"Jennifer Lopez in a cowboy hat"
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This Week
💦 Ever imagined Justin and Hailey watching Gardeners World?
💦 Bisexual military threesomes, cowboy romances, cocky doctors, and adult-baby fantasies
💦 Gogo mirrors
Events, 5 - 12 October
Some huge shows are opening this week! spittle will be working the room at Carlos Ishikawa on Wednesday, Gagosian on Thursday, David Zwirner on Friday and Ridley Road Project Space on Saturday; there’s NO rest for the art-adjacents.
🧊 5 October | 6–8pm | Emma Cousin: Game Face, Niru Ratnam, W1F 9BW & W1D 7AH (across 2 locations) [Oxford Circus] | Exhibition runs through 27 November | Free.
🧊 6 October | 4–8pm | Martin Eder: The Spirit is Weak, but the Flesh is Willing, HENI London, W1F 9AH [Oxford Circus] | Exhibition runs through 11 November. Free.
🧊 6 October | 6–8pm | Issy Wood: Trilemma, Carlos Ishikawa, E1 4UN [Whitechapel] | Exhibition runs through 20 November. Free.
🧊 7 October | 4–8pm | Social Works II, curated by Antwaun Sargent, Gagosian, W1K 3QD [Bond Street] | Exhibition runs through 18 December. Free.
🧊 7 October | From 7pm | Cosima zu Knyphausen: Closet Drama, piloto pardo, E2 9AH [Bethnal Green] | Exhibition runs through 15 November. Free.
🧊 8 October | 6:30–8pm | Dale Lewis in conversation with Eliel Jones, Block 336, SW9 7AA [Brixton] | Free.
🧊 8 October | 6–8pm | Mark Rothko: 1968: Clearing Away, PACE, W1S 1HE [Oxford Circus] | Exhibition runs through 13 November. Free.
🧊 8 October | 6–8pm | Noah Davis, David Zwirner, W1S 4EZ [Green Park] | Exhibition runs until 17 November. Free.
🧊 9 October | 5–8pm | George Henry Longly: gogo mirrors, Ridley Road Project Space, E8 2NP [Dalston] | Exhibition runs through 6 November. Free.
🧊 11 October | TBA | Thomas Eggerer: Stranded, Studio M, Rochelle School, E2 7FA [Shoreditch High Street] | Free.
Exhibitions of the Week
Sophie Barber: How Much Love Can a Love Bird Love, Can a Love Bird Love a Love Bird at Alison Jacques. Now closed, information here.
Sophie Barber’s first show with Alison Jacques mashed up contemporary celebrity iconography with twee scenes from rural England. Ever imagined Justin and Hailey watching Gardeners World? Or Kendrick cruising down to Camber Sands? No? Well Sophie Barber has. The billboard-sized paintings came from a place of obsession - that kind of cloying obsession we can’t resist when it comes to seeing sanitised celebrities in their natural habitats – imagining them taking part in ‘normal’ day-to-day activities. Barber’s layered practice - literally applying layer after layer of heavy oil onto unstretched canvas - creates a surreal sense of overindulgence, almost tempting viewers to rethink the quick way we consider fashionable lives external to our own as perfect; forgetting our shared human messiness.
Graham Little at Alison Jacques. Until 6 November, information here.
If contemporary culture isn’t your thing, then just head up the narrow staircase at Alison Jacques to Graham Little’s solo exhibition. Taking inspiration from vintage fashion magazines, pulling self-assured female figures from the pages and rendering them in gouache and pencil, these intricate, intimate, and cautious works encourage slow, long looking.
Hot Links
📈 Who is benefiting from the relationship the most? - The Art Newspaper attempts to shed some light on the unfairness of unpaid internships - if you have an intern, a good idea is to consider whether they are doing the job in place of a permanent employee and whether you truly believe that it sets a great tone for young people entering the industry to be unable to access basic statutory employment rights (and the minimum wage)...
😈 A “blighted annual brouhaha of preachy fake news” - Waldemar Januszczak rips into the Turner Prize… again. Unusually, this year’s edition includes five collectives, working in everything from music to art therapy. Since the last edition - when nominees shared the prize equally - The Sunday Times critic declares: “nothing is true any more. And nothing counts.” Naturally, spittle will be making our own minds up on a weekend trip to the prize’s location this year, in Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry.
⛓To keep you buying-it-now, Amazon delivers every “posture of servile domination” - Kyle Chayka deep dives into a dystopian new era of literature, honed to Jeff Bezos’s Amazon algorithm. Apparently ‘Amazon’s Literature is often explicitly erotic. Archetypes include bisexual military threesomes, cowboy romances, cocky doctors, and adult-baby fantasies.’ A goldmine - who knew?
👜 “I sometimes talk to them and tell them how pretty they are” - Frieze week means crumpling tens of press releases into your bag, lugging laptops around in your bag, carrying your phone because it doesn’t fit into your tiny party-bag, and, it goes without saying, hoarding as many free tote bags as possible. Revisit Dino Bonacic’s exploration of the gender identity of objects / love letter to handbags (which FYI are unisex) for DAZED.
🥾“Fantasy is a balm!”- Rachel Tashjian reviews that Balenciaga collection which featured an array of artists – Anne Imhof, Eliza Douglas, even Juergen Teller – among normies that worked for the brand in-store. Tashjian asks, is it a ‘skewering of middle class culture or tender love note?’
And! The gorpcore shoe trend that just keeps on coming.
🤠 “Jennifer Lopez in a cowboy hat: extremely Americancore” - White American teens have been aestheticising mundane Asian activities - and dubbing it ‘Japancore,’ but Asian Americans have hit back with their own ‘Americancore’ TikToks. One interviewee, Chikamori, has been unironically filming ‘just American things’ leading her followers to suggest she go to a gun range: ‘So probably my next exploration is there’.
🎙“Atkins adapts the Lacanian term ‘extimacy’ for this everyday confusion of the intimate and the alien” - Hal Foster reviews Ed Atkins’ new video work The Worm, articulating Atkins’ ability to ‘corpse’ the technology he uses, exposing reality hiding behind the digital veneer.
Add-to-cart
The collab you probably *haven’t* been waiting for! Jeff Koons has teamed up with Uniqlo for their ubiquitous artist t-shirt series. Announcing the collab, Koons delivered a typically stoner-like speech, repeating words and managing to string together a sentence without saying much at all: I enjoy very much how Uniqlo is in contact with my generation but also a younger generation and it really communicates across cultures and everybody enjoys very much their clothing. We are just people who are seeking to be connected with each other. And yet! - spittle predicts these may be cult items in years to come. With prices ranging from £12.90–£24.90, it’s worth the risk. Launching 18 October, purchase here.
Parting shot
Petrol Crisis is Solved!!! Turns out Josh Smith has provided a savvy solution via his collection in collaboration with Givenchy (featuring actual fuel can handbags), which streamed on Sunday (view here). We’re here for the thigh-high ruffle platform boots and pumpkin ball bags!!
Love,
