McLaren & Lawrence outside SEX [1]
I.
If, like me, you are keen to promote the idea of D. H. Lawrence as a Sex Pistol, then it's surely important to show how his artistic project, like McLaren's, shared a similar aim: namely, to confront the English with the one thing they feared most: sex ...
II.
"It is a pity that sex is such an ugly little word", says Lawrence in a late article for the Sunday Dispatch [2], though this hadn't prevented sex from becoming a key term in his vocabulary. Indeed, his critics - and they were legion - accused him of being sex obsessed.
I don't think that's true. But it's certainly the case that sex was central not only to Lawrence's libidinally material philosophy, but also to his politics of desire.
For sex, said Lawence, brings people into touch and thus counters the alienation produced by modern industrial capitalism and "perpetually interferes with the nice money-making schemes" [3] of those who feed off this system [4].
Lawrence's democracy of touch - a kind of immanent utopia that exists now/here in the real bonds formed between lovers and rests upon a new economy of bodies and their pleasures - is quite literally fucked into existence; for men and women having been made new after the act of coition, "wish to make the world anew" [5].
That's why Oliver Mellors - the gamekeeping protagonist who fucks Lady Chatterley every which way from Sunday - declares with naive sincerity that if men and women only copulated with warm hearts then "'everything would come alright'" [6].
Whether Malcolm McLaren suscribed to such a romantic view is debatable. But he had certainly read Lady Chatterley's Lover [7] and one would imagine that, like many who were born of the countercultural radicalism of the 1960s, McLaren would regard Lawrence as one of those sleeping on the right side of the bed ...
III. [8]
Quickly bored even with his own projects and uncomfortable with the idea of commercial success, in the spring of 1974, McLaren decided to radically refurbish 430 King's Road and rebrand the tiny shop as Sex:
'"The one thing that scares the English. They are all afraid of that word.'" [9]
The façade included a 4-foot sign of pink foam rubber letters spelling out the new name in capitals. The walls of the interior of the boutique were also lined with pinkish foam rubber and covered with graffitied lines taken from erotic literature and Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto (1967). Latex curtains, red carpeting, and various sexual paraphernalia used decoratively helped to create the sleazy (somewhat intimidating) look of an authentic sex shop.
Sex sold fetish and bondage gear supplied by existing specialist labels, as well as designs by McLaren and Westwood which were intended to be provocative rather than seductive. These included T-shirts printed with images of a nude adolescent smoking a cigarette; homosexual cowboys, bare female breasts; and - perhaps most notoriously - a leather mask of the kind worn by the Cambridge Rapist.
Lines taken from pornographic texts were also often added to the designs, as were various Situationist slogans from May '68 and references to some of Malcolm's heroes, such as the playwright Joe Orton.
IV.
Despite the fact that both Lawrence and McLaren wilfully outraged English society and openly fought against censorship and bullying authority, I'm not sure that Lawrence would have been a customer at Sex had he been a young man living in London in the mid-1970s, rather than during the Edwardian period.
In fact, he would probably be horrified by McLaren's antics and dismiss him as just another grand pervert guilty of getting his sex in his head; a man full of ineffable conceit and boundless ego. And in this he'd amusingly anticipate Johnny Rotten's opinion of Malcolm ... [10]
Notes
[1] The photo of McLaren outside his King's Road store was taken in 1976, when he was aged 30. The photo of Lawrence was taken when he would have been around the same age, in 1915.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essay and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 144.
[3] Ibid., p. 145.
[4] That said, Lawrence was conscious of the fact that - as Deleuze and Guattari put it - sex is also present in "the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a
judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate ..." In other words, unconscious libidinal investments bear directly upon the socio-historical field. See Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 293.
[5] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 136.
[6] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 206.
[7] In a list of his top ten books compiled for The Guardian in February 2000 - click here - McLaren places Lady Chatterley's Lover at number 7 and describes it as blissfully romantic.
For a post in which I discuss the McLaren-Lawrence relationship (published 30 May 2024) click here.
[8] I have taken material for this section from an earlier post on TTA entitled 'Passion Ends in Fashion' (1 December 2023): click here.
[9] Malcolm McLaren, quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 220.
Lawrence places the blame for this morbid and at times hysterical fear of sex amongst the English on the arrival of veneral disease in Europe during the Renaissance period. Due to the great shock of syphilis and its ghastly consequences, the Elizabethans, says Lawrence, came to regard their own bodies with horror and began
to privilege spiritual-mental life over instinctive-intuitive being.
See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles ... pp. 182-217. And see also my discussion of this astonishing essay by Lawrence in the post entitled 'On Art and Syphilis' (17 September 2018): click here.
[10] It should be noted that I don't share this opinion and think it absurd for Lawrence to group together and dismiss so many other arists and thinkers - including Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust - in the manner that he does. One is tempted to paraphrase one of his own lines and remind him that what is perverted to one man is the laughter of genius to another.
See my post on D. H. Lawrence and the grand perverts (21 March 2017): click here.
In fond memory of Malcolm on what would have been his 79th birthday.
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