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I’m delighted to announce that David Hockney has written the preface to Rethink/Re-Entry, the Derek Boshier monograph I am editing. In the piece, Hockney points out that they have known each other since 1957, and that Boshier “like me, is an artist, and one who has never lost his wonder at the world”.
“I started out in art school as a painter. I studied there for eight years and most of my education was based around the visual arts. I learnt all my politics and understanding of the world through the history of art.” Malcolm McLaren speaking on British arts documentary series the South Bank Show, 1983 Among […]
‘Black is the most exciting colour’ (Goya). Black when used in different ways appears the most infinite and mysterious, the most spatial and loose. Malcolm McLaren, essay for course at Croydon Art School, 1967 It’s exciting. Work is underway on building the Art In Pop group exhibition which opens next month at Le Magasin, France’s […]
In the shop’s various incarnations I made clothes that looked like ruins. I created something new by destroying the old. This wasn’t fashion as a commodity; this was fashion as an idea. From his foreword to The Look: Adventures In Rock & Pop Fashion, Malcolm McLaren, 2001 The first exhibition to examine the late cultural […]
John Beck and Matthew Cornford’s intelligent and measured book The Art School And The Culture Shed may be a slim volume but it packs a hell of a punch in locating the ravages wreaked on our cultural life over the past 20 years by privatisation, the failings of local councils and town planners and the […]
Artist/illustrator Peter Knock pays tribute to the British ‘Situation’ painter Robyn Denny, who has died: Sad to learn of the death of abstract painter Robyn Denny last Tuesday (May 20). It surprised me that he was, in fact, 83; my image of him is locked into the 60s when he was one of the hip […]
While interrogating materials for Rethink/Re-Entry – the monograph of artist Derek Boshier I am editing – I’ve come across many delights, including these sketches in the Flowers Gallery archive for one of the most visually striking documents of the post-punk era, CLASH 2nd Songbook.
“There is a moment when ‘good taste’ becomes dead; what has been considered ‘bad’ is suddenly found to be invigorating. Fashion today has little to do with la mode and the tacky is often accepted as an essential part of the necessary ‘total’ look. It can be fun.” Cecil Beaton, introduction to the catalogue for […]
I went to a good school (it was approved, as my first editor would have it in the late 70s. You had to be there). I was taken on as a scholarship boy, one who showed enough promise for the fees to be paid by the council. But I was lazy, not as bright as […]
Today the National Portrait Gallery unveiled Imaginary Portraits, a selection of works by artist Derek Boshier, who is the subject of a monograph I am editing. Prominent are two studies of David Bowie; an oil-on-canvas painting executed in New York in 1980 while Bowie was rehearsing for his role in Bernard Pomerance’s play The Elephant […]