“there is nowhere left to go but prehistoric”
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This Week
💦 we’ve had cottagecore, goblincore and gorpcore, now comes *the finalcore*
💦 a corrupt government official with levitating braids
💦 wild, unbridled, desperate, orgiastic avowal
Events
🧊 29 March | 4–10pm | YELLOW FIELDS, BLUE SKIES: ART SALE FOR UKRAINE, curated by Turkina Faso, Pushkin House [Holborn]
🧊 30 March | 7–8pm | What is dead, what do we let die: An evening of readings (part of the programme for Every Ocean Hughes’ film One Big Bag), Studio Voltaire [Clapham High Street]
🧊 30 March | 6–8pm | BLOB (Curated by Eddy Frankel), TJ Boulting [Goodge Street]
🧊 30 March | 5–9pm | Michel Gomm: waxed plastic farmhouse, Claas Reiss [Great Portland Street]
🧊 31 March | 6–8pm | Ulala Iami: Reminiscence, Union Pacific [Whitechapel]
🧊 31 March | 6–9pm | Harlesden High Street: Pieces of Mind, Somerset House [Temple]
🧊 1 April | 7–9pm | Jack Jubb: Viscous, The Residence Gallery [London Fields]
Exhibitions of the week
Mythopoeia, ACROSSS, until 9 April, information here.
‘Is it a slug, or is it a penis?’ were spittle’s first thoughts when looking at Oda Iselin’s painting-cum-sculpture Trollkatt (2021). ‘Probably neither,’ were our second, while gazing intently at a red-eyed witch, hexing us from the tip/end/tail of the beastly and flaccid form… Strange worlds, deceptive transformation of materials, and embracing the fantastical were key themes in artist Amanda Ba’s curated group show, Mythopoeia (or, the making of myths). spittle loved Ba’s previous post-lockdown show Entropic Horizons (in a disused pub), but this show – in a gorgeous roof terraced townhouse rumoured to be Tim Walker’s ex-studio – was magical. Highlights included Emma Pryde’s crayola-cerulean oil paintings channelling Jung; and self-taught Manal Kara’s combination of a wooden tree trunk embedded with found hourglasses and applied AI generated images printed on satin to continue her project of ‘wild, unbridled, desperate, orgiastic avowal.’ Aching with yearning, Ding Shilun’s painting The Adoption of the Maiden (2021) situated an ornately dressed and seemingly gravity-defying family in a timeless room – how the figure of a corrupt government official with levitating braids got into the predicament of being a female faun, is anyone’s guess. How to begin understanding these world-building artists’ motives for constructing false tales and enchanting realities – ‘fabulation’ – as the press release names it, well, that’s the point.
Photographing Protest: resistance through a feminist lens at Four Corners until 30 April. Info here.
“Grannies against Nuclear Winter,” and “Extraterriestrial Lesbians say no to clause 28” are just some of the placards depicted in Four Corners’ exhibition documenting the history of feminist protest photography. Beginning in 1968, this chronological take explores this little-talked about group of photographers who challenged the traditionally male genre of documentary photography. Such documentary artists turned their lens on movements and issues which may have been overlooked by their male counterparts, and, as such, remind us of the politics of looking, and the inherently subjective nature of photographic media.
Hot Links
🌾 “I didn't know we ’ad a king – I thought we were an autonomous collective!” - From the romanticisation of poverty within Italian Cucina Povera tradition, to Yves Saint Laurent’s iconic 1976 peasant collection (here), Katie Revell explores why no one has found inspiration in British peasant culture - indeed, that peasant culture is generally seen as romantic and charming, just as long as it is ‘elsewhere’. A fascinating sociolinguistic assessment!
⚢ “Read the room, fucko!” - Bryony White analyses the rise of the Lethal Lesbian - from Basic Instinct to Killing Eve - cutting through TV’s banal visions of domestic heteronormativity, concluding that, unlike Thelma & Louise, ‘these more recent appearances of the murderous queer feel like lazy iterations of a potentially liberatory politics… recuperative projections of flattened, liberal #girlboss feminism’.
📞 Digital manipulation of photos becomes Even More Insidious - Kyle Chayka describes the new iPhone’s camera output as ‘coldly crisp and vaguely inhuman, caught in the uncanny valley where creative expression meets machine learning’. News of the inbuilt digital manipulation (that makes photos look automatically photoshopped and ‘over-real’) mortifies spittle, how are we supposed to achieve our Indie sleaze aspirations without the lo-fi grain of the iPhone 7 & below?!
🦖 “So, like tiktaalik-in-reverse, we crawl back into the safety of the primordial soup” - We’ve had cottagecore, goblincore and gorpcore, now comes the finalcore – Dinocore, which harks back to that which started it all–the palaeolithic era. A trend which ‘doesn’t reference dinosaurs per se, but rather draws on prehistoric imagery and artefacts, like skeletal forms, reptilian rock formations, ancient cave paintings,’ which Günseli Yalcinkaya claims is born from the digital sphere fuelling our constant need for regression, and a cataclysmic fixation on ‘the end.’
🚽 ‘”I know what an upper decker is. Or a payday. That’s when you don’t flush the turd.” - Legendary film-maker and author John Waters gets the interview treatment in The New York Times in a conversation where he suggests the real vibe shift is to a (liberal led) very crazy level of ‘woke-like’ political correctness getting in the way of artistic freedom and play.
Add-to-cart
spittle is eyeing up tickets for Jeremy O’Harris’ play Daddy – now getting a London tour at the Almeida Theatre following big success in NYC. Describing it in Vogue, Amel Mukhtar elucidated ‘it’s a modern melodrama, incorporating his Protestant upbringing and its Christian morality plays, while centred on the relationship between a young Black gay artist and an older, moneyed white art collector. The plot fabricates from the second act of his life – inspired by the heady, polychromatic experiences he had living in LA, couch-surfing and doing odd jobs, surrounded by friends who were sugar babies, and men who “promised you castles in the sky”.’ Also, Tschabalala Self dolls! Tickets available here.
Parting shot
We went to see Damien Hirst’s latest exhibition at Gagosian, Natural History, so that you didn’t have to. A highlight from the show, and a work which intelligently questions, err, infant meat consumption (???), we bring you Innocence Lost (2009) - a sausage in alcohol. In an exhibition filled to the brim with dead animals, you may find yourself wondering how many have been sacrificed for his work - well look no further than this article from 2017 which attempts to find out!
All submissions are welcome at spittlesubmissions@gmail.com. Published on Tuesday mornings, click here to subscribe!
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