//George Grosz’s book jacket for of Die Kunst is in Gefahr, published by Malik Verlag, Berlin, 1925//

“Today’s artist, if he does not want to run down and become an antiquated dud, has the choice between technology and class warfare propaganda. In both cases he must give up ‘pure art’.
Either he enrolls as an architect, engineer or advertising artist in the army (unfortunately very feudalistically organized) which develops industrial powers and exploits the world; or as a reporter and critic reflecting the face of our times.”
From Last Round, the conclusion to Art Is In Danger

Today I’m returning to Blessed & Blasted – my occasional series about art manifestos – with Art Is In Danger, issued as a small book in 1925 by George Grosz and John Heartfield’s brother Wieland Hertzfelde.

This choice has been triggered by a charity shop acquisition of the catalogue for the 1979 London exhibition Neue Schachlichkeit And German Realism Of The Twenties, an examination of the so-called “New Objectivity” which arose as a reaction to the establishment of Weimar Germany.

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Tags: Frank Radziwill, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Karl Blossfeldt, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Maria Elena Buszeck, Max Beckmann, Neue Schachlichkeit, Otto Dix, Sylvia von Harden, Weimar Republic, Wieland Hertzfelde

Roland Barthes in his office at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, 1963. Henri Cartier Bresson/Magnum.

Interesting to note that Roland Barthes’ “anarchic foam of tastes and distastes” is contemporaneous with You’re Gonna Wake Up. No surprise then that J’aime, je n’aime pas became the starting point for updates and personal interpretations among list-loving binary-fixated bloggers from the mid-Noughties onwards.

Here is a translation of the Great Signifier’s original, complete with coda:

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Tags: 1977, Roland Barthes

Produced as the programme for the International Poetry Incarnation held in London in the summer of 1965, this “invocation” performed a similar function to the event, which is seen as the first gathering of the tribes which would form the counterculture.

Compiled by 10 of the participants at the London flat of Alexander Trocchi, the mission statement “maps a new emergent countercultural community”, as art historian Andrew Wilson wrote in 2004.

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Tags: 1962. 1965, Alexander Trocchi, Andrew Wilson, Arnold Wesker, Better Books, Centre 42, City Lights Books, Edinburgh Festival, Moving Times, New Departures, New Directions, Peter Whitehead, Project Sigma, Residu, The Castalia Foundation, the Olympia Press, The Roundhouse

//Collage: Derek Harris.//

This composition of images by Derek Harris from Christopher Gray’s Situationist text Leaving The 20th Century makes plain the significance of the visual vocabulary of the 60s anarchist movement on punk in general and Malcolm McLaren & Vivienne Westwood’s Anarchy Shirt in particular.

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Tags: 1976, Chris Farlowe, Christopher Gray, Derek Harris, Glen Matlock, Jordan, Karl Marx, Leaving The 20th Century, Malcolm McLaren, SEX, Sex Pistols, So It Goes, Steve Jones, Vivienne Westwood

Two “manifesto” designs which emanated from 430 King’s Road – the You’re Gonna Wake Up t-shirt and the Anarchy Shirt – share a reference to “The Black Hand Gang”.

I had long assumed that both referred to Spanish anarchists La Mano Negra, since the group’s name was listed with that of their fellow countryman and revolutionary Buenaventura Durruti.

But on the t-shirt, the absence of an “and” or connecting device had me pondering the possibility this was another Black Hand Gang; maybe the secret society dedicated to Serbian unity (linked to one of the events which triggered the First World War, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914)?

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Tags: bernie Rhodes, Buenaventura Durruti, Christopher Gray, David and Stuart Wise, Don Letts, Franz Ferdinand, Futura 2000, Hiroshi Fujiwara, Jay Strongman, King Mob, La Mano negra, Malcolm McLaren, Notting Hill, Point-Blank!, The Black Hand Gang, You're Gonna Wake Up

//Comic Strip, Point-Blank!, 1971. Derek Harris Collection.//

My investigation into the multifarious strands which fed into the creation of the 1974 t-shirt You’re Gonna Wake Up has, in turn, ignited a convincing set of new theories about the genesis of another “manifesto” design, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s so-called Anarchy Shirt.

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Tags: Anarchy shirt, Derek Harris, Hiroshi Fujiwara, Malcolm McLaren, Point-Blank!, Situationist International, Vivienne Westwood, You're Gonna Wake Up

Sixty years after Blast, the You’re Gonna Wake Up t-shirt adopted the same truculent tone and diffuse dialectic 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 SEX in the late autumn of 1974 – was conceived by Bernie Rhodes and realised with contributions from friends Malcolm McLaren (who wrote the slogan) and Gerry Goldstein.

Of course, it is best known for carrying the following band name: “Kutie Jones and his SEX PISTOLS”.

I investigated its history in THE LOOK and also here. By publishing the list with links today I aim to dive deeper to demonstrate the tract’s range beyond popular culture.

Hence the references to artists David Holmes, Mel Ramos and Patrick Heron (and his campaign against The Tate), the literature of Alfred Bester, David Cooper, George Dangerfield, Konstantin Paustovsky and Bernard Wolfe, the work of  radical journalists Alexander Cockburn and Mervin Jones and the campaigning of political activists Pat Arrowsmith and Marian and Doloures Price.

Such content dates the compilation to October 1974: The Guardian published Heron’s 14,000-word Tate critique over consecutive days between the 12th and 14th of that month; the shirt itself mentions a piece by Jones in the New Statesman on October 4 and also an Elton John interview in the NME on September 25 (in fact the issue was dated September 28).

Alongside the call-girl phone number taken from local newsagents there are such quizzical references as that for former Playboy Club UK head Victor Lownes: “To be avoided first thing in the morning”.

Is this because one of the contributors had encountered him leaving his club Stocks, just a few hundred yards from SEX along the King’s Road?

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Tags: Alexander Cockburn, Alfred Bester, Bernard Wolfe, bernie Rhodes, David Cooper, Elton John, George Dangerfield, Gerry Goldstein, Konstantin Paustovsky, Kutie Jones & his SEX PISTOLS, Malcolm McLaren, Mel Ramos, Mervin Jones, Monty Modlyn, October 1974, pat Arrowsmith, Patrick heron, SEX

Wyndham Lewis’ 1914 publication Blast 1 is the daddy of the modern aesthetic manifesto.

It’s also a Modernist objet d’art.

Iconoclastic and satiric, at times inchoate and irrational, Blast’s aim was to establish Vorticism‘s endorsement of the machine age and and simultaneous disavowal of the stultifying Romantic legacy of the Victorian era.

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Tags: 1914, Blast 1, Edward Wadsworth, feng shui, Filippo Marinetti, Ford Madox Ford, Gerry Goldstein, Jacob Epstein, Malcolm McLaren, Picasso, Rebecca West, Suffragettes, Wassily kandinsky, Wyndham Lewis, You're Gonna Wake Up

As explored in In Their Own Write, the most important creative in the development of British print media in the latter half of the 20th Century was Nick Logan. Arguably his greatest contribution was via the launch of The Face in 1980.

This year-end review – “123 things to remember 1980 by” – was featured in issue 9, published 30 years ago.

Adopting the technique applied at Harpers & Queen by the magazine’s poster boy Peter York – who appears in this issue in three separate articles due to the recent publication of his tone-setting Style Wars – The 1980 Face Show inaugurated the lifestyle list-culture which dominates global media to this day.

It’s as fascinating for who it promulgated – who can remember the name of Bad Manners’ lead singer now? – as for that which it found hard to define.

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Tags: 1980, Harpers & Queen, Keith Joseph, New Romantics, Nick Logan, Peter York, Robert Elms, The Face

By the time this appeared in International Times, The Angry Brigade had bombed the Biba boutique in Kensington High Street, west London, on May Day, 1971.

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Tags: Biba, International Times, Kensington High Street, The Angry Brigade