"It’s just a grown up fucking egg!"
All submissions are welcome at spittlesubmissions@gmail.com. Published on Tuesday mornings, click here to subscribe!
Above: Billy Fraser and Mitch Vowles: Wishbone at Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix.
This Week
💦 Frieze imitating freeze imitating frieze
💦 Computers can cook?
💦 Another day… another microdrama of the self
Events, 31 August – 6 September
Commercial gallery openings are BACK, although evening private views are not a given. We’re loving September's female focus with shows by Sophie Barber, Sofia Mitsola and Emily Moore.
Don’t Miss:
🧊 31 August | Opening 10am–6pm | Emily Moore: Black Roses, Ordovas, W1S 2ER [Oxford Circus] | Exhibition runs until 4 September | Free
🧊 1 September | All Mouth Gallery: Small Pleasures: Part II, Online auction of small artworks | Runs until 15th September 10pm | Starting bids £10 - £130
🧊 1 September | Opening 6–9pm | James Lincoln: You Have to Laugh, Platform Southwark, SE1 8BS [Southwark] | Exhibition runs until 6th September | Free
🧊 Closing 2 September | Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film Screening, Japan Society | Online | Rentals $1-10
🧊 2 September | Opening 6–8pm | Sophie Barber: How Much Love Can a Love Bird Love, Can a Love Bird Love a Love Bird, Alison Jacques, W1T 3LN [Oxford Circus] | Exhibition runs until 2 October | Free
🧊 2 September | Opening 6–8pm | Sofia Mitsola: Aquamarina: Crocodilian tears, Pilar Corrias, W1W 8EF [Oxford Circus] | Exhibition runs until 2 October | Free
🧊 4 September | Opening 11am–6pm | Helen Marten: Sparrows On the Stone, Sadie Coles HQ, W1K 3DB [Oxford Circus] | Exhibition runs TBC | Free
🧊 4 September | Performances at 6, 7 and 8pm | Kühle Wampe: presents Harbingers of a New Dark Age , Collective Ending, 3 Creekside Deptford, SE8 4SA [ Deptford Bridge] | Free
Exhibitions of the Week
Billy Fraser and Mitch Vowles: Wishbone, Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, until 23 September 2021. Information here.
A home video shows crowds gathering to watch darkness fall during the 1999 solar eclipse; a man eats a chick (‘it’s just a grown up fucking egg!’) as part of a social media drinking challenge; football fans swarming a car stumble away after one falls backwards off the roof: all while three pints of Stella Artois spin on their axes across the centre of the screen. Mitch Vowles’ work delves into quintessentially British masculinity - blue Levi’s, pool tables and pubs - and is complemented by the sentimentality of Billy Fraser’s holographic works. Apples for bobbing, prize goldfish, firework packets, and gift shop crystals are simultaneously fantasy and memory - all painstakingly preserved in clear resin, and the artist’s childhood drawing of a rocket in space is recreated on an eight foot canvas. Absurd and sweetly nostalgic, if you grew up in the nineties and naughties this show will remind you of what it is to be a Brit.
Breakfast Under the Tree, Carl Freedman, Margate, now closed. Images here
Russell Tovey’s curatorial debut at Carl Freedman in Margate featured an A-list array of contemporary painters: Toyin Ojih Odutola; Doron Langberg; Caroline Coon; Lenz Geerk, among others. Titled Breakfast Under the Tree, the show also spotlighted rising stars—all coincidentally interviewed on Talk Art—Lindsey Mendick, Oscar yi Hou, and Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings. We couldn’t help noticing the Gucci exhibition sponsorship… For peace of mind, Spittle wants to know: did the brand pay the shipping costs or the insurance?
Hot Links
🏩 TOWIE star Amy Childs is related to YBA Michael Landy - “Someone said Kent was the garden of England, as Essex was merely the patio,” notes Landy on Essex’s classist reputation. In a documentary commission for Firstsite, the artist breaks down Essex’s history while reflecting on the rise of the region’s unfair stereotypes.
⚔️ Some Real [gossipy] Violence - Filmmaker James Crump dishes the dirt on making last year’s bizarre Jordan Wolfson documentary, apparently the most ‘unsavoury’ moment of his career. Interviewed by the notoriously unreliable Kenny Schachter, Crump’s strange accusations include that Wolfson ‘[emailed] me a list of people I should interview who “hated” him.’ Time for a re-watch…
👾 The Opium Wars meet the Metaverse - China limits video game usage for under-18s, decreeing them ‘Spiritual Opium’, while confirming there’s no end to censorship. How long until social media receives the same fête? Or Serpentine Gallery’s predicted next wave of incoming artworks-cum-ecosystems, utilising the metaverse?
✨ Propriety, capital, and cliché - Unsurprisingly unimpressed, Artforum’s Joseph Henry reviews New York’s iteration of the notorious Immersive Van Gogh experience—appearing everywhere from Houston to Hangzhou to Emily in Paris; “An emblem of an Instagram-enthralled population committed to their own microdramas of the self.”
👡 How did this system take over? - Writer and fashion historian Aja Barber takes us on a whistle stop tour of the history of fast fashion, touching on the histories of colonialism, racism and feminism. Part of the Slow Factory Foundation’s Open Education programme.
💅 “Culture, it seems, is good for our skincare regimen” - Just before that Tiffany campaign dropped, Bryony White and Leonie Shinn-Morris explored the complex (parasitic?) relationship between fashion and beauty brands, and contemporary art. Just what does this relationship say about our understanding of these artists’ work, and our relationship to commodities?
🍸 “When things go well, there is laughter, solidarity, admiration and fun” - The White Pube explore the absurdity of reality TV, and the strange comfort it brings in times of need, via all 11 seasons of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (top tier TV, in Spittle’s opinion).
Edition of the Week
Curated by Matt Keegan, this book displays visual/cultural ephemera from the year when corporate greed shifted [Bill Clinton’s] democratic party policy to the right. Including views of Kara Walker, Tillmans and Barney exhibitions, and ads for HIV tests. One featured ad: “the year is 2020. Computers can cook, all sex is safe and its illegal to bare arms and bare feet” - for Kenneth Cole shoes | 1996, $35 from Inventory press
Parting Shot
Frieze imitates Freeze imitating Frieze: Just in time for Frieze 2021, Frieze magazine launches their dating site Lonely Arts, which sits a little too close to notorious meme page Freeze Magazine’s ‘Freeze Dating’ for our liking. Take your pick, but we think Freeze’s demographic is more our cup of tea this cuffing-season…
Love,
London’s beating ‘art
<3 <3 <3 <3