Advance Notice: Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges: Joining the dots from the Situationist International to Malcolm McLaren 26 September – 14 November 2015

We are very excited to announce this new exhibition from the renowned John Hansard Gallery in Southampton.

From Situationism to Beat to Punk, Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges unites a group of remarkable radical artists, poets, writers and activists who initiated, perpetrated and influenced a range of seminal post-war alternative movements.

Presenting rarely exhibited material – including cut-ups, paintings, film, video and sound, as well as self-published books, pamphlets, anarchist propaganda, punk ephemera and graphics – the exhibition examines the creative interplay between William Burroughs, Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, Alexander Trocchi and King Mob, and their collective influence on Malcolm McLaren in his endeavours to disrupt the cultural and social status quo from the 1960s to his premature death in 2010.

Malcolm McLaren co-opted the intellectual vigour of this powerful and difficult group of individuals to make insurrectionary statements from his days as a Situationist art student in the 1960s, to the end of his life in groundbreaking artistic forays expressed through pop culture (fashion, music, environment, performance, film). Having repudiated painting as a bourgeois form of expression like Jorn before him, McLaren’s lifelong work was inspired by such Situationist techniques as détournement (the juxtaposition of pre-existing elements), Burroughs’ ‘cut-ups’, and Debord’s emphasis on the staging of situations “that bring a revolutionary reordering of life, politics and art”.

Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges will present the so-called “defiguration” paintings exhibited by Jorn in the early 1960s, alongside the detourned comic strips of the Situationist International’s literature and Debord’s cinematic masterpiece, The Society Of The Spectacle. McLaren resurrected slogans associated with radical group King Mob, and their commentary on the banalisation of everyday life by the consumer society in the late 1960s. He also lifted text from the porn novels Alexander Trocchi wrote for the Olympia Press in the preceding decade. Original volumes of the revolutionary group’s King Mob Echo will be on display at the exhibition, which will also highlight the links between Trocchi’s book Helen And Desire and McLaren’s t-shirts design entitled ‘I Groaned With Pain’

We at Live Art Local are very excited about this exhibition and cannot wait to visit.  If you want to find out more then visit www.hansardgallery.org.uk

John Hansard Gallery University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton, so17 1bj

Free Admission Open Tuesday to Friday 11– 5 Saturday 11 – 4 / T: 023 8059 2158