“Are we exclusionary? Absolutely”
The atmosphere is crackling with excitement behind-the-scenes in art spaces across London as Venice looms. Some of us will be celebrating in sunny London, some of us will be in stuffy Biennale back rooms, printing press releases. In honour of the various revelries, spittle will be on hiatus next monday, but back - refreshed/burning out - and better than ever the week after!
Read our latest column on Elephant magazine here!
This Week
💦 an autopsy on enticing, glossy imagery
💦 dopey-looking figures that shield their eyes
💦 a soulless fucking nightmare
Events
Things are looking a bit more chilled this week, as everyone flees the city for sunnier climes (see above)! We’re looking forward to getting intellectual, with a bunch of book and magazine launches, plus some talks, too.
🧊 12 April | 6–8pm | Kutlug Ataman: Mesopotamian Dramaturgies & Fiction, Niru Ratnam [Oxford Street]
🧊 13 April | 6–9pm | Hongxi Li: Dream Rich, curated by DATEAGLE ART, at Harlesden High Street [Harlesden]
🧊 13 April | 7pm | Conversation: Mark Leckey and Matthew Higgs, Cashmere Radio (online broadcast)
🧊 13 April | From 6pm | Patrick Goddard, Die Biester (Book launch), Seventeen Gallery [Hoxton]
🧊 13 April | 6–8pm | Seth Price, Sadie Coles HQ [Oxford Circus]
🧊 13 April | 6–8pm | Korakrit Arunanondchai, Carlos Ishikawa [Whitechapel]
🧊 13 April | 7pm | BLOB Talk with Eddy Frankel, Olivia Sterling, Emma Cousins and Luke Burton, TJ Boulting [Goodge Street]
🧊 14 April | 6–8pm | Editorial Magazine Launch, Tenderbooks [Leicester Square]
🧊 14 April | City Entwined, Paradise Row [Bond Street]
Exhibition of the week
Gabriel Kuri: motion in acceptance of an impending crash, Sadie Coles, Bury Street, until 23 April, information here.
Straddling dystopian movie props and casino-style corporate public sculpture, Gabriel Kuri’s new works at Sadie Coles are objects of the everyday – tipping-trays, coins and credit cards – enlarged to Art Attack-like scales. Fabricated to the nth degree, they appear alien-like in their perfection; think factory line, not artist studio. Kuri’s recent declaration that he is ‘not purely a conceptual artist’ came as both a surprise and a relief to spittle – the aura of these works screams more Städelschule and ‘critical theory’ than identity politics and feelings. Presumably navigating dreams of utopian currency and the decline of cash in our hygiene-conscious and crypto-saturated moment, these sculptures are blown up to comedic scale, making us think of the total disconnect with the physical structures that define our daily lives. These objects on which we rely but have a stone cold relationship with (no spiritual or emotional connection whatsoever) include: office furniture; malfunctioning hand sanitizer dispensers; forms of barriers and human-replacing technologies in airports. Whether it’s design for the sake of design or utility enforcing design, the way we accept shapes and systems as given – or neutral – when they all had authors with specific intentions, that’s the question in the form of *change* that spittle was given in Kuri’s beguiling show.
Hot Links
🗄️ “slurring out the words through opioid-bated breath” - Identifying a burgeoning online philosophy of appropriation as analogous to digital archiving of cultural objects, Satya Paul tenders a lively discourse about a ‘seemingly disparate corpus of Substack writers, independent podcasters, and Soundcloud rappers’ that are ‘linked by the way they stratify image, sound, text, and video across social media platforms [in] a methodology of world-building and self-mythologization… all mediated through the screen as networks remix pre existing forms’. Reference of spittle is a glaring omission; we have reached out for a correction.
🦎 “Grey is the reality of how we see the world” - The inimitable Jack Jubb is interviewed in émergent magazine by Valeria Biamonti. When asked about the misted window/airbrush effect of his work, Jubb says - ‘people intentionally create images that have the appearance of being low resolution. We want to infuse the image with this sense of memory… so when we create equally degraded images in contemporary art we suddenly evoke this disconnection or glitch in temporality.’
👼 “I see art schools as carriers of a virus called art with a capital “A” and it needs a host to replicate” - Interviewed by India Nielsen, Mark Leckey talks on Newcastle Polytechnic, how the internet has changed the way subcultures evolve, cargo cults and of his enduring belief that, through technology, we can reach an intense state of euphoria.
🧢 “Are we exclusionary? Absolutely” - Netflix’s new wild ride of a doc, ‘White Hot’, explores the highs and lows of tweenie-brand Abercrombie and Fitch, who’s founder brazenly described their intentions of only going after ‘the cool kids’. Probably too late to be cancelled – given we rarely see A&F out and about in the Soho and Mayfair area – we still expect an impending trend-cycle revival of the brand in the coming months. You heard it here first!
🍝 “Gordon Ramsay, mostly known for inventing toxic masculinity…” - Five short stories about food. Covering Marie Antionnette, billionaire space racers and TV dinners the writings weave around class, culture and consumables – sparkling water as status symbol and the downfall of Perrier; American TV chefs gagging over British recipes and how the gig economy works to ‘make the middle classes feel like royalty.’
🥀 Marilyn Monroe, gold coins, blue jeans, cognac, heart-shaped sunglasses - Emma Madden examines the chokehold that Lana del Rey’s Born to Die aesthetic had on a generation of depressed, permanently online teens, and how the aestheticisation of pain has changed and moulded itself to fit ever-changing ways of being on the internet. How will the ways that we express pain online change now that the early-twenty-teens tumblr sad girl aesthetic has started to be reinterpreted by a new generation of TikTokkers?
Add-to-cart
Edward Thomasson – an incredible artist who shows with Maureen Paley and Southard Reid – has announced a fundraising offer for his next performance project. For an extremely reasonable £220, he’ll spell out your name in his unique language of contorted dancing figures in watercolour on a2 paper. spittle can see a new logo up for grabs!
Parting shot
YBA turned film director Sam Taylor-Johnson dispels spittle’s Frieze LA FOMO by describing the celebrity-laden art fair as ‘a soulless f***ing nightmare’ akin to a Sainsbury’s supermarket in The Sunday Times. spittle suspects this review might not make it into next year’s promo and marketing spiel.
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