Richard Kern is, I guess, a pornographer, inasmuch as his work sporadically appears in the pages of such self-explanatorily titled “gentlemen’s magazines” as Juggs, Taboo, and Barely Legal. He’s a boil on the face of fashion-a persistent reminder that everything new is not necessarily interesting. To accuse Childish of being an anachronism is to miss the point. As a painter, he is the author of some 2,000 expressionistic works resembling those of his heroes van Gogh and Munch. As a writer-of brutally maudlin tales in the manner of Fante, Bukowski, and Céline-he’s published thirty-odd volumes of poetry and two novels. As a musician much admired by the likes of Beck, the Beastie Boys, and Kurt Cobain, he’s released over eighty albums of singularly primitive garage rock. The former apprentice stonemason from Kent, England, has resisted virtually every stylistic innovation of the last quarter century. From Folk Archive.īilly Childish ( is an inspiration. An online, virtual collection of contemporary objects and actions made by inspired amateurs, Folk Archive includes documentation of everything from a banner protesting a recent spate of homophobic and racist bombings in Central London to a fairground ride bedecked with garish images of the late Princess Diana.Įd Hall, Unison trade union banner, 1999, painted fabric, ca. In this spirit, Deller and fellow artist Alan Kane launched the Folk Archive ( last year at Tate Britain, seeking to rescue the genre from the ethnographic backwaters and present it as a central creative force in British cultural life. Hanne Darboven and On Kawara look lightweight by comparison.īritish artist Jeremy Deller once announced that if Pop art is about liking things, as Andy Warhol famously declared, then folk art is about loving things. Crammed with compellingly banal anecdotes, Frame’s lovingly crafted drawings hold their own with any process-oriented conceptual art. Originally appearing in the music press and on album sleeves, they’ve more recently been anthologized in a series of books (Omnibus Press, London) and are essential reading for rock pedants everywhere. Something of a legend in British music circles, Pete Frame has been creating his exquisitely rendered and painstakingly researched “Rock Family Trees”-genealogies of bands from earliest inception through inevitable and myriad lineup changes to present (or final) formations-for over twenty-five years. Another sign that it’s time to dust off those gray overcoats once again? The widow of deceased vocalist Ian Curtis has just sold the film rights to her moving memoir, Touching from a Distance (Faber & Faber, London, 1996). Currently enjoying something of a renaissance among a younger generation of artists, designers, and musicians, Joy Division will take center stage in Michael Winterbottom’s soon-to-be-released 24 Hour Party People, a fictionalized screen account of the hubris that was the Manchester music scene in the years after punk. If ever they were to make a film of The Elementary Particles, this band’s doom-ridden atmospherics would serve as the perfect sound track. A fine riposte to the lazy liberalism and bourgeois hedonism of the soixante-huit-ers, a generation Michel Houellebecq so rightly despises. (Knopf, 2000) Ideal summer reading: unremittingly depressing, with little or no light at the end of the tunnel. Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles.(Imagine the Beatles and New Order locked in a recording studio with Serge Gainsbourg at the controls.) None is sweeter than “Put It in a Letter,” a resounding hit in the Higgs household. Graham’s second full-length CD, Bed-Bug features seventeen mostly self-penned stabs at pop’s vernacular forms. Strangest, perhaps, is The Bed-Bug, Love Buzz and Other Short Songs in the Popular Idiom (Dia Center for the Arts, 2000), his recent foray into the world of pop music. Vancouver-based conceptual flaneur Rodney Graham is in danger of becoming the world’s most interesting artist-a one-man group show whose eclecticism bears ever-stranger fruit. ” is on view at the Temple Bar Gallery in Dublin. Matthew Higgs is associate director of exhibitions at the ICA, London, where he curated “City Racing 1988–1998: A Partial Account.” His multiartist “I Want More.
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