At all times, my acts and my actions in life have stemmed from love or eroticism, as you like it.
Pierre Molinier, The Shaman And Its Creatures
Pierre Molinier, “the man and the painter, the genius and the pervert, the ‘lesbienne’ and the guns lover” is not an easy figure to pin down.
Derek Boshier is the next subject of the BBC strand What Do Artists Do All Day? – Zara Hayes’ film, which was shot in Los Angeles and shadows Boshier on his daily routine, will be screened at 10.30pm UK time on BBC Four next Monday (August 24).
Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges* is the title of the forthcoming exhibition about the creative interplay between a group of remarkable radical artists, poets, writers and activists who initiated, perpetrated and influenced a range of post-war alternatives.
Chris Stephens, the Tate’s head of displays and head curator of modern British art, has organised for Derek Boshier’s 1962 painting to be hung at Tate Britain on London’s Millbank.
Continue reading Not-so-hidden persuader: Tate displaying The Identi-Kit Man by Derek Boshier
Let It Rock was digging in the ruins of past cultures that you cared about. It was giving them another brief moment in the sun. It wasn’t about doing anything new. It was an homage. It was nostalgia.
Malcolm McLaren to Momus, 2002
Forty three years after its creation I can reveal the source of the Jerry Lee Lewis image which appeared on the Let It Rock t-shirt design “The ‘Killer’ Rocks On!”.
It is from a lobby card for Alan Freed’s 1958 rocksploitation flick High Street Confidential!; an original was just one of the pieces of 50s ephemera adorning Let It Rock’s premises at 430 King’s Road in 1972.
Continue reading Found! The source of the Jerry Lee image in Let It Rock’s Killer Rocks On t-shirt
//Boshier features in these panels from BBC Four’s Pop Art-style run-down of the season elements//
British artist Derek Boshier – subject of Rethink/Re-entry, the monograph I have edited which is published this autumn – is to be featured in next month’s BBC season of programmes about Pop Art.
Boshier has been commissioned by the broadcaster to create a new BBC Four ident which will run throughout August alongside new logos produced by his fellow Royal College graduates Peter Blake and Peter Phillips (who starred with Boshier and the late Pauline Boty in Ken Russell’s groundbreaking 1962 BBC documentary Pop Goes The Easel).
Two of Malcolm McLaren’s t-shirts from the very first production run of I Groaned With Pain – the notorious text design produced with Vivienne Westwood in 1974 – will be featured in Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges, the exhibition I am co-curating with David Thorp at Southampton’s John Hansard Gallery this autumn.
I Groaned With Pain is named after the first four words of the paragraph of text McLaren lifted from beat writer Alexander Trocchi’s erotic novel Helen And Desire (published in 1954 by Olympia Press under the pseudonym Francis Lengel).
The 1970 BBC documentary At A Printmaker’s Workshop focuses on Dorothea Wight’s fabled Studio Prints in Queens Crescent, Kentish Town.
It is also a marvellous snapshot of London on the cusp of change as inner city areas became invigorated by the arrival of interesting new businesses (with none of today’s dread “regeneration” and its companion property-speak of “creative quartiers” and such).
Continue reading Studio Prints: At A Printmaker’s Workshop in Kentish Town 1970
This is a very nice short made by producer/editor Tulip Tappenden at Derek Boshier’s Los Angeles studio in 2013:
Derek Boshier: An artist at his studio. from TulipT on Vimeo.
It includes many of the works featured in the forthcoming monograph Derek Boshier: Rethink/Re-entry, which is published by Thames & Hudson in October and features a foreword by David Hockney.
Order your copy here.
Check out, if you have the chance, Derek Boshier’s giant 2011 work Reigning Apps And Blogs in the summer show curated by Michael Craig Martin at London’s Royal Academy of Arts.
Continue reading Derek Boshier’s Reigning Apps And Blogs in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition