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GLAM! THE PERFORMANCE OF STYLE
VISIT TO EXHIBITION AT TATE LIVERPOOL 27/04/13
The Context of Glam
The exhibition celebrated the Glam culture of the 1970's. Primary expression for Glam (short for glamour and first termed in 1937) was fashion art film photography, and pop music.
Glam was revivalist, ironic, theatrical, androgenous and surface effect and artifice more important than meaning, although the term is unstable having different connotations across cultures/nationalities.
Glam can be interpreted according to Charles Jencks' formulation of postmodernism and seen as a challenge to the rationlism of modernism, and prioritised eclecticism and pastiche over sponteneity and creative autheniticity .
Stylistic ececticism of Glam which combined revivialism and futurism (which was encapsulated in the Retro- Futurist and Avante Garde musical and visual styles of Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music at the time).Visual iconography from 1930's high camp to Americana, Pop Art and Space age were conflated.
The pop star was presented as a ficticious alien persona and with this came a recognisable theatrical transgression that resonated in British consciousness . A heightened sense of self identity and self-awareness was facilitated, with the possibility of re-invention, inclusiveness and an acceptance of the possibility that one might be something other than binary norm of heterosexuality, ending closeted male homosexuality see also Bowie
Brian Eno in 1973 wearing the costume which was on display, designed by
Carol McNichol
Bryan Ferry as he appeared on the inner gatefold of Roxy Music's eponymous first album in a jacket designed by Antony Price
The Exhibition
Roxette 1977 John McManus
16mm film
Duration 15 mins 58 secs
On entering the gallery, the stage costumes, album covers and ephemera connected with Ferry and Roxy Music immediately set the scene, the high camp and theatricality being heightened by Ferry's vibrato and falsetto voice s emanating from a film installation nearby ..."Ooh the way you look makes my starry eys shiver"
still from Roxette 1977
16mm film colour sound
This BA graduation film was one of the highlights of the exhibition for me and documented a group of McManus' contemporaries at Manchester Art school preparing to go to a Bryan Ferry concert and clearly showed the strong visual impact of the glam aesthetic
and the conflation of influences exisiting within the genre. Ferry himself is never seen , and as the film documents the fans getting ready for one of his concerts, as the viewer I became the fascinated voyeur as their meticulous attention to detail and their simulation of 'the look' began to unfold. The androgeny of Glam is strongly evident in certain scenes, whereas elsewhere references to more conventional gender stereotypes and sexuality of earlier Hollywood films. Remisniscent of the Hollywood films that fascinated Ferry and Price, constructed and directed tableaux are are re-enacted in the same self-conscious manner as adopted by my friends and I during a similar period, when executing our own manifestations of 'The Roxy Style' .
Art schools of late 1950's and 1960's were an important influence in the emergence of Glam Rock( eg. Ferry was a student of Richard Hamilton at Newcastle School of Art, Antony Price Trained at The Royal College of Art )
They represented escapism from the cultural constraints of the working class (Ferry)and encouraged experimentation with style.
Towards the end of the 1960's, Art and life- style became sythesised, and which was personified subsequently by Ferry and Roxy Music sho were described by Hamilton as 'above all else, a state of mind' .
The expertise and attention to detail that is embodied in Dandyism came to the fore and was 'performed'. Life was viewed as a form of performance, with the the constructedness of gender being played out.
'Image maker' Antony Price was a latter day realisation of Baudelaire's dandy-hero with "a burning desire to show to create a personal form of originality ...
Price combined a straight Clark Gable silhouette with a gay sensibility in his designs for Stirling Cooper in fluenced by artist Tom Of Finland.
His designs redefined the male body and reacted against current trends of a flat chest and narrow hips ( a unisex look). Aspects of the male body were exaggerated or enhanced through the designs eg. an elongated torso, small waist, broad shoulders and bridge crotch trousers (worn by Ferry and Bowie) This aligns with both a homoerotic stereotype and heterosexual archetype 'hero' link to Research Paper
Amanda Lear on the cover of Roxy Music's first album Roxy Music 1972
Glam reacted against the hippie counterculture of the time, psychodelia and progressive music.
Sharon McElroy