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Diamond Dust Volume One | |
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 Peter Blake |
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Diamond Dust
Volume One Featuring
new works by Diamond Dust Volume One is best described as a portfolio of iconic images by iconic artists. Conceived in part as a response to Andy Warhol's famous diamond dust screenprints, Diamond Dust Volume One brings together an unprecedented constellation of richly mythologized heroes of contemporary culture, interpreted by artists who are themselves acknowledged in different ways as pioneers of cultural identity. At once an exercise in sheer aesthetic gorgeousness and an exploration of iconic status, Diamond Dust Volume One presents an extraordinary tension between surface and psychology. Thus, the legendary
British Pop artist Peter Blake has made a "white-on-white"
image of Elvis Presley, suggesting both the legacy of Presley's genius,
the imperial nature of Presley's fame, the metaphysics of pop death,
and the postmodern reclamation of Elvis as a universal cultural signifier.
Entitled Love Me Tender, Peter Blake's screeprint for Diamond Dust Volume
One maintains the artist's career-long fascination with the iconography
of Pop, and thus becomes instantly canonical within the school of Blake's
work. The same can be said of Gavin Turk's extraordinary self -portrait
of himself as Josef Beuys. As with Blake's image of Elvis, this is a
work which provides an important synapse between the trajectory of Turk's
identity as an artist, as well as passing a multi-layered comment on
the nature of cultural celebrity. Extending the intellectual reach of
both Turk's Pop effigy of himself as Sid Vicious in the style of Warhol's
image of Elvis Presley, and his early Cave plaque announcing the enshrinement
of Gavin Turk's residence in London, this new work for Diamond Dust
Volume One, entitled In Memory of Gavin Turk, refers - as does Blake's
Love Me Tender - to the role of death in relation to iconography. The
work puns directly on Warhol's diamond dust portrait of Josef Beuys,
while enabling Turk to continue his artistic exploration of his own
identity as an artist - a theme which has been consistent throughout
his work to date. Simon Periton is an artist who seems to work with the delicate tracery of rococco styling, and then subvert its fragility with ambiguous ideologies. His 'anarchy' motif has appropriated one of the principal street icons of contemporary culture, submitting the complexities of its political code to an entire range of carefully poised interpretations. In this sense, Periton might be likened to an Augustan satirist of the mid eighteenth century, for whom the contortions of fashion or sophistry are linked with a supreme articulation of style and taste in order to offer moral perspective. But there is also a science fiction quality to Periton's aesthetic, punning on both the reduction of ideology to decoration, and the conversion of self-conscious style into highly codeified artworks. For Diamond Dust Volume One, Periton has made a work which adds further layers of meaning to his maintained interpretation of the street iconography of 'anarchy' and thus enables a further destabilisation of its meaning. Peter Liversidge's screenprint explores the glamour of air travel while also shuttling between concepts of artistic style. There is a sense of freedom and luxury in his work for Diamond Dust Volume One, which is also balanced on a sense of the utterly modern. His "Just Think About The Good Things In Life", presented in this portfolio, is detached and dream-like, presenting perhaps the landscape of aspirational culture at a time when notions of escape, luxury and the self as celebrity are seen within a broader context of social anxiety and the need for compensatory pleasure. Peter Saville is a designer and ideologue who has pioneered the relationship between cultural identity and contemporary aesthetics. Long acknowledged as one of the leading graphic designers of the post-Punk period, his work articulates an astonishing refinement of intellectual concept, the consequence of which is an enshrinement of product which doubles as cultural commentary. Saville's aesthetic maintains a dialogue between glamour and subversion, modernity and postmodernism, commodity and conceptualism. Himself mythologised for own contribution to the language of contemporary taste - from early work for the group Joy Division, through to his present explorations of the abstracted forms of his own visual language - Saville's work for the diamond dust portfolio performs a cultural and aesthetic audit on the very idea of The Crown Jewels. Saville is one of the architects of contemporary cultural language, and confirms his role as one of the unique interpreters of postmodern thought and culture. Michael Bracewell
2003
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