Malcolm McLaren to exhibt art at the Baltic

Oct 1 2009 by David Whetstone, The Journal

Sex and Malcolm McLaren are inextricably linked. So David Whetstone offers no prizes for guessing the theme of the art he is bringing to Gateshead.

In his view, popular culture is pretty much always about one thing – that three-letter word beginning with ‘s’.

“Sex is so often the end story to any wishing, wanting, hoping, angst-ridden pop song and will always be in most people’s thoughts.

“So I thought that if I were to make a statement using the word ‘shallow’, my best beginnings were in popular culture.”

Since so much of pop culture was wrapped up in “what Mick Jagger called I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”, he focused on that word, that concept, that activity, which has served him so well and ensured the survival of the species.

Sex, as he envisaged it in this context, took him back to his student days, of which there were a lot.

He explains: “I did eight years at art school. I went from school to school because I thought the outside world didn’t look terribly attractive.

“I stayed as long as I could through the 1960s until I was chucked out at the dawn of the 1970s and plunged into a terrible depression.”

Those art school days, as he recalls them, were a lot to do with huddling in cold flats in front of single-bar electric heaters, rolling cheap cigarettes and peering at even cheaper porn movies made when legislation dictated that they could only be released when masquerading as something more highbrow.

Consequently, sex was dressed up in an excuse for a plot enacted by people who couldn’t act.

As McLaren tells it, these cheap, grainy, amateurish films were watched by frustrated young men getting absolutely no satisfaction at all. These were what he sought for Shallow and it took him on a bit of an odyssey.

“It was difficult, but I did manage to find several hundred at the end of the day,” he says.

As with most things that have ever been traded, there were collectors and obsessives occupying a small niche of the art house video market.

“Some people were just glad to get rid of them,” recalls McLaren.

He assembled his material, chose clips to run on a loop and then put them to pretty random snatches of pop music.

“I suppose you could call them cut-ups, with Bessie Smith and The Zombies in there together,” he tells me.

“Basically, some form of alchemy happened. It’s a lot like cooking sometimes when you mix these ingredients together.

“I can’t really tell you how, but this music and these films got some kind of curious lift. It all became a bit magical and I thought I’d done something which I hadn’t been entirely sure would work.”

Malcolm McLaren’s Shallow, which he describes as a sort of artistic peepshow, was one of the exhibition’s big hits and it also wowed the critics at a “very prestigious” art fair in Basle.

“I admit I was surprised at the response,” says McLaren.

Shallow, described by Baltic as “a series of musical paintings”, has since been shown in Paris and Hong Kong. Its Gateshead showing will be its first in the UK.

The artist is full of admiration for director Godfrey Worsdale. So much so that he has agreed to give a talk at Baltic on November 13 when he will reveal details of his next project.

An art school lecturer once told him that there were really only two themes – sex and death. That is a clue ahead of what promises to be a truly entertaining night.

Shallow by Malcolm McLaren is at Baltic from October 16 to January 10, 2010. Tickets to the talk on November 13 go on sale today at £10 from www.wegottickets.com or at Baltic.