"I would twist my neck all the way round to catch a glimpse of the burnt out husk of it"
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From left to right: Jean Dubuffet; Cooking Sections: Salmon: A Red Herring; slag heap/minecraft project/public installation Marble Arch Mound
This Week
💦 The Mound, Flops
💦 Cafe Cecilia opens, Simone Rocha rumoured to have designed uniforms
💦 Martin Herbert makes a case for the ugly
Events, 17 - 30 August
This week sees Ben Grosser’s show, a speculative fiction on an alternative Silicon Valley, opening at arebyte; Matthew Barney’s revered Cremaster Cycle screens across the UK; an open-call exhibition dedicated to gone-too-soon RnB legends Aaliyah and Lefteye at Harlesden High Street; and a garden party n raffle at The Wickham Arms in Brockley.
🧊 19 August | Opening 6-9pm | Elsa Rouy: A Demon in a Sundress, Guts Gallery, 147 Stoke Newington Road, N15 0NY [Stoke Newington] | Exhibition runs until 26 August. Free
🧊 19 August | Opening 6-9pm | Ben Grosser, arebyte, Unit 21, 7 Botanic Square, E14 0LG [Canning Town ] | Exhibition runs until 23 October. Free
🧊 19 August | Opening 9am - 3:30pm | Cafe Cecilia, 32 St Andrew’s Road, E8 4RL [Cambridge Heath] | Restaurant open Wednesday - Sunday, for breakfast and lunch
🧊 20 August | Opening 6-9pm | New Songs for Old Rituals (group exhibition curated by Tommy Ramsay), Thames-Side Studios Gallery, Unit 4, Harrington Way, SE18 5NR [Woolwich Dockyard] | Exhibition runs until 5 September | Free
🧊 20 August | Opening 8pm - late | Further Than the Eye Can See, Unit E, The Smoke House, 75 Smeed Road, E3 2NE [Hackney Wick] | Exhibition runs until 22 August. Free
🧊 21 August | Various times and venues | Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle: Cremaster 4, 1, 5 & 2, Select Picturehouse Cinemas in London, Brighton and Liverpool. £13.40 - 14.40
🧊 25 August | Opening 4-8pm | This Is For The Jeeps, Harlesden High Street, NW10 4NJ [Willesden Junction] | Exhibition runs until 26 September. Free
🧊 28 August | 12pm - 12:30am | Brockley Gardens Garden Party, The Wickham Arms, SE4 1TF [Brockley] | Fundraiser raffle & garden party. Free [raffle £2]
Exhibitions of the Week
John Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty, Barbican, until 22 August 2021. Information here.
Jean Dubuffet’s retrospective at Barbican had many highlights; from graffiti-inspired works, artist caricatures, and abstract starscapes made with commercial building techniques, to hallucinogenic, performative theatrical sets and psychoanalytic dream drawings; it all sat perfectly in the concrete and brutalist maze. Plus, it seems Dubuffet got to butterfly painting well before Mr Hirst. Catch the show before 22 August!
Cooking Sections: Salmon: A Red Herring, Tate Britain, Millbank, until 31 August 2021. Information here.
Artist duo Cooking Sections present a theatrical foray into the deep web of issues surrounding modern farming practices. Deftly linking overconsumption, ecology and the history of colour, this work provides a deep, insightful and tender look at the crises facing our fragile ecosystems. Accompanied by a volume from isolarii (a subscription-based publisher, creating beautifully presented, miniature stand-alone titles on a variety of topics), this exhibition offers a truly special, meditative experience.
Hot Links
🧑🎨 Make artists uglier again! - Martin Herbert observes how artists are now more beautiful and socially charming than ever before. He heeds warning of this continued acceleration, “could we be heading towards an inverted-world reality where the ‘attractive’ part is enough?”
🐸 The evolution of Pepe; from benign and chill frog-dude to international hate signal - A MUST WATCH about the meme which is inextricable from contemporary chaos, this excellent BBC doc traverses post-truth politics and the evolution of the internet.
🍀 ‘I Haven’t Seen Anything Cool in So Long’ - high/low culture maverick Jamian Juliano Villani is opening a commercial gallery—named O’Flaherty’s—in New York. Spittle is vibing with their motto, “if you were going to die in a month and you had to do a fucked up show, what would it be?” Gavin Brown’s legendary passerby bar re-envisioned for Manhattan’s next-gen cultural elite?
☁️ What made Courtney Love say that she thinks Gen-Z are “funnier than any other generation I’ve ever known”? - Text-heavy Instagram “shitposting” is the answer, and the new trend has been given the NYT treatment by Taylor Lorenz, as Gen-Zs ironically poke fun at over-earnest [Millennial] Facebook-style status updates.
🍥 Paris Hilton, performance artist - Philippa Snow delves into Paris’ outrageous new Netflix show, Cooking with Paris, and concludes that this stage of her oeuvre is “the equivalent of Marina Abramović’s late-career softball collaborations with, for instance, Lady Gaga – a commercially viable, lucrative comeback piece that helps to turn the artist into even more of an unchanging logo than before”.
💸 “The bougainvillaea is plastic. So are the tables… [and] there’s anatomy on display tonight that hasn’t moved since 2010” - Jay Rayner savages The Dorchester’s ‘Polo Lounge’ pop up, horrifying readers with a description of the restaurant’s signature deconstructed salad which can be tossed, tableside, to create a plate that guests should be paid £38 to eat, rather than the other way round.
Edition of the Week
Support Studio Voltaire in advance of their hotly-anticipated re-opening, after two years of expansion, with Laure Prouvost’s Geelong Lambswool throw. Pre-stained with spilt coffee rings, the blanket will work perfectly for messy picnics in Shoreditch Park. The limited edition fits broadly with the artists continuing practice centring on lost ‘grandfather’ character, a made-up fellow artist who "didn't really like conceptual art – he liked making bottoms". Keenly priced at £620.00 from House of Voltaire.
Parting Shot
The Government Strikes Again With New “Sculpture” At Marble Arch. Spittle has been left speechless, and so defers to Zarina from The White Pube who commented, “I am obsessed with the Marble Arch Mound, fascinated by it in the same way I would feel myself automatically slow down to look at a car crash. I would twist my neck all the way round to catch a glimpse of the burnt-out husk of it, despair and feel a deep sadness grip my throat.”
Love,
London’s beating ‘art
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