'Fan Club'

So I've clocked up two weeks worth of research for 'Fan Club' an exhibition being put on at the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool. Its going to be a mix of art and ephemera around the subject of celebrity but particularly fan worship. This makes the exhibition seem a little precocious and patronising; 'Hark at all these people who mindlessly worship the idols of popular culture'. This is not its aim. Work included will be by artists about fans, by artists who are fans and by fans themselves. I think it will be more about legacies.

'Fan Club' is mean to accompany a touring exhibition from the Victoria and Albert museum, 'My Generation' a series of photographs by Harry Goodwin taken on Top of the Pops from 1964-1973. The icons of the rock n roll generation will adorn the walls, cheekily posing, moodily staring and even playing their stratocasters with their teeth. The black and white images engrave their subjects into icons. Framed on a gallery wall, in an exhibition named 'My Generation' they make material the essence of youth which spurned the spirit of rebellion in the 1960s and 70s. At once they historicise, this is the past- but a past you were/are a part of. Were, you lived it. Are, you listen to the records, brought up on the music, the politics, the images. You remember those depicted in the photographs.

So 'Fan Club' makes for an eloquent partner-exhibition. Exploring this remembering, through fan clubs, fanatactists and impersonators. But its not just remembering or legacies, thats all a bit past tense. Its about how these icons are made and how they thrive. Not just single artists but entire music movements. Think Mods, Rockers, Punk, Goth, Gangster what are the codes, the vocabularies that define each movement, which allow it to permeate. What is it that gives identity to these music movements? Dress code? Place?

The exhibition will explore these fan clubs, these networks of communication complementing Goodwin's photographs but also (I hope) destroying some of that iconicity in favour of highlighting the buzz which creates it.