“I want KAWS to pay for my therapy”
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This Week
💦 the hallway effect is a bummer
💦 sartorial life in the age of the metaverse
💦 the sublime, the kitsch and the disgusting
Events: 25 - 31 Jan
It’s the final week of January - Christmas was a month ago now so there’s lots going on and no excuse to miss! Start your week with group shows in Soho, sate your appetite with vegan Mondo Sandos in Camberwell and spend Thursday and Friday at solos from artists to watch like Bryan Guiseppe Rodruiguez Cambana, Noémie Goudal and Joe Frazer…
🧊 25 January | By Appointment | Virile (group show curated by Will Ballantyne Reid and Helen Neven), The House of St Barnabus [Tottenham Court Road]
🧊 26 January, 6–8pm, ECHO (group show featuring Jane Simpson, Grace Woodcock, Kaari Upson and George Henry Longly), The Artist Room [Oxford Circus]
🧊 27 January | 6–9pm | Mondo Verde (vegan dinner by Mondo Sando), Grove House Tavern [Denmark Hill]
🧊 27 January | 6–9pm | Bryan Guiseppe Rodruiguez Cambana: Ópera de Balcón, Cell Project Space [Cambridge Heath]
🧊 27 January | 6–8pm | Jala Wahid: Aftermath, Niru Ratnam [Oxford Circus]
🧊 27 January | 6–9pm | Noémie Goudal: Post Atlantica, Edel Assanti (new gallery space) [Goodge Street]
🧊 28 January, 5–9pm, Joe Frazer: station car park barbershop mirror, Ridley Road Project Space [Dalston Kingsland]
Exhibitions of the Week
Waste Age: What would design do? at Design Museum, until 20 Feb 2022
There is so much madness in this exhibition. On one side is James Shaw’s very drawn-by-a-child looking, plastic-extruded-from-a-gun chair; on another, Studio Drift presents its each-component-of-a-Nokia-brick-phone-melted-down-into-solid-blocks, Mondrian-esque piece. There are Stella McCartney tracksuits made from fishing nets, and Phoebe English pieces with milk curd buttons. Sanne Visser makes ropes out of human hair from the barbershop floor and there are even building materials 3D printed from sludge made by feeding waste coffee cups to mushroom mycelium. Maddest of all are the statistics (we run through more than a million plastic bags in a minute… the first US landfill was only built 80 years ago… lightbulbs used to last twice as long until planned obsolescence was invented…) but the triumph of this exhibition is that it floods you with hope and ideas and perspective - we can fix things / we don’t have to throw them away.
Henry Mills: Tonic at Ridley Road Project Space, now closed
Henry’s photography show was so far beyond the current mainstream of neo-surrealist dreamscapes and critical-theory loaded conceptual installations one spittle writer almost forgot how to look at his photographic works. Radiating with the warmth only analogue film can achieve, these portraits highlighted the queer and sun-kissed parts of summer’s lockdown life; acceptance, empathy and kinship tied these works together into a hopeful (tonic-like?) show with no need for the spectacle of the sublime, the kitsch and the disgusting. After the lengthened weather forecast of figurative painting – will it be photography next?
Hot Links
♟ “Disney for Banksy fans, over and over and over.” - Last week, the Serpentine opened an exhibition, both physically and in Fortnite, of work by US street artist KAWS. Unsurprisingly, the exhibition has received mixed reviews, as many critics wonder why the hell a self-respecting gallery such as the Serpentine is bothering with an artist whose work has “no concepts, no emotions, no beauty and absolutely no point.”
👽 Smuggling alien porn into the Schinkel Pavillon - Cassidy George interviews Agnes Gryczkowska, curator of the insane exhibition in Berlin bringing Swiss surrealist HR Giger into a dialogue with alchemical sculptures by South Korean artist Mire Lee. Horror, Slime and Satanic Eroticism are but a few dystopian-core trends spittle predicts will punctuate 2022.
🧵 ‘Gen Z has an obsession with “really specific and almost like, advanced taste,”’ - How are musicians, hard hit by a move to streaming, navigating this transition into the digital age? By pivoting into luxury fashion and beauty, obviously. Citing Frank Ocean, Tyler the Creator and Harry Styles, Rachel Tashjian explores “the boom of the boy brands.”
💃 you’re signing away your life when you curate an exhibition - Fiontan Moran, Tate’s rising star Assistant Curator delves into life at the institution and his plans to synthesise the soul, the creativity and community of club nights such as Adonis with the museum’s post-pandemic live performance programme. Watch out for his radical display re-enacting Trisha Brown’s iconic and seemingly spontaneous Set and Reset dance performance in the tanks next month!
👀 the hallway effect is a bummer - JTT gallery owner Jasmin Tsou on the Nota Bene podcast delves into how Borna Sammak convinced her to open a gallery; the joyously messy nature of Michelle Maccarone gallery; unpaid invoices; and the unspoken emotional labour of being a dealer stuck to their booth at an art fair.
🔮 expressing ourselves in new, joyful, completely immersive ways! - Fashion critic Vanessa Friedman speculates on sartorial life in the age of the metaverse – and the corporations looking to profit from it! In the VR world, ‘your psychological identity — how you feel inside — and your social identity’ become WAY more complex according to David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy at New York University. Gulp.
🗝 everything’s just a bit too “lovely” - spittle’s favourite interior designer Jermaine Gallacher has been awarded a newspaper column in the Evening Standard. Come for the nu-gothic aesthetics and stay for the shopping recommendations – including insanely good ceramics by a young artist to watch Miranda Keyes
Add-to-Cart
Isaac Simon at Deptford’s wonderful South Parade gallery has launched a fundraiser to benefit Maggie’s cancer charity in London. A wonderful cause and so many amazing artists: Charlotte Edey, Erica Eyres, Jack Otway, Jakob Worlinson and Jack Jubb to name a few. And one certain spittle writer has their eyes on this incredible work by Kenneth Winterschladen. The show is open from Thursday 27 February (PV: 6–9pm) to Sunday 30 January. More information here. Donate!
Parting Shot
We’ve all been there, babes…
Love,
London’s beating ‘art <3 <3 <3 <3