonos Song Stories: Bowie In Berlin photographic display of rarely seen images
Recent encounters with Time Out founder Tony Elliott have brought to mind the audacious sign created by design collective Electric Colour Company to mark the magazine’s move into premises at 374 Gray’s Inn Road.
Continue reading Electric Colour Company’s sign for Time Out’s Gray’s Inn Road offices, 1970
As befits a sorely-missed man of singular style and taste, the catalogue for the forthcoming sale Furniture Pimp: The Collection Of Jim Walrod is an absolute treat.
Today marks eight years since the death of visual artist, designer and cultural provocateur Malcolm McLaren.
His friend Joe Stevens sent me this photo a couple of years back. It was taken during the period when McLaren – wearing one of the tartan bondage suits he designed with Vivienne Westwood – was mounting the defence of Sid Vicious, then on the murder charge for having killed Nancy Spungen.
This extraordinary episode from an extraordinary life – during which time McLaren encountered the likes of Donald Trump’s vile mentor Roy Cohn, the legendary radical lawyer William Kunstler and criminal defence attorney F. Lee Bailey (the latter by way of an introduction by Allen Ginsberg) – will of course be covered in my book Malcolm McLaren: The Biography, which is to be published by Constable & Robinson next year.
Of the many talented photographers who provided The Face with its visual verve, Kate Simon was uniquely positioned to chronicle the cutting edge cultural developments in New York in the 1980s.
Simon had spent much of the previous decade in London, photographing musicians and performers from Bob Marley and David Bowie to the Sex Pistols and The Clash (whose debut album features her striking portrait of Strummer, Jones and Simonon). Crucially, Simon’s work also appeared in the New Musical Express during The Face founder Nick Logan’s editorship of the music paper.
I’m very much looking forward to Women Look At Women, the new exhibition which explores feminine identity through the work of 13 internationally renowned women artists opening at London’s Richard Saltoun tonight.
This summer I am staging PRINT! Tearing It Up, an exhibition at central London’s Somerset House which investigates and celebrates the power of independently produced British magazines and journals.
//Left: detail, outer gatefold illustration by Holly Hollington, Greasy Truckers At Dingwalls Dancehall, Greasy Truckers Records, 1973; right: Uschi Obermaier and Michael J. Pollard, Oui, October 1973. Photo: Chris von Wangenheim//
//Left: Detail, uncredited cover photo, Oui, Oct 1973. Art director: Don Menell; right: detail; Greasy Truckers sleeve//
Recently I obtained a pristine copy of the October 1973 issue of American men’s magazine Oui, which contains a Chris von Wangenheim fashion shoot featuring actors Michael J. Pollard and Uschi Obermaier .