Cushion Works & Derek McCormack PRESENT
The Shithole Opry (the exhibition)
and The Shithole Opry Collector’s Guide (the publication)
Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren were the designers of punk’s most famous fashions — what if they were also vampires? Welcome to The Shithole Opry Collector’s Guide, Derek McCormack’s devilish blend of art and fiction. This flashy new lookbook documents Hillbilly Heaven, a 1950s collection created by Westwood and McLaren for hillbilly vampires to wear to the Grand Ole Opry, the mother church of country music. From safety pin fangs to punk Minnie Pearl pearl necklaces, The Shithole Opry Collector’s Guide showcases all manner of star-studded shit from the collection, accompanied by a foreword by McLaren and a reprint of a review from a long-lost issue of Vampire Vogue magazine. The book is a riff on Westwood and McLaren’s work of the 1970s, which reimagined American rockabilly and rocker gear; it’s also a perversion of the clean-cut Christian facade of much country music. Most of all, it’s a parody of the way fashion designers pirate the past for inspiration, as it poses the question: What if the past stole from fashion the way fashion steals from the past? The Shithole Opry Collector’s Guide combines McCormack’s original artwork with his most original writing to date: the result is spectacular and sinister, sidesplitting and spine-chilling.
Pbk, 7.25 x 10.5 in. / 128 pgs / 250 color
U.S. $35.00 CAD $50.00 GBP £30.00
ISBN 9798993054704
Designed by Justin Carder
Published by Cushion Works and distributed worldwide by D.A.P.
Derek McCormack is a writer and artist who lives in Toronto. His work is characterized by its absurdity, obscenity, hilarity, brevity, and darkness. His 2004 novel The Haunted Hillbilly (Soft Skull) was named a “Best Book of the Year” by both The Village Voice and The Globe and Mail. Recent novels include The Well-Dressed Wound (2015) and Castle Faggot (2020), both published by Semiotext(e), and a collection of essays about fashion and death titled Judy Blame’s Obituary (Pilot Press, 2021).
Book events at Hauser and Wirth, Los Angeles (April 25) and Artists Space, New York (May 14).
What the critics are saying…
“McCormack’s gloriously demented catalogue of bespoke gewgaws and thingamajigs astonishes…
it’s as if Westwood and McLaren’s London SEX shop—decorated by the set designers of Howdy Doody and Hee Haw—crash-landed into Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium and was then psychically sodomized by Al Capp’s Li’l Abner.
McCormack has been a hilarious, profane, and brilliant literary force since his early works…In 2011, he was diagnosed with abdominal cancer, and his books since that event…have taken on even more experimental approaches with his signature black-humored body horror.”
— Nate Lippens, Fecal Matters: On Derek McCormack’s country-fried coprophilia, Artforum
“When I encountered the work at the show’s opening many of his historical and cultural references flew over my head—zoom!—but that didn’t inhibit me from being profoundly moved by what he’s done. I’ve felt similarly about Kathy Acker—the references and appropriations in her work are also astonishing—but the power of both Kathy’s and Derek’s work for me is how they pull me into an alternate world, one in which they assault what Julia Kristeva, translated into English, calls the “clean and proper” body—a term I find wonderfully self-explanatory.”
— Dodie Bellamy, An Assault on the Clean and Proper: On Derek McCormack’s Shithole Opry, Decorative Cabbage
“Glamour is a sleazy business. It is the stuff of crusty wigs, dirty gems and paper tickets stained with sweat from the exhilaration of seeing your favorite rhinestone cowboy twangalang his hits onstage (and maybe show you his twangalang after?). True to the legacy of Westwood and McLaren, Derek McCormack’s toilet paper pearl necklaces, hangtag-fringed wig and excrement studded with semiprecious stones are at once disgusting and gorgeous to behold. Every word and page delighted and thrilled me.”
—Rachel Tashjian, fashion critic, CNN
“The images are mesmerizing — this is a lot of shit!”
—Andre Walker, fashion designer, king of New York
The Jean Schlumberger of shit, the Elsa Peretti of safety pins and poo, Derek McCormack croons another rhinestone jingle to jangle the nerves of the complacent, lazy, and dim. His bijoux punk any natural order of beauty with gags and faggotry until the fun climbs out of our behinds. As Scabbie Hoffman Ouija’d me last night: Stool, this book!
—Bruce Hainley, author of Correctomundo, Under the Sign of [sic]: Sturtevant’s Volte-Face, Foul Mouth, and Really, No Biggie, among other things
…a fresh steaming classic, like Tex Ritter’s “Blood on the Saddle” – except that it’s shit.
… McCormack’s most polished turd yet!
Literarily, Minnie Pearls thrown to swine.
How-dee! How doo? – Minnie Pearl
The names of all your favorite G.O.O. stars dragged through the mud.
—Richard Hawkins, Fine Artist