As an 80′s child, I don’t profess to have owned a classic Bowie album or swooned over Marc Bolan. But for any fashion and art loving, Ab Fab overdosed, pop culture peruser, surely this exhibition would struggle not to have at least one or two things to deeply relate to. Maybe this exhibition would clear up the evolutionary lines in this seemingly familiar genre.
You may have visited the curator, Darren Pih’s, last show at Tate Liverpool, the in depth and fascinating exploration of French surrealist artist René Magritte. That show saw an epic body of work from an artist admittedly only vaguely recognised by a few. The collection and back story was an invaluable incite into surrealism and Magritte's work that has been constantly understudied by the ever media hogging Dali. Similarly Pih’s journey into The Performance of Style doesn’t fail to inform us of a genre that we sometimes feel like we know everything about.
After the first part of the exhibition tour was over and we had reminisced over the musical exploits of Glam, we started to journey into the seemingly more real underbelly of the time period. While the artwork on display is from some of the nations most treasured collections of the time, I felt like I missed the point to the relevance of certain works.
The David Hockney portrait of Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, what a beautiful painting, however I can’t imaging the pair swapping middle class bliss for sex, drugs and glittery platforms. And the Andy Warhol 1956 Kitten heal illustration, ‘Four shoe tips’, yes a great example of how an artist progressed in to the later fashion genre but not of the evolution of the genre it self.
(Several fabulous works from fashion photographer Guy Bourdin are on display)
However do not let this put you off, the story continues. Now we discover the darker side of the 70′s via the eye of photographer Nan Golden. With her morbid fascination with real life, you get to peek into the lives of the drug addicted muses of the time. Other works point out what glam really meant, from a point of view deep from with in the art scene. You discover the desire to be androgynous at the time was less about being void of sexuality but owning both in excess at the same time.
(Richard Hamilton. Fashion-plate. 1969-70)
As Pih ends his tour, just past the vintage Vogue’s priced 50p, on how the story of glam started in the 60s and ended sharply in 1974. I prepare to leave slightly unsatisfied still wondering why the era started and what it evolved into. As I do leave though, retracing my steps to the entrance, I realise instead I have the feeling I’d somehow been there and somehow felt what they felt.
I’ve almost forgotten all together about just being an 80s child.
MF.
(The star of the glam advert shot by Nan Golden and a more recent shot of her by my self taken at a Homotopia Event.
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