“gay son or thot daughter?”
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This week
💦 chicken breasts with Anna at Balthazar
💦 vaping with Jenkin at Madame Tussauds
💦 a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Hitchcockian gloom
Events
🧊12 Nov | 6-8pm | Salvo and Andreas Schulze: About Painting, Sprueth Magers [Green Park]
🧊12 Nov | 6-9pm | Conor Ackhurst: Crumple Zone, Soft Commodity [Warren St]
🧊13 Nov | 6-8pm | Markus Lüpertz - Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Michael Werner [Bond St]
🧊14 Nov | 6-8pm | Sang Woo Kim: The Seer, The Seen, Herald St [Bethnal Green]
🧊14 Nov | 6-8pm | Vestige: Gegee Ayurzana, My-Lan Hoang-Thuy, Tobias Thaens, Project Native Informant [Bethnal Green]
🧊14 Nov | 6-8pm | Paul Housley, Cedric Bardawil [Leicester Square]
🧊16 Nov | 4-8pm | Forrest Bess: Trees in Snow, A.Squire [Bloomsbury]
Exhibition of the week
Louis Blue Newby & Laila Majid: Inner Heat at Goldsmiths CCA until January 25 2025, info here.
We couldn’t have been happier to learn our absolute fave fave fave artist duo, Louis Newby and Laila Majid, were having their first institutional solo; and in London no less, in the gorge gladiator pit space at Goldsmiths CCA. Pacing it to the exhibition opening, we knew it was going to be sleazy when we spotted a Red Bull car pulled up outside. Inside, the scene was congregating. The crowd was chic – including both artists who were holding forth in pristine UGG boots and red Jacquemus double stacked heels, respectively. Peering down from the viewing platform above, we were overjoyed to see everyone arranged around and on infrastructural interventions like steel perch benches and handrails, fawning over and furiously Instagramming the black and white wall based works.
Grainy, droll and boxed in perspex, these drawings are part of the Contact series which further develops Newby and Majid’s ongoing exploration of image mediation. Their duo practice centres on the constant sharing of found images with each other – taken from archival print publications, body modification magazines, manga manuals, reddit forums, social feeds, YouTube and even Pornhub. The distinct visual and memetic language that emerged from this mediated exchange led to the Spread series (notably shown at Sadie Coles’ The Shop in 2023!), which we love for the mashing together of familiar references (e.g. an iconic still of Maggie Gyllenhall in The Secretary), sexy tableaux (e.g. a huge gay orgy) and the downright ridiculous (e.g. a hairless dog in a diamanté collar sitting on a red leather couch) – reader, our dopamine is spiking just thinking about it. The absence of context or provenance, and the distancing effect created by an overlaid leather-cast silicon sheet that looks like skin, makes each of the images in that series unknowable, and we were eager to see how Newby and Majid would push this idea further.
Spread featured imagery found in print publications but the source material for Contact is purely digital. In one, a Chow Chow dog with fabulous eyebrows is spliced together with swampland that declares ‘I am extremely blessed and incredibly grateful’. In another, an upside down, naked figure gives Vitruvian Man side by side with a diagram expanding the girl boss -> gaslight dynamic. There is a distinct push/pull in these compositions, not least because of their formal elements. The final work is distanced from each original image via process: once scraped from the web, they are photographed using a thermal heat camera, which reproduces them in strips (imagine, printed like a receipt). Blown up large, these strips are essentially now barcodes, and the artists set about translating each one onto paper in a totally mind numbing process that takes weeks. The penny dropped for us as we worked our way towards the show’s largest work, a 3 metre long series of 6 spliced vignettes: working together is this generic, labour intensive way is another form of image mediation. There is something very kinky about the austerity of the process and the levity of the final compositions… feeling kind of hot we went in search of refreshment and ended up at the Marquis of Granby (Vibe: Art School meets Football Fan meets Mark E Smith) where many baby gallerists had been lured under false pretences (there was no pizza). The only downside of the evening? Not a single Red Bull to be seen !!!
Hot links
👠 “I had mashed potatoes, Anna didn’t” - Marc Jacobs and Anna Wintour speak about Marc’s upcoming guest-edited Vogue December issue over chicken breasts at Balthazar. Anna’s reply to Marc suggesting she be on the cover? “Move on…” Marc, if you’re reading, we thought it was a fab idea x
🧶 “I point to his lapel, where a badge with a pube stamped inside is pinned” - Our new fave-young-writer, Dora DB at Plaster, took Jenkin Van Zyl to a place we’ve always wanted to visit: Madame Tussauds, with some iconic imagery - including the artist sucking off a Stormtrooper - to boot…
😶🌫️ “Art Must Be Beautiful… Artist Must Be Beautiful” - In Frieze, Jeppe Ugelvig reviews Marina Abramovic’s wellness drops made in collab with, Dr Nonna Brenner of Austria who the artist describes as ‘a healer who embraces ancient and natural methods to treat illnesses.’ One friend describes how ‘it smells like the stuff you feed horses to deter flies from their mane’ while another is concerned why there is ‘96% ethanol in a product claiming longevity’. That’s why we won’t be adding to cart… x
👩🎨 “‘Alex Israel x Snapchat,’ 2021–22” - how and when did the “artist agent” become a thing? Natasha Degen looks back over a few long decades of neo-liberal shifts in the symbiotic worlds of art, culture and finance, to map out the rise of the artist’s commercial coordinator.
📚 “The book can't compete with the screen” - We’re all a bit auto-fictioned out, aren’t we? One too many drug-binge-infused, self-referential, internet-quoting debut novels have sent us, collectively, over the edge. In Spike, Conor Truax examines the roots of this ghastly phenomena and proposes a way out which, thankfully, doesn’t include grad-school in upstate New York, vaping or situationships… thank fuck!!
👑 “Is Kim trying to imply she’s the 21st-century People’s Princess?” - Parasocial observers of Kim Kardashian will have noticed, over the years, that she has a fascinating relationship with the past, and the authenticity thereof. In an article for Dazed, Thom Waite applies Mark Fisher’s hauntology, Francis Fukuyama’s end of history, and other cultural theories to Kim K’s desire to collect cultural history.
Add-to-cart
What should enter into our email inboxes at 4am yesterday morning other than a newsletter from one our favourite online stores, Gallery 98, who sell archival artist ephemera from the 1960s-2000s. This naked Larry Gagosian card by Julie Harvey is truly something we can never unsee! Happy shopping kiddos x
Parting shot
Blink and you missed it! An advert for holidays to Qatar - where last time we checked, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people experience legal persecution - was mysteriously deleted from Talk Art’s podcast recent interview with Jesse Darling… i mean … come on my dudes ! whatever happened to due diligence…
xo