“what does it mean kissy face no heart”
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This Week
💦 tangping, or “lying flat”
💦 Latex, gore-tex and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
💦 Ecce in Semper Aeternum
Events
Mexico City-based sculptor Martin Soto Climent returns to London with a show at Union Pacific; a performance conveying cyclical feelings of loneliness, euphoria, joy, and frustration takes place at Moarain House; and three-metre paintings mined from the subconscious by spittle-fave Sonya Derviz at Collective Ending… go get it x
🧊 15 Feb | 6–9pm | Decriminalised Futures (group show), ICA [Leicester Square]
🧊 16 Feb | 1pm | Tenderbooks - TenderChats with Kenjiro Kirton author of Cooking with Scorsese, hosted by Dal Chodha [IG TV]
🧊 17 Feb | 7:30pm | Avice Caro: Mythweaving EP release (Music, Dance, Poetry, Film, Art, Photography), Slow Space, 274 Richmond Road [London Fields]
🧊 17 Feb | 6–8pm | Emergent Magazine Launch, Hannah Barry [Peckham]
🧊 18 Feb | 6–9pm | Martin Soto Climent: Gentle Stranger, Union Pacific [Haggerston]
🧊 19 Feb | 6–9pm | Daria in Semper Aeternum – Machinochrome Dreams (closing party performance), Moarain House [Bethnal Green]
🧊 19 Feb | 3–8pm | Nicholas William Johnson: Rapture, Peter von Kant (new space) [Deptford]
🧊 19 Feb | 5–10pm | Lewis Brander and Sonya Derviz: First Light, Collective Ending [Deptford]
🧊 15 Feb | 6–9pm | Decriminalised Futures (group show), ICA [Leicester Square]
Exhibitions of the week
Every Ocean Hughes – One Big Bag, Studio Voltaire, until 17 April
A doula traditionally provides physical and emotional support during and after childbirth, but what physical and emotional support is there after death? These aren’t the big questions that spittle usually mulls over, but Every Ocean Hughes’ first UK solo show has had us musing on such matters for weeks. Posing as a death doula, the narrator is explicitly physical in this 30-minute video work, swaying and juddering and maintaining intense eye contact with the audience throughout the narrative, which comes thick and fast and is totally surprising. The piece delivers some facts of life that seem both exquisitely important and totally overlooked. Packing a ‘mobile corpse kit’, the doula matter-of-factly careers through the inequalities in end-of-life practices, describing the bureaucracies and semantics which dishonour and disadvantage queer people after they die, and interspersing the account with unvarnished anecdotes about post-death bodily fluids (gross and engrossing). Most striking were descriptions of the comfort that family members gained from spending time caring for the body of a loved one, to ensure they receive a ‘good death’.
Leo Costelloe – And if this is the end I want a boyfriend, Ridley Road Project Space, now closed, information here
Suspiciously close to Valentine’s day, sculptor Leo Costelloe’s exhibition was a whirlwind of romance: blown-glass pink bows; heart-shaped daggers and even a full-scale wedding cake titled ‘End of Days’. Costelloe’s supple and seemingly disparate works tend not to read easily – polaroids, silver chains, dead mice and goat bone secateurs stuck to the wall, for instance. But his lightness of touch, his technical deft, his mastery of the arranging of different materials (he assists the chicest of London flower queens, Simone Gooch a.k.a Fjura) – all delivered with a knowing wink – place him totally in his own alluring, tactile and mysterious arena. Googling the word ‘eschaton’ which appears in one work’s title, spittle is taken to a quote that makes everything seem to make slightly more sense, he’s ‘trying to make that which belongs to the afterlife happen here and now.’ And we’re here for it.
Hot links
😗 ‘what does it mean kissy face no heart’ - Taking Eckhaus Latta’s Spring ‘22 Ready-to-Wear collection (‘a parade of sleek, honest, horny garments that lusts for the human body in a sort of clinical way’) as its point of departure, this gorgeous article delves into the recent indomitable rise of ‘clinically horny’ techwear in fashion. Think surgical tools, latex, gore-tex, intense wetness and The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.
📸 Party photography is back, as is Gawker, blogging, and Tao Lin - Taylor Scarabelli decrees why The Indie Sleaze Revival Is a Hot Mess for Interview. ‘In the age of social media, indie sleaze is not a subculture, nor a rebellion. If anything, it’s just another blip in the trendscape… a hashtag destined to become enmeshed with the Y2K revival before it.’
🛌 ‘Calliopes, the goddess of poetry, might save humans’ - Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi on the psychotic collapse of the western mind for e-flux. In the context of a post-pandemic world – including increased surveillance, control, and policing in tandem with decreased job security – Bifo asks: ‘Why live in conditions of permanent humiliation? Why not resign from all that, economic concerns be damned?’
📼 An understandable, if unimaginative, reaction to Modern Digital Turmoil - Much like the churning sea of re-emerging, hyper-nostalgic micro-trends in fashion, music and movies, graphic design is seeing its own revival of aesthetics of the past. Dana Kachan outlines the revival of trends like Psych-Out, Vaporwave, Bauhaus, and Retro.
🕶 Joan Didion and the death of Cool - John Ganz admires Joan’s cool and expresses his disdain for Ross Douthat’s recent lib-baiting NYT article,‘Try Canceling Joan Didion’, explaining for those at the front that cool is ‘a virtue and one that’s being lost by the contemporary cultural demand to emote, to declaim, or to comment incessantly’. We hear you, John!
Add-to-cart
We came across this gorgeous spiky ‘barb’ cushion on one of our favourite instagram interiors accounts: @___concorde – a late Valentine’s gift that is sure to be well received. Made with love in Sydney by Shy Talaga, they are available to order by Insta DM for prices between $180–300AUD
Parting shot
Kate Moss caused mass hysteria amongst hangers-on at the Royal Academy – thankfully spittle understands no Francis Bacons were harmed in the melee…
Love,
London’s beating ‘art <3 <3 <3 <3