As former manager for the legendary 1970s English punk group, the Sex Pistols, artist and musician Malcolm McLaren had a hand in revitalizing pop culture as we know it.
But three decades later, he laments modernization’s effect on society.
“I live in very difficult, confused and fragmented times culturally,” he wrote in an e-mailed interview earlier this week. “There are no signposts, no one to navigate this culture today, where high and low culture have finally ... dissolved into one another.”
On Thursday at Luch Bar, McLaren will invite Moscow to explore his latest grandiose exploration of high and low culture. He’s bringing a stew of visual and musical ingredients that he’s put together in a piece called “Shallow,” but don’t it call it a performance.
“It is not truthfully a performance as such, but more a welcome to the world and life and times of the artist Malcolm McLaren,” he said.
“Shallow,” as McLaren describes it, is essentially a snapshot of pop culture filtered through his own cut-and-paste working methods that he put together two years ago in New York for an art group, also called Shallow.
“The word ‘shallow,’ often used to describe pop culture, was a useful beginning,” he explained. “No matter how shallow people say pop music is, and in particular, its origins (part organized crime, part teenage werewolf), it continues to confound, astound and seduce something deep in all of us. … Let’s be shallow, I thought.”
McLaren trawled through decades’ worth of amateur sex films and spliced together a montage of “the foreplay before the paid and shallow sexual act.”
“I slowed down most of the images until sometimes they almost stood still, revealing through their age a certain painterly quality,” he said.
The musical aspect of “Shallow” was not prepared in tandem with the visuals. Instead, McLaren slapped a series of genres together into a sampled pastiche, one that he says helped the visual side of the project take on a new meaning.
“I made 21 musical works from a grab bag of pop culture’s debris of the past 50 years. I took verses from here, hijacked choruses from there, cut and pasted orchestral film scores, looped guitar and piano riffs and altered all in tempo and key as the case may be,” he said. “They became my ruins of a pop culture that I loved.”
Ruins or not, “Shallow” will be followed by a few words and a short DJ set from McLaren of his favorite songs. But don’t call him a DJ, either. Actually, just let him tell you what you can call him.
“There has been ongoing confusion on who and what Malcolm McLaren is,” he wrote. “But in fact, Malcolm McLaren is and has been an artist in the purest sense of the word for his entire adult life.”
“Shallow” will be shown at Luch Bar on Thursday, Nov. 19 at 8 p.m. 27/1 Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Ulitsa. Metro Frunzenskaya. (495) 287-0022, Luchbar.ru.
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