Malcolm McLaren: the father of punk won't stop until he's conquered the art world, upstaged porn's sex scenes, and put a dead French fashion designer in a broadway musical

Interview, Oct, 2008 by Glenn O'Brien

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Malcolm McLaren is a young artist whose video work Shallow was the surprise hit of this year's Art Basel in Switzerland.

Well, okay, McLaren is not really young. He's just a new artist. And actually, he's not really new at all. McLaren has been on the leading edge of art since the '70s, but back then, it wasn't so easy for people to understand that managing a rock band, even one that was a total media event the Sex Pistols-could be art. But now he's come out of the closet and made it official: Malcolm McLaren is an artist.

That should have been apparent from the shop he operated with then-girlfriend Vivienne Westwood. The clothes the duo designed for Sex, later called Seditionaries, defined the look that came to be known as punk. It should have been more apparent when he took another punk band, Bow Wow Wow, and added ritual African drumming and a 14-year-old Lolita vocalist to produce a huge hit ("I Want Candy"). Or when he mixed square dance and Afro beats with hip-hop in collaboration with some Muslim DJs, the World Famous Supreme Team. Or when he mixed electronic dance music with Puccini's Madame Butterfly. I mean, I knew he was an artist then. But to most people he was just a fast-talking recording artist.

I think McLaren was a little embarrassed to make it official, but that's what he did a year or so ago when he contributed to a group show in a Chelsea gallery curated by the artist Stefan Bruggemann. McLaren's piece was titled Shallow, as was the group show, and it consisted of eight short color videos. These were assembled from clips of '60s erotic film, re-edited, slowed down, and set to music mixed up by the man himself.

And this was the idea that came to fruition at Basel with Shallow: 21 short films by Malcolm McLaren, a McLaren double-album's worth of art-music videos--all appropriated from porn, soft or hard or commercial, and all with scenes that took place either immediately before or after the "action." The films are beautiful, funny, abstract, and strange. M.M. has a great eye and he found odd, revealing, resonant imagery that he transported through re-timing to another level of consciousness, and then wed to music that has been similarly estranged from its source--radical remixes that mine the riches of pop niches and give us miscegenational tracks of pure, post-pop genius.

I gabbed with the maestro in New York before he hopped yet another in that endless stream of jets.

MALCOLM McLAREN: Okay. Okay.

GLENN O'BRIEN: I saw your installation last summer at Art Basel. I loved those films; they're very mysterious. It took me a long time to figure out that you didn't actually shoot them.

MM: Maybe that's because they were very slowed down. It certainly wasn't an intention. I didn't think the source was really important. I was just looking for a way to create some kind of map of feelings, really. The project started when I was asked to collaborate in a group show titled Shallow. It wasn't my word or my idea--they came to me and asked if I'd do something using the word shallow as the theme. At first, I really wasn't sure my finished product worked. For the first time in a very, very, very, long time, I was extremely shy about showing any of my work! I finally went down to the gallery to meet the other artists who were installing. I showed one--only one which was just two people watching other people having sex, to gauge the reaction. They liked it. I was very happy. That's how it all began. Then the project went to Art Basel. I thought, Oh, I can't just show these few pieces. Maybe I should really make this epic. I'll do it as big as I can. I wanted to make as big a statement as I could, so I thought, I'll show so many that no one will be able to watch them in one continuous moment in time--they wouldn't actually stand in the room that long. People could jump in and jump out. It wasn't narrative-based so it didn't really matter. That's how I ended up with 21; I think I decided on 21 because I liked the number, really.

GO: I have an oblique relationship to this project because the original curator, Stefan Bruggemann, is a fan of my writing. I was introduced to him by Aileen Corkery. When I met him I was finishing up a novel called Shallow.

MM: Oh, wow!

GO: Maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe he liked that title.

MM: I think you're probably fight--artists are fantastic at copying ideas from other kinds of artists.

GO: Well, I'm flattered because it's a good title. The book I wrote was kind of based on my experiences in the fashion world. But I think he probably just liked the word shallow.

MM: He just kept going on about this idea of shallow. He really loved the word. This was the word he was going to use to bring in all these disparate elements of different artists' activity in a show. He certainly was very insistent.

GO: How did you get the idea to slow the film down?

MM: Simply one reason, Glenn: I couldn't find images that sustained in real time the length of the pop songs that I had already cut up and remade. That was their length. I couldn't find images of people about to have sex that sufficiently interested me for that length of time. But if I slowed the image down, it started to make sense to me. It didn't matter to me that they didn't move to the groove or to the rhythm--in fact, I was glad for that because I didn't want them to fall into sync. So, slowing them down didn't matter to me. I just sort of more or less worked toward something in the three- to three-and-a-half-minute range of time, and then, I just slapped one of these cut-up musical pieces on it that I felt might work. I instinctively went for what, at that second, seemed like marrying the two--the image and the sound. But the slowing-down process made the actions more painterly. When the gallerist wanted to know what to call them, I said for God's sake, don't call them videos--it's such a mass word now. I called them musical paintings, because of the slowed-down nature of them.