“Botticelli went to Vegas”
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This week
🧊 Jiggle Physics
🧊 Leonardo’s crotch with protruding skull
🧊 Horny men on Porsche chat rooms
Events
💦 13 September | 6–8pm | Max Clendinning: Interior Eulogies, Sadie Coles, Bury Street [Green Park]
💦 14 September | Time TBC | GRIMM Gallery *new London space*, Lucy Skaer: Day Division, Bourdon Street [Green Park]
💦 14 September | 6–8pm | Helen Marten: Third Moment Profile / The Almost Horse, Sadie Coles, Davies Street [Bond Street]
💦 14 September | 6–8pm | Alexander Guy: White Lies, Carl Kostyál [Oxford Circus]
💦 15 September | 6–8pm | Lydia Blakely: Winners, Niru Ratnam [Oxford Circus]
💦 15 September | 5–8pm | Marlene Steyn: You-me-verse, Lychee one [London Fields]
💦 16 September | 6–9pm | Marieke Bernard-Berkel: Preludes, *NEW GALLERY ALERT* , Sherbert Green, [Cambridge Heath]
💦 16 September | 6–8pm | Natasha Tontey: Garden Amidst the Flame, Auto Italia [Cambridge Heath]
💦 16 September | Friends with Benefits vol. 2, Safe House 2 [Peckham Rye]
💦 16 September – 25 September | Deptford X Contemporary Art Festival [Various locations]
💦 16 September | 6–8pm | Everything I do could be done differently (Finissage), Piloto Pardo hosted by Cecilia Brunson Projects [London Bridge]
💦 16 September | 6:15pm | Marianna Simnett: The Severed Tail film screening, London Film Festival at the BFI
💦 17 September | 12–4pm | Used Clothes Sale, Avalon Cafe [Bermondsey]
Exhibition of the week
Kenneth Winterschladen: Divinity (sic) at South Parade until 8 October, information here.
Acéphale was a semi-secret magazine produced by Georges Bataille, a controversial French theorist interested in eroticism, mysticism, and the irrational. Among his beliefs, he considered the forcible provoking of excess as a way to gain ‘personal sovereignty’. Acéphale’s first cover featured Leonardo DaVinci’s vitruvian man, edited by surrealist André Masson: brutally re-rendered with a severed head, a skull protrudes from the figure’s crotch and hands grasp a burning heart and dagger. Bataille declared that decapitating oneself – removing possibility of rational thought via, erm, losing the brain – can unlock restraint and help us leave serfdom for enlightenment… A similar phenomenon is explored in Kenneth Winterschladen’s exhibition at South Parade, which synthesises detached, out-of-context and dream-like imagery in contrasting positions: spiderwebs growing hands and lungs, solar systems punctuated with Instagram-friendly sunsets on copy paper, and mirrored self-portraits decorated with holepunch-sized fragments of tin foil. Oval-shaped like an old-fashioned mirror, an eye, or perhaps even a keyhole, the titular painting Acéphale (2022) renders Leonardo’s man in puzzle pieces over a beautifully-drawn bird, like those the artist’s father keenly photographs, the exhibition text reveals. In another work, windows of kitsch imagery (flowers, sunsets, clouds) are juxtaposed with a surveillance-like (à la Sims) rendering of the artist’s childhood home; at once colourful, clinically oppressive and bland. spittle felt urged to recall the blandness and pure cliche of our own childhoods that – in this industry – we are actively working to forget. Other strong works like Rehearsal (2022) channel the beguiling strangeness of artists like Kai Althoff and Markus Lüpertz in a way that feels fresh and genuine in an age of surreal painting for the sake of surreal painting – and controversiality just to stand out. Leaving Winterschladen’s show reminded us of jet-lag induced nightmares of late where past memories fade and pulse together into improbable/jarring/harmful scenarios. Impossible to make sense of – without delving deeper than we might feel ready to.
Hot links
👙“I’m not saying the internet ruined boobs. But it does seem like, in real life, they’re being de-platformed.” - Cara Shacter explores a declining interest in boob-focused entertainment for Spike. From the decline of Playboy and Hooters, to Kylie Jenner’s trompe l'oeil Jean Paul Gaultier x Lotta Volkova boob-bikini, the riveting piece also explores how the societal desire for bigger boobs may be linked to the stock market?! Our dinner-party takeaway has to be that the science of how video games depict breast behaviour is named Jiggle Physics.
🧑🌾 “Botticelli went to Vegas” - Cult photographer to the stars David LaChapelle gets the profile treatment in VICE, The FT and The Guardian. Beginning his career by powerfully depicting men with AIDS as celestial angels, he discusses his now-iconic images of Tupac, Yeezy, Amanda Lepore and Elizabeth Taylor. spittle was most inspired to read that he has ditched the metropolis, and now lives in a former nudist colony in a remote part of Hawaii, where he runs an organic farm and lives off-grid using solar power. *packs bags*
🔫 Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Bad Brains, Fugazi, Sonic Youth, and Fishbone - we loved 032c’s dive into fave writer William S. Burroughs’s move to Lawrence, Kansas, bringing Kurt Cobain, Kim Gordon and Nirvana with him to play at the iconic Outhouse music venue. WSB was famed for his incredibly-dangerous-to-produce ‘shotgun paintings’ that he shot with the same fervour of any born and bred Kansan hunter.
🦢“most of what I paint I have to find hideous in at least one way” - Issy Wood gets interviewed for Blackbird Spyplane, discussing her favourite Judith Leiber bags named ‘minaudières’, why she left Mark Ronson’s label, Larry Gagosian flirting with her, and a cow-shaped bench she regrets buying during lockdown. The secret to her sought-after paintings? ‘There's something quite sad about any sales image: There’s a neediness to it that I’m thrilled to meet halfway.’ She says, ‘I take these things out of whatever fake context they’re in, and give them even less context.’
🏷️ “So, I have a label obsession… I have a thing with the feeling of them” - Brooklyn Beckham talks to Vogue to show us what’s in his bag. Normally these videos quell our nosy impulses and give us a perfume rec or two, but Posh and Becks’ eldest induces the unfortunate mix of boring and cringe. Content like this just builds the case for banning nepobabies from all online content under they’re at least 30. Filled with “NFT stuff,” “10,000 labels” and too many references to his partner (we get it, you’re in love!) Brooklyn need to learn when to *zip* it !!
Add-to-cart
Join Rene Matić’s Soul Club with this artist-designed – and limited edition – bowling bag created for House of Voltaire. Cheekily reading ‘Tainted Love’ and with a sexy leopard skin strap to boot, there is virtually 0% chance of bumping into someone at Ridley Road Social Club or the Spurstowe wearing it. Available here for £290. PS for spittle readers regularly travelling longer-field for biennales, press trips and art fairs, perhaps the Nina Simone version emblazoned with ‘I’M GOING HOME’ might be more up your alley! xoxo
Parting shot
Following on from the incessant proliferation of “curating”, our favourite sparkly-skinned teen heartthrob Robert Pattinson has tried his hand at Sotheby’s Contemporary Curated, which will hit the blocks in New York at the end of the month. In a video from the auction house, Pattinson states “curating it I was thinking more about how things would feel in the room,” intel which we’ve heard is only taught to top students at the RCA.