I’m involved in a couple of events which open in London this week: artist Lucy Harrison’s multi-layered project Carnaby Echoes in the West End and photographer Nick Knight’s exhibition Punk at his Showstudio space in SW1.
The fabulous Peggy Noland has selected four online clips loosely linked by the theme of transformation for LA’s Museum Of Contemporary Art channel MOCAtv:
• A “haul video” from Mall Of America made by dedicated shopper PiinkSparkles
Property Of A Gentleman, the exhibition opening at Prague’s Svit gallery at the end of the month, will cast much-deserved light on the life and creative outpourings of Reginald Alan Westaway, the British outsider artist and recluse.
Westaway died in 2008, the walls of his house in Herne Bay, Kent, scrawled with diagrams and plans for a lute he was making at the point of his demise. The words were written in Latin and the discarded instrument was propped amid the detritus of decades: empty wine bottles, documents and reference papers, threadbare clothes, packaging and paper bags. The “drawing room” was frozen in time – the curtains hadn’t been opened for years- and the surfaces in the house were submerged under accumulations of spiders’ webs.
From this clutter emerged a complete oeuvre indicating a singular artistic life, self-catalogued and apparently self-sufficient. Westaway’s achievements would have rested in obscurity were it not for the devotion of M.Goldstein’s Nathaniel Lee Jones, who is collaborating with the artist Dirk Bell on the forthcoming exhibition, the Czech title of which is Majetek ušlechtilého muže.
I Always Remember A Face, Especially When I’ve Sat On It is the arresting title of a great 14-track vinyl-only compilation from artist of the fantastical, Maurizio Cattelan.
This is the tracklisting:
A Side
1 Bernard Herrmann – Brave New World (Excerpt)
2 The Cheers – Black Denim Trousers & Motorcycle Boots
3 Pierre Schaeffer – Etude Aux Chemins De Fer (Excerpt)
4 Judy Garland – The Trolley Song
5 Coldcut – Stop This Crazy Thing (Excerpt)
6 Malcolm McLaren – Miss Belle
7 Gene Vincent – Jezebel
B Side
1 Les Paul & Mary Ford – Bye Bye Blues
2 Hoosier Hot Shots – I Like Bananas Because They Have No Bones
3 The Dorsey Brothers – Lullaby Of Broadway
4 F.T. Martinetti & A.Guintini – Sintesi Musicali Furutiste (Excerpt)
5 Malcolm McLaren – Ride A Fashion Horse Pt.2
6 Cornelius – Fantasma
7 Ozzie Nelson And His Orchestra – Dream A Little Dream Of Me
The LP – produced under the auspices of his online magazine Toilet Paper, marks Cattelan’s current show at Basel’s Fondation Beyeler. See here.
A collaboration with The Vinyl Factory, I Always Remember A Face, Especially When I’ve Sat On It has been produced in a limited edition of 1,000 copies and is available here.
Read Toilet Paper here.
Listen to the comp here:
I sourced one of the paintings which is in More Than Fair, the exhibition of Ian Dury’s artworks which opens at his alma mater, London’s Royal College of Art, next month.
Dury gave the ultra-Pop Dany Bubbles to his friend and designer Barney Bubbles in the late 70s during their spell of collaboration which resulted in a series of triumphs: single sleeves such as Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, What A Waste and Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, the 28 wallpaper covers of the album Do It Yourself, the Blockhead logo…
This is designer Ben Kelly at his 1974 degree show at London’s Royal College Of Art.
Kelly adopted the alter-ego The Photo Kid, who is portrayed in the work by which he is standing. The Photo Kid wore clothes – in particular brothel creepers – from Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop Let It Rock, as did Kelly; the shoes, pink socks and belt in this photograph all came from there, while the Hopalong Cassidy & Topper top (see Ian Harris’s comment below) was picked up at a Paris flea market.
Continue reading The Photo Kid: Ben Kelly at the Royal College Of Art, 1974
Paris, Capital of the XXIst Century is a personal and subjective journey that began firstly by ambling through a century’s archive of thousands of cinema commercials about the city (its inhabitants, what it sells, how it looks…), secondly by gathering impressions (choosing what to exploit, covet and keep), jotting them down only when I returned to my studio. Then, using these specific scenes as a palette and my voice as a brush, twenty-one portraits emerged of a Paris I had never witnessed before.
Malcolm McLaren November 2009
Tomorrow (June 10), Art Basel will host a screening of Malcolm McLaren’s final artwork, Paris, Capital of the XXIst Century.
Continue reading Alchemy: Malcolm McLaren on Paris, Capital of the XXIst Century
In her review this weekend of TJ Clark’s new book Picasso And Truth: From Cubism To Guernica, Financial Times art critic Jackie Wullschlager writes about how meaninglessness replaced absolute truth in the 20th century epoch of terror and totalitarianism, and that “in our age of performance and body art, Clark brilliantly posits a Picasso who replaced a truth project with a performance project, playing, dazzling, persuading.”
Continue reading The master tailor’s tale: Il Sarto di Picasso
As demonstrated by my recent post, the west London house of collector/gallerist Jonathan Ross became a hive for the art/boho/punk crowd flooding the capital in the 70s.
Among the visitors were Johnny Thunders and Iggy Pop, who both left their marks in different ways.
//All photos (c) Jonathan Ross//
Here are more previously unpublished images from London’s punk demi-monde.
Coincident to receiving Joe Stevens’ photograph of the pre-Pretenders Chrissie Hynde and photographer Kate Simon in Malcolm McLaren’s Sex Pistols Nude Boy shirts, collector/gallerist/Londoner Jonathan Ross supplied me with this fabulous selection of Polaroids taken at his west London house in the same period.
These include Hynde and Simon as well as their fellow Americans-about-town, the performers Judy Nylon and Patti Palladin and artist/tattooist Ruth Marten, writers Tamasin Day-Lewis and Jon Savage, Ross himself, his girlfriend Gina Louthan and Sir John Betjeman.