It’s always a delight to encounter fresh artworks by a favourite artist, and Derek Boshier’s print One from 1967 is no exception.
Continue reading Derek Boshier: One (1967) + !Manifesto! (1969)
Derek Boshier: One (1967) + !Manifesto! (1969)
Art
‘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’
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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.
No End To Enderby: Sutcliffe + Eatough making Anthony Burgess film for centenary in 2017
I’m very excited by the news that artist Stephen Sutcliffe and director Graham Eatough are making a film based on the first and last chapters of the Enderby novels by my literary hero Anthony Burgess.
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, bad or indifferent.”
Malcolm McLaren, The Look, 2006
It’s coming up to five years since I posted my marathon dissection – including extensively researched links to sources and references – of the divisive 1970s punk manifesto t-shirt design You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You’ve Been Lying On!
Here is a new version of that post, revised and updated with fresh links.
Enjoy!
Sixty years after Blast, the You’re Gonna Wake Up list t-shirt adopted a similarly truculent tone in an attempt to ring the alarms amid a culture rendered flaccid by the failure of the 60s dream.
You’re Gonna Wake Up – which went on sale in Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s boutique Sex at 430 King’s Road in the autumn of 1974 – was conceived by fellow traveller and soon-to-be manager of The Clash Bernie Rhodes and realised with contributions from McLaren and their friend Gerry Goldstein.
Of course, it is best known for carrying the band name McLaren had recently granted to a bunch of teenagers hanging around the shop: “Kutie Jones and his SEX PISTOLS”.
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 1960s and 70s: pasted onto the wall and scraped away at the end of the exhibition.
Meanwhile, in the New Year, John Hansard Gallery – the Southampton space where David Thorp and I staged the recent show Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges – will be mounting an exploration of Burgin’s engagement with the theories of philosopher Roland Barthes.
Continue reading Victor Burgin: UK76 at Richard Saltoun and Burgin/Barthes at John Hansard
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 and writer/musician Richard Hell.
Arceneaux won for his experimental play, “Until, Until, Until . . .,” inspired by the controversial appearance by African-American actor Ben Vereen in black-face at Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inaugural celebration.
McLaren – A New Type Of Artist: Subject of my talk last night to CSM fine art students
Last night I gave a talk to fine art students at Central Saint Martins as part of the London art and design college’s Monday Guest Lecture series.
The title – Malcolm McLaren: A New Type Of Artist – stemmed from the catalogue introduction by the late Paul Taylor to Impresario, the 1988 New York New Museum show he curated about McLaren’s activities.
Taylor wrote:
Clearly, Malcolm McLaren is a “bad guy” of contemporary pop culture, a reputation that in these times makes him all the more appealing. To many in the worlds of art and social criticism, however, McLaren is like a new type of artist. A “producer” in more than one sense of the word, he has literally orchestrated new musical events and created provocative “cultural texts” within the mass-media. He has also shown that art in the post-avant-garde era is a matter of synthesis, of combining elements from radically different sources. . . . McLaren is a populariser, which is to say that he is a pioneer.
Cosey Fanni Tutti’s Aggro Chic intervention in Club International
A few months before Cosey Fanni Tutti upset the apple-cart as a member with Genesis Breyer P. Orridge of COUM Transmissions – the “wreckers of civilisation” who staged the Prostitution exhibition at London’s ICA – the performance artist/musician posed with another model for a 1976 issue of men’s magazine Club International.
Continue reading Cosey Fanni Tutti’s Aggro Chic intervention in Club International
Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges catalogue published this Friday
The catalogue for exhibition Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges: Joining The Dots From The Situationist International To Malcolm McLaren is published on Friday (November 13).
Continue reading Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges catalogue published this Friday