“there is a giddy anarchism to pissing in your own mouth”
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This week
🧊 zeitgeist in a bottle
🧊 out of touch political critique
🧊 a chocolatey, pooey, unknown liquid
Events
Openings are starting to slow down as we accelerate into hazy summer days... We’re looking forward to a proper Goldsmiths opening on Thursday night – a week prior to spittle’s summer celebration! Who’s coming?
💦 18 July (opens by appointment) | Takuro Tamayama, curated by Ginny on Frederick, Lock Up International [email to find out…]
💦 20 July | 5:30 - 10pm | SEASON zine x OOF Magazine Euro 2022 meet-up: England vs Spain, Oof Gallery [White Hart Lane] Free (ticketed)
💦 21 July | The Direction Of Colour, Fels world, Staffordshire Street Studios [Peckham Rye]
💦 21 July | 6:45–10pm | Call to Arms (Book Launch) Reference Point 180 [Temple]
💦 21 July | 7pm | Lindsey Mendick’s Desert Island Dishes, Barletta, Turner Contemporary [Margate] Tickets £55, available here
💦 21 July | 6–9pm | Goldsmiths MFA Fine Art, MA Artists' Film & Moving Image Degree Show [New Cross]
💦 22 July | 5–9pm | 502 Bad Gateway (Celebrating 10 years of Bronze Age), SET Kensington [Gloucester Road]
💦 23 July | 12–6pm | Forms without Forms, group show curated by Shayna Fonseka, Asylum Studios [Suffolk]
💦 24 July | 5:30pm | Grok presents Metropolis with live re-score, Genesis Cinema [Mile End] Tickets here
Exhibition
Queer Earth and Liquid Matters, Serpentine Galleries event at Stone Nest, London (two-days, now finished, information here)
Serpentine Gallery has been pushing our imagination concerning the environment and art more than most other UK art institutions. For instance, their ‘General Ecology’ project functions as long-form curating, evolving exhibition-making spanning multiple years unlike de rigour agenda of blockbuster show followed by blockbuster show. Unveiled this weekend was Queer Earth and Liquid Matters at London’s impressive Stone Nest (a dark former Welsh chapel in Covent Garden spittle was first introduced to at a Sadie Coles HQ party). It brought together myriad voices responding to the climate emergency, from spittle fave artist Bones Tan Jones to transgressive theorist Jack Halberstam of ‘Female Masculinity’ fame. Highlights included Xavi Aguirre’s lecture encouraging architects to think about the end of buildings when they design them instead of their immediate visual impression; an ‘architecture without authorship’. ‘All buildings leak’, they observed on a separate point highlighting weakness as a universal element of building, small or large, cheap or expensive. ’Architecture is nothing but liquid management.’ Acid Plumbing, their film collaboration with P. Staff was then screened, which brought together thinking about social progress and architecture. For instance, thinking about how violence re-orders public space, Staff observed how the Serpentine Gallery was originally a gunpowder storage building in the centre of London – so the police would have access to weapons and artillery should there be a citizen uprising. Particularly resonating was their honest point that they are tired of the inherent optimism expected of queer and trans artists who are expected to have some kind of recuperative practice. ‘Trans kinship is an inherent resistance to order,’ they note. Adham Faramawy’s performance newly-commissioned Daughters of the River was an absolute masterpiece. Combining dance, spoken word, and video, the work was a project in decolonial thinking by drawing on mythology and fiction finding new ways to understand human’s messy but crucial relationship with water. From the dumping of foul into London’s River Thames or how the ageing and inadequate sewer system here in the UK caused multiple outbreaks of cholera, to the contemporary water war between Ethiopia and Egypt as the River Nile contracts and dries up due to man-made irrigation intervention, Faramawy’s performance transfixed viewers (basking in a familiar yet creepy green light utilised in many of the artist’s works) with ASMR-inducing water sounds, poetic statements – ‘the daughters of the river wept’ – and both serenading and beguiling flute performances. Tylor Deyn and Joseph Funnell, the two dance performers and co-choreographers, were integral to a crescendo of the piece – turning the stage into a vision of a queer rave while slathering themselves in a chocolatey, pooey, unknown liquid while stomping their feet and writhing under spotlights. This was the best thing one spittle contributor has seen this year and it deserves another iteration asap. Curators, if you’re listening, we want more! On the hottest day of the year in a windowless church – every audience member was transfixed – it’s moments like this we do what we do.
Hot links
⚽️ “It looks like a Coldplay album cover.” - With the Women’s Euros kicking off, and the world cup around the corner, we are really getting into our favourite sport… judging the team’s kits. Thankfully, The Face have done loads of the hard work for us with their guide to the best football shirts to cop, with a heavy emphasis on the vintage kits. This summer, we’ll be obsessively hunting down Hull City FC’s 1992 home kit.
🌀 Is the vibe shift the return or re-birth of irony? - John Ganz investigates on his substack how, ‘magazines [well, the art adjacent media] repeatedly declare the death and re-birth of irony; and cultural critics praise its virtues or denounce its vices.’ What the vibe shift really is, he names, is the ‘retarded avant-garde.’
❌ ‘NOBODY—wants to see Trump art in 2022’ - Emily Colucci reviews the Barbara Kruger up at David Zwirner NYC for Filthy Dreams.’ What the hell was I missing?’ she asks regarding one video she describes as ‘single-minded political critique’ and ‘particularly out of touch.’ Colucci concludes that ‘it seems everyone has already collectively decided on these works’ successes in that regard, nobody, not even renowned critics, takes a step back to question whether they are, in fact, radical or even good.’ ouch.
🔥 Britain needs a psychological shift to handle heatwaves - ‘There are no life hacks for feeling too hot – we must learn to accept it, and adjust our expectations accordingly,’ says Marie Le Conte in the New Statesmen. Why can’t we, like our European counterparts, chill, allow things to slow down in the day and not have a parallel schedule of work in July to December.
👯♂️ “Gia Coppola, who is… a Coppola” - Fellow substacker Dirt delves into the ‘golden years’ of Teen Vogue, where nepobabies were everywhere but without social media we had no idea, and we were able to flick through the pages thinking that, yeah, it’s actually quite feasible for normal teenagers to be staying in chateaus wearing chanel suits and having a little feature in a magazine. Oh how innocent we were!
Add-to-cart
We’re never usually ones to turn down something free, however, due to a lack of space and reinforced flooring, we’re unable to take up this incredible offer of a free sculpture by Scottish sculptor Keith McCarter. 12.4m wide and made from concrete, the sculpture was originally made for the exterior of the Ordnance Survey building in Southampton, before being saved by the public arts trust. If you have the space for the work (and the muscles to move the thing) contact Tim Skelton on twitter.