“Marina, babe, you didn’t go far enough”
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This Week
💦 patriot rock
💦 literally hammering your face in the pursuit of a stronger jawline
💦 Megan Fox’s Pool Scene
Events
Every January the biannual onslaught of group shows starts, and this year is no exception. This week, we’ve got groupies at The Artist Room, Ilenia, and Alice Amati, plus Bloomberg New Contemps beginning its London leg at Camden Art Centre on Thursday! Plus, Condo opens this weekend – we’re especially excited for Soft Opening hosting LambdaLambdaLambda, Maureen Paley Studio M hosting Sweetwater, Berlin, and Carlos Ishikawa hosting Chapter NY and Galerie Kandlhofer, Berlin.
🧊 17 January | 6-9pm | Athen Kardashian & Nina Mhach Durban: I’ll Wear The Bangles From Your Hands, SOUP [Elephant and Castle]
🧊 17 January | 6-8pm | Haunted Garden, curated by Leonardo Devito, The Artist Room [Tottenham Court Road]
🧊 18 January | 6-8 pm | Emma Cousin: Tunnel Vision, Niru Ratnam [Oxford Circus] 🚨 new space alert! 🚨
🧊 18 January | 7-11pm | Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Camden Art Centre [Finchley Road]
🧊 18 January | 6-8 pm | Natura Morta (Group show), Ilenia [Shoreditch High Street]
🧊 18 January | 6-8pm | 7th Wall (Group Show), Alice Amati [Warren St]
🧊 19 January | 6-8pm | Jan Gatewood: Group Relations, Rose Easton [Bethnal Green]
🧊 19 January | 6-8pm | Nina Porter: vision on the run, a. SQUIRE [Holborn]
🧊 19–28 January | London Short Form Film Festival, ICA [Charing Cross]
🧊 20–21 January | 12-6pm | Condo opening weekend, 23 galleries, all info here.
Exhibitions of the Week: A Margate Moment x
Lizzy Deacon & Ika Schwander: Prosecco Wisdom at 243 Luz, until 24 Feb, info here;
Nat Faulkner: Days at Roland Ross, until 25 Feb, info here;
Alex Margo Arden: Attention Restoration at Quench, until 21 Jan, info here.
Lee Greenwood croons his badass masterpiece God Bless the USA while a giant shiny pink penis bucking bronco jerks violently back and forth, ridden by artist Ika Schwander. Wearing a floral shift dress Schwander’s face is set: 100% focussed on not being thrown onto the inflatable American flag themed arena. Is this a simulation? The combination of patriot-rock, the sincerity of Schwander’s expression and the vigour of the penis fairground ride is absurd in the extreme – I can feel a certain hysteria gripping the audience at 243 Luz. Schwander and collaborator Lizzy Deacon purportedly spent a month filming at the all-inclusive resort where their moving image work Prosecco Wisdom is set. Listlessly drifting around this ‘abject capitalist backdrop’ they alternately work out, swim, play candy crush and, my favourite, sellotape water bottles filled with pool water to their limbs and take selfies in bed – the resulting auto-generated slideshow complete with iphone slideshow music is too gloriously banal. Commenting on the bodily alienation of the content production performance, the work is hypnotic in its depiction of the neurosis bred by the promises of the ‘luxury’ leisure holiday model and its bleak reality. Naturally obsessed, we will be keenly watching what Deacon and Schwander do next !
Also tripping down Margate’s Northdown road on this particular Sunday afternoon were lots of familiar faces from the London scene, all snoozy from fish & chip lunches and also hangovers. A few doors on from 243 Luz, Roland Ross opened a gorgeous show of new work by Nat Faulkner. A greenish photographic composition of an industrial door dominates the space – Faulkner explained the door leads to a room in a university department that simulates the effects of years of pollution and exposure on objects in a matter of minutes. Other works also prod at the temporal potentiality of spaces and objects; a closed circuit radiator filled with helium – too heavy to float, a gallery door reversed, silver coated flasks that will oxidise and tarnish, and a photographic image produced by etching on negatives in a makeshift darkroom… a supremely elegant show.
Popping into Quench we make a bee line for Alex Margo Arden’s much instagrammed installation featuring a characteristically detailed and specific scene reconstruction: reclaimed museum mannequins are poised to apply paint, with a bundle of Victorian era equipment between them. Arden approached her show by delving into Margate’s quirky history – specifically the cathedral like caves (old chalk mines) that were discovered in the mid 1800s. On a previous sojourn in Margs, spittle visited these caves and was amused to find out that the Victorian paintings of exotic animals were based on written descriptions – explaining why almost everything (crocodiles, rhinos) look like dogs. Interested in querying the authority of the archive, Arden ramps the intrigue a notch higher by drawing attention to the residue left by custodianship. Changing hands regularly, the caves and paintings were continually reimagined / renamed / re-mythologised. Upon learning that some of the animal paintings actually started out depicting a completely different species we vow to unearth the truth and slip into an extended and uneasy internet sleuthing session in the oddly glittery gallery loos.
Feeling charmed, we drifted off to a bar called CAMP where the day culminated in tipples du jour – glacé cherried Shirley Temples for those pretending to do dry Jan, and soothing whiskey on the rocks for gallerinas and artists braving strep throat (bacterial infection). What happened to legendary queer club Sundowners we hear you scream? Some unsavoury allegations (that we won’t go into here) that have seen it relaunch under new management, causing some major and much needed infrastructural changes x
Hot Links
☃️ "help me, I'm freezing" – Friend of the ‘sletter and meme king Cem A (aka @freeze_magazine) talks to Ben Davis of the Art Angle Podcast, discussing anonymity, intimate images, and anti-intellectualism. As one of the few meme-makers who’s successfully moved the artform offline, it’s nice to hear them discussing the potentials of the medium and its materiality x
💀 “formulated with hydrating botanicals, essential oils, vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, white bread, and white wine” – spittle famously took a stand against the daylight robbery that was taking place in the RA gift shop (rinsing punters for £50 Marina Abramovich themed pint glasses). Interpreting us to have said ‘Marina, babe, you didn’t go far enough’, the queen of performance art responded, ‘hold my beer’, and did what all celebrities are doing nowadays and started her own skincare line. To be fair, we’d be happy to shell out £200 for some moisturiser if it makes our skin look half as good as hers at 77.
🏍️ “talking the talk about cosmopolitan men and uncut cocks” – In this article from 2021, Philippa Snow examines Megan Fox’s career, starting with her most recent performance at the time of publication - Till Death - an average horror which (shockingly) relies on Fox’s beauty to bring in the big bucks. Basically, Snow argues that Fox is underrated and underappreciated because and she’s kinda got a point, at least on the acting front. Fox’s book of poetry came out at the end of last year and we’re sincerely hoping Snow will deliver another in-depth analysis of this important addition to Fox’s oeuvre.
🦅 “Eyebags detected (time to ropemaxx)” – So, you looksmaxxed too hard and now your for you page is filled with Gigachad jawlines? ‘You’re not alone’ says Internet friend 3000 (aka Gunseli Yalcinkaya), killing it again investigating the rise of lookism and its kinda insidious undertones. This is what happens when teenage insecurity crosses paths with phrenology and gets pumped through an algorithm. Grim xx
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The last few years has seen an influx of hotties opening galleries in the Cambridge Heath/Bethnal Green/Shoreditch area, but East London has long been home to (hot) women-led spaces. Yes, we’re primarily thinking of Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas’ The Shop.
You won’t believe it, but the space that was home to the iconic and shortly-lived gallery/shop run by Emin and Lucas has just come on the market.
Brian Gurtler, the current owner who is selling this little slice of British history says that when he first moved into the building he hired a skip and threw in various pieces Emin and Lucas had left behind. “I threw about £250,000-worth of art into that skip,” he says… ouch!
For those looking to restore the vibes, The Shop is available (for financially-backed freelance curators looking for stability) here for £1,500,000.
xoxo