Indefatigable Ian Harris + The Earth: Pop culture maverick’s 60s rock roots come to light
Ian Harris is one of those London characters who turns up at various stages in the capital’s post-war pop culture narrative.
Category: 2010s
A punk rock Feliz Navidad + ¡Feliz Año Nuevo! to you, to all collaborators + fellow schemers + dreamers
Below is a fun clip bringing back memories of the 2000 European Merry Mex-Mas tour by El Vez with his Memphis Mariachis and lovely Elvettes.
‘He stuck out his tongue and made devil faces in the glass’: The Conformist to feature artists, designers, writers, performers, utopians, outsiders, posers, perverts and other figures who have affronted or inverted the idea of ‘conformity’
‘ I am among the participants in The Conformist, a group exhibition being organised for the New Year by artist Paul Kindersley at the gallery of Julia Muggenburg’s extraordinary London art/jewellery establishment Belmacz.
Questioning American sanctities with satire and witty frustration: Rethink/Re-entry is one of The Observer’s art books of the year
Derek Boshier: Rethink/Re-entry – the artist monograph I edited – has been picked as one of the best art books of 2015 by British broadsheet The Observer.
Revised and updated with fresh links: My marathon trawl through the references in You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You’ve Been Lying On!
“It didn’t matter what side of the bed you were lying on, as long as you were lying on it. Everybody from (author/actress) Anne Lambton to (Sex Pistols guitarist) Kutie Jones to (socialite and writer) Anthony Haden-Guest – they were all flattered. Just goes to show how everyone loves to have their moment – good, […]
Victor Burgin: UK76 at Richard Saltoun and Burgin/Barthes at John Hansard
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 […]
New map in the New Year – Punk London: In The City 1975-78
I am collaborating with Herb Lester Associates on a new map – Punk London: In The City 1975-78 will be published in the New Year as a celebration of the movement which swept the capital 40 years ago and resonates today as an attitude throughout the world.
Support the publication of important new book Different Class: Fashion, Football & Funk – The Story of Laurie Cunningham
I’m not a football fan; I loved playing when I was in my 20s and 30s and as a kid followed Liverpool FC avidly but my interests have long lain elsewhere. But there is one football book that deserves publication in my view: Dermot Kavanagh’s Different Class, which explores the life and cultural significance of […]
Richard Hell + Young Kim present the Performa 15 Malcolm McLaren Award to Edgar Arceneaux
On Sunday night the performance art biennial Performa 15 culminated with a celebration of the 40th anniversary of punk. As part of the event at New York’s Hôtel Americano, the Malcolm McLaren Award – designed by Marc Newson with $10,000 prize money – was presented to Edgar Arceneaux by Young Kim of the McLaren Estate […]
‘Blowing up bridges so there is no way back’: Malcolm McLaren, Situationists + Sex Pistols remembered by Fred Vermorel in new exhibition catalogue
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, […]