Next week witnesses the opening of a London exhibition of reworked images by music/street art photographer Janette Beckman.
Continue reading Janette Beckman’s Punk Hip Hop Mashup opens in London next week
Exhibitions
A brief journey through David Bowie’s London from the 40s to the 10s with me and Herb Lester
As a tribute to the late rock star, I have joined forces with map-makers Herb Lester to create an online guide to David Bowie’s London from his birth at 40 Stansfield Road in Brixton in 1947 through his solo art show in Mayfair in 1995 to the giant retrospective David Bowie Is exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington in 2013.
Derek Boshier: One (1967) + !Manifesto! (1969)
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)
‘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.
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
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.
‘Blowing up bridges so there is no way back’: Malcolm McLaren, Situationists + Sex Pistols remembered by Fred Vermorel in new exhibition catalogue
Considered as an artwork, a two-and-a-half year project, and in its own terms, McLaren’s Sex Pistols’ was as seminal and resonant as Picasso’s Guernica.
Only this was a masterpiece made not of paint and canvas but of headlines and scandal, scams and factoids, rumour and fashion, slogans, fantasies and images and (I almost forgot) songs, all in a headlong scramble to auto-destruction.
For it was equally a Situationist treatise-by-example, the unremitting and obdurate core being McLaren’s grasp of the theory of situations as proposed by the SI.
Indeed, the story of the Pistols is a Situationist textbook of how to create situations from which there is no return. You refuse to negotiate, to compromise, to be co-opted, you exacerbate every crisis and recklessly play loser wins and then you blow up all the bridges so then there is no way back.
We are then forced to invent another future. Or maybe simply relish the mess, “the ecstasy of making things worse”.
From Fred Vermorel’s memoir which appears exclusively in the new exhibition catalogue.
The catalogue for the exhibition Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges is now available.
The lavishly illustrated 100-page book includes a foreword by John Hansard Gallery’s Ros Carter and Stephen Foster, my introduction, an essay by co-curator David Thorp and a specially commissioned memoir of Malcolm McLaren and his connections to post-war radicals by his art-school friend and collaborator Fred Vermorel.
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
Rare footage to be revealed at Malcolm McLaren Night in Southampton tomorrow
Tomorrow (November 2) I am introducing a Malcolm McLaren film night at Southampton’s The Stage Door as part of the city’s Film Week.
Continue reading Rare footage to be revealed at Malcolm McLaren Night in Southampton tomorrow
Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges: Installation shots from radical art, beat + punk exhibition at John Hansard Gallery
Hope you enjoy this selection of installation shots from the exhibition Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges: Joining The Dots From The Situationist International To Malcolm McLaren, currently wowing visitors to Southampton’s John Hansard Gallery.