“any more Travis Scott White Claw?”
All submissions are welcome here. Published on Tuesday mornings, click here to subscribe!
This week
💦 What’s up, doc?
💦 If they seem like floozies, it’s performance art
💦 sustained bewilderment
Events
Saddle up kids, we’ve got a tight lil schedule for u this week! Starting off with Glen Pudvine at Matt Carey-Williams’ new gal (wonder what floors they’ve gone for), followed by a spot of shopping at Fantastic Toiles. Ding Shilun will be taking over Bernheim gallery’s excessively massive space with a solo show, and we’ll be rounding off the week with Aria Dean’s talk at the ICA. A perfect itinerary of art, retail therapy and intellectual engagement to keep the old cogs whirring while we deactivate insta and tune out the sickening sun drenched posts from friends and foes at Zona Maco. Besos x
🧊 6 Feb | Glen Pudvine: Mug, Matt Carey-Williams [Marble Arch]
🧊 7–8 Feb | 6-11pm | Fantastic Toiles, 96 Teesdale St, E2 6PU [Bethnal Green]
🧊 7 Feb | 6-8pm | Ding Shilun: Mirage, Bernheim Gallery [Piccadilly Circus]
🧊 8 Feb | 6-9pm | Kat Anderson: Mark of Cane, Nunnery Gallery [Bow Road]
🧊 9 Feb | 6:30pm | Artist Talk with Aria Dean, ICA [Charing Cross] | £10/7.50
Exhibition of the Week
Jan Gatewood: Group Relations at Rose Easton, until 2 March, info here.
For literally 80 years the badass Brooklynite Bugs Bunny has been an icon of American insouciance. Simultaneously goofy, cool, cute and vicious, Bugs has captured imaginations as a audacious icon of child(and adult)-hood escapism, able to embody and shapeshift between any and every possible character trait seamlessly. As a cartoon, Bugs has been accused of espousing propaganda (Warner Bros cast him as a marine in WWII, to help with morale, even facing off against Herman Goring in Herr meets Hare, 1945), racism (in a now pulled ep which derogatively depicts Japanese culture), and exhibiting chaotic bi energy As a tool for communication, he’s been both lauded and misused. Jan Gatewood’s show at Rose Easton takes the malleability of the rabbit metaphor - specifically in this case Br’er Rabbit, a trickster figure not dissimilar to Bugs Bunny heralding from African American and Caribbean folklore - and runs with it. A masterclass in pared back trippy mysticism, the captions and aphorisms strewn throughout the works like What’s Your Stance on Interracial Relationships? and Rearrange the self as an act of humility suggest these bunnies are proxies for a different kind of message, communicating in a different way about how we relate to each other.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again (sorry to rabbit on?), but we loved the exhibition text by Justin Chance! Available online here or go go go to Rose’s and pick up a copy yourself. Stat! x
Hot Links
☕ “So who are London’s Spotted most eligible art-world bachelors? Spotted: Isaac Simon, the bad boy of Farringdon…” – We did a(nother) thing in our column for Plaster magazine in a rash attempt to sex up the scene. Sorry to everyone named. Tune in here for our January rewind xoxo spittle
🐄 “Of course, the ultimate wide-open space is inside your brain” – Erik Davis recently dug into his archives to uncover this review of the 1994 See the Light tour - which featured Aphex Twin, Moby, Orbital and Vapourspace. Painting a picture of a genre in its infancy, the article is brimming with baffling anecdotes, and is a true time capsule of the 90s (including an explanation of what veganism is - imagine!).
🏎️ “the institution wants to thank its loyal public, without whom the Centre would have no reason to exist” – When the Biennale de l’image en mouvement 2024 (or, the biennale of the moving image, for those who failed French GCSE) opened a few weeks back at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève we instantly googled ~ Flights to Geneva ~ however quickly realised there was no need to schlep all the way to Switzerland, because the whole thing is available online. Nice one. The focus on AI is très à la mode and we’re obsessed with new works by Lawrence Lek and Sheila Chiamaka Chukwulozie.
⌨️ “It was all fun and games when we were uploading 300 pictures on Facebook from an average night out, but it’s a lot weirder and more jarring when your dreams are profoundly disappointing” – The Guardian’s Nesrine Malik hits the keyboard for The Fence, perfectly elucidating why elderly millennials’ relationship with technology is so embarrassing; their online coping mechanisms so infantile… ouch x
🥤 “I don’t do coke anymore; it shoots straight into your third eye” – A tender consideration of whether ‘all the leather on LA corners means rockstars are in again?’ by recovering sex columnist Tea Hacic-Vlahovic. We’ve never read a piece that served so hard and are actually choking up at not being able to reproduce the entire thing in pull quotes right here and now. If you’ve ever wondered why ‘straight men, at their most masculine, at their most manly, are kind of gay’ this is the column for you x
Add-to-cart
Mowalola just released the ultimate look to show you’re a fashion-art girlie; a polymath; a queen of the scene; a gal about town. The MoWA tracksuit, a nod to MoMA’s American College inspired merch, is nothing short of a big slay. Is a ‘fit this casual allowed to grace the front desk if it cites the biggest museum in the world?? We sure hope so! £250, available here.
Parting Shot
A debilitatingly cringey interview with Raff Law (son of Jude): ES magazine wildin on us with the nepo babies as usual… when are they gonna start tapping into some actual London talent??
