Soho is London’s daring and dirty soul of the city. It is the place for free spirits to grab the world by its balls. Nowadays, the property mobs and chains of upmarket restaurants are taking over, either way, hidden clubs and bars of Soho, taking away the only places left for loneliness and dare. Going up to a dingy staircase of pleasures and the last London’s bastion of bohemia, beyond an underground aesthetic, dip into a mind of other people’s inner sexuality and beyond all the sleaze, those places remembering the better days.
I asked Brian Griffin, a British photographer to tell me about an interesting artist that I should write about. Someone deep, down, and dirty-interesting because I want to write about subversive artists. So Brian has his way of saying that French artist Anne Pigalle is „different“ and I do remember a hardcore rock guitarist Nick Farr also mentioned Anne in a very interesting context. So my mind is made up. I will tell you a story about never – mind -Jackson -bollocks – here’s – Anne-Pigalle Anne Pigalle, a French multimedia artist.
Many punk visions over 40 years of rebellion music now have spoken up against the sterilization of Soho, so has French Montmartre artist Annie Pigalle. I am telling you about Annie Pigalle who, as a performer, sang in many dingy clubs in London and Paris. As a punk rocker in her soul she’s reciting „deliciously and filthy poems“ and she sang a cabaret in small and intimate Soho clubs. The entire world is waiting for her. We may say that Soho clubs are already in the past, the places that are fast disappearing, especially now after the COVID19 pandemia. But Annie is taking a stand “against this ‘acceleration of gentrification’ with her art.” We are talking about art to be as colorful and seductive as Soho’s disappearing spirit itself.
Pigalle celebrated the 40th anniversary of punk music with an art show and a concert of punk songs in Hackney, but she grew up in Montmartre, Paris and as a teenager, she played guitar in all-female punk bands in the 80s, hanging out with punk musicians in Paris and London, where she also attended the Sex Pistols’ gig at the Chalet du Lac in 1976. Today Madame Pigalle managed to appear in all major UK and world music and art magazines. She is an art performer, musician, and painter and by now she was photographed by Lord Snowdon, Mario Testino, and Nick Knight. Also, Karl Lagerfeld and Jean-Paul Gaultier used her music and image in Japanese TV commercials. Pigalle as a painter uses collage, mixed media a lot, in order to present female raw sexuality images. Her work was used on a collage board at the entrance of the Centre Choreographique National d’Orleans by Agnes B, in the connection with a touring exhibition Les Jeunes Gens Modernes on French New Wave. We can say that Anne Pigalle is a French New Wave as well as she was and stayed a punk rocker until today www.annepigalle.com
In the UK and France, validate in pop culture for over 3 decades, she managed to stay independent. As a real cabaret girl, she moved to London in the 80s, performed the clubs, made some recordings with Adrian Sherwood, recorded for Channel 4 an opera called ‘The Kiss’, written by Michael Nyman and produced by David Cunningham from The Flying Lizards, also with Trevor Horn’s ZTT Records in 1985 Everything Could Be So Perfect. As a modern Edith Piaf, Anne’s poster for the single He! Stranger hung all over London. It was her in front of a red velvet curtain, as reminiscent of Lynch’s „Twin Peaks“. While in LA in the 1990s, Anne Pigalle played with Leonard Cohen‘s musicians and with John Lee Hooker‘s musicians in South Central Babe’s and Ricky’s and recorded some songs with Cypress Hill’s producer Jason Roberts. Following her idol Edith Piaf, Pigalle played a closed and intimate show at Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles, where a few Hollywood celebrities attended such as Iggy Pop and Courtney Love. She met Nancy Sinatra and her musician guests in her gigs, included Glen Matlock, the original bass player of the Sex Pistols, Terry Edwards from Gallon Drunk and Paul Robinson (Nina Simone). The photography for the cover is Anne’s own self-portraits and graphics by Malcolm Garrett, Pigalle also released the trilogy, L’âmerotica Part I and II 21 surreal and erotic vignettes of poetry put to music, also a collection of new songs and erotic poems called Madame Sex and L’ame Erotique as an art CD, and played live concerts in London. Then, she created La nuit Amerotique, a new venture night in Soho with a new philosophy, performing various materials relating to Pigalle, Soho, Art, and Eroticism, in various locations. She performed a show at the National Portraits Gallery, London, and so on and on, the list of her work is very long.
So who is and what is Anne Pigalle really like as a painter? Hmm…Herbert Wright who is the editor of an architecture magazine and often writes about architecture, urbanism, and art said for Anne, „Pigalle found other galleries because she ‘wanted to take control of the art’, but these guys said ‘you can be as weird as you like’. Yet weird isn’t quite the right word for her artistic practice. Whether from external observation or internal contemplation, she has honed a unique glimpse into innate sexuality, building a vivid, trash-glam aesthetic with her recurrent use of reds, pinks, and golds, sometimes spiked with kitsch trinkets and faux jewels. You can trace the inspiration of Matisse in her often naively simple lines and forms, charged with desire. But she explores seedier sides of women and lust, with other French roots such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas. And crucially, she does it as a female artist. She explicitly celebrates the almost-extinct Soho life-form, the prostitute, in works like Do The Street (2009), where her subject is sassy and confident, but also punky and strange, seen with a touch of psychedelic vision.“
Just for the argument sake, if Andy Warhol built on a tradition of a form of “anti-art”, it was during this key time of building the idea of art-trash – from the Pop Art celebrations of mass culture that forms today, still the dark ages, into the decadent realms of drugs and sexual weirdness. In a time of Warhol’s plastic pop culture art formed a crucial shape. It is and was an anti-aesthetic that has an enduring impact beyond the subterranean avant-garde of New York City. That seed keeps on living in modern art, even today and Anne Pigalle is living proof. The more subversive underground movement, the more trash, the more sex we see (or we think we see) the more we take a better creative artistic approach to different art creation, centered on emerging trash aesthetics. Would that be, just as it was in the time of Andy Warhol, the psychedelic utopianism of the organized counterculture? As Andy Warhol’s art and film projects were re-shaped as multi-media experiences, and the importance of the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed raised up, we are today keeping on with this idea, with new music, and with a brand new art. Anne Pigalle does walk the same path!
With this French, Montmartre artist there is always a certain punk aesthetic that echoes in the back, especially in her visual art. But that is just one of many aspects. Madame Pigalle uses mixed media to create a dark, sensual, enveloping mood on the print. She plays with a sexual language with mixed media, forward and explicit – in l’Arche de Noe. Pigalle is a multi-media artist. „Sadly, we won’t see any of her little sexual sculptures, but we do get a taste of her work customizing clothes with a Vivienne Westwood skirt with Dick and Sperm Pearls (2012).“ „Her art is her ‘frustration about the destruction of London and specifically Soho’ cliché city icons, both personifying bewilderment in simple female forms,“ explained Herbert Wright in his article.
The beauty is lurking in night’s shadows of Soho in London, is it too late to save Soho’s naughtiness?