"How to guarantee your group exhibition will be chic?”
All submissions are welcome here. Published on Tuesday mornings, click here to subscribe!
This week
🧊 a masterclass in gaslighting, sadism, deceit, entitlement and delusion
🧊 a former artist, as priapic and badly behaved as Picasso in his pomp
🧊 volcanic hell holes
Events
There are 6 weeks until Christmas. That’s just 41 more days of daily private views, gallery hops and studio visits ‘til spittle takes its annual festive week off to explain the ‘sletter to our aunts and uncles. This week we’ll be heading out into the misty London air to ponder upon whatever Jenkin Van Zyl has planned for his exhibition at Rose Easton on Wednesday. Then straight on to Nana Wolke’s anticipated show at Nicoletti… maybe(!) attending the after party at The Glove That Fits xoxo
💦 15 Nov | 6–8pm | Motor Dance Journal launch, ICA [Charing Cross]
💦 16 Nov | 6–8.30pm | Nana Wolke: Wanda’s, Nicoletti [Cambridge Heath] | Free afterparty the glove that fits til midnight
💦 16 Nov | 7pm | launch of crosscurrent magazine, including contributions from Ana Viktoria Dzinic, Chris Kraus, Leon Dame and Monica Majoli, 10 Greatorex Street [Aldgate East/Whitechapel]
💦 16 Nov | 6–8pm | Jenkin van Zyl: Vore, Rose Easton [Bethnal Green]
💦 16 Nov | 6–8pm | Emmanuel Awuni: walk, Pipeline Contemporary [Oxford Circus]
💦 17 Nov | 7pm | Dr David Dibosa and Sam Wetherell in conversation for Ayo Akingbade’s exhibition, Chisenhale Gallery | Free, book here [Mile End]
💦 17 Nov | 7pm–1am | Futur.Shock performance night, FOLD | £13.45 [Canning Town/Star Lane]
💦 17 Nov | 6-8pm | Norm Clasen: The Iconic Cowboy at Union Pacific [Aldgate East]
💦 17 Nov | 6–8pm | Dialogue, group show with Natalia González Martín, Serpil Mavi Üstün and Khushna Sulaman-Butt, The Artist Room [Piccadilly Circus]
💦 18 Nov | 6–9pm | Sung Tieu: Moving Target Shadow Detection, FormaHQ [Borough]
💦 19 Nov | 5–8pm | Henrique Oliveira: Plumule, Kupfer [Hackney Central]
Exhibition of the week
Interior, curated by Andrew Bonacina, Michael Werner, until 4 February 2023
How to guarantee your group exhibition will be chic? Why not invite Andrew Bonacina – who recently departed his role as Chief Curator at the Hepworth Wakefield – to do the hard work for you. Responsible for recent and upcoming exhibitions of hot names like Hannah Starkey and Hurvin Anderson (also represented by Werner) as well as shows with ‘overlooked’ artists including Magdalene Odundo and Alina Szapocznikow, Bonacina’s finger is on the pulse.. In 2018, he invited designer Jonathan Anderson to curate a show at the HW museum which placed artworks by Dorothea Tanning and Caitlin Keogh in conversation with clothing by Commes des Garçons and Issey Miyake. Now Loewe, dressers of curators and collectors alike, enviably involve him in their glitzy projects and prizes. Opening last week at Michael Werner, this show featured many hot names of the moment: Julien Nguyen, Florian Krewer, and Walter Price among them. The title, Interior, provided a self-evidently loose connection between these artists’ diverse lines of enquiry, while also cosily referencing the wood-panelled, fireplace-laden rooms that mark out Michael Werner’s old-school-posh space from the white cube formula. Overall, the assignment could be understood as a germinal show for celebrating the earthy, hazy, solemn, mystical, distant, wistful, introspective, rusty, timeless, and symbol-rich artworks that galleries like 15 Orient, ADZ and Stuart Shave Modern Art have made achingly cool. But cleverly, Bonacina situated these contemporary works amongst historical pieces which prove the weird and the eerie has long been a compass point for artists – for instance, an unsettling and surrealistic painting by feminist American artist Anita Steckel from 1960 couldn’t have felt more fresh. Kai Althoff, purveyor of faux-naive and often violent paintings, provided three new jagged-shaped canvases that were magnets to the art school graduates attending the private view. spittle’s fave piece was by Hilary Lloyd – a small Sony analogue monitor on the floor depicting a homely video of a white dog gnawing on a bone, a dissonantly cute moment in a largely unsettling show. Can’t get enough? Bonacina curates Jake Grewal’s hotly-anticipated first London solo show, opening next week at Thomas Dane.
Hot links
🐴 ‘Avant basic’ is the true heir to rococo - Rococo is back, baby! Writer Danielle Thom examines how the recognisable formal gestures and ‘elegant whimsy’ of Rococo is on the up. Including the wondrous description of Flora Yukhanovich’s work as ‘what might happen if you typed ‘sexy Tiepolo’ into DALL-E’.
🎬 The curiously endless appeal of Hollywood - spittle fave podcast Nymphet Alumni dissect why we are so obsessed with the ‘Old Hollywood’ time period (1910s–60s) so oftenly depicted/referenced in film and fashion. Discussed are the new movie Babylon, Netflix’s controversial Marilyn documentary, Blake Lively, Brad Pitt, the desire to join a commune and take drugs, low necklines, red lipstick and sequins, Vanity Fair’s photoshoots, and bridal moodboards for normies. But is any of this relevant and interesting? They ask…
💎 Want to become an extra in a mysterious Tramps gallery film? - elusive gallery Tramps are casting roles (no acting experience required) for A Cautionary Tale, a ‘masterclass in gaslighting, sadism, deceit, entitlement and delusion set within the framework of 'contemporary art'’ - shooting in locations across London, Paris and Berlin. Email tramp.s@aol.com with interest and for more details, we most certainly are xo
🥬 ‘Honey it’s not just food…it’s art’ - Vittles newsletter invites Virginia Hartley and Matt O’Callaghan to pen two essays on ‘the dangers and pleasures of food as art’ via the gorgeous radicchio form of leaf chicory. ‘When I grow, harvest and cook radicchio,’ O’Callaghan thoughtfully argues, ‘I am involved in a process of creation, nurture and destruction akin to, if not as dramatic as, The KLF burning a million quid, or as emblematic as the self-shredding Banksy.’
🚗 ‘He’s not just memorised Earth – he can now pinpoint specific parts of the moon and Mars’- the internet’s favourite geoguessr (someone who identifies random places on earth based on screenshots from google maps) gets a profile in The Face. Trevor Raibolt’s insane ability to pinpoint any location, documented in his viral tiktoks, have now started to take him across the world; “he sold all his possessions, left LA and headed to Germany, where he saw his first ever Google car.” Although now he’s starting to travel the world, Rainbolt can’t stop seeing cities through street view’s eyes. We wonder what Jon Rafman would make of that…
Add-to-cart
The scarf we never knew we needed has just (yesterday) dropped courtesy of the ICA x Charles Jeffrey’s LOVERBOY <3 We wanna know who on the ICA team is responsible for this delightfully affordable collab (name yourselves!) as the scarves on the LOVERBOY site are nearly three times as dear. Sporting a cat eye print from the new NEKO capsule collection, and the (iconic?) ICA logo we are jumping on this pre order opp without a moment’s hesitation. Available to pre-order here for £38.
Parting shot
Shout out to the NYT for this insanely reductive headline. Try using that phrase in an art history essay and you’re getting a D, kiddo. spittle’s intense and stringent investigative journalism can reveal that they swiftly changed the headline to something more factually accurate but equally clunky – better luck getting away with a boo boo like this next time sweeties!! We thought Vulture’s description of her works – ‘Volcanic Hell Holes’ – was much more illustrative xo
*Approximately 12 hours later*
RIP.