//The post featured a grab of Pennie Smith’s portrait for Nick Kent’s The Politics Of Flash article in an April 1974 issue of the NME//
Ten years ago I posted this on The Look blog upon returning home from a gathering at London gallery Chelsea Space.
The venue was fitting; Chelsea Space is within the grounds of Chelsea College of Arts which was in Manresa Street off the King’s Road until a few years back. This was among the arts institutions attended by the student painter Malcolm Edwards in and around London in the 1960s.
Our friend the writer Chris Salewicz broke the news; among the company was guitarist Mick Jones, whose life, like many of us, had been improved by connection with McLaren.
Naturally, Jones expressed sorrow, and his immediate response to the news of McLaren’s passing struck me hard. ‘We’ll never hear Malcolm’s latest thoughts again,’ said Jones. ‘All those brilliant, wild ideas which seemed to pour out of him on a daily basis, that’s over. And that’s really sad.’
//World Hotel Room from The Brothel Series, Caroline Coon 1998, Oil on canvas, 122 x 153cm. Photo: Richard Holttum//
“For this solo exhibition to happen in the same year that we celebrate 100 years since some women were legally considered human and therefore entitled to vote is deeply significant for me. The formation of my feminist project always meant that I needed to be a figurative painter – this made me, right from the start as an art student in the late 1960s, a ‘girl’ outlaw in the then Greenbergian-ruled art establishment. I am what Linda Nochlin called, in her 1973 essay, a Realist Criminal.” Caroline Coon, 2018
Liverpool’s The Gallery is staging yet another must-see exhibition: the first solo show by painter, writer, thinker and countercultural figurehead Caroline Coon.
Entitled Caroline Coon: The Great Offender, it is curated by Martin Green and James Lawler, who have selected 29 of Coon’s works and are mounting the show as part of their ‘Perpetual Provocateurs’ 2018 season.
The striking and intimate portraits are of men Borel is either close friends with, or met randomly. Straight, gay, trans, from various professions and backgrounds, the sitters in Homme Libre have an edge of some sort, be it in their stance and attitude, an air of mystery and romance, their strength and vulnerability, or they have reminded Borel of someone she once knew or saw in a film. The series explores ideas of masculinity seen from a female perspective, examining themes of intimacy and identity.
From the notes for Homme Libre
I am among the subjects of photographer Carla Borel’s exhibition Homme Libre, which opens next month at London’s A22 Gallery.
Sweet relief from travails personal and political was provided last night by visits to openings of two contrasting yet similarly satisfying creative endeavours in our great capital.
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.
//Cut The Cost Of Living, UK76, Victor Burgin, 1976//
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.
//Front and back cover designs////Pages on McLaren including image of the 1977 God Save The Queen muslin top designed with Vivienne Westwood and featuring Jamie Reid’s graphic and lyrics for the Sex Pistols track////Vermorel’s memoir includes images of McLaren’s student work such as this mixed media piece produced while on a fine art course at Goldsmith’s College in 1969//
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.
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).
Lucky Los Angeles; later this week there is a special screening of Zara Hayes’ recent film about Derek Boshier, which was shown as part of the What Do Artists Do All Day? strand.
//Derek in his element signing books with the blow up of his Bowie silhouette sketch for Lodger reflected behind him. Photo (c) Sarah Lee//
Last night’s book launch and private view for the Derek Boshier monograph and new exhibition at Flowers Gallery in Cork Street, central London, was a great success.
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