“where is the line between delusion and self-belief?”
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This week
💦 hot pursuits
💦 twunk-meets-art-lit
💦 ye olde fake lady gaga art scam
Events
We can’t believe it was early June when we last wrote to you, dear reader. Life has been intense… Basel nearly killed us, and this weather is just girl, confusing. We lie awake at night thinking: when will Sadie Coles persuade us to decompress after Basel at her villa on the Greek isle of Hydra??? We NEED to experience first hand the horrors of the Jeff Koons “GUILTY” yacht, owned by Greek billionaire collector and construction magnate Dakis Joannou (pictured). We simply must take to the streets in formation, humming “Voulez-Vous” with Pierce Brosnan (?) in hot pursuit – as Vogue it-girl Olivia Allen seems to be doing on the streets of Corfu constantly. Instead, we find ourselves too often on the dry dirt (formerly grass) of London Fields behind an obnoxiously large pair of Chloé aviators, clutching a Buzzballz Espresso Martini.
🧊 9 July | 6-8pm | Laughing Twice, Henry Gibbs and Rebecca Willing, Flexitron Gallery [Angel]
🧊 9 July | 6-9pm | Gary Card: Gathering Dust, Plaster [Tottenham Court Road]
🧊 11 July | 6-8 pm | Kern Samuel: Rough Draft, Soft Opening [Cambridge Heath]
🧊 11 July | 6-10pm | Thirteen, 13a Horton Road [Hackney Central]
🧊 12 July | Lynn Hersam Leeson: Desire Inc, 243 Luz [Margate]
🧊 12 July | 6-9pm | Body Count, Miriam Simanowitz and Thibault Aedy [text by Lydia Trail], 96 Robert Street [Great Portland Street]
Exhibition of the week
Sophie Podolski: Wisdom should Be Sung at Goldsmiths CCA, until 24 August, info here.
In 1974, artist Sophie Podolski died aged 21 leaving her life’s work to her best friend, Joelle de la Casiniere. Over 300 drawings, etchings, colleagues, poems, and a novel – made in the few years of Podolski’s late teens and very early twenties – were scrupulously preserved in a stack of boxes in de la Casiniere’s living room where they sat for 40 years. Grief rolls off de la Casiniere when this is discussed at a talk she gave at Goldsmiths CCA in June, like the boxes she cared for contained not just work but her missing friend. The pair met when Podolski was 16: stateless and living in Brussels, she and de la Casiniere became quick friends, moving in together and forming a small countercultural cooperative in an Ixelles town house, which they called Montfaucon Research Centre.
“Overthrowing the semantic order” was the stated purpose of Montfaucon, and the members lived in what seems to us like a state of glorious anti-intellectualism, experimentalism and clear-sighted social criticism. Hallucinogenic – acid and speed-fuelled – and charmingly automatic, Podolski’s spindly line traces riotous poems and drawings, sometimes serene and at others frenetic. A Nan Goldin-esque slideshow film made by de la Casiniere has a sound track spoken by Podolski, and it is astonishing to hear her voice as you fall into the show, her soft and hard humour tracking the stream of consciousness works on the walls and in the vitrines. We’re not sure we can put it better than the critic Emily LaBarge, who reviewed the exhibition in 4Columns, writing: “Sinuous nude figures of ambiguous gender embrace in the midst of writhing clouds, an otherworldly miasma; a weathered, hollow-cheeked woman dressed like she’s on her way to a garden party, but for her long black gloves, reaches out to pluck a nude woman’s pert nipple while unidentifiably feathered creatures swirl and wheel overhead; a rotund woman sunbathes in a deck chair underneath which (what looks to me like) a massive turd steams in the sand… With her psychedelic, hallucinatory images, her aesthetic assault on bourgeois values, and her critique of language and culture as systems that require breaking, it’s easy to see why Podolski was admired [in her time]... Podolski’s visuals fly between Max Beckmann, Toyen, Shuvinai Ashoona, Jacqueline de Jong, Mary Ellen Solt, Robert Crumb, stoner drawings, jokes, doodles, the Book of Revelations… I don’t know what any of it means, because, let’s face it, meaning is the problem, meaning is a trick, meaning brings us closer to the world we know and further from the world we want to imagine—somewhere less ugly than here, somewhere the self is multiple, somewhere everything is permitted…”
Largely forgotten after her death, Podolski’s works sat quietly in de la Casiniere’s house until one day she took a selection to WIELS, Belgium’s leading contemporary art institution, and blew the minds of the curatorial team there. The first time Sophie Podolski exhibited after her death would be a solo show at WIELS in 2018, which has now arrived here, at Goldsmiths CCA, in what is the first showing of her work in the UK. A mind warping show, don’t sleep on this one kids x
Hot links
🖼️ “our faces mangled by wind and speed like castaway Munch paintings” – It’s rare these days to read criticism which is actually scathing, but in this article for the London Review of Books, Tom Crewe gives a full bodied, razor sharp, heavy weight take-down of Ocean Vuong’s swirling, self-indulgent prose.
🤳 “People are beginning to cosplay themselves” – The king of B roll Adam Curtis has returned with a new 5 part series Shifty, out on BBC now. In this interview with T.S. Waite, Curtis speaks about apathy versus optimism, why he got bored of TikTok, and the limits of art as an oppositional force.
🫦 “the modern anti-hero may serve as a feminist mirror to society” – Our problematic fave Anna Delvy is back, and in this interview with Sleek magazine she’s dishing out girlypops soundbites by the spoonful. She touches on authenticity, freedom, and how art is above language… deep!
❌ “The man gently reaches out his hand and grabs the woman’s bum” – Jordan Wolfson, another problematic fave, debuted his new work ‘Little Room’ at the Fondation Beyeler last month. For Plaster magazine, friend of the ‘sletter Isabel Walter visited, finding a lackluster, spectacle-less show.
💸 “Here’s a little snap of me rolling some quick biz before jumping on the road!” - artist Emma Webster tells all to the New York Times about a reported scammer stealing Lady Gaga’s identity to try and buy her in-demand work before (you guessed it) attempting to flip it at auction despite (fake) Stefani (Gaga’s real name) emailing the reassuring “NEVER selling”... A must-read for artists about the concerning lengths sad lengths loser flippers will go…
Add-to-cart
Frieze EIC has Andrew Durbin released the steamy cover of his Paul Thek/Peter Hujar bio – which is sure to be moving tribute two incredible and complex artists. We look forward to adding this page-turner to our reading pile, already filling with other twink-(twunk?)-meets-art-lit (like previous Frieze covers) on our Pash faux-Noguchi coffee tables x preorder here divas
Parting Shot
Does anyone else stare blankly from their (unairconditioned) gallery offices at our European counterparts on IG, who seemed to say bon voyage email and head straight to the beach after Basel? This phenomenon of extended summer breaks is a hot topic explored by Tim Schneider in The Art Newspaper. Gallerists weigh in: some say they need time to recover from burnout, others are opening new project spaces to keep July active, while many simply follow collectors to Napa, Aspen, or the Hamptons (sounds quite fab, tbh).
Can we please just agree on a global art world August off? C’mon peeps…
xxx