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.
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.
“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”.
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
I am collaborating with Herb Lester Associates on a new map – Punk London: In The City 1975-78 will be published in the New Year as a celebration of the movement which swept the capital 40 years ago and resonates today as an attitude throughout the world.
Continue reading New map in the New Year – Punk London: In The City 1975-78
I’m not a football fan; I loved playing when I was in my 20s and 30s and as a kid followed Liverpool FC avidly but my interests have long lain elsewhere.
But there is one football book that deserves publication in my view: Dermot Kavanagh’s Different Class, which explores the life and cultural significance of Laurie Cunningham, one of England’s first professional black soccer players.
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.
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.
Specially selected posts from this blog’s archive are now featuring on Flashbak, the digital resource featuring images and stories from the past.
Continue reading Specially selected posts from the blog archive now appearing on Flashbak
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.