“I’ve never laboured over anything”
This week
💦 artist-designed nippleclamps
💦 a restaurant giving nothing but scam
💦 more Turkish blankets and Moroccan rugs than you can shake a stick at
Events
We can’t wait for the Hardcore group show opening at Sadie Coles HQ this week on Thursday! Reba Maybury’s accompanying text has us drooling: ‘the works tow a line where the intention is to occupy the infinite contradictions that sex inhabits because sex has an undeniable urgency, and this urgency is never a frail thing. Sex exhilarates us. Consequently, the policing of who is allowed to possess sex will be endless. This is the power play of who can feel the most alive.’ Well I’ll be blown.
🧊 23 May | Rhea Dillon: An Alterable Terrain opens at Tate Britain [Pimlico]
🧊 24 May | 6:30-9pm | Hunting the Dawn, Liliya Art Gallery [Putney]
🧊 24 May | 9.30am | Gary Simmons in conversation with Ekow Eshun, Hauser & Wirth [Oxford Circus] Free, tickets here
🧊 24 May | Performance at 7pm | Jaya Twill: The Power to Extend Your Life, Project Space [Hackney Wick]
🧊 25 May | 6-8pm | Hardcore, including Stanislava Kovalcikova, Bruce LaBruce and Monica Majoli nd more, Sadie Coles Kingly Street [Oxford Circus]
🧊 25 May | 6-8pm | Meat Market #2, including Sophie Mei Birkin, Camilla Bliss, Louis Newby and more, A Butcher’s shop in Deptford, 31 Tanners Hill SE84PJ [Deptford]
🧊 27 May | 7pm - 6am | Subset #4, Set Woolwich [Woolwich]
🧊 29 May | Marie Lueder SS23 Sample + Archive Sale; Mental Health Tools Workshop by Hélène Selam Kleih; and Poetry Jam by James Massiah, Hackney Depot [Cambridge Heath/London Fields]
Exhibition of the Week
Richard Burton at PM/AM, until June 5th info here; and Roberta Booth at Castor, until June 10th info here.
Just a short stroll from each other in Fitzrovia, current exhibitions at PM/AM and Castor coincidentally play with sci-fi tropes. Although not explicitly referencing one another, when taken together one can trace changing attitudes towards technology over the last 50 years.
Roberta Booth: Works on Paper at Castor consists of humorous, anthropomorphic depictions of modern household objects. Indicating a fascination with the potentials of new technologies, her pencil drawings are imbued with a wary post-war optimism concerning how technology could (potentially maybe hmm not sure) equal societal transformation. A wrench glimmers in front of a snake-skin background; garden shears peck and chatter like birds; a 1930s semi is reflected in an amputated car wing mirror. There is something Ballardian about the banality – and the Englishness – of the scenes she depicts. Focusing on these suburban middle-class objects, the works hum with anticipation, as Booth contrasts the domestic and the mechanic. Described as ‘neo-futurist’, Booth’s work seems conscious of the perils of mechanisation, yet enthusiastic for the revolutionary potential it contains.
At PM/AM, Richard Burton’s dystopian, lonely figures fill the walls. The same figure is repeated - hazy everymen, faces obscured, reminiscent of the scramble-suit clad characters of Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Hinting at the dangers of authoritarian uses of technology which have become prevalent in recent years, Burton’s paintings evoke the repetitive nature of work work work. The figures are subjects, cogs in a bureaucratic machine. As in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), the absurd and the banal orbit one-another; the dumb repetition of office work is pulled back into focus by the absurdity of the systems the work upholds. Bathed in a murky light, the gleam of Burton’s scenes is as disturbing as it is intriguing. This interplay between fear and desire gets at the seduction which drives our wariness of – and reliance on – algorithms today.
Hot Links
🙃 “The bafflement continues, room after room” – In The Art Newspaper, Ben Luke skewers a ‘catastrophic’ Picasso show curated by Paul Smith, who in the accompanying catalogue concedes he has ‘little academic knowledge of Picasso’.
🍝 “The kale Caesar was giving low-budget … and the lobster rolls were serving major tuna-salad energy” – our fave publication Grub Street explores the new gen of food critics: TikTok influencers, obviously. A lively piece of writing, but from comping meals for guaranteed likes, to bumping up portion sizes to avoid looking stingy, or designing cringe Reel-ready food moments (‘Anything cheesy is always good, because there’s some kind of action item’), we’re not super excited about the future of the industry…
📞 “don’t feel required to offer artist therapy. Always ask what an artist wants out of the visit. Never promise anything” – spittle’s fave gossip columnist dishes out her 35 top tips for navigating art world waters. Apparently, the rich and powerful are similar to horses; art advisors are the best drinkers; and one should never turn down an invitation to go to Palazzo Chupi xx
🏰 “We live inside art” – Gavin Brown and Hope Atherton reach the upper echelons of style accolades: a photoshoot of their home in The World of Interiors. It’s beyond chic, and includes a private gallery (natch); a studio; and more Turkish blankets and Moroccan rugs than you can shake a stick at.
Add-to-cart
Elusive art and fashion collective Bernadette Corporation have collaborated with Supreme on these sterling silver nipple clamps. We’re wearing ours to Sadie’s Harcore PV this month, and Adonis the next ;-) . Available here for £368 xo
Parting Shot
In latest niche art world Twitter news: one (former) NYC-gallerist (we hear) has created an active polling system for rating and comparing artists (mainly), but also drugs and Rodolphe von Hofmannsthal. Our hearts go out to Elmgreen and Dragset, who somehow managed to receive a lower % than recently cancelled dog-systems purveyor: Tom Sachs…