“more yuppie with a dinner reservation than Trumpie with a Twitter habit”
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This week
💦 extras and ’sextras
💦 Lisa Schiff’s bespoke marketing tricycle
💦 a front row enema performance
Events
Big East London night on Thursday cuties! PS all the exhibition titles this week look like the tracklist for an Arcade Fire album, no? xoxo
🧊 5 March | 6-8pm | Tom Wesselmann: Up Close, Almine Rech [Bond Street]
🧊 5 March | 6-8pm | Alvaro Barrington: Back Home / I am… I said, Sadie Coles Kingly Street [Oxford Circus]
🧊 5-6 March | 6-11pm | Fantastic Toiles, Things Matter CIC [Finsbury Park]
🧊 5 March | 6-8pm | Tom Hardwick Allan, South Parade [Farringdon]
🧊 6 March | 6-8pm | Ebun Sodipo: An Ominous Presence, Soft Opening [Cambridge Heath]
🧊 6 March | 6-9pm | Fern O’Carolan: Guilt & Grace, Neven [Cambridge Heath]
🧊 6 March | 6-8pm | Divine Southgate Smith: Navigator, Nicoletti [Old Street]
🧊 7 March | 6-8pm | Tadashi Toyama: Distant Thunder, William Hine [Camberwell]
🧊 7 March | 6-9pm | Sorry about the mess, 125 Shaftesbury Avenue [Charing Cross]
🧊 8 March | 2-3pm | Alex Margo Arden: Safety Curtain talk, Autoitalia [Cambridge Heath]
Exhibition of the week
Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern, until 31 August, info here
The Leigh Bowery! opening had eleganza swans galore descending on Tate Modern on a Tuesday, in the most packed and characterful opening we’ve ever seen there. The 80s set were out in full force, triple-trilbys askew, including the likes of Boy George, Princess Julia (naturally on the decks), William Baker, Sue Tilley, Michael Costiff, David Holah and Stevie Stewart (of Bodymap), Mark C. O'Flaherty, Nicola Rainbird (Bowery’s widow), Richard Torry, Anthony Fawcett, Louisa Buck, and Jeffrey Hinton (also on the decks)… from the younger London scene we spied Charles Jeffrey, Roxy Lee, Adonis’s Shay Malt, Antonia Marsh, Gray Wielebinski, Asa Seresin, Moritz Tibes, Old Drag, Jenkin van Zyl, Billy Parker, Sean Burns, Sofia Hallstrom, Helen Neven, Will Ballantyne-Reid, Antoin Sharkey, Felix Choong, Ethan Price, Jamie Bull, Simon Gray, Prem Sahib, George Henry Longly and of course darling curator-of-the-moment Fiontán Moran… as little freaks ourselves we loved this show, and were delighted to see the Tate programming getting a bit more zeitgeisty, experimental and dare we say it… culturally relevant. Of course, oldies like Adrian Searle who gave the show 3 stars in the Guardian and who probably sulked through the time period in question might miss the romanticism that the alternative scene of this prolific and tragic period might hold for the rest of us. Bowery used his body as a canvas and the club as his muse, turning looks on a dime and offering the rest of us a new way of being in the world that radically broke with trad drab British Thatcherite life, and all with a flutter of charming self deprecation. O’ to have been front row for the enema performance! To have been dining at Harrods alongside Bowery in his ‘florals for spring’ all in one dress, just lips and eyes on show! A mummy and a daddy to us all, he was stunningly prolific in his short life, before dying in his early thirties from HIV AIDS related complications, tragically just five months before medication starting becoming available. Shout out goes to those bravely staffing the raucous bar on the bridge, we’ve never seen people grabbing Tate’s (questionable) wine so friskily!
Hot links
🇺🇸 “actually, she looks like every girl in the West Village.” - In her first column for AnOther magazine, Biz Sherbet breaks down new Conservative aesthetics through the rosy-cheeked metaphor of the hot girl.
🫦 “extras and ’sextras’” - A new photobook by Rosie Marks, with a text by Esra Soraya Padgett is the result of a year spent shadowing Brazzers stars. In this interview with The Face, they explain what drew them to the porn industry, why Brazzers is the best in the biz, and recount some of their favourite plots.
😴 “we, the present subjects of this system, the stuff of exploded stars” -This is a long read, but boy is it a good one! For e-flux, Charles Tonderai Mudede explores the anti-capitalist, critical, theoretical potential of lucid-dreaming.
Add-to-cart
As ever, we are in a state of high anticipation for the return of Fantastic Toiles this week, and have been saving our disposable income in order to really fill our boots. Top of our list is anything cigarette-encrusted by the inimitable TJ Finley, and farm-ready, flirty ‘fits from Pig Ignorant.
Fantastic Toiles @ Things Matter CIC, 5-6 March, 6-11ppm, more info here.
Parting shot
News relating to art advisor to the stars, Lisa Schiff – who we adore for her catchphrase “know that I love you” – just keeps coming out. We received a tip that this unnamed estate sale (which cannot coincidentally have happened on Valentines day <3) included many of her belongings (which didn’t quite make the cut for Phillips </3). Highlights include a bespoke marketing tricycle for one, erotic drawings by Ele D’Artegnan, works by spittle-faves live Parker Ito and Heji Shin, and a (presumed) portrait of Schiff by Yukimasa Ida (pictured) which sold for $20,000 over it’s high estimate. Kerching! We’re sad we didn’t hear about this earlier to get in on the bidding action, but we enjoyed window shopping regardless… Lisa, know that we still love YOU cutie x