“I love faucets”
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This week
💦 private interests and private parties
💦 psychologically stunted subjects and celebrity-reject name dropping
💦 concerned dogs
Events
As the weather continues to do us dirty, we’re eagerly anticipating whiling away the hours at some of our favourite galleries - working on our minds, rather than our tans. We can’t wait to see what the residents at Good Eye projects have been up to, and are looking forward to getting our literary hats on at Soft Opening and Ginny on Frederick respectively!
🧊 25 July | 8pm | Reading… (with Cyrus Dunham, hannah baer and Travis Alabanza) Soft Opening [Cambridge Heath]
🧊 26 July | 6–10pm | David Stearn: So it goes, piccalilli [Sydenham]
🧊 27 July | Dead Hungry Pizza at E5 Bakehouse [London Fields] | Tickets from £40, here
27 July | 7pm | Book launch: Lotus Laurie Kang: In Cascades, Chisenhale [Victoria Park] RSVP here
🧊 28 July | 7:30pm | Caleb Femi at Bold Tendencies [Peckham Rye] | Tickets from £17, here.
🧊 28 July | 6-9pm | Kara Chin: Concerned Dogs, Goldsmiths CCA [New Cross Gate]
🧊 29 July | 12-5pm | Open Studios, Good Eye Projects [Baron’s Court]
🧊 29 July | 6-9pm | Real Review #14 Launch, Ginny on Frederick [Farringdon]
Exhibition of the Week
Ed Atkins: Copenhagen, Cabinet Gallery, now closed, info here.
Ed Atkins’ Copenhagen is a tight, succinct exhibition. Set across two floors of Cabinet gallery in Vauxhall, the ground floor comprises drawings of the artist (half spider half man), a selection of post-it drawings (great works, but not what we’re here for), and some large-scale stills from his most recent video piece The Worm. In the basement, the latter plays, projected onto a large wooden box, similar in size to a shipping container. The work, around 12 minutes in length, details a conversation between the artist and his mother, recorded during lockdown. In typical Atkins fashion, the artist has used motion-capture technology to document the minute details of his posture and expression, before transplanting them on to a digital other, a strange host. Thus a tension between truth and fiction takes hold.
The conversation, which involves his mother discussing her childhood, and her relationship with her own mother, is touching and intimate - made uncanny by the film’s set, which alludes to the set of a talk show. Both players’ voices convey a slight sense of awkwardness, a shyness from being observed. Sections of the conversation linger on the topic of disguises – how his mother used to dress up as characters to entertain her parents, and how his father lacked confidence in his appearance. Atkins’ character, a stock model bought online and then animated after his own movements, acts as a mask, directly replicating Atkins’ expressions on a computer generated face. These layers of reality and fantasy, surveillance and earnest confidentiality create a feedback loop which amplifies the abject and the uncanny as much as the relatability of the scene. We are aware that what we are seeing is not a truth, yet are also aware that the fictions of the scene allow Atkins and his mother a certain protection, a disguise onto which they can project an alternative reality.
Hot Links
🤑“Larry Gagosian, I know, doesn’t care about my work. It’s like, you’re there as long as he can make money off you” - Larry G gets the profile treatment in the New Yorker this week. Strap yourselves in for a wild, 17,000 word ride covering sexual assault allegations, lawsuits, Russian oligarchs, and chasing Issy Wood for a show. After asking Gago about what might happen after he eventually dies, Wood received a text while in the marble-clad toilet: The other galleries you are considering will most likely go out of business before my demise… wow.
🙅“What really distinguishes the Dimes Square scene is that its authors are increasingly comfortable around the word fascist…” - J. Arthur Boyle trashes the Dimes Square literary scene in an op-ed for Verso titled ‘The Right-Wing Avant-Garde in American Fiction’. Writing on the scene, he says, usually falls into two camps: ‘uncritical encomium for new blood in the stagnant waters of Manhattan’s art world, or uncritical rejection of the scene tout court.’
💄“Everything about this house is forward thinking and in touch with nature. There’s also loads of designer furniture” - watch spittle fave writer Whitney Mallett break down the architectural influences of different Barbie Dreamhouses for Architectural Digest.
⚽️“Wayne Rooney was not a normal footballer shape,' observes the British artist Rose Wylie” - Just in time for the women’s world cup, Plinth have launched an online exhibition with Artsy, focusing on women artists who explore sports culture in their work. The show is ‘titled Keepers, a nod to the idea that men tend to gatekeep sport and its associated media’ - smart.
🍿“Jared Leto would want organic purple popcorn with every meal” - spittle noted that the title of this article changed from ‘Less Cocaine, More Vegetables: Concert Tour Cooking Goes Healthy’ to the less enticing ‘Meet the Chefs Who Feed Beyoncé and Lizzo on Tour’ – but the raw ingredients of the article remain the same. Bon Appetit!
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Today sees the launch of Queen Martine's latest collaboration with Nike. Designed for the U.S. Women's National Soccer team, Syms’ clothes combine sporty-tailoring with the heeled Nike Shox that we can’t get enough of. Available here from 1pm x
Parting Shot
As you may or may not have seen, the London art sphere lost its marbles last week over a glitch in the matrix: a non-arts-savvy writer, from the Evening Standard magazine of all places, wrote an art world insider piece expounding what they have termed ‘the YLAs’ (Young London Artists / the new YBAs) in what is a confusing move against the regions. Littered with hilarious typos (yes, the magazine really did publish ‘Sezane’ instead of ‘Cézanne’ - sadly now corrected) terrible prose and embarrassing photography, the piece touched a nerve for its sheer ignorance of the scene, selecting a bunch of rich kids and framing them as ‘disruptors’ (apart from Sean Burns and the VO Curations duo… guys we’re truly sorry you got caught up in this). To add insult to injury, barely any of them are even artists. The dire state of affairs was immediately met with ridicule and unbridled horror by the art world, and a flurry of vitriolic responses swiftly appeared via the likes of ArtReview and The Art Newspaper, which was picked up by artnet, as well as on Twitter and Instagram stories across the board. We wouldn’t be surprised if one or two editors are currently putting together their own lists of actual new gen YLAs in response (Eddy you can have that one for free). As spittle fave Louise Benson points out in her piece, ‘those on the list include the daughter of advertising executive and prolific art collector Charles Saatchi, alongside a property heiress worth £758 million, who offer such sparkling advice for those aspiring to enter the industry as ‘Just do the work’ and ‘Don’t be afraid to fail’’; Anny Shaw chimes in to point out that Phoebe Saatchi Yates’ advice to ‘go for broke’ is degrading when ‘these days, the vast majority of artists are literally broke’ and not only-child beneficiaries of Daddy’s $200 million business empire and networks x
Needless to say, Sezane has been in our dreams all week and the only thing that soothes us is scrolling through our screenshots to relive that revitalising sense of community in shared outrage. Sharing a few of our faves here so you, too, can find some peace – if not the answer to that eternal question: why won’t the scions of very wealthy families just work in auction houses and leave the rest of us to it?