Paul Gorman

Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges

Modernize your old culture! Be up to date! Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges installation well underway

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DÉTOURNÉD PAINTING

Intended for the public. Easy reading

Collectors and museums,
be modern
If you have old paintings,
do not despair.
Keep your memories
But detourne them
So they correspond to your time
Why reject the old [paintings]
If one can modernize them?
With a few brushstrokes
Modernize your old culture
Be up to date
and distinguished at the same time
Painting is over
Better give it the final blow
Detourne
Long live painting

Asger Jorn, exhibition catalogue, Galerie Rive Gauche, Paris, May 1959. Translation: Young Kim.

Among the pertinent exhibits of our forthcoming show Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges is the statement disavowing traditional approaches to artistic creation made by the Danish artist and writer Asger Jorn in the late 50s.

Continue reading Modernize your old culture! Be up to date! Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges installation well underway

Installing our exhibition Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges: Joining the dots from the Situationist International to Malcolm McLaren

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Today David Thorp and I worked with the team at John Hansard Gallery on the first day of the installation of our forthcoming exhibition Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges: Joining the dots from the Situationist International to Malcolm McLaren.

Continue reading Installing our exhibition Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges: Joining the dots from the Situationist International to Malcolm McLaren

I Groaned With Pain: Malcolm McLaren’s own t-shirts to feature in exhibition of status quo-disrupters

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//The t-shirts show the deliberate production of variants within the limited edition designed and written by McLaren and printed on the simple square pattern produced by Vivienne Westwood in 1974. © Malcolm McLaren Estate//

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.

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//T-shirt with central tear on light blue jersey with exterior seaming, labelled, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, 1974. 360mm x 375mm. © Malcolm McLaren Estate//

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).

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Icteric’s influence on the Sex shop t-shirt You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You’ve Been Lying On!

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//Explanatory text panel which appeared on the inside cover of Icteric No. 2 with 2004 note, from King Mob: A Critical Hidden History//
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//Extract of text on 1974 t-shirt by Bernie Rhodes, Malcolm McLaren and Gerry Goldstein//

A few years ago I attempted a dissection of the intriguing elements of the culture-shock t-shirt You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You’ve Been Lying On!, produced by Bernie Rhodes, Malcolm McLaren and Gerry Goldstein for sale in Sex at 430 King’s Road in the autumn of 1974.

In You’re Gonna Wake Up, the declamatory tone, aggressive punctuation, satirical bite and use of basic typographical emphases such as the repeated forward slash and random capitalised text combined to detonate a densely packed cultural device.

Continue reading Icteric’s influence on the Sex shop t-shirt You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You’ve Been Lying On!

Introducing first UK screening of Malcolm McLaren’s completed Paris: Capital Of The XXIst Century at The Performance Studio next week

Malcolm McLaren

McLaren opened up the frontiers between artistic and wider cultural attitudes by taking fashion and music out of their respective contexts and translating them into new formats that captured the wider popular zeitgeist. A closer look at his seemingly disarticulated, exuberant and streetwise oeuvre shows it to be consistent and, in its own way, profound.

David Thorp

On Wednesday (June 3) I’m introducing a screening of Malcolm McLaren’s Paris: Capital Of The XXIst Century at The Performance Studio in Peckham, south London.

This is a the first-ever opportunity in this country to see the final work, which McLaren completed a matter of weeks before his death in April 2010. A working version was shown here just once, at Newcastle’s Baltic in November 2009.

Continue reading Introducing first UK screening of Malcolm McLaren’s completed Paris: Capital Of The XXIst Century at The Performance Studio next week