SPITTLE RETURNS WITH... “ballyhooed couture”
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This Week
💦 green goddess slaw and cucumber agua fresca
💦 nerds and twinkies
💦 Snoop Dogg’s cousin
Events
We’re back and busy babies! After a relaxing August, measured out by an incessant stream of art world thirst traps posted from Marseille, Alvaro’s gorgee float at Carnival and Snoop Dogg’s cousin showing at Harlesden High Street, we return to the front desk amidst a slurry of news about how the art market is in crisis. Excellent !!! The usual background natter about what seems like an eternal state of crisis has shifted up a gear – into NYT territory – and having seen the savagery with which galleries treat their lowest paid staff, we conclude all our jobs are probably on the line! Better make the most of it kiddos, and get yourself down to some openings pronto… you never know where your next internship might come from x
🧊 10 Sep | 6–8pm | Ella Walker, Pilar Corrias [Oxford Circus]
🧊 11 Sep | 6–8pm | Situational Attempts, curated by Billy Parker, The Artist Room [Tottenham Court Road]
🧊 12 Sep | 6–8pm | Andre Derain and The Stage, Cassius & Co [Knightsbridge]
🧊 12 Sep | 6–8pm | Amanda Colares Silva: DAE OF HARLESDEN, Metroland Cultures [Kilburn]
🧊 12 Sep | 6–8pm | Anthony McCall: Raised Voices | Gary Hume: Mirrors and other creatures, Sprueth Magers [Green Park]
🧊 12 Sep | 6–8pm | Lewis Hammond: The Glass House, The Perimeter [Bloomsbury]
🧊 12 Sep | 6–8pm | Urs Fischer: Scratch & Sniff, Sadie Coles [Oxford Circus]
🧊 13 Sep | 6–8.30pm | Angus Suttie, The Sunday Painter [Nine Elms]
Exhibition of the Week
Matthew Barney: SECONDARY: light lens parallax, Sadie Coles Kingly Street (now closed, info here).
Recently in my regular, time-consuming doom scrolls, I have come across short videos – originating on tiktok but copied to other social media sites in order to maximise views – of groups of gym rats lifting increasingly bizarre and dangerous combinations of equipment. Benches are stacked onto racks which dangle from cable stations; one man lifts a sofa while his friend lies on top, in turn lifting dumbbells weighing twice as much as me; fridges, bikes and beds are all embroiled in this circus performance, played out for views – and I can’t stop watching. The tactic is simple: perform a dangerous, bizarre display of strength, power and masculinity, and the audience won’t be able to look away. This type of digital rubber-necking has me hooked, and as I scroll I wonder how long they can keep up this act; how long until one of them falls?
As I entered Matthew Barney’s show SECONDARY: light lens parallax, which was on view at Sadie Coles over the summer, I was greeted by a composite sculpture consisting of two weight racks melded together, made from ceramic and synthetic polymer. The two materials are jarring, with the fragile, ceramic lower half of the sculpture in a perilous position with the weight of the upper half bearing down on it. This Frankenstein sculpture reflects some of the chaos and imminent danger of those tiktok videos. There is a disconnect between the strength on display and the precarity with which it is held together. Rather than impressing, it feels dangerously performative… as soon as one part slips the spectacle crumbles.
The exhibition’s focus point is a multi-channel video, SECONDARY (2023), in which actors recreate an incident from a 1978 Raiders vs. Patriots American football match, where players Jack Tatum and Darryl Stingley collided, resulting in Stingley becoming permanently paralysed. Barney’s characters repeat stylised choreography, endlessly recycling the moment of impact, turning it into spectacle before slowly stripping it of its power to shock, and instead encouraging the viewer the consider the entropic potentials of such an event. How many infinitesimal variables must align for such a horrific outcome to occur?
Later in the film, the actors lower another sculpture, a net made from dumbbells, cast and rendered in ceramic, into a pit of mud, before reenacting the collision in the pit themselves. Covered in mud, unable to pull themselves out, the film takes on a sinister edge. This horror-infused setting solidifies Barney’s work as a glaring critique of American culture and, more specifically, the American Dream as played out in professional sports, where promises of fame, wealth and success are held together by a thread, haunted by violence and performativity.
Hot Links
It’s been a summer of gossip, spicy takes, in-depth investigations, bonkers trends and truly mid-art – all explored in our special bumper edition of hot link highlights from the last month or so, just for you xxx
💎 “[Jay] Rutland [of Maddox Gallery] is a character who shimmers with sleaze” – In a long read for The Fence, Clive Martin – returning to the big smoke after a hiatus – makes the case for a new concept to understand some dark turns the city is taking: ‘London Noir’, “an interzone, a shadowland where villainy collides with ambition, eroticism, slime and glamour…”
🌊 “parenting is in fact a competitive sport” – spittle-fave ArtReview’s Louise Benson tackles Oscar Murillo’s huge Monet-esque turbine hall drawing project for kiddies in partnership with Uniqlo. Not exactly thrilled, she describes how it falls “oddly flat, as if organised by a well-intentioned art teacher”. #eek
🚬“the ultimate house party experience in London” – spittle-fave Roisin Lanagan writes on Stormzy’s dystopian new Soho club – visually styled after the chintzy interior of a postwar terrace – named House Party, while positing that the ‘the [actual] house party in all its sweaty, drunken, bombastic chaos is a dying art…’ truly, RIP
🟢 “we’ll always have our half-empty bottles of NYX lip oil and cropped white tank tops as mementos of the most gleefully ratchet of seasons” – For British Vogue, Mahoro Seward writes says what we’ve all been thinking: brat summer sucks!!!! We said it! Plus, another hot piece from them, ‘Quitting is for Winners’, for 1Granary spills the beans on leaving a senior position at a British style title… ☕x
🧖♀️“I think the spa music is getting to me” – For Plaster, Harriet Lloyd-Smith dives into London’s wild new art attraction the MOCO Museum (a private gallery including works by Jeff Koons, Daniel Arsham and…erm…Robbie Williams) notable mainly for shifting gross merch that says creepy things like ‘‘If you think sexuality is a choice, how do you explain the fact that women still like men?’”...
🏠 “the black fridge has a kind of TOWN CAR dimension to it that reads as ‘Corrupt Business Man’” – FOR SCALE goes off on the ‘1990s “SOFT SUBURBAN” aspirational-class sand-salmon-coloured aesthetic’ somehow linking it to ‘the (FALSE?) claim that AMERICAN PSYCHO J.D. V*NCE f*cked a couch’, concluding that this is ‘pretty much the only compelling, relevant thing about him’. Political x
💨 “Per her LinkedIn profile, she is currently the head of architecture at Yeezy” – In the New Yorker, Naomi Fry asks what Kanye West’s wife and muse, Bianca Censori’s, nudity reveals, and what does it hide? (With the article artwork looking suspiciously similar in concept to Ruby Dickson’s Kim K paintings)
🪆“when Candy Spelling couldn’t sleep at night, she would visit her dolls” – An incredible piece by Lou Stoppard in FT Magazine that interviews some of the most prolific doll collectors in the world, including one whose dolls live in the cellar of a “123-room house on an estate purchased from Bing Crosby in 1983.” Obsessed
👄 “The Fashion Industry is Having a Meltdown Amid Rampant Gossip” – we just loved this fabulously camp headline from The New York Times – whatever goss is in the article is probably old news by now… time for one about the art market x
Add-to-Cart
Chopova Lowena x Climax Books is a match made in heaven (!) we want it ALL x available here.
Until next time, xoxo