Punk provocateur Malcolm McLaren gets ‘Shallow’ in a new exhibit in Philadelphia

Punk provocateur McLaren gets ‘Shallow’ in Philly

PHILADELPHIA — In his nearly four decades as a vanguard of pop culture, Malcolm McLaren has worn many hats: musician, producer, filmmaker, impresario, fashion designer, reality TV star. At age 63, the punk progenitor is adding another discipline to his resume: visual artist.

“Shallow 1-21,” a series of 21 short video works that combine snips of obscure 1960s sex films with musical “cut-ups” by McLaren, is on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts through Jan. 3. It’s the first time the 86-minute piece is being shown in its entirety in the U.S.

The 21 segments — only four of which include nudity — consist of just a few frames of film, slowed down and repeated to match the length of each piece of music.

Depending on the music and the scene, the moving portraits in “Shallow” can feel wistful, sad, threatening, banal, hypnotic, lusty, even comical.

“Shallow 4″ is a single back-and-forth pan of three bored, slouching women on a long couch accompanied by a raging cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” by Chinese all-girl punk band The Wild Strawberries. “Shallow 5″ pairs Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together” and Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” with a repeating shot of a topless woman descending a staircase, dragging a fur coat behind her.

Sex has been a recurrent theme in McLaren’s creative career.

During punk’s formative years in the early 1970s, he and his then-girlfriend, designer Vivienne Westwood, ran the London clothing boutique “Sex,” and McLaren gained notoriety as manager of The Sex Pistols. He said “Shallow” is reminiscent of his life as a teenager watching dirty movies with friends in a dismal London squat.

“I just really recall from watching those sex movies back when I was about 18 in art school, I can’t remember the (sex) act,” McLaren said with a laugh. “The only things I could remember were the preambles, funnily enough, and the generic, mundane aspect to those preambles sort of intrigued me.”

Those are the moments captured in “Shallow,” which McLaren calls “musical paintings.” Each song-length piece is distinct and not sequential, so viewers can start and stop watching at any point.

McLaren did the first 8 videos in 2007 for a group show in New York. He created the rest from that time until 2008, when the entire 21 videos were shown at Art Basel in Switzerland.

He made the music first, scouring through some 500 CDs of music from the 1940s onward, then making new compositions by cutting and layering tracks with electronic beats. Then came prolonged digging through junk shops for old 8mm films and videos, and tracking down the scant collectors of the “not even B movies, more like D or F movies” he sought.

“Often these movies would not be seen specifically as pornography because it was before the industry was established,” McLaren said. “They wouldn’t be called sex films; they would just have crazy titles like ‘Miniskirt Love’ or something” and play in double-feature drive-ins.

McLaren edited the visuals and sound as separate elements — he sees the music and video for each segment of “Shallow” as largely interchangeable.

“I preferred them to be completely disconnected, simply because the thought of falling into that horrible moment where it might end up being one of these rather banal MTV pop videos,” he said. “That is such an all-embracing medium that covers everybody’s way of thinking about music and a picture, and it’s been done a zillion times over.”

Pennsylvania Academy curator of contemporary art Julien Robson saw “Shallow” at last year’s Art Basel in Switzerland — the only other time all 21 have been shown — and undertook an effort to bring the piece to Philadelphia.

He joked that McLaren’s splashy exploits in pop culture, fashion and music — from hip-hop to electronic opera and beyond — might tempt some to crown him “the prince of shallow,” but his art is anything but.

“It evokes the idea of desire in a very poetic way,” Robson said of “Shallow.”

McLaren is currently working on a musical portrait of Paris. He divides his time between that city and New York.

On the Net:

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts: www.pafa.org