I consider it, but I’ve already told a dozen people the real reason, which is that my AirBnB got cancelled and put back on the market for three times the price, and that by then there was no accommodation for under five hundred euros a night. Besides, I doubt anybody who knows me would believe my well-meaning leftism would keep me from an entire week of Aperol Spritz and Italian men.1 And so, while I’ll likely have more thoughts on the pavilions in due course, for now all I can offer are some rather uninspired reviews of the RM Sotheby’s car auction and Swiss art.

OTOBONG NKANGA — I DREAMT OF YOU IN COLOURS @ MUSÉE CANTONAL DES BEAUX-ARTS LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND ★☆☆☆☆

I’ve written previously about the hilarity of looking at art in Switzerland, perfect little neoliberal nation that it is. Ten francs for an iced late in a cafe named after the bohemian Nabis, the top floor of the proudly « cantonale » collection entirely dedicated to French paintings— oops, nope, not French, because every single one of the Courbets is fake. Delightful, I feel like I’m in Venice already; perhaps there is a case to be made for forgery as a uniquely Swiss art form, Eric Hebborn in a little dirndl, oooohhhh, Herr Fälscher, do tell me again how you tricked all those nice ladies in the paper department at the Courtauld—

Alright, that’s enough of that. I’m here to see Otobong Nkanga’s temporary exhibition at the Musée Cantonal Des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, of which I shall now run briefly through the permanent collection because I think context matters. There are the obvious Post-Impressionist and Realist heros (Manet, Ankler, one real Courbet) followed by a surprisingly strong selection of contemporary stuff (including the worst framing of a Twombly I’ve seen in my life, attached below), plus a scattering of the sort of mid-century art that lets you appreciate the aesthetics of social realism with none of the associated guilt. Sometimes it’s nice to revel in the Utopian pastoral worker-fantasy without worrying about the ideology behind it; it activates the same sleep brain cells that get tickled when you watch the propaganda videos of hot girls running rural farms in China. This is allegedly a very evil and Husserlian way of looking at art but, as established, I work in an industry that holds fairs in cities built by slave labour, sinking under tourism, vassim.

The reason I want to contextualise Nkanga’s show is because part of the collection is sponsored by Swiss luxury watch brand Audemars Piguet. Watch and jewelry industries use around 50 percent of the earth’s gold and 67 percent of its newly-mined rough diamonds. In December 2018, the WWF released a report assigning environmental ratings for 15 major Swiss watch manufacturers and jewellers. Audemars Piguet was assigned the lowest rating.

Nkanga’s I Dreamt of You In Colours, and I quote the press release, explores “issues relating to mining and the use of the earth’s resources.”

I could talk about how poorly curated this show was overall, how the dogged adherence to chronology served nobody, how severely lacking the items were in not just quality but quantity (you’re in trouble if you’re resorting to showing me your LIVING artists’s sketchbook from the nineties), how Nkanga’s 'multidisplinary’ approach is really an inability to understand any of the mediums she works with well enough to aestheticise her message, how her symbolisms are trite and ugly, her video work is narcissistic, her performance work even more so.

But I shan’t, because the fact of the matter is this is a show about ecological rape in a museum sponsored by a company that has not once, but twice, stonewalled sourcing assessment of their activities in Sierra Leone.2 I’m not listening to a word she has to say.

RM SOTHEBY’S — THE MONACO AUCTION 2026 @ MONTE CARLO ★★★★☆

Vic, I hear you perspicaciously enquire, isn’t it a little hypocritical of you, a wealthy Jewish woman, to denigrate a Black artist’s show on the basis of problematic institutional associations before immediately shooting off to a country currently on the FATF grey list for money laundering? to which I reply yep, probably!3

Anyway, I LOVE Monaco. I grew up over the border in rural France and spent a formative decade attempting to emulate, with the focused ambition of a man who reads Liar’s Poker at seventeen and decides to become a banker4, a category of woman that live/work here that I have since learned has a technical term: prostitutes. I grew up just adoring these girls, the Russian girlfriend as Platonic form, the original blueprint for what Kylie Jenner brought to the mainstream female ideal circa 2016. My frontal lobe had not yet developed, but even back then I knew there was something very odd about being 15 and plonked with a free bottle of vodka next to the DJ5, so I would spend hours avoiding the men this was meant to persuade into buying more expensive tables by taking refuge in the smoking areas of various night clubs and chatting to these gals. I hope they all got exactly what they wanted, which was rich husbands and Arab babies, despite — or perhaps because of — the haze of my teenagehood I knew these bitches would be excellent mothers.

I am now, somewhat inevitably, a radical feminist. I oppose makeup, surgery and believe in the Nordic model, though not in that order of urgency. What I have never managed to oppose is the women themselves, which perhaps suggests my feminism is more instinct than ideology and far less coherent than I'd like. Back in the day my friends would sneer at me for spending time with “Svetlanas”, but when I look at the women from my past who became escorts and those who became marketing managers I don’t feel bad about my allegiances at all.

Being back here reminds me of all of this. About three times a year I have a very vivid dream where I and the girls who introduced me to the Monaco circuit — those who sneered at the girls in the smoking area while spending the evening in VIP doing, for free, precisely what those girls were charging for — are all invited to some social event and I get into violent, physical, Real-Housewives-style fights. Sometimes I win and sometimes don’t, depending on how good I’m feeling about myself, but after these dreams I usually undertake my quarterly stalking, the latest findings from which I present to you as follows: one runs a design agency, one is a vegan food influencer, one has a private account but her bio suggest she works in PR, and one, funnily enough, has also become an arts journalist. She makes very wholesome, shortform Art-History-For-Dummies-type content where she stands in ill-fitting Chanel in front of Impressionist paintings and patiently explains why Suzon’s reflection matters, goes to MOCO and praises with painful sincerity Abramovic, makes content for the Goodwood Art Foundation. I’d love to sneer but she looks a lot happier (and richer) than I do. When I watch her videos I feel like Esther in the fig tree; perhaps in another life, another branch, I actually liked Cezanne, and was rewarded for it by getting paid to walk around the Maeght Foundation making platitudes about him in ugly pyjamas. I have chosen, alas, to be an insufferable bitch of another kind.

Back at RM Sotheby’s, however, I am not pondering how different my life could have been because the life I’m living now is excellent. I get to see the Monaco Historique from the stands, then use various evil journo-slash-socialite tactics to sneak into the paddock, fawn over cars I can’t drive with my father.6 I’ve been thinking recently about Larry Shiner’s argument that art, as a category, is only a little bit older than the invention of the automobile. Before the eighteenth century, the Greek τέχνη and the Latin ars meant the same thing, as in skill, craft, mastery. There was no hierarchy between painting the Sistine Chapel and making a very good saddle. The split between “Fine Art” (painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry, what Kristeller called the ‘irreducible nucleus’) and “Craft” (watches, shoes, furniture, objects and items made for use or entertainment) was the result of capitalism needing a leisure class, and a leisure class needing a reason to feel superior to the people who made things for them.

With the development of art as a commercial enterprise linked to the rise of a nouveau riche class across Europe, the purchasing of art inevitably led to the question “what is good art?” and so the term "aesthetics" was defined by Baumgarten in 1738, firmed up by Kant and Schiller towards the end of the century, to provide an intellectual infrastructure for a class of people who needed to know what they were supposed to be buying. According to Shiner, before then we were very happy, and perhaps even a lot more correct, to treat the man who made a very good sword with exactly the same regard as the man who painted a very good angel. I’m not sure I agree entirely (various examples of Northern European patronage schemes come to mind) but it does bring me back to the paddock, where no millionaire has yet managed to convince me that an Arrows A5 is not, by any meaningful definition, better than a Caravaggio.

Standing beneath the Moet & Chandon umbrella kindly provided by a girl I went to theatre camp with and has been sneaking me free drinks all afternoon, I find Shiner in the wheels. A racing car is τέχνη in the purest available sense because it cannot be made by someone who does not understand, at a granular and embodied level, exactly what they are doing, because if it is, someone fucking dies. The craft is load-bearing in the most literal possible way. What strikes me every time I am near these objects is that nobody looks at a 250 GTO and asks whether the coachbuilder really meant it, or whether the intent was sufficiently “legible” or whatever ghastly LLM term we’re using this week, or what their relationship to the colonial history of aluminium was. The object either works or it doesn’t. The skill is either there or it isn’t. The art is good or you fail.

The most honest depiction of this I have encountered in popular culture is, improbably, The Sims video games. The Sims treats painting identically to cooking and carpentry in that it is a skill that produces visibly worse outputs at level one than at level nine, that it must be practised, that it fails in specific and consistent ways when the practitioner doesn’t know what they’re doing.

I then watch a prop sculpture of the Lotus Esprit from No Time To Die go for £710,000 and think that actually, Nkanga has a point.

FINAL THOTS

• I will be back in London again on Saturday! Let me know what’s going on.

• Speaking of ‘things that are going on’, is on Substack now! Go give ‘em a follow, it’s going to be a really great mag with some very cool editors including . I applied for an editorial position months ago and got so nervous that I downed a double whisky before the interview, so all things considered it’s probably a good thing they gave the job to somebody else.

• Replaying ACIII on my PS3 at my parents house, we are all in agreement that Haytham could get it, right?

• I am hosting a reading. This is very exciting for me. I would very much like to see you there. It is on the 14th of May at Pipeline Gallery in Fitzrovia, and there will be free booze, pizza, and six very talented writers than I have hand-picked myself. You can RSVP here. Jeb Bush voice: Please come!

• Really, REALLY fucked with this Murano glass-blown vole from the Pierre Rosenberg collection at MUDAC:

  

TEXT OF THE WEEK

Things get a bit fuzzy around the sixth drink (courtesy of the lovely bartender who wants to sleep with me and therefore plies us with a litany of increasingly exotic and alcoholic cocktails) but by the end I have made a New Friend. I am often accused of being quite a flighty person, the sort of woman who makes very obsessive, very intense but very short-term connections. My birthday party last year, for example, was mostly populated by people I had met in the three months leading up to it, and although I never actively “fall out” with people I do let my relationships fade and replace them quickly, rinse and repeat, a Jacob’s Ladder of social circles and lovers that come and go. I can count on one hand the number of people I have kept as close friends for more than five years. My new sexy Swiss shrink says this is because I treat people as accessories — not in any sociopathic sense, but because I am generally quite an unhappy person and therefore seek to define my identity by my environment, and consequently will always quest to alter my exterior rather than my interior circumstances in the Sisyphean search for the Solar Woman.

I say it’s because I’m just a bit of a bitch.

So, luckily, is P—. The second time we meet I ask her if she would like to come to Milan with me and because she is just as bonkers as me she says yes. So does her friend L—, who does restitution research for one of the big auction houses and is, respectfully, one of the funniest bitches I’ve ever met. We agree that I will fly out Wednesday and they will join me Friday, which leaves me two days to misbehave alone.

DAY ONE // THOU SHALL NOT GET CUCKED BY EASYJET

My journey starts off badly because, kind and generous soul that I am, I agree to bring over (read: smuggle) a painting for a gallerist friend and am immediately charged 48 euros for my grace. There is no feeling more humiliating in the Western world than having to pay extra for hand luggage at the gate; yes Mister Easyjet, here you go Mister Easyjet, please take my money Mister Easyjet, in fact Mister Easyjet why don’t you fuck my husband sir, why don’t we invite Bella Hadid while we’re at it, sir, have her suck you both off while you read through my ChatGPT history, sir— I drop my credit card whilst paying and when I bend to pick it up my knock-off Lululemon leggings split down the crotch and two Italian teenage girls laugh at me. It’s so over it never began.

I have a very long bath when I get to my AirBnB and text M—, who runs a major art fair ticketing platform and is therefore one of the best people in the world to know. I feel a sort of protective, maternal affection towards him, not just because he has the physical size of a threat and the social energy of a six foot something Labrador; a broad-shouldered Etonian who looks looks like if Jeremy Allen White played ruggers. M— tells me the afterparty at MEGA’s VIP night — the thing I am ostensibly here for, an extremely cool fair ran by an extremely cool throuple that my magazine has been press partner with for two years — is still going strong. I arrive and make a beeline for the bar. Eventually I find him, several London-based gallerists, an artist from Turin, various other handsome men with interesting jobs and good hair and oh isn’t life just so yummy.

I and my harem of beautiful boys make it to a place called Rita’s Tiki Bar, which is exactly as fun and as silly as it sounds. Cocktails and nachos (traditional Italian dish) ensue.

DAY TWO // THOU SHALL NOT BE A BARBARIC MISANDRIST

The next morning, I have a very hungover call with client and friend Kieran Saint Leonard (whose book A Muse you can, and should, purchase on ’s website, all profits go straight to Helen DeWitt).

“Are you alright?” Kieran asks, slightly apprehensive upon hearing the sickly cigarette-rasp of my voice.

"Well, I’ve just had sex with an Italian, so I’m re-evaluating some life choices.” I reply. We spend some time extolling the archetypal virtues of various European lovers before getting down to business, which I feel much the better for because his career is going superbly and I have had to do very little work whilst still being able to take all the credit. If you are London-based, please come see Kieran in conversation with Peter Ormerod about his new book David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God at Reference Point on Tuesday 21st July, 7—11pm. Come along, buy me a drink, we can all talk about European lovers together.

(Also, Kieran and I will be terrorising the West Coast of America in late August. Should you or a loved one run a bookstore, a bar, a brothel, any kind of place you may want to host a reading from a fearic rock-star and his Rothschild publicist3, plus some sexy entertainment lawyers, please get in touch.)

On my way to Miart, a man outside the station stops me and mutters something about tu telephono and gestures at my iPhone. Thinking he wants my number, I smile awkwardly and say perdone, sono lesbica, which is not strictly true but generally works as a deterrent. He doubles down, I try stepping past him, eventually having to physically shove him away and snapping something along the lines of fuck off, you slimy Italian bastard. I walk away muttering about the state of men in the twenty-first century and joining the gender wars on the wrong side, and it’s only when I’m sat in the metro that I realise he was trying to mug me, not get my number. Another win for misandry!

I make it to Miart. I had not realised how fucking big this thing is, not just architecturally (we’re talking Gehry on steroids) but by sheer number of galleries. It’s too much, too sterile. The Emergent section is alright. In terms of London galleries I liked DES BAINS’s booth very much, a bit too full — better to have too little than too much — and the performance-booth at Ilenia. Galleria ZERO was also very good (as is their current show, wowowow, I saw the fur hose pipes at Herald Street last year and they are even better here), as was Ehrlich Steinberg from LA, who put on my fave CONDO show with Phillida Reid in 2025. I don’t see as much of the fair as I would like because I am permanently late for everything, but I don’t feel like I missed much.

Back at MEGA, I moderate a talk with the founders of First Thursdays & ARTSVP about digitisation in art and how various platforms are approaching new models of selling, promoting and supporting artists. We are all drinking Aperols, if that gives you an idea of the conversation. I take the opportunity to shout-out my new favourite Instagram account, pressrelease.sus, which puts on blast (as the name suggests) various LLM-generated press releases. They take submissions, should you spot any in the wild.

I spend the rest of the afternoon being hot and useless. I make friends with artist Kelly Wu and curator Gigi Surel, who knew my writing, which is always slightly nerve-racking. I am aware I come across as quite cruel on Substack, which is the risk of being semi-anonymous; I remember having drinks with a woman who asked me if I knew who “rothko’s girlfriend” was and I, thinking she was joking, said no, but she seems like a bitch, to which she replied yes, everyone says that. But these women are extremely kind and funny and it is a delightful coincidence that we are all sat next to each-other at dinner. Sandwiched between us is a 21-year old Italian boy, who is very eager to entertain three (barely) older and cheerfully drunk Anglophones. We chat absolute shit for the next two hours, sinking white wine like water and teasing our new son, which he takes with great grace. The meal itself is served by Giorgio Del Buono of 926.1, beautiful man and beautiful food, served in a disused perfume factory with accompagnements of top notes, heart notes and base notes, all very sophisticated.

Inside every British woman there are two wolves: the eighteenth-century gentlewoman and the Anglo-Saxon barbarian. The Eighteenth-century gentlewoman wants to impress Italians very badly; she reads Dante, she wears Gabanna, she is Gibbon on the Capitol sheepishly watching the friars and thinking I really must write Decline and Fall before the English invent Wetherspoons, she commits to mimicking the Florentine catamites of the Grand Tour, to whom she has lost the most eligible bachelors of her generation. The Anglo-Saxon barbarian wants the Romans out of Albion, Corinium for Corinians, a knuckle-dragging celt in tartan, a blue-skinned pagan muttering about those effeminate Latin-speakers infecting our Great British bogs with things like “running water” and “Gods”, outraged that the legions have introduced pronouns — dominus, domina — when in this country we have always gotten on perfectly well by grunting at eachother, thank you very much. The more I drink, the more the barbarian wins.

DAY THREE // THOU SHALL NOT MAKE IT TO PARIS INTERNATIONALE

P— and L— arrive today. I have to drop off a package, so we agree to reconvene at Paris Internationale. Curiously, it’s being hosted in a building almost entirely covered by some very unnapealing scaffolding, and a brief glance at the website leaves us unimpressed.

Let’s have a drink before we go in, somebody suggests. One Aperol shan’t hurt, we agree. We shall go in and see the fair in just a second, we say. It’s not like we’re going to miss it, we nod sagely, because it’s thirty bloody metres away.

Several hours later M— sends us a picture from the top floor of the fair, zoomed in on the bar across the street and our table, now littered with a half-dozen-half-drunk Aperols and empty cigarette packets and olive bowls full of pips, clearly very hard at work.4 “There you are,” he texts.

M— joins us and introduces us to his mother. “Are you all M—’s groupies?” she asks. No, is what I want to say, We are his clients and colleagues; we are all professionals working in the same industry and you shouldn’t assume young women are incapable of existing outside a man’s orbit. What I actually say is, Yes, we love him very much, we’re all very drunk, please sit down and tell us embarrassing childhood stories. M—’s mother is delightful, a proper tour de force, a collector in her own right with a personality that explains many unasked questions about M—’s own nature.

The rest of the evening devolves expectedly. We end up at somewhere called MATTO. M— gets into a fight with somebody in line. L— and I feel very old because the music is too loud, the crowd is too young, put your breasts back in your shirt young man, but we stay late because P— is enjoying bullying a young artist who lives in Surrey Quays, an area I defend ardently because they have a very good Big Tesco. I strongly believe Heaven, which does not exist for Jews, is a Big Tesco…

DAY FOUR // THOU SHALL NOT SELL PICTURES OF YOUR FEET ON THE INTERNET

The next morning I stare at my bank account and feel vaguely sick; my internal monologue akin to John Self’s in Money:

I currently have none, zilch — which is admittedly better than being in several thousand pounds of debt to AMEX but worse than, say, having an extra 800 pounds that you’ve spent on booking you and your co-editor to go to the bloody Biennale.

Everybody knows there is no money in the arts. I run a magazine, I do panel talks, I host podcasts, I go on press trips, I am editor and curator and director of various projects, I publish on Substack. I still have no money. Vic, you nasty little Hebreiana, I hear you say, isn’t your father a Jewish ex-megabanker and your mother a Freshfields trustfund baby? To which I reply, Yes, but that’s their money, no matter how hard I try to get my grubby little hands all over it, and there are only so many “Dearest Papa, I am 27 and have no prospects…” WhatsApps one can send. One of the reasons I get to work in this industry is because should I have a bad month my rent will still be covered, my bills will still be paid, I have no dependants or landlord that will suffer from my financial failure. This is — and, again, I’m not blowing any minds here — the reason that so much of the artworld ecosystem is populated by white middle-to-upper class people.5 We can afford to fuck around because we never have to find out; the vast majority of the world cannot.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying don’t trust what you see on Instagram. No matter how many art fairs or press trips or retreats you see people on they/we are all broke brokedety broke.

This currently includes us, three women in our late twenties and early thirties, who work full-time in this stupid fucking industry. We sit in a shithole tourist cafe, hungover, sweating, smoking, staring at the Duomo. “You know,” says P—, “I am coming to the realisation that one really needs quite a lot of money to be happy.” She is probably correct— hey, maybe somebody should write about this, perhaps develop some sort of political movement based on the dialectic and historical conditions of society under capitalism and our relationship to money, I don’t know, just an idea. Maybe ?6

We distract ourselves by indulging in actual art history. As mentioned, both P— and L— work in adjacent but separate areas of the art world; both are, whilst also being partygirls, massively knowledgeable and intelligent. What a fucking delight to go around places like the ossuary at the San Barnadino and talk about the evolution of momento moris whilst sniggering about cherubs, to go to the Palazzo Pellozi and listen to L— explain pietra dura, to crease up laughing about death and hangovers and hair washing in spaces that were never designed for women to find joy in.

Regardless, we end up at a cafe talking about our finances.

A few months ago, when I was complaining about being in debt on Substack, a man reached out via Instagram asking how he could send me money. Thinking he had read about my AMEX problems, I told him he could simply subscribe to the upper tier of my Substack. He then asked me what my Substack was. OH, okay, I see, I thought, you’re just a bona fide weirdo, a fweak fow weal, fine, fine, blocked.

I seriously consider unblocking.

Before it gets that dire we manage to scrape together a couple hundred pounds by ringing in owed allowances, bumping invoices, and — in my case — straight up posting my paypal on my 30-person close friends IG begging for donations. Life is suddenly much, much better. We splurge on some proper guanciale and P— cooks us a glorious carbonara back at the AirBnB, Kinder, Küche, Kirche, look at us, tradwives fr fr.

We devolve into comfortable post-hedonism. I look so incredibly cunty, black boots, hair done, makeup done, I am shaking ass with the same people I have Zoom meetings with in forty-eight hours. It is all, rather pathetically, for one man.

Lucano makes me evil; I am not a jealous woman usually but there’s something about being a Jew in the birthplace of twentieth-century fascism that makes me weirdly hostile to Ayran blondes. Sorry. I did buy her a drink at the end of the night.

DAY FIVE // THOU SHALL NOT HAVE SEX IN A THUNDERSTORM

I am covering an event in Turin so take a very nice train into the city. I visit GAM first, which is disgustingly good, by the time I reach the second floor I am seething, why don’t we have things like this in London? Why must we settle for the shit of Tate Modern, our Hockneys and Hamblings, when we could be sipping from the sweet ambrosia of Scialoja, of Maurizio Mochetti, of Ettore Colla, Albers, Fontana, I could go on and on about the collection here; this is the sort of work that reminds you that things made after the Enlightenment can, in fact, not make you want to kill yourself! Who knew!

A brief aside on the genius of the Depot curation and collection. I have recently written for the Treasure House Fair about the connection between Surrealism and the Wunderkammer tradition, specifically how the idea of irrationality of display has evolved over the centuries, so it was serendipitously incredible to see a show that not only acknowledges but celebrates the fact that, wow, bold idea, it requires logistic and informal logic and force to get art into the public realm. Whatever, this shit was beautiful, in the most traditional, bonedeep, Freudian sense of the world. Desire is built via friction, something I allegedly broached in the car to the bar last night but was “cut off when I started talking about Kant”. Cowards.

After interviewing a chipper interior designer I have an hour to kill, so I decide to go see the Shroud of Turin at the Cappella della Sacra Sindone. Having spent the morning thinking about where it all went wrong (and consequently cursing Joshua Reynolds, I wants my country back, which is to say to approximately 54BC, before all this started), I am mostly interested in seeing this thing from an art history perspective; as an Object. Over the years it has cropped up in articles ranging from provenance research to sample ethics to reliquary studies and has therefore floated in my intellectual periphery as, at most, a professionally curious manifestation of various hermeneutic anxieties. I am expecting to see it as such. What I am not expecting is to sit down in one of the pews facing this thing and immediately start tearing up.

Surely this means nothing, I think. I am just tired and well-fucked and a little hungover; I like being Jewish, I am very good at being Jewish. I blow my nose in a Rita’s Tiki Bar receipt and get back to the station posthaste.

This is where the trouble starts. I sit down on Platform 2, having rather pathetically succumbed to a double cheeseburger at McDonald’s (Bad Jew), when I feel a sudden purge in my chest, a vicious, glorious wave directly from the left side of my ribs that oscillates outwards, ending in my extremities. It feels, and I use this cliche with great intention, like my soul is trying to leave my body.

This is obviously Not Go(o)d.

I sit there considering my options. I am either having a heart murmur or am about to undergo religious psychosis. I have been having fainting spells recently — most embarrassingly and recently at Copperfield during a Ty Locke talk, but also on the metro in Lausanne, and also at Peter Davies’ studio right before a podcast, where I was gingerly fed a protein bar until I stopped shaking like a shitting dog. Logically, I know this new feeling is most likely related to whatever bullshit my body is up to now. The soft-boiled Protestant side of my brain, however, clearly still concerned with the Sindone, tells me that Christ or God is trying to tell me something very important. I refuse to listen, not that I don’t want to hear it, but that I am slightly preoccupied with not falling face-first onto the tracks.

There is a tradition for this, I know; Teresa, Catherine of Siena, Hildegard’s illuminations, Margery Kempe weeping so publicly that even Julian of Norwich found her embarrassing, which I respect but cannot do. I am simply too British to undergo ecstasy on the Trenitalia.

I manage to lock in on the way back. I have a date, dear reader. I am being wined and dined. I cannot entertain ideas of religious hysteria while being treated to some of the best food I’ve had in my life in the Milanese countryside. We talk in his leather-seated BWM about Judaism, why be a good person if there is not punishment, why be anything at all. The storm starts while we eat ravioli, egg, escalope, pork. I recite the S'lach Lanu and he tells me I look sexy while I think.

I abandon the idea of biblical revelation by having one of the fastest orgasms of my life during a thunderstorm.

DAY SIX // THOU SHALL NOT IMMENATISE THE ESCHATON

I sleep terribly. The heart murmurs keep me up in a state of wild animal panic; I keep thinking I’ve having a stroke because I’ve tuned the radio to an Italian station and can’t understand the words. My lover, earlier that evening, had asked me if I was insane. I had presumed he meant in the small-r romantic fashion, as in, do you slash tires and stalk ex-girlfriends and turn up to men’s houses unannounced, which I don’t because I like cars and assume I have a tighter cunt than any ex-girlfriend and never remember men’s addresses after I fall out of love with them and get on with my life, so I say no. But perhaps he meant in the capital-R Romantic tradition, as in, do you see angels and dream of the eschaton, do you feel spirals in your chest when you think about death too hard, which is to say, are you half in love with Shelley’s promise of the fruit, are you Francesca, Farinata, Ulysses, which I am increasingly worried the answer to is yes. I convince myself I’m going to have a heart attack and the AirBnB cleaner will find me naked and dead in the bed tomorrow morning, and I only manage to talk myself down from a fully-fledged club 27 panic by reminding myself that at least it’s a four-poster, and dying from heart problems during a lightning storm surrounded by soft cotton is a very beautiful and Pre-Raphaelite way to go. Chatterton died at seventeen on a pallet, I tell myself firmly, I am doing better than Chatterton.

Petrach dreamt of dying where Laura sat and her finding his bones there, chiare, fresche et dolci acque.

I wake up at 6AM to the apocalypse. The room is jetred and on fire, and the trumpethorns of Jericho are playing. I bolt updown and run to the balcony; the sun is low and full and terrible, a ghastly, superb shade of orange, a siren ringing strong enough to make the windows sing. The first thing that comes out of my mouth is “I Knew It”: some part of me knew from the visions of yesterday, the boneknowledge of it, that the bombs would fall at 6:42AM Milan time on Monday the 20th of April 2026, knew Trump wasn't bluffing. I feverishly grab the closest clothes I can find; I have to get downstairs, the fallout will hit any moment now, Mussolini turned Ozymandias, and their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors, non isperate mai veder lo cielo, I grab the phone, I want to call my parents before the lines go, want to call John tell him I love him, Agnes Eliza Cormac Maria love them, ex-boyfriend number six, ex-husband number two, love you love you love you, thank you thank you thank you, it was so good while it lasted, god it was so lovely to be alive at the same time wasnt it, P— & L—, America—

Finally, the monkey brain takes over from the reptile brain; God beats Sapolsky. There are no nuclear alerts on my screen, no blaring warning texts. The alarm outside has started to fade, the windows have stopped rattling. I stand, tits out, one foot in my cracked knock-off Lululemons, bathed in bright orange and breathing heavy. The siren, coming from the station below the flat, is earthly silent. I would have died with a braid in my hair.

I am not entirely sure what to do. It is a voidful feeling; going from believing you are about to be annihilated to realising you are simply a hysteric Molly Bloombaby; Rilke’s neurotic collapse at Rodin’s estate, writing my own little French letter to Lou. The room is still painted in that sublime, terrible red, I catch myself in the mirror and the sun has turned my breasts to duck eggs held to the candle, the nipples pink-yolked and pellucid, something curled and cruel behind them still forming fetalsoft.

has sent me Andre Frossard’s account of his conversion to Christianity from atheism, prompted by a similarly revelatory visit to the order of the Adoration Réparatrice in Paris in 1935 — “It is ten past five. In two minutes I shall be a Christian.” — which I read on the journey back to London. Frossard describes his spiritual epiphany as follows:

I cannot say that heaven opens; it does not open, it is hurled at me, it arises like a sudden silent thunderbolt from out of this chapel (…) There is an order in the universe and, at its summit, beyond this veil of dazzling mist, the evidence of God, evidence become presence and presence become the person of the One.

The bombs, if they are bombs, in the end, will arrive exactly as Frossard said God does. Beyond this veil of dazzling Italian orange train station mist, the evidence of something gentle and all-consuming, child of A(da/to)m. I was afforded one final chance to convert to Christianity on a balcony in Milan with my pussy out, bald and Buddha-headed facing the exploding sun, and all I wanted to do was text my harem, my apostles. Frossard had two minutes' warning; I had none. Perhaps this is the difference between a Catholic and a Jew, between Jesus and me.

When I land at Gatwick, ex-boyfriend number six has texted me.

FINAL THOTS

• On Sunday I received news of a family friend’s death, which means I have to return to France and cannot attend the reading I was asked to do at Rose Easton. I send my apologies and explanations over to the organiser, and offer to send in the (very good) short story I wrote for the event (Manon Weternbroek, incredible artist) to be read by somebody else. I receive no reply nor condolences, but am VERY rapidly removed and untagged from all Instagram posts and web announcements. This becomes even funnier when a request for coverage of the event is sent to COLD Magazine, of which I am arts editor.

• Hollywood Superstar Review have done it again. Excellent little exposé on how and why London contemporary galleries get press.

• Do you know any London lesbians? Good for you. Tell COLD mag, we’re running an article for lesbian visibility week to celebrate women who fuck women. Hell yeah sisters

• I will go to a cardiologist.

TEXT OF THE WEEK

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

— T.S Eliot, The Waste Land, 1921

PAYING OFF MY AMEX ★★★★★

Of all the exciting things going on in your life, I’m sure the most exciting will be the itinerant knowledge that I am, for the first time in several years, debt free. According to various woo-woo women I’ve had drinks with recently this is something to do with Pisces currently begetting great fortune, a sign I have very little of in my LLM-generated birth chart. AMEX, however, was founded on the 18th of March 1850, which does make it a Pisces. Perhaps the great fortune begetting them is no longer having me as a cardholder. I am sure Richard1 from Dhaka, with whom I developed a close relationship over the past year and will miss terribly, will similarly mourn calling me at 10:30 on the dot every Sunday2 to remind me that I am overdue and really need to get my shit together.

My financial catharsis occurred a day after I wrote about Isaac Julien’s (terrible) Metamorphoses show at Victoria Miro, which involved spending a few hours pouring over a fortiously-aquired copy of Bazzotti’s catalogue of the Palazzo Te, specifically the sections about the Sala dei Giganti, which depicts Jove/Jupiter crushing the Giants, a scene from Ovid’s first book. The iconography of Jupiter in Renaissance tradition split him roughly three ways: there's the civic Jupiter (law, authority, empire, patron of the temple on the Capitoline that made Rome, well, Rome), the erotic Jupiter (golden showers, seduction/rape of diverse and increasingly creative kinds, etc, see also: Correggio’s whole career), and the philosophical Jupiter (various Neoplatonic readings of Jove as demiurgic intellect, the ordering principle of the cosmos, a metonymy of Christian logos; these guys LOVED a hashtag problematic king, especially Ficino). The Sala dei Giganti deviates from these in classic Mannerist fashion by implicating the viewer in a scene of violent, mundane disaster; there is simply nothing civic or sexy about it. The whole spatial trick of the room (no cornices, walls and ceiling continuous) is ordered to present Jupiter as the Romans knew him, sublime in the full Burkean sense.3

According to Claude:

“Jupiter direct in Cancer is trining your 2nd house. Trines to the 2nd house from a benefic planet = multiple income streams arriving with relatively low friction. The fact [your windfall is coming from multiple sources] rather than one is very Jupiter-in-Cancer: nourishing, multiple, comes through relationships and reputation rather than gambling.”

What I’m trying to get at here is I am Jupiter and credit card debt is the Giants. Suck it, AMEX.4

THE WEIGHT BETWEEN, GROUP SHOW @ GATHERING ★★★☆☆

“All that is good is easy, everything divine runs with light feet."
— Nietzche, The Case of Wagner, 1888

I was not familiar with the specific aspect of Bachelard’s philosophy on which this show is based. I enjoyed his phenomenology of shelter in the Poetics of Space (referenced in my photoshoot interview with India Sachi and Sarah Daoui for AppleDoll), but had not read L'Air et les Songes, in which he asks the following: “Can the study of fleeting images be a subject?” It's a good question to open a show with, but it is also, if you're not careful, the kind of philosophical alibi capacious enough to accommodate almost anything. The Weight Between at Gathering mostly avoids this trap, but only by the skin of its teeth.

I will preface this by saying I tried reading the full Bachelard text, I really did, but the only complete copy I could find online was in French, and I kept getting distracted by the Rilke references, because why on God’s green Earth would you read a Frenchman write about Nodier and planes when when you could be reading Rilke writing about literally anything else, so I only got about a third of the way through, mea culpa. Also I picked up another Pratchett on my way to Geneva that kept calling my name, like, why are these footnotes not funny? Whatever, I digress. What I am trying to get at is I am not a Bachelard expert, and who knows, perhaps if I was I would have felt differently about the show, but I am undeniably shooting from the theoretical hip here.

From what I can tell, the premise of the aerial imagination/the imagination of movement is oriented around air, wind, light, and unperceptible elements that, as Bachelard puts it, are such that “movement takes precedence over matter.” The difficulty that both Bachelard notes (and that the show is trying to address) is that these substances are defined by a kind of spiritual flux. Images of aerial imagination are those that exist, in so far as they can, in the world of transition. What TWB is trying to do is, I suppose, reify what Bachelard concedes may be unreifiable in material terms, to find substance that can somehow formalise the Rilkean sky or Shelley’s celestial islands. This is, of course, a paradox5 — and one the show resolves unevenly, depending on how seriously each work takes the problem it has been given.

Bachelard (above, fantastic beard) proposes that the test of any aerial image is “the extent to which it makes us lighter or heavier.” He distinguishes between kinematic and dynamic imagination: movement that is perceived visually, he argues, "remains purely kinematic," and because "sight follows movement so effortlessly, it cannot help us to make that movement an integral part of our inner lives." He speaks of this too in literary terms (a poem talking about clouds is not the same as a poem that feels like a cloud), and the idea is easily enough resolved in the visual artistic realm: the aerial image that merely looks like air, functioning in some vague atmospheric register of weightlessness and transition is a failure, much like the poem that talks about clouds with burdensome or unwieldy language is a failure. What Bachelard demands instead is dynamic participation, an inhabitation rather than an illustration of weightlessness. The strongest works in The Weight Between fall into the former camp, the weakest the latter.

The show’s strongest works are Harminder Judge’s Untitled (shell) and Magdalena Skupinska’s small untitled panel, and it is not a coincidence that both demand physical participation to be properly received. At distance, the work flattens, which sounds like a criticism but isn’t. There is something of Nodier’s aerial traveller in the experience, in that the depth is entirely present but it requires your movement to activate it. It feels like looking at a landscape from a plane, altitude yielding topography. Yummy. Skupinska operates at the opposite scale and with the same logic; her panel, her earthly materials (annatto, chamomile, blue spirulina, ultramarine on wood) gesture directly to Bachelard’s dynamic imagination, the translation of the mundane to the divine.

Monty Richthofen’s work is also some of the most compelling in the room that doesn’t quite answer the show’s question. Lightboxes as a premise is aerial enough; but the ink splotches feel fungal, rooted, earthbound, and no amount of backlight fully resolves this. It answers Bachelard, but in the negative, the light is doing the celestial work; the transitory mark-marking simply can’t follow. Lukas Heerich’s Glocke (a bell encased in rubber, muted, grounded) has the same problem at greater symbolic cost. A bell on the floor is an omen: it cannot work because reverberations cannot travel without hitting the ground and stunting themselves, and its collapse implies the structure that held it has gone too. This speaks obviously to ruin, to churches returning to soil. Again, the opposite of aerial. Striking, both of them (seriously — these are all good works of art!) but being the best work in a room and being the right work in a room are, occasionally, different things.

Rana Begum is represented by two bodies of work, and one is considerably more interesting than the other. The Mesh (galvanised steel suspended from the ceiling, arranged to suggest a cloud) is the show’s most obvious gesture: heavy material made to look light, which is more or less the opposite of what Bachelard asks for. It is kinematic in precisely the sense he warns against. The Louvre works are more considered. Painted glass slats mounted in aluminium, they operate on the logic of the window blind, objects that are themselves designed to mediate the flow of light, which is as noted far more interesting. The gradient is the problem: it descends, deepening from pale at the top to saturated at the base, which is exactly the wrong vertical differential for a show organised around ascension. Well maybe that’s the point, Vic, I hear you say, the work gets heavier as it goes down, Begum is actively pulling in the wrong direction. This may well be the case, I reply, but to me it reads as a pretty but conceptually kitsch representation of the classic light = good = up and dark = bad = down. The title, too, speaks of hierarchy, or at the very least institutional power and judgement. Again, I have to express I like these works very much, I just think they’re answering the wrong questions.

And then there’s Serra. Oh, Richard, my beloved, my baby, I’ve previously written about how in the next Vedic/Puranic yugas, after which the universe is destroyed and re-created by Brahma, I hope to be re-incarnated as whatever metal gets used in the next world-cycle’s Serra sculptures. But I have also spoken about how I find his oilstick works really quite mid. Horizontal Reversal VIII does not change my position. None of his genius survives the transition to paper. His inclusion feels forced, frankly, Carvalho and Széchenyi’s pairing (not particularly clever, still very lovely) does more to address the idea of aeriality than Serra’s big goopy boxes, which feel sort of thrown in because a. Serra is a good name to have on the press release and b. it’s also a black rectangle.

The Weight Between is a show that sets itself an almost impossible task and half-succeeds, which is more than most shows manage. I was listening to Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin when I saw it, a piece that fits Bachelard’s description of the aerial-ideal, "the great timeless memory of an aerial state, one in which everything is weightless, in which our very own matter is innately light." I go to shows like this one partly for professional reasons and partly because I am, at my core, someone who still believes that paint on a surface or plaster on a wall can do something to a person that nothing else quite can. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzche notes how “everything good is instinct — and consequently easy, necessary, free. Effort is an objection. Light feet are the first attribute of divinity.” The non-divine works of this show, that is to say the mundane ones, are not bad works; they are effortful ones, heavy with a sort of epiphanic failure, the real trouble being that in the time it takes to say look at me, I’m about air! you’ve used up half the oxygen in the room.

NATUREA, GROUP SHOW @ SKOPIA, GENEVA ★★★★☆

Featuring Silvia Bächli, Erik Bulatov, Jean Crotti, Franz Gertsch, Fabrice Gygi, Alex Hanimann, Alain Huck, Claudio Moser, Leanne Picthall and Melissa Steckbauer. Really pleasantly surprised by this. I was feeling a little tender after a very unpleasant afternoon, and thought I would cheer myself up by sneering at some bad Swiss art, but alas, only ended up making myself a bit weepy and overwhelmed — having forgotten that since about 2016 the Swiss have actually starting making tremendously good contemporary stuff.

There is no particular throughline to the curation of this show, and none needed, because so many of the works themselves are just so good. Crotti’s mark-making (pictured above) is superb, I’m such a sucker for coloured pencil on paper, it was — as I’m sure it was many of us — the first material I ever worked with. For that reason I find it so irresistible when it’s used to depict youthful bodies, something almost unbearably appropriate about it, doubling the nostalgia until it becomes something closer to grief.

Franz Gertsch (below) was a new one for me but wow, just look at this, look at the texture. In Christoph M. Loos: Eine (Wieder-)Erfindung des Holzschnitts in Resonanz mit Merleau-Pontys Chiasma woodprint is described, very charmingly, as skulptural-grafische Meta-Sprache, a a sculptural-graphic meta-language. You can see this very much so in Gertsch’s work, Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility of flesh, the wood grain is simultaneously the tool, the surface, the image, a complete collapse of art and the body (wood, flesh) that makes it.

This is simply one of those very unpretentious shows chock-full of good art. I had a look at their roster and woof, what a programme. As I say, pleasantly surprised, I think I sort of embittered myself towards Swiss art while reading L’art Suiss N’existe Pas in preparation for a residency at La Becque that I (very sadly) did not get past the shortlist for, but this is after all the country that produced Valloton, the Giacomettis, Calame, Hodler, Anker, etc. I did not get the residency but the Swiss, it turns out, are doing just fine without me.

PITY DRINKS @ PIZZA EXPRESS ☆☆☆☆☆

Deeply unpleasant meal after a deeply unpleasant phone call with somebody I love very much, the sort of conversation that causes a crash-out6 so major that a circumspectly sugary mug of tea gets left outside my bedroom door, followed by a slightly nervous knock and a gentle “shall we go to the pub, dear?” All the pubs are closed or busy so we end up at Pizza Express on our phones, presumably because it’s quite hard to feel sorry for yourself when eating free dough balls. Nevertheless, I still manage to.

FINAL THOTS

• I will be in Paris all next week. And Milan afterwards. Tell me what to see!

• I got to go to my first all-journo party on Friday, wherein someone interrupted a conversation about the Muslim Brotherhood to point out that the Daily Mail was running a headline we’d just coined as a joke. Journalism is a field. We are all just standing in it.

• Happy Easter! That one was our bad guys, sorry.

TEXT OF THE WEEK

ISAAC JULIEN — ALL THAT CHANGES YOU. METAMORPHOSIS @ VICTORIA MIRO ★☆☆☆☆

“Rendering the heights of heaven no safer than the earth, they say the giants attempted to take the Celestial kingdom, piling mountains up to the distant stars. Then the all-powerful father of the gods hurled his bolt of lightning, fractured Olympus and threw Mount Pelion down from Ossa below. Her sons’ dreadful bodies, buried by that mass, drenched Earth with streams of blood, and they say she warmed it to new life, so that a trace of her children might remain, transforming it into the shape of human beings.”

— Ovid, Metaphormoses (I:151-176)

There’s a joke to be made here about standing on the shoulders of giants while pissing on their legs and telling them it’s raining.

Giulio Romano completed the Sala dei Giganti at the Palazzo Te in around 1535, covering every wall, ceiling, and originally floor (replaced for various reasons too dull for Substack) with a scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses: Jove crushing the Giants from above, the Gigantomachy, commissioned as courtly flattery for Federico Gonzaga. The room is, in the most literal sense, a machine for producing awe at hierarchy; in 1541 Vasari wrote “let no one think ever to see any work of the brush more frightening, or more realistic, that this."1 Both the Jesuit writer Segneri and the eighteenth-century physician-rabbi Isaac Lampronti, who visited the chamber repeatedly and tested its acoustics himself each time, invoked the cruelty of the Greeks by comparing it to the Ear of Dionysus, the dictator-tyrant of Syracuse’s prison, “built in the shape of an ear, so that in the small hole that was placed in the arch it would be easy to hear words, laments and noises and cries issued by the prisoners.” A room that hears everything and reports to the man at the top. Dickens called the place “inconceivably ugly and grotesque” and “more like a violent rush of blood to the head” and another twentieth-century Italian writer screamed inside it, terrified by the frescoes, which returned what as described as “a hundred cavernous, infernal cries,” whereupon she ran out of the building entirely. The affective message is architectural as much as it is pictorial: this is what power looks like from below.

So, naturally, the perfect place for Isaac Julien to shoot a film arguing that all force is horizontal.

The work itself deserves a fair account before it gets its demarche. All That Changes You. Metamorphosis (2025) is a five-screen installation, 23 minutes and 36 seconds, presented within a mirrored environment that multiplies and fragments the image and the viewer simultaneously (something something selfie economy, we’ll get into this later) and a bunch of photographs downstairs. The theoretical lineage is semi-serious: Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Donna Haraway, Carlo Rovelli on the relationality of time, Anna Tsing on ecological entanglement. Fine, I have no real qualms with any of these frameworks, although we must acknowledge that what Julien is really trying to get at here is Spinoza, only he wants to look like he reads women. His primary ambition is to look progressive, which he succeeds at insofar as his Deleuzean approach is philosophically defensible (a plane of immanence, no hierarchy of being, reality as relational becoming, etc, although in practice his visuals are more Haeckelean, which sort of defeats the purpose, but alas, bigger jellyfish to fry).

The secondary ambition, however — to imagine transformation as survival, to think posthumanism through the body rather than despite it — fails at the first hurdle, which is sensually. If we are to believe in the Roscusian everywoman then let us not start with celebrities. Sheila Atim and Gwendoline Christie (both extraordinary performers, both wasted here) are presented as goddesses in the most airless sense: symmetrical, luminous, composited into a Western beauty ideal so Dior-advert adjacent it borders on parody. This also goes for the voiceovers, my God, how much were you paid to do this, I’ve seen Christie absolutely destroy as Hippolyta at the Bridge, you’re a serious actress, do you not feel a little ripple of something like shame when stepping into the recording booth? does your agent know you’re about to recite all this woo-woo nonsense in a lobotomy-voice? this is the sort of prose you find on the side of coffee cups in Burford Garden Centre, how on earth is anybody mean to sit here listening to this with a straight face, is that why the mirrors are here? am I meant to make dead-eye contact with my own reflection so I can re-evaluate what brought me here in the first place, hear my father’s voice curl through the carpeted labyrinth of Miro’s upstairs space, Dionysus’s limestone Ear above the City Road McDonalds, you should have been a bloody divorce lawyer, girl—

Ovid's Metamorphoses is not a hopeful book. Transformation in Ovid is almost never chosen, liberatory, or collective: Daphne becomes a tree mid-flight from Apollo and he claims her anyway; Io is turned into a cow by Jupiter to hide his own crime; Actaeon becomes a stag for the accident of seeing Diana bathing and is torn apart by his own hounds; Arachne, beaten for the impertinence of being right; Philomela, left raped and turned to tongueless nightingale; Niobe, childless stone; Medusa, cursed. Julien's press release describes the Sala dei Giganti as a space of "crisis and the possibility of renewal." This is a reading so optimistic it constitutes a different text. Giusti's essay calls the frescoes a "metaphor for the collapse of classical humanism." Romano's Giants are not collapsing classical humanism. They are being destroyed by it, on the orders of its chief executive, for the entertainment of a duke. The collapse is theirs. The humanism survives intact, just as the sons of the Gigantomachy rose in contemptrix superum, looking down.

Julien wants Spinozean immanence — everything flat, everything connected, no hierarchy of substance or being — but he keeps reaching for the transcendent to get there. The specificities and brutalities of history, the weight of Jovian authority, the subject-substance monism of entropy is all thrown to the dogs for this puerile wish fulfilment. It’s very nice to imagine The Great Fungi Of Venus Will One Day Consume My Bones And Feed The Deers,2 but this sort of moon-gazing, ecological egomania treats the Earth as Narcissus did the pond. You cannot expect me to take it seriously, from either an aesthetic or a philosophical point of view standing inside a room whose every surface depicts transformation as punitive and imposed. To have taken your title and your central metaphor from the poem that said room illustrates suggests one of two things: either Julien has not read the Metamorphoses with any attention, or he has read it and decided the room doesn't mean what it means. Both are bad.

A final note. If Julien was sincere about his ambitions to challenge racial hierarchy beyond “let’s chuck a Black actress in there to look deep”, he would have turned to actual representations of Black women in Mannerist art, which were, well, deeply racist. The actual visual language of Palazzo Te and its period offers three options: exotic allegories for Africa (the four continents as codified in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia), anonymous servants (background figures defined entirely by their proximity to white subjects), and the occasional Queen of Sheba, though typically whitewashed (cf. Lucas de Heere, Tintoretto, your dad). Julien's press release describes his work as placing Lilith (played by Atim) at the centre of the Sala dei Giganti to reframe it as "a site of survival, witnessing and reconfiguration rather than ruin," but to actually reconfigure that room, you have to look history in the eye and dress her in something other that the sartorial grammar of a contemporary luxury fragrance campaign. I understand it’s much nicer and easier to say here’s what could have been rather than here’s what was3 — yes, it’s lovely to imagine a world where women like Atim could have been represented in these spaces, but to imagine it without naming what it replaces is to perform the erasure twice. It says: she could have been here without asking who didn’t put her there instead, and in what form, and to what end. Julien is incapable of reflecting on this seriously because to him we are all made of the same stardust or whatever, and therefore it’s perfectly appropriate to use women as props in whatever insipid, anachronistic, false equivalencies he likes.

I don’t have the time or willpower to go through Lorenzo Giusti’s accompanying essay apart from gently suggesting that Italian men need to get a fucking grip.4

ZINZI MINOTT — YARDSOUND @ STUDIO/CHAPPLE ★★★☆☆

If I had less journalistic integrity I would give this four stars for the jollof rice alone, which was much welcomed after a walk in the freezing cold and too many beers at the Queens Head & Artichoke. Minott's video art is basic but skilful, quick cutaways and overlays propping up scenes of Caribbean domestic life against right-wing rhetoric. The installation highlights the all-too-familiar dissonance between the personal and the political, the realpolitik and the bodies that have to live inside it. The juxtaposition of private tenderness and public hostility has been the load-bearing wall of politically engaged video art for long enough, and Minott does it well, but there are moments where the editing makes the point so cleanly that it forecloses the discomfort it should be generating. The Southport footage is the most demanding thing in the room and the work is right to include it, it sits uneasily against the domestic warmth of everything surrounding it — which is, presumably, the point. Less comfortable is the question of what the archive footage asks of its audience. Carnival, family dancing, Starmer on borders, streets on fire; the montage argues that these things form a single continuous story, which they do, but I would have liked to see it go somewhere beyond generating a general feeling of shame (which may well also have been the point.)5

The Dutch pots are the stronger artistic idea and the weaker formal one. Speakers housed inside objects whose cultural significance is inseparable from what they produce and contain (food, warmth, etc) is elegant in theory but almost too handsome in practice. The collage works are excellent.

DRIVING WIV DAD @ SOUTHEAST WALES ★★★★★

Rallying is an elite sport in the most classical sense, not because you have to be bred for it or spend your teenage years missing birthday parties to be any good, but because only a very specific kind of person looks at a sixty-year old heap of British Leyland's finest optimism and thinks yes, much better than stamps, and that person has a hyphenated surname and a complicated relationship with their mother. Classic car collection and maintenance is, after perhaps boat sailing, the most ruinously stupid sport ever invented. There are sensible people like Arab billionaires who collect these marvels of technology and keep them in air-conditioned warehouses in Switzerland, but there are also mad Englishmen who enjoy swinging them around lamposts with their daughters over the weekend in the Costwolds. Whatever, a great time was had by all, I love my Dad and even though we never win at these things it’s always nice to see cars designed for the French Riviera being asked to navigate a wet gravel track at the sort of speeds that would would horrify everyone who has ever lovingly restored one and delight everyone who hasn't.

FINAL THOTS

• I have no strong feelings about the demise of Sora apart from feeling really bad for the guy who used it to make fetish content involving young men wearing wet jeans. They were very good artworks, in their own way.

• I’ll be reading at Rose Easton on Saturday 25th of April for Martin Mayorga and Manon Wertenbroek’s Silencia Solutions! Yes, I’m as shocked as you are that I’m allowed within ten feet of the building after my Arlette review, but I am delighted nevertheless.

• Wrote about Tracey Emin at the Tate for COLD Magazine :-)

• God, I’m so close to being debt free, I’m going to shove my AMEX down somebody’s throat the moment it’s all paid off, maybe it could be yours? Subscribe below to enter the raffle!

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TEXT OF THE WEEK

“I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven, and likewise their disciples and apostles; - I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, indivisible Art; - I believe that this Art proceeds from God, and lives within the hearts of all illumined men; - I believe that he who once has bathed in the sublime delights of this high Art, is consecrate to Her for ever, and never can deny Her; - I believe that through Art all men are saved.”he whole time without other people hearing what one says.”

―Wagner, A German Musician in Paris, 1841

“I like Wagner’s music better than anybody’s. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.”

—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890

I. ON BRAINS, HAVING RABBITS FOR SONS

No reason for the father of lobotomies not to have a son. Presumably piercing women’s brains with icepicks doesn’t affect your ability to produce a scion, unless you get your heads mixed up. However, for some reason or other, it really surprised me to discover that there was a Walter Freeman Junior, maybe some vile subconscious ideals I have about penetration and an admonished wife going that’s quite enough of putting things where they don’t belong, dear.

Perhaps more surprisingly is that sometime in the early 2000s, Freeman the Second made a discovery that should have reorganised the philosophy of art but didn't, because neuroscientists and art theorists have maintained, with the grim mutual satisfaction of divorcés who've agreed not to talk at parties, a near-total failure to read each other. C.P Snow, describer of this ‘gulf of mutual incomprehension’, would famously ask literary types at dinners to explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the scientific equivalent of saying do you know how to read, darling? only to discover that “so the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into [science] as their Neolithic ancestors would have had."1

What Freeman found, recording the electrical activity of behaving animals with electrodes planted in their olfactory bulbs, was this: when a stimulus arrives at the brain, the brain constructs a pattern of neural activity in response — and then deletes the stimulus-driven pattern entirely. What remains is endogenous construction (as opposed to a representation) of the stimulus, something the brain made from its own prior organisation, using the stimulus as a trigger rather than a template. The stone is not in the soul; what is in the soul, as Aristotle says, is the form without the matter — εἴδη ἄνευ τῆς ὕλης — the likeness of the stone is in the soul, and the two are not the same thing.

Freeman, being a careful man, went looking for a philosophical framework adequate to what he’d found, and he ended up, by a route that passes through Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, at Saint Thomas of Aquinas.2 Specifically, at the Summa Theologica‘s account of how the intellect knows: not by passive impression, not by storing representations, but by constructing species intelligibiles (intelligible forms) that are adequate to things in the world without being copies of them. The adaequatio rei et intellectus, the adequation of mind and thing, is an active, asymmetric, constructive achievement. The mind thrusts outward into the world — this is what Aquinas means by intentio, which has nothing to do with what your psychoanalyst means by it — and then, in the intransitive return, builds within itself a form that can meet the world’s form without becoming identical with it.

This is either a very old idea or a very new one depending on where you’re standing. Freeman points out that Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza collectively buried it in the seventeenth century, installing in its place a picture of the mind as a passive receiver of impressions, a machine that processes inputs into representations. The machine metaphor was enormously productive for three hundred years of neuroscience and equally productive, though less advertised, for the philosophy of art that developed alongside it. If the mind receives impressions, then art is fundamentally in the business of making impressions. The work is a stimulus; the viewer is a receiver; meaning is the content of the impression made. Every audience theory of art — Beardsley’s aesthetic experience, Dickie’s institutional conferral, Bourriaud’s relational encounter — sits downstream of this seventeenth century picture of mind that Freeman’s electrodes, stuck into the olfactory bulbs of small rabbits in Berkeley, have demolished in a far nobler way than his father’s work ever did.

What the brain actually does is stranger and more demanding. Rather than receive the world; it constructs an adequation to it.3 The construction requires something to be adequate to — some formal structure in the thing known that the mind’s endogenous activity can meet, match, and incorporate as abstractio. The raw stimulus (Aquinas calls it the phantasm, the brute sensory impression) is transient and cognitively useless in itself. It serves only to trigger the constructive process, after which it is deleted. What persists, what becomes knowledge, is the form the intellect built in response. This means that a work of art which operates only at the level of the phantasm, designed to produce a brute sensory or institutional or social impression without providing any formal structure for the intellect to construct an adequation to, is a work that, in the most literal neurobiological sense, leaves no trace. The brain receives, fires, deletes, moves on.

In many ways this rejects the entire impressionist/representationalist picture, the classical empiricist model. There is no impression in the Lockean sense, no blank slate, no tabula rasa. The world doesn't write itself into the brain. Hume's skepticism about causation famously rests on the claim that we never perceive causal necessity, that we only perceive constant conjunction, and habit leads us to expect the second thing when we see the first because the inference is psychological rather than rational. But this whole argument depends on the impression being a reliable, passive record of what's actually there, otherwise you can't even get the constant conjunction. If Freeman is right and the brain is constructing its perceptual content rather than recording it, then Hume's empirical foundation is already compromised before the skeptical argument even gets started. You can't build an epistemology on impressions if there are no impressions, only constructions. The impressionist theory of mind and the impressionist theory of art fall together; Freeman’s rabbits do to Hume what Hume thought he was doing to Descartes.4

This is not a thesis-manifesto about taste or difficulty or the reactionary preference for pretty paintings or some kind of proclamation to RETVRN TO TRAD. It is a claim about what kind of object can actually engage the cognitive apparatus that humans use to know the world. And it has, I want to argue, direct consequences for how we evaluate what has happened to contemporary art since Marcel Duchamp walked away from painting in 1918 and left, propped against the wall of Katherine Dreier’s apartment on the Upper East Side, a ten-foot canvas called Tu m’ that is the most philosophically interesting and most philosophically symptomatic work of the twentieth century, and possibly the most expensive mistake ever made.

II. ON GOD, CREATION, DIVINE SIMPLICITY

Here is a claim that will strike you as either obviously true or obviously absurd depending on your priors: God has no real relation to the world.

Far from atheist, it is, in fact, the position of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and it follows with considerable logical force from premises that are very difficult to deny if you’re going to be a theist at all. The argument runs roughly as follows: God is pure actuality — actus purus, the fullness of being without remainder, without unrealised potential, without dependence on anything outside himself. If God stood in a real relation to the world — if “Creator” or “Lord” named something genuinely in God rather than something genuinely in us — then God would acquire a new property when creatures begin to exist, and lose it if they ceased. He would change. But a God who changes is not the necessary being on whom everything else depends; he is just another thing in the world, larger and more powerful than the rest, but subject to the same ontological precariousness. So the relation of Creator to creature is, on Aquinas’s account, real on the creature’s side and merely rational on God’s. We are genuinely ordered toward God as our ground and end. God is not genuinely ordered toward us as though we completed him in any way. The asymmetry is total.

The philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig finds this position, and I am quoting him directly here, “extraordinarily implausible,” “startling,” “quite incredible,” and “just not credible.” He says this in the space of a single paper, which suggests either that the position is very bad or that Craig is very annoyed, and probably both. His objection is essentially this: you cannot have real effects without real causes. If the causal relation is unreal on God’s side — if God is not really related to what he has made — then the universe’s existence becomes, in Craig’s word, “unintelligible.” The word “Creator” becomes a mere label we apply from our side, an extrinsic denomination with nothing in God to ground it. This seems, Craig thinks, to empty divine creation of any real content. A God who creates the world without being really related to it is not a creator in any meaningful sense; he is a kind of ontological bystander to his own achievement.

Craig’s deeper worry is about divine simplicity, the doctrine that God has no composition whatsoever, no distinct properties, no accidents, no contingent relations.5 If God is absolutely simple, then God has the same intrinsic properties in every possible world. But a God who created different creatures would, Craig insists, be intrinsically different. The God who made a world with dinosaurs and no humans is not the same God, intrinsically, as the one who made a world with humans and no dinosaurs. If simplicity requires that God be identical across all possible worlds regardless of what he creates, then divine freedom is destroyed — God couldn’t genuinely choose between possible worlds if he is constitutively the same in all of them. Craig’s solution is straightforward: abandon divine simplicity. Allow composition in God. Let God acquire new relational properties at the moment of creation. The relation is real on both sides, God changes in some sense when he creates, and the universe’s existence is once again intelligible.

What Craig is doing, stripped of the theological vocabulary, is demanding a reciprocal relation. He wants the creative act to register in the creator, to leave a mark, to constitute a genuine bond running in both directions. A creation that doesn’t change the creator seems to him not quite real — metaphysically weightless, a kind of conjuring trick. And this intuition, I want to suggest, is extremely widespread, extremely powerful, and extremely wrong. It is also, and this is where we turn back to the rabbits in Berkeley, the intuition that underlies almost every influential theory of art produced in the last hundred years.

I’ve spoken about Nick Zangwill’s 1999 paper Art and Audience in my takedown of Rose Esaton and Arlette’s Condo show, in which he catalogued the remarkable consensus among otherwise very different thinkers that art essentially involves a relation to an audience. Beardsley says a work of art is intentionally endowed with a disposition to produce aesthetic experiences. Tolstoy says it expresses emotions in order to elicit them. Goodman says it imparts understanding. Danto says it makes a statement to the artworld. Dickie says it is presented to the artworld for appreciation. Levinson says it is intended to be regarded in ways similar to how past works were regarded. Despite their many differences, all of these theories agree that the relation to an audience is constitutive of what it is to be art. The artwork, like Craig’s God, must be really related to the other side of the equation, or it isn’t fully itself.

Zangwill argues, against all of them, that this is wrong. His argument turns on what he calls minimal rational explanation: if we want to understand why artists make art, we need to identify properties of works that make it intelligible to want to bring them into being. He calls these P properties — whatever the artist intends to realise, whether beauty, formal excellence, expressive truth, or anything else of value. Now here is the key move: the intention to realize P properties in an object is sufficient, on its own, to rationally explain the creation of that object. No reference to an audience is required. The artist who wants to make something beautiful has a complete reason to make it regardless of whether anyone will ever see it (cf: Kafka writing novels he intends to burn, the private poet, the shoe left behind the pub). The working sketch has the same ontological dignity as the finished canvas even if it is destroyed before anyone sees it.

The parallel with Aquinas is structural and, I think, more than accidental. In both cases, a powerful and intuitively compelling objection insists that a real relation to the other side is necessary for the thing to be fully what it is. Craig insists God must be really related to creation, or creation is unintelligible. The audience theorists insist art must be really related to its audience, or art is incomplete. And in both cases, the response is the same: the value, the excellence, the being of the thing in question is grounded in something prior to and independent of the relation. God’s perfection is prior to creation. The artwork’s P properties are prior to any viewer. The relation is real on one side — the creature genuinely tends toward God, the viewer genuinely engages with the work — and grounded but not constituted on the other.

Where both arguments go wrong is in the same place. They mistake the conditions of recognition for the conditions of being. Craig thinks that if the relation doesn’t register in God, creation isn’t real. But this confuses the question of whether creation is real with the question of whether God is changed by it. The artwork’s beauty doesn’t become real when someone sees it; it becomes recognised. The audience relation is real and important, but it is epistemically significant rather than ontologically constitutive. The tree makes noise in the empty forest because God put it there. This is Aquinas’s asymmetry applied to aesthetics, and it is what Zangwill’s argument, at its best, is trying to capture.

Zangwill stops short of where we need to go. He can tell us that P properties are prior to audience relations, but he cannot tell us what P properties are, or why they are valuable, or what grounds their claim to exist independently of the institutional apparatus that, in the contemporary art world, has largely replaced them. For that we need to go further — back, in fact, to the same Thomist metaphysics that Freeman’s neuroscience has quietly rehabilitated, and forward to a Spanish-Dutch lens grinder who got the conatus right but drew the wrong conclusions from it.

III. ON SPINOZA MY BELOVED

The version of Spinoza that circulates in contemporary art discourse arrives largely through Gilles Deleuze, who wrote two books on Spinoza and used them as raw material for a philosophy of immanence, becoming, and the dissolution of fixed identity that proved enormously generative for artists and curators looking for theoretical cover in the 1980s and 1990s.6 The key terms in this transmission are affect (tacitly echoing Aquinas’ and the medievalists’ affectus, but more on that later) and the plane of consistency, which suggests a vision of reality as a flat field of forces without hierarchy, without transcendence, without any fixed point from which value could be imposed from above. Everything is a mode of the one substance. Everything expresses the same immanent power in different configurations. Nothing is intrinsically higher or lower, better or worse, more or less real. The artwork, on this picture, is a generator of affects — intensities, encounters, becomings — and its value lies entirely in what it produces in the relational field between itself and whoever or whatever it encounters.

This is coherent Deleuze. It is terrible Spinoza.

What Spinoza actually says, in the Ethics, is that every finite thing has a conatus, a striving to persist in its own being, to maintain and increase its power of acting. Spinoza’s fundamental ontological claim about finite modes is that each thing, insofar as it is a thing, strives to be more fully what it is, it strives to be perfect. Spinoza defines perfection simply as reality: more real means more perfect. A thing that fully actualises its power of acting is more perfect, more real, than one that doesn’t. This is not the flat, hierarchy-dissolving immanence of the Deleuzian inheritance but a rigorous account of intrinsic value grounded in the degree to which a thing expresses its own essence.

Spinoza goes further. He defines good and evil as what increases or diminishes a thing’s power of acting as opposed to anything that increases or diminishes a thing’s power of acting. And he defines joy — laetitia — as the affect accompanying passage to greater perfection, the felt sense of a thing moving toward more complete self-expression. Sadness — tristitia — is the affect of passage to lesser perfection, the diminishment of a thing’s power of being, a value grounded in the immanent teleology of each thing’s striving toward its own fullest expression. The good, for any finite thing, is whatever enables it to be more completely what it is.

Now apply this to art, and apply it carefully, without the Deleuzian softening. A work of art, on Spinozist grounds, has value insofar as it expresses and actualises its own formal power. Its conatus is its formal striving and the degree to which its internal organisation drives toward its own most complete expression. A Rothko, for example, has enormous formal conatus: the relationships between the colour masses are organised with such precision and such internal tension that the work keeps generating new adequations in whoever attends to it, keeps producing the passage toward greater perfection that Spinoza identifies with joy. The work strives, and its striving is available to any intellect — recall Freeman — sufficiently open to construct an adequation to it.

So what does a work with low conatus look like? It looks like an object whose formal properties are insufficient to sustain any internal dynamic, any passage between states, any striving toward greater self-expression. It is an object that derives whatever life it has entirely from the relational apparatus around it: the gallery, the label, the press release, the art world context, the Discourse(tm). Remove the apparatus and nothing remains. Difficult or demanding art does not outsource its conatus to its institutional context, which is a precise Spinozist account of what it means for a thing to be determined entirely by external forces rather than its own immanent power. Spinoza has a word for the condition of a thing that is maximally determined by external forces rather than its own nature: servitudo, bondage, which if I was braver and better-versed in Nietzsche I’d naturally link to On the Genealogy of Morals. It is the opposite of freedom, and it is the condition, on a rigorous Spinozist analysis, of most of what gets made and celebrated in the contemporary art world.

The artists and curators who operate under a loose Deleuzian-Spinozist banner believe themselves to be working in the tradition of immanence (rejecting transcendent value, dismantling hierarchy, releasing art from the tyranny of fixed formal criteria) while actually producing a maximum possible dependence on external determination. The work means nothing without the institution. The institution means nothing without the discourse. The discourse means nothing without the consensus of a self-selecting community that has agreed, in advance, to find meaning there, a closed loop of mutual conferral.7 In other words, the Deleuzian art world has taken Spinoza’s most important insight (that value is grounded in the immanent striving of each thing toward its own fullest expression) and systematically replaced it with precisely what Spinoza argued against (the determination of value by external relations, the πίστιν μὲν παρέχει ἄνευ τοῦ εἰδέναι… μάθησιν δ᾽ οὔ as Plato puts it in Gorgias).

There is one more thing Spinoza gives us before we turn to Duchamp, and it is the most useful of all for our purposes. Spinoza’s account of passage — joy as the movement from lesser to greater perfection — is explicitly temporal and formal. You cannot be joyful, in Spinoza’s sense, while standing still. Joy is the felt dynamic of increase, the active transition between states of power. This means that a work of art capable of producing Spinozist joy must have internal formal movement. Not literal movement, naturally, but the formal equivalent of differential intensities, tensions between elements, the structured pull of one part of the work against another that produces in the attentive viewer the felt sense of transition, of being carried from one state of adequation to another, always slightly higher, always slightly more complete, always right. This is what Rothko’s colour fields do, quite literally. This is what the colour relationships in a Titian do, what the voicing of a Bach chorale does, what the spatial compression of a Zurbarán performs. They all have it, and it has nothing to do with representation, narrative, institutional context, or audience-directed intention, it is everything to do with formal conatus, and it is either present or absent, and you can tell the difference if you have — returning to Freeman — constructed a sufficiently refined abstractio to be adequate to it. It is matter becoming adequate to form, which is the oldest definition of Beauty we have, the creature's real relation to God rendered in pigment.

The question is whether this translation constitutes art in any sense that connects to why art matters — to the neurobiological account of knowledge as constructive adequation, to the Thomist account of intellect as the capacity to meet the world’s form with its own, to the Spinozist account of value as immanent striving toward greater perfection. On all three accounts, the answer is the same.

IV. ON DUCHAMP MY FOE

We are now, finally and unfortunately, in a position to look at Tu m'.

Duchamp made this painting in 1918 (the same year that White on White was painted) at Katherine Dreier’s commission, his last painting, before walking away from the medium entirely and spending the rest of his stupid little French life making other things that were allegedly quite important, who knows, we all should have stopped paying attention after Malevich anyway.

Tu m’ is ten feet wide and roughly two feet tall, oil and graphite on canvas, and it contains: the cast shadows of three readymades (a bicycle wheel, a corkscrew, a hat rack) painted in trompe l’oeil; a row of paint sample swatches in receding perspective; a painted hand pointing at something outside the canvas, rendered by a commercial sign painter whom Duchamp hired; a real bolt fixed to the canvas surface; a real safety pin; and a painted tear in the canvas, complete with painted stitching. The title is a contraction that Duchamp declined to complete. He refused, characteristically, to explain it.

What is, in Thomist terms, Tu m’ doing? Susan Barbour frames it as a perceptual skills test; asking whether you can you identify the readymades from their shadows alone, can you distinguish the real safety pin from the painted one, can you mentally rotate the twisting white trapezoid into three dimensions, etc. The work is, in this reading, an inquiry into the conditions of perception, a set of epistemological problems arranged on a mundane surface and eliciting theories of vision, multi-sensory perception, and the enactive approach.

This reading is correct, and it is also a devastating self-indictment.

Every element in Tu m' is designed to interrupt the constructive process by which the intellect builds an adequation to the world. The work is not trying to produce abstractio. It is trying to keep you permanently at the level of the phantasm, permanently in the moment of uncertain recognition, permanently asking whether what you’re seeing is real. The real safety pin breaks the picture plane at exactly the moment you've started to construct a spatial form from the depicted tear. The cast shadows refer to objects not present, so the intellect reaches for a form to be adequate to and finds only an absence. The pointing hand (painted by someone else) redirects your attention outward, toward the viewer's own act of looking, rather than inward, toward the work's formal structure. Every device Duchamp deploys is a device for ensuring that the raw perceptual encounter never resolves. It’s vile.

It is also, in the most precise sense, the founding of a mistake. What happens when you generalise this as a theory of what art should do? You get a world in which the interesting question about any work is not what formal values it realises but what perceptual or institutional or social assumptions it engages. You get a world in which the work’s intelligence is measured by the sophistication of the problem it poses rather than the quality of the form it achieves, a world of feminist pornographers and gay Imams. You get Alain Badiou’s Empire of Permissibility, as outlined in his thirteenth thesis:

“Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.”

Duchamp was unwilling to do this; preferring to spend most his life trying to displace the anxiety of formal emptiness, the absence of the maternal phallus, by tugging at the Big Other’s shirtsleeves and loudly snivelling dis moi que c’est bon, Papa, dis moi que c’est bien.8 That is why he stopped painting. He correctly identified that the representationalist picture of perception — the mind as passive receiver of impressions — generates a particular and very powerful art-philosophical problem: if the work’s meaning is what it impresses on the viewer, then the work’s meaning is always uncertain, always dependent on the viewer’s receptive state, always potentially different for different viewers. His dogshit solution to this uncertainty was to look to society as God, the Imaginary as Real, to remove the formal content and replace it with a pure institutional or contextual question, because questions have a stability that impressions don’t, and he is a Frenchman and a coward, a lobotomite of the highest order.

If the interesting thing about a work of art is the epistemological problem it stages (cf: Caravaggio, Twombly, the cave paintings of Lascaux), then the most efficient art is the art that stages the problem most directly, with the least possible formal mediation (hence the readymade). But if Freeman is right, if the mind doesn’t receive impressions but constructs adequations, then the instability Duchamp was solving for doesn’t exist in the form he thought it did. The worry that formal content can’t reliably cross the gap between work and viewer is a worry generated by the empiricist picture of mind as blank slate. On the Thomist picture, the viewer’s intellect is precisely the capacity to construct forms adequate to the forms in things — adaequatio rei et intellectus — and what makes great formal art great is that it provides something sufficiently structured for the intellect to be genuinely adequate to. The gap will never be closed by removing formal content and replacing it with institutional questions; it closes by having enough formal content that the intellect has something Real to meet.

VI. ON WHAT REMAINS

Spinoza distinguished between those who are led by reason — who understand the adequate causes of their own affective states — and those who are led by passion — who are buffeted by external forces they neither understand nor control. Aquinas also distinguished between two modes of cognitive engagement with the world: firstly, intellectus, the capacity for direct, non-discursive apprehension of form, the immediate adequation of the intellect to what a thing is, a moment of recognition in which the species intelligibilis and the thing's formal principle meet without remainder. It is, in Freeman's terms, the state in which the endogenous construction the brain has been building achieves maximum grip (Merleau-Ponty's phrase, but the concept is pure Aquinas). Affectus, by contrast, is the movement of the will and appetite toward or away from what the intellect has apprehended, the oriented striving of the whole person toward the good that intellectus has made visible. What Aquinas insists, against both the Platonic tradition before him and the Cartesian tradition after, is that neither can function without the other, and neither can function without a formal object adequate to them, that to climb Jacob’s Ladder and achieve the imago Dei all creatures and creators must exercise both capacities at once.

The question that follows from Freeman’s finding is: if the brain deletes the stimulus and retains only the form it constructed in response, then what kind of object is worth making? What kind of thing rewards the constructive effort the intellect brings to bear on it? This is not a question neuroscience can answer by itself. You need to go further into Aquinas than Freeman takes us, into territory that academic philosophy has largely avoided for reasons that are more sociological than intellectual.

Aquinas inherits from Aristotle the doctrine that knowledge is possible because being is intelligible — because things in the world have forms, and the intellect has the capacity to construct adequations to those forms, and these two facts about reality are not accidental but complementary. The adaequatio works because the world is the kind of thing that can be known, and the mind is the kind of thing that can know it. But this means that the formal properties of things — Zangwill’s P properties, what Aquinas would call the work’s formal cause — are not projected onto them by knowing subjects. They are there, prior to any encounter, waiting to be met; just as God is.

This is what it feels like to stand in front of a great artwork. Not the initial hit — that’s the phantasm, and it’s deleted almost immediately — but the sustained constructive effort in which the intellect keeps building and revising its adequation, keeps finding more formal structure to be adequate to, keeps discovering that the work has more to offer than the last pass revealed. The experience has duration because the formal properties exist more to be adequate to than any single act of abstractio can exhaust. Good art is a formal achievement of considerable complexity (Wolffin’s opposed formal categories in Principles of Art History come to mind here, Linear vs. Painterly, Plane vs. Recession, Closed vs. Open Form, Multiplicity vs. Unity, Absolute vs. Relative Clarity), create a structure that the intellect can spend a long time getting adequately inside. The phantasm — what it looks like from across the room before you’ve really looked, after the press release and before the white wine — is almost nothing. The abstractio — what you know after sustained encounter — is something that didn’t exist in you before you stood there.

Now consider what it feels like to encounter a work that has no formal properties worth constructing an adequation to. The phantasm fires (surprise, amusement, provocation, the social pleasure of recognition, the anxiety of not immediately knowing what to think) and then the brain waits for the formal structure that would give the constructive process something to work with. And waits. And eventually does what it always does with stimuli that don’t reward abstractio: it moves on. The work is not experienced in any cognitively meaningful sense, it is undergone, it is Middlemarch’s roar on the other side of silence, it is the unbeschreiblich Haupt of Rilke’s Apollo— God, where is the honour in creating, in viewing these types of works?

The distinction between undergone and experienced is Dewey’s, actually, from Art as Experience (1934), and it is one of those cases where a pragmatist and a Thomist arrive at the same place from opposite directions, which is always a good sign, I love it when all my friends get on. Dewey’s point is that genuine experience has a consummatory quality; it moves through phases toward a resolution, it has the shape of a complete action, it achieves Spinozean perfection, Beauty, Goodness through transition. What is merely undergone lacks this shape: it happens to you, registers at the level of stimulus and response, and leaves no cognitive residue. The brain, as Freeman would say, deletes it.

Dewey was writing in 1934, fifteen years after Duchamp left painting. He was already watching it happen. We are now a hundred years on from Tu m’, from Malevich, from Verdun and the Battle of Lewes Road. We are now a world of celebrity artists, a world that has mistaken the war-machine of art for art itself, boots—boots—boots—boots—the bullets in the bandoliers, how damning to us that Aquinas would have understood exactly what was happening! That he would have called it by its right name, which is acedia, the failure of the appetite for the good, the spiritual torpor that mistakes its own exhaustion for sophistication! That he would have prescribed, with the blunt pastoral confidence of a very large Dominican who had never doubted that God nor Beauty was real, more looking at beautiful things.

The prescription is not, to be clear, a curriculum reform or a manifesto or a return to the academy. Aquinas did not prescribe institutional solutions to spiritual problems, and neither should we. But there are practical consequences that follow from the argument, and some of them are already happening, largely without theoretical articulation, among artists and organisers who've noticed independently that something is wrong with the machine. Below I outline some practices that will almost certainly make everything better.

V. FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION / A THOMIST MANIFESTO FOR YOUR SINS

The Thomist view of contemporary art is this: formal properties are prior to relational ones. The work’s esse, its act of being, its formal completion, is prior to any audience, any institution, and any discourse of the ding an sich must be treated as such. Form is, simply put, the translation of the divine into the mundane. It is either the most important thing art can do or the only thing art can do.

I. Kill the Gallerist

The most interesting and increasingly-visible item of contemporary Thomist practices is the nomadic gallery structure. This is not a new idea; it has precedents in the Arte Povera generation, in the Situationist derive, in the long tradition of art made for specific non-gallery sites9, but it is newly urgent. O'Doherty identified the problem in 1976 in Inside the White Cube: the gallery context is doing work the art cannot do itself, amplifying whatever formal properties the work possesses and supplementing the neurotic Lack. The white cube is, in Freeman's terms, an institution for the production of phantasms. Burn down Bermondsey.

II. Kill the Written Word

Another very simple way of seeing whether a work is externally determined or internally self-actualising is to kill text.10 No paper, no placard, no website. Work it out, piggy, and if the swine can’t figure out what the pearls mean then they were never real pearls to begin with. Burn the press release.

III. Kill the Artist

Note here that I say artist and not Author (I am an animal, not an anti-Barthesian). A work is not valuable because a person made it. Remove the halo of personhood, the hylomorphic qualities of “identity”, would Gonzalez-Torres’s clocks still tell the time if his lover had not died of AIDs, would your mother still love you if you had not been born? Almost certainly yes. Burn the biography.

IV. Kill the Private View

I refuse to believe the first rung of Jacob’s Ladder is a damp stoop in Fitzrovia and a glass of warm white. Like literary readings, the point of the private view is to couch our own diseased need for affection, for sociality, for Being Known by the Other, behind intellect (or at least the performance of it). But Aquinas is clear on this: “Bonum est perfectivum affectus, verum autem intellectus. Intellectus autem naturaliter praecedit affectum.” The good perfects affection/will; the true perfects the intellect. And the intellect naturally precedes affection. “Affectus terminatur ad res ipsas; sed intellectus… res in multas intentiones dividit; unde illae intentiones sunt intellectae, non autem sunt dilectae… dilectum autem proprie est res ipsa.” Affection is terminated in the things themselves; but intellect divides things into many notions. Those notions are understood, not loved; properly speaking what is loved is the thing itself. Let us love the art before we love eachother, it is hard to deny ourselves the chance to find God over cigarettes and Chardonnay but we must try. Burn the invite.

V. Kill the Installation Shot

The Native Americans were right; cameras steal the soul. Aquinas (citing Augustine) explicitly links ocular appetite to curiositas, the ‘concupiscence of the eyes’ that makes men curious. See it for yourself, not through a screen. But Vic, I hear you say, what if there’s a show in New York that I want to see but I can’t afford the flights, I only can see it via Instagram, do you hate Londoners, do you hate me? to which my reply is, yes, I do. Don’t see it. You’ll live. What mad entitlement breeds the notion that we are sanctioned to see EVERY SINGLE THING EVER MADE; are you a bulimic, must you Consume Consume Consume, you Leviathan of a human being? Is this why you have Spotify and haven’t bought a CD since 2006, because you believe the world owes you every miserable creation ever brought into existence? If God wanted me to “see” that show he should have bought me an apartment closer to Clapton. Burn your phone.

To be clear, this is solely about contemporary art. Any work older than 10 years you should google or buy a catalogue, or a postcard, or have it come to you in a dream, whatever. I am absolutely not suggesting someone who cannot afford to go to the Prado should never know what the Garden of Earthly Delights looks like.

VI. Kill the Interdisciplinary

Know your medium. Understand why it is the best way to translate your message. Experiment, by all means. Who knows, perhaps your ideas about Marxist masculinity really are only best expressed via the clarinet and crosstitch, fine by me. But you do not get to claim that these are difference disciplines, that the meaning is generated by anything other than the collision itself. It is not good enough to say the photograph and the painting say the same thing is different ways, you must treat your work with the dignity of formal unity, with, as Aquinas would put it, “integritas… debita proportio… claritas” — wholeness, due proportion, and radiance — a unity of both ethical and aesthetic purpose.

If the collision is real, it will impose constraints; it will produce a new grammar; it will reorganise both materials until they stop behaving like “music” and “textile” and start behaving like one thing with one act. If it isn’t, “interdisciplinary” is another way of saying you are not capable enough of conciseness to choose a form. Burn the hyphen.

VII. Kill the Art Fair

Not paying £27 for a glass of Ruinart, you fucking nazis.

10

The written word belongs to the museum, not the gallery, anyway.

THOU SHALL NOT DOUBT ALAN MULLALY—

The Boeing 777 looks terribly flimsy.

Now, logically, I know this cannot be the case. This million ton machine will NOT fall apart over the Atlantic because we hit an airpocket the size of my ass. The way the cabins wibble when we hit turbulence must be some incredibly clever bit of engineering designed to mitigate force or energy or torque or whatever, I’m not an engineer, as far as I’m concerned aeroplanes are kept up by the will of God and Merrill Lynch.

Anyway, aside from the small voice in the back of my mind shouting YOU’RE GOING TO DIE, THIS IS WHAT YOU GET FOR USING CHATGPT TO WRITE EROTICA ABOUT NEPHILIM, GOD IS GOING TO STRIKE THIS ALUMINIUM BEHEMOTH OUT OF THE SKY WITH YOU INSIDE AND IT WILL BE WELL DESERVED, this was the best flight I’ve ever had. I get obliterated on Californian white, eat the best chicken I’ve ever had in my entire chungus life (courtesy, presumably, of Monsanto— Robert Shapiro I’m sorry I ever doubted you), finish one Ed Atkins (research for ), two Terry Pratchetts, a small pamphlet handed to me at Liverpool Street entitled Introduction to the Bible, watch 30 Rock until I pass out. This is what the modern woman was designed to do, I think.

The automatic toilets in Miami airport are needlessly aggressive. Brother I’m not even halfway through this dump, leave me alone. Where do the shitters at MIA fall on the hermeneutic spectrum of Zizek’s toilets?

MIA → MEX

THOU SHALL NOT THINK MUCH OF SINNERS (2025)—

Spend my layover drinking in the Downtown InterContinental with the co-founder of my magazine, who I haven’t seen in half a year. Nzinga, who answers all of my emails for me and moved from Luanda to Miami because she wants to find a rich husband, hates African Americans because they are not “real Africans”. She goes on these rants in front of Black people on purpose and her Angolan accent thickens in a way it never does when it’s just us in a corner of a Cuban cafe, but there’s a group of VH1 celebrities behind us at the hotel bar and she wants attention. She drives me back to the airport in her Miata and we talk about babies, about how I don’t want one, about how she wants many but only with a white man. All I can say is I didn’t really take to Göransson’s scoring in Sinners for Spinozean reasons which seems to satisfy whatever part of her is constantly digging for my opinion on race relations in America.

God, I don’t know what to do with America, I don’t know what to do with myself. I’ve been reading some weird porn and when the man in uniform at customs says “good girl” after I move my ring finger onto the fingertip scanner I want to climb over the counter. And then I pass through customs and feel the Fear; not in the “oh officer, a strip search, you say?” way but the bone-bricked, have I accidentally swallowed a kilo of cocaine way, the my God you work for a government that shoots people way, the my God is the same God as in your Constitution’s God way, the my God what is a woman meant to do with this power, with any power way.

After customs I spend an hour in the smoking bar of TGIF at the airport talking to a beautiful gay Cuban who finds my use of the term fag very funny and tells me about how his mother helped defend rioters after the Clement Lloyd protests. I let a charming Hispanic woman convince me to buy a horrifically expensive pair of earrings at the D gate. The flight attendant on the flight to Mexico City gets me a glass of white wine I haven’t asked for because she sees me praying before we take off and calls me mi amore when we land and tells me I am brave for believing in God even if it’s not the same as hers. They let the military men on the same time as they let the women with children and there are big glaring white and blue signs about fines for not having proper identification and I can tell that every single person in this queue is thinking about Minneapolis. Maybe these are my opinions on race relations in America.

MEXICO CITY — DAY ONE

THOU SHALL NOT TAKE AN UBER—

Am immediately punished for trying to do the right thing by being overcharged for a taxi. Aw, c’mon, this guy looks nice, I tell myself. He’s got no teeth! He’s not gonna jew me! And hell, even if he does, the Uber is £6, let’s say he makes me pay more than double, I get paid .50 a word, I’m an adult woman in a new city, I can afford to drop fifteen quid on a car ride for God’s sake, what am I, a plutocrat?

He charges me 45 American dollars. He converts this into 60 British pounds. This is not how money works. This is exactly how money works. There is a moment where we just look at each other. I know I won’t argue. He knows this too. He knows he’s a dick. I know this too, now, toothless bastard. I leave my still-lit fag butt in his console as some small act of retribution. #gringamaxxing

Have very late dinner in a small taqueria opposite the tallest memorial arch in the world, the Monument to the Revolution, a beast of an Art Deco building originally erected in 1910 as a cromlech to Porfirian glory and eventually finished after the, ahem, teething troubles in 1938. I’m thinking about Mexico and Iran, about the House of Iturbide and the Qajars, about the way worlds transition between dynasties. I will never know which side of the picket line I would have stood.

My Spanish is dogshit, truly, but I speak fluent French which allows me to get away with a lot. I chat with the stall owner who tells me los revolucionarios muertos hang out there. It takes me a minute to understand he means the monument, not the taqueria, which I was perfectly happy to believe was haunted by the ghosts of Constitutionalists.

Usually this is when I go for a pootle around a new city but a group of shirtless men start shouting and I get ushered into the nearest hotel, where the concierge orders me a car, free of charge, back to my AirBnB three blocks away. This seems overkill. As the car drives off I hear a noise that very much suggests it was not.

Try falling asleep to Roy Casagranda’s dulcet tones on Venezuela and, of course, Iran. My great great grandfather was an unpopular Persian moneylender; an impressive feat all things considered. Get depressed thinking about history, get bored thinking about Americans. Listen to Casagranda talk about the Aztecs instead. Hell yeah brother.

MEXICO CITY — DAY TWO

THOU SHALL NOT START A REVOLUCIÓN—

Jesus fucking Christ Mexicans make good food. I know I’m not blowing any minds by saying this, I think it’s universally recognised as one of the top 5, if not 3, regional cuisines, but this is ridiculous, this is obscene, how does anybody get anything done around here? How do you not spend all day rolling yourself from one foodplace to another? How do you hold down a job, start a family, sorry darling, I shan’t be impregnating you tonight because no orgasm could ever come close to the taste of a cazuela campechana?

What I’m trying to say is I had a very good breakfast. Do you know how difficult it is to get a Jew to like beans?

I’ve got a couple of hours to kill and about 3,000 calories to walk off so I visit MUNAL and the San Carlos Museum. MUNAL is great. Mexican artists understand the interaction of light and colour far more than Europeans. San Carlos doesnt have as much good art but they do have an extraordinarily well curated show about representations of death in nineteeth-century art, which tickles all sorts of different planes of my big smooth brain because I did my dissertation on Victorian taxidermy in British country homes. Mexican photography and medical art1 is very, very good, this is something I already knew, but as always there is a real pleasure and difference to seeing works face to face instead of on a computer screen or black-and-white catalogue from the 80s.

I get so engrossed in various calling cards featuring photographs of dead infants that I arrive late to the opening of Feria Material. I hate being late; it makes me feel incompetent and disgusting even though I truly never mind if anybody else is, oh no, an extra fifteen minutes to sit with one thumb up my ass and the other scrolling incessantly through whatever bizarre Wikipedia page I’ve decided to obsess over this week, how ever shall I survive.2 But, as is so often the case with personal insecurities, the thing I find completely benign or even massively loveable in others, I absolutely loathe in myself (c.f. saying “like” too often, large noses, having opinions in general).

My arrival at Material, however, turns out to be my first introduction to the concept of “Latin time”. Before I come here I ask several Mexican and Latinx friends if they have any advice for me beyond the usual don’t do drugs (unless the proposer is hot) and don’t get sold into the white slave trade (of which I am at relatively low risk of unless the market suddenly discovers a shortage of aristocratically-breasted Jewesses). The universal piece of counsel I receive is: don’t bother being on time for things.

Don’t be racist! I say, horrified. Bitch te prometo que cuando los mexicanos dicen que algo empieza a 7, en realidad quieren decir a 10, reply my friends. It turns out that I should have, as they say, sat my white ass down and listened. Despite being almost an hour late for the start of this thing, I and the rest of the press gang have to hang around for another 45 minutes. I’m getting nervous and nauseous, sweating through my little Anglican moral superiority complex, I don’t know anybody, I understand but don’t speak the language, I’ve got slightly more glamorous shoes in my bag but everybody is dressed so much more beautifully than I am, oh God they all hate me, oh God I can’t do this, oh God I want to go home, where’s my horrible English weather and high-strung Irish press officers who shout at me if I’m five minutes late instead of all these gorgeous(ly) laid-back Latinas telling me no te preocupes cariña, this isn’t right, how can you be happy at an art event?

Finally a very glamorous set of people cut the rope. It’s incredible how artspeak transcends language; en estos tiempos sin precedentes sounds much the same across oceans. The speeches are fine, the thank-yous last longer than the exhalations of genius and community, it’s all very wholesome and artworld-y. If I don’t get to look at some art in the next six minutes, I think cheerfully, I am going to pull a Zapata and ask the skinny blonde American complaining about the lack of translators to join me in starting a riot.

The Second Mexican Revolution is avoided when we’re let through. It’s technically after noon, so I could start drinking now and not feel like too much of a reprobate, but I end up deciding this feels defeatist (yes, I’m still stinging from being called a pre-alcoholic by 3 - no, it’s not because they’re wrong but because they aren’t; I’ve decided I’ll quit drinking when at least two other publications pick up on the premonition).

Instead I make a beeline for one of the only two people I know will be here; Jacob Barnes from . Fantastic booth featuring the artworks of Conor Ackhurst; two pianos, one stacked upside down on top of the other, accompanied by some sumptuously textual felt pieces. I hound him and lovely Michael (whom I last saw over hot dogs at a Philadelphian dive bar a year ago) for as long as feels appropriate before beelining to my only other point of contact, Andrea something-Italian from Copperfield, whom I oscillate between sexual and maternal adoration for for many reasons, but mainly because he is the only other person I know who is also divorced in his twenties. Copperfield’s booth is also very good: as established I’m a sucker for taxidermy and animal by-products in art and Sophie Jung’s is some of the best of the best.

Well, that’s it, that’s the grand rolodex of People I Know. The Fear hits again but I get over my neurosis of being a foreigner by being a foreigner who drinks and smokes. I do envy those with sober charisma (another reason to eventually quit drinking). I rely far too heavily on going up to beautiful women, stuttering slightly as I compliment their outfit, and asking if they have a lighter. If they don’t I dump my bag out of the table in search of one I know is tucked in my pocket, and talk about the weather, the art, Trump, whatever, everybody here is a well-meaning liberal and people are so kind to slightly useless British women.4 By lunchtime proper I’ve had five drinks paid for on various company cards, eight new numbers, and several invitations to parties I end up not attending because I am a fundamentally horizontal woman with a chronic penchant for Going Home When I Get Sleepy.

Bolstered by a) alcohol b) the comforting idea that nobody wants me dead I go around to introduce myself to the other London booths. I have a longer article out now on Fetch about this should you be interested in my grown-up analysis. I am overall very, very pleased to say that London has done us very, very proud. I don’t like all of the art, of course I don’t, this is statistically impossible, but every single booth had serious thought and personality and, perhaps most importantly, effort behind it. Studio/chapple, Des Bains and Soup have done some really fun things with the structure and walls of the booths themselves, which I am always a fan of (the blue curtain-walls at Soup in particular), Brooke Benington is super sexy and confirms my theory that suspended artworks are coming back. Not to get soppy but I am so pleased with my city. You killed it, London.

Some other things I liked: General Expenses (Mexico City), Sketch (Bogota), the guy who laughed at my story about accidentally asking for a handjob instead of a straw in my awful French-tinted Spanish at the Guggenheim Bilbao, HAIR+NAILS (Minneapolis/New York), Sophie Jung’s shoes + baby, the photography at NAC (Santiago de Chile), the girls and paintings at Pangée (Montréal), enchiladas.

Some other things I disliked: Nearly every single New York booth, especially the one in all black with just one painting that wasn’t for sale, unless this was a customs thing you absolutely have to kill yourself, the bit of mint that got stuck behind my left canine, the slightly off-centre hanging at Patel Brown (Toronto/Montréal), the begrudging acceptance of the fact that Canadians make good art, queuing for twenty-eight minutes for enchiladas.

The small migratory beast in me that likes Lying Down more than, well, anything else, convinces me to go to bed at a very reasonable hour. Buenas tardes.

MEXICO CITY — DAY THREE

THOU SHALL NOT SHOW THY TOES ON THE INTERNET

I wake the next morning to see that my toes have been featured in the corner of an TheArtRevival video (exactly as awkward to see being made live as you would expect). I’ve spoken extensively about my dislike for the majority of art influencers, I had a go at Carrie Scott and Justin Bua in my last Substack, so I’ll briefly indulge in my distaste for this account.

I think there is something seriously distasteful about this style of bright-eyed, sensationalist short-form content. TAR’s formula is simple: crouch, point, call the work CRAZY 🤪, repeat. Everything else she makes is reaction-face narration over other, more talented people’s videos, but I’m not deigning that type of slop with a review; I’m here to talk about her ”reporting”.

I have no issue with levity in contemporary art commentary/content. As mentioned in my rant against Bua, I think there is plenty of space to recognise how phantasmal this whole thing is. Art can be goofy; we can be goofy about art. If all we art journos/content creators disappeared tomorrow, life would go on much the same (better, probably). But when you have over a quarter of a million followers, I find it absolutely baffling to treat these spaces as fetish arenas.

No one’s asking for Krauss on Reels. But you’re making money off this (those very stylish Chanel pumps didn’t pay for themselves). Someone has worked for months on an object you reduce to an egg pun. You’re not stupid - you picked up on the fact that one of the major motifs of the fair was the use of organic materials - so why perform ignorance, why belittle both the work and your own intelligence? Are you afraid of being seen as smart? You are one of the most eloquent, elegant and followed women in contemporary cultural commentary. Do us all a favour girl and do better.

Anyway, Zona Maco today. Nobody is paying me to write about this so I’ll keep it brief: it’s a cool fair, cool people, bad cocktails, terrible toilets. The art is better at Material, but not by much, I’m so impressed by the overall quality of Mexico Art Week.5 And people want to tell you about it! Artists, gallerists, assistants, all very happy to walk you through the booth, what a cool atmosphere! The range in price is massive, which is a good thing; I’d wager about a quarter of the buyers I spoke to here are first-time collectors.

Spend a delightful evening at Third Space (now these are some art babes that deserve their flowers). End up at a magazine’s launch party, make some glorious American friends, smoke indoors, dance to Sade, stumble home at a vaguely acceptable hour. Evan, Lilah, Shea, Shea’s beautiful friend, thank you for a gorgeous evening.

MEXICO CITY — DAY FOUR

THOU SHALL NOT DROWN—

Realise I’ve lost my favourite ever sweater that I bought in a second-hand shop in Poland; therefore irreplaceable, AMEX is hounding me about the two grand I owe them, it’s all over, I am such a deeply and unpleasantly irresponsible person, I should be shot, and I’m out of coffee. This whole ordeal bums me out enough that I check out of my not very nice AirBnB early and get a hotel room closer to the centre of town that has functioning heating and a bath.

I’ve got a few hours to kill before my next studio visit so I go back to the San Carlos museum to revisit the death exhibit; it really is fantastic. I get very excited by depictions of the Flood, I shan’t get into it now but my psychoanalyst thinks it has something to do with the fact my earliest sexual awakening was Alan Rickman. They have a beautiful painting called El Bese De La Muerta depicting a mother and father dragging their two children out of the waves after the Mesopotamian deluge, both clearly dead. The figures are obviously distressing, but the worst/best part of the painting is a tiny temple in the very far background, do you ever think of St Paul’s beneath the Thames, of the Knesset in asphalt, of Golestan oil-slicked, of Lady Liberty floating past Bar 54?

I spend maybe fifteen minutes in front of this thing thinking so hard about death and civilisation and water that I have to dash to the toilets and throw up. Hangover or Hegelian existentialism, who knows. I watch the half digested beans circle the bowl and decide the sweater is more upsetting than the bailiffs.

Go to studio visit; have an excellent afternoon using google translate to discuss Shelley and Merleau-Ponty with a Colombian. Return to Material, have an equally excellent cigarette conversation about feeling old despite being young with señor Barnes, retrieve my portable charger from Evan. Promise to go out. Go back to new hotel and have shit hotel food. Decide to lie on my bed for just ten minutes after shower, just a quick nap, a brief respite before all the wild crazy cool partying I’ll do tonight. Fall asleep for twelve hours and wake up sixty five minutes before my flight home. Fundamentally horizontal woman.

MEXICO CITY — DAY FOUR

THOU SHALL NOT MAKE FUN OF TRUMP ON DI INTERNIT—

Some, ahem, troubles with US customs. The less said about this particular stint in the land of the free the better.

North Carolina is an interesting and beautiful state. Its airport is not. Have another extremely good aeroplane meal and One Glass of Wine like the avatar of purity & restraint that I am. Dream of AMEX.

MOROCCO

THOU SHALL NOT STEAL A CAT FROM ESSAOUIRA—

Morocco is a surprise trip from my boyfriend and therefore none of your business, in fact it’s barely ours. I am a well-fucked woman in love and in a country that lets you smoke indoors. There are also many cats. Life is good. Bonne nuit, أحبك, etc

TEXT OF THE WEEK

FINAL THOTS

• I think it’s time for the return of the play reading in London, specifically the Absurdists ( have a monopoly on Shakespeare). If no entrepreneurial soul has started one by the time I pay off my credit card debts I might start a series myself; do reach out if you or a loved one might be interested in standing on a pub stage for ten minutes and acting out some Pinter.

• Just discovered weopen is a divorced father of two. Love that for him.

• Idea for a bit: Sally Rumi. It’s just Normal People but in Persian ghazal-style lyric. Yeah. Yeah? microphone feedback noise, ducks thrown drink

Before we dive in, I’m very excited to say I’ve sold out that the fine folks over at gowithYamo have made me an Social Media Ambassador; it’s an excellent app that lets you check into shows and leave reviews while you’re there, which is the exact sort of accessibility to debate and opinion that I’m always sounding my barbaric yawp about. And it’s FREE!!!!! You can download the app here and follow me at @rothkosgirlfriend if you’re interested in seeing my immediate reviews of various London shows rather than waiting for me to collate them all on Substack. There’s already a dozen of my reviews on there that I haven’t published anywhere else, so check it out.

I have to say it really is a superb app, like if Seb’s Art List (RIP) and Google Maps had a baby. I tend to think of myself as well-informed in terms of What’s Going On Around Here but I took it out for a spin on Tuesday and ended up seeing NINE!!! extra shows that simply hadn’t popped up on my radar. Some of them were even good!! And having a place to immediately record and publish your thoughts that isn’t the notes app on your phone or the DMs of your lovingly exasperated friends is just the cherry on top. Seriously, download it.

OPENING REMARKS: CONDO, SPINOZA, PENJAMINS

What I’m looking for during Condo is not just good art, but good art that speaks to each other, or even art that becomes good because it’s speaking to other art. Not to be a Hegelian, but the real delight in these sorts of shows is that emergence of a temporary logic where the host programme and the guests actually rearrange the medium + message to generate a third (dare one even hope, better?) thing.

I understand this isn’t always easy (or indeed possible) due to the arbitrary nature of Condo’s pairings (I still don’t know how the decision to pair Gallery X with Gallery Y is reached, but I like to picture Vanessa Carlos digging around in a velveteen top hat for names on bits of torn up paper, or perhaps blindfolded and lobbing darts at a map). Sometimes a gallery draws the short straw and is paired with another whose works simply don’t or can’t speak to their own (at least not with without extensive squinting/artspeak), and this is not an indictment of either programmes/galleries, just bad luck. Sometimes a good gallery gets paired with a bad gallery. Sometimes a bad gallery gets paired with an even worse gallery. Little can be done in such cases, beyond a shrug and a suggestion of a more violent application of taste from the get-go, but this makes me sound like Brecht and is the sort of counsel that gets my inbox filled with messages saying ART IS SUBJECTIVE ART IS SUBJECTIVE ART IS SUBJECTIVE ART IS SUBJECTIVE and I’m leaving that myth where it belongs, which is snugly inbetween my little Tabi’d toesies.

However, it would be unfair to chalk up any success to luck entirely. The formula is not simply good art + good art = better art, there is a third variable, the curation. For such a large volume of shows, I devised a slightly wonky formula that helped me add up the standalone quality, then add the curated “conversation” term as follows:

wherein

• V = overall value of the show/presentation

• qᵢ = baseline quality of work/artist i (how strong it is on its own)

• qⱼ = baseline quality of work/artist j

• c = curation factor (0–1): how well the show activates the relationships (selection, placement, pacing, framing)

• sᵢⱼ = synergy/interaction between i and j (how much they speak to or rearrange each other); can be positive, 0, or negative

• · = multiplication (so strong works + strong works make the synergy term matter more; weak work(s) dampen it)

• (i<j) = only count each pair once (i with j, not j with i; no self-pairs)

My goal here isn’t to pretend that all of these factors are objective/reducible to numbers or that there’s some grand universal theory of beauty. As Spinoza says, we can can only “judge” the quality of something in relation to our own perception of quality; we can’t define things by properties like “good” or “bad” but only by relations between things, by their capacity to do things to other things and/or have things done to them by other things (in fact Condo is almost entirely an exercise in Spinozaean relations). I guess this is what most people mean by subjectivity. This version of his affectus (“an ability to affect and be affected“) is just a nice, tidy little way of talking about Condo in particular, because when you’re seeing an absurd number of shows it helps to name the difference between “good work” and “good work made sharper by its neighbours.”

I’m aware the formula itself is not perfect even beyond discussions of subjectivity (who are YOU, you beastly woman, I hear you ask, to assign value, numerical or otherwise, to an artwork? the answer to which is me going pHhhfhhfrrfhfhfhhhhpppppbrrrrrggg :D whilst flapping my arms). Some shows have a gestalt that only appears in the full set (A+ B + C together), not in any two-way conversation, and bigger shows are almost always more “valuable” because I’m summing over all pairs and the number of terms grows like n(n−1)/2. But it works well enough for a Substack written at 9AM on a Sunday.

That being said you shouldn’t really listen to anything I’ve written anyway, because I was introduced to the concept of the “penjamin”1 halfway through the first/opening weekend and spent the rest of it exalting once-in-a-generation artistic & curatorial genius where there was, at best, drywall.

I’m not going to review every show, just a few that I had something to say about. You can see my top picks over on brave, and my general ranking on the graph below:

AMANDA WILKINSON (HOSTING AIR DE PARIS + TAKE NINAGAWA) — GAËLLE CHOISNE, KETTY LA ROCCA, GŌZŌ YOSHIMASU ★★★★☆

In anticipation of math nerds and Adorno fanboys, I’m going to open with a show that immediately proves the major weakness of my formula, which is that the more galleries are involved the “better” the show is liable to be, simply because there are more numbers involved. AM is hosting one Parisian and one Tokyo(ean? ite?) gallery in their space, and the greatest strength of the show doesn’t come from the individuals artworks but the way in which they function together.

This isn’t to say the artworks themselves aren’t good (some of them are!), but that the narrative through line of fluidity (water, language) is really, really convincing. You start picking up little connectors that you wouldn’t have without the juxtaposition: the dried glue in Choisne‘s sculptures becomes waves once you consider the tsunami motif of Yoshimasu’s works, the writing in Yoshimasu’s works mimics the asemic scripts in La Rocca’s, the hands in La Rocca’s become mirrors of those in Choisne‘s video work, it’s all very cyclical and interconnected and satisfying, just like life.

ROSE EASTON (HOSTING ZAZA, MILAN) — ARLETTE AND SYLVANO BUSSOTTI ★☆☆☆☆

I’d like to start this review by apologising to Arlette, the artist who unfortunately finds herself down the barrel of this particular gun. I would like to assure her that this is not a sniper rifle; it’s more of the gatling laser2 that I am shooting Rambo-style into the ether of London Art Discourse that she happens to be the trigger of.

The show is framed as a conceptual and visual conversation between Mexican visual artist Arlette and Italian contemporary classical composer Sylvano Bussotti (1931 – 2021). The art itself was totally unmemorable, so we won’t waste any time on trying to dissect whatever that was trying to be (I suspect this whole wave of ‘intermediary’ Dick Higgins-esquery is this decade’s attempt at Fluxus, some sort of neologistic intervention into the waning echoes of modernism and its ideas about notation and the translatability of medium, but obviously this doesn’t work if— whatever, I’m bored even starting to write about it, let’s move on).

It is, in fact, the press release that I would like to focus on here.

It’s made up of some AI generated artspeak (press officers, at least do the decency of telling your GPT to avoid using supplementive participial clauses, the verb “allowing” followed by some bullshit appears three times here) that goes on to reference bigger and better names in order to prop up Bussotti’s art (Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, all the names I used to shove in my uni essays when I wanted to sound smarter).3 But, more interestingly, it also contains a letter from the living Arlette to the dead Bussotti. Like her art, it’s an entirely unremarkable piece of writing that I was ready to dismiss until I came across the following line towards the end, where Arlette asks us qua signore Bussotti the following:

I would like to be grown-up and academic about this, and so I am not going to say, very firmly and irritably and in the sort of tone my mother uses when I’m asking whether I should get botox or move to Manhattan, of course you have an audience, woman, you know you have an audience, you sat down and typed this out and sent it to a gallery assistant, where did you think it would end up, in Heinz-Klaus Metzger’s ass? Sylvano is not reading this, God is not reading this, the press officer is reading this, i am reading this, because that would be a bad start to an essay. What I will say is that this is a good question because it opens up to a discussion I’ve been meaning to have for a while now; namely the role of the audience, and whether “having an audience” is a contingent fact about art’s circulation or a condition of art’s existence as such.

My crank here is obviously not with the idea of writing to or about dead men, which we all do in our own ways. What has turned me into my mother is this increasingly prevalent notion that artists are somehow above attention-seeking or indeed, attention-receiving; that the audience is some sort of pollutant.

There’s a rough spectrum to consider here: the view of audience as inessential to what art is, constitutive of art as an event of reception, or structurally produced by the work and its interpretations. All of these are fundamentally non-Albertian models of viewing: they reject the Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti’s view of the painting as a window onto an imaginary space, the costruzione legittima where the spectator stands outside the work, looking in, and the relation is basically one-way. Gombrich is the more modern art-historical exemplar of this baseline (“I see the picture”) and is the closest to Arlette’s view of audience: spectatorship relegated to something subtractive. Against that default, Nick Zangwill sidelines audience as non-constitutive (at most a normative issue of competent uptake), Johannes A. Gaertner makes audience the condition of art’s existence (art as an event of reception), and David Carrier tracks how works and art-writing actively manufacture the spectator-position rather than merely addressing an already-given viewer.

When Arlette says “validation of visibility” what she really means is validation and/or visibility. Once you say you are not making your art for anybody, you remove yourself from the social contract between creator/perceiver (ironic considering the text preceding the question, see footnote 3). One such half of this contract is you (the artist), the second is them (the audience). We will here be using Gaertner’s definition of audience as outlined in his 1954 Harvard lecture: “part (group or individual) of a public which responds to the specific (aesthetic) stimulus of a work of art or of an artistic effort.”

Nick Zangwill has already tried arguing that art should not invoke any relation to an audience in Oxford University Press’s 2007 aesthetics anthology. I agree with him that if your definition of art essentially involves being for (or aimed at) an audience, you’ve got to deny some very normal things count as art: not just fringe examples, like Kafka’s desire to have The Castle + The Trial destroyed after his death and so for his art to have no intended audience-relation (as discussed by Jerrold Levinson), or even grave goods or funerary sculptures (whose only audience are gods or the souls of the departed - i.e., a “netherworldly audience”) - but solid, everyday acts of creation, like private poetry (written with no intention of anyone else ever reading it) or working sketches made as part of the artistic process (often destroyed, never intended for exhibition, yet still plausibly artworks in their own right). He doesn’t make mention of non-intentionalist/accidental art, but I’ll supply him with extra ammo and say that sometimes a discarded shoe behind the pub is art, and that’s certainly not “made” for anyone because it’s not made “by” anyone.

Where he loses me, however, it his stratification of audience presence as recognition/ratification/reassurance (who the “right” audience is, and whether the work’s valuable features are properly appreciated). He invokes what he calls “P-properties” to explain this, the idea being that art-making can be explained in terms of an artist’s aim to realise certain valuable features in the work: beauty, expressive rightness, formal unity, etc. His argument is that, if that goal already makes sense of why the work is made and why it matters, then importing an essentially audience-facing relation doesn’t add explanatory power; it’s optional, non-constitutive. And because what’s essential to art should not be explanatorily idle, the fact that we can account for (at least some) art purely via the pursuit of P-properties shows that audience-relations can’t be part of what art is.

This is all nonsense, of course. As Gaertner says, “without an audience there is no art.” Art is an event in reception. Arlette is clearly aware of this, because she chose:

a. the formal language of reliquaries, icons, and tabernacles, items designed to be seen and worshipped4

and

b. the epistolary form to engage said works with Bussotti’s.

A corollary of the final clauses of the definition is that a language cannot function normally unless there are at least two speakers.5 If you’re speaking to a wall you’re not talking, just making noises, if you’re writing a letter and throwing it in the bin you’re just making squiggles on a page. Bussotti of all people knew that audience is constitutive of art, because he made fucking music. Composers are some of the ultimate event-theorists; they have to believe that art isn’t an object but something that happens (via not only orchestral activation but orchestral reception; if every player and audience member has wax in their ears the art does not technically exist, only the act of the art - in which case, it becomes performance art, which only furthers my point that art happens in the mind of an audience). Notations are only, as Gaertner would put it, “potential art” until it functions as a stimulus that actually produces aesthetic response. P-properties exist only when they are instantiated as such in reception: they are not properties “in” the work in the way pigment is in paint; they are properties-as-experienced, activated by response.6

I have to re-iterate this isn’t some personal grievance with Arlette. I speak to too many artists - good artists, great artists, artists I adore as both people and as creators - who somehow manage to reify the idea that audience means nothing with the fact that they are showing in galleries. You know, the thing where people go to look at things. I hate this kind of faux-humility, it makes my skin itch, it makes me feel like Orson Welles talking to Henry Jaglom about Woody Allen and the Chaplin disease. Carrier provides a taxonomy to understanding this reluctance: Steinberg’s reciprocal model in which the picture addresses (and in a sense “sees”) the spectator; Fried’s absorptive model in which the work strives to efface the beholder by presenting itself as complete without us; and Foucault’s negating model in which the spectator’s place becomes structurally unstable, the beholder constituted as an absence or displacement within the structure of representation itself. But none of these models support the claim that the audience is inessential to the work’s existence as art, or permit the artist to solicit reception while disavowing the receiver, which is what Arlette wishes.

“Really we must begin before we enter the chapel.” says Steinberg in his introduction of the Cerasi. To many the chapel is an architecturally uninteresting, poorly lit, pedestrian antechamber that visitors must force themselves through in order the true art: the altarpieces, the conversion of Paul, the things beyond - as Carrier puts it - the “false start.” But the start, in my eyes, is not false but virtue of being a start at all, because art is always a threshold phenomenon. The antechamber is not a corridor you endure on the way to meaning because it is the condition under which meaning can occur. Likewise, the work is the built threshold between private intention and public interpretation: without an approach, the altarpiece is just paint on a wall; without a receiver, art remains only potential. We must begin before the chapel; we must walk to corridor before we arrive at the altar; we must construct the conditions of perception before we perform reception.

What Arlette calls “validation of visibility” collapses two different things: being seen, and being applauded. Visibility is the condition of spectatorship; validation is the fantasy of immunity from judgement. I understand, truly, why she and other artists adopt this fantasy. We live in an age of accelerated moral sorting and if we pre-emptively position the viewer as being “outside” the work, then the work is insulated from the ethics of being per/received. But unless Rose Easton is coming to your house and putting a gun to your head (unlikely, considering Rose is a very nice woman who probably has better things to do), nobody is forcing you to show me your art, in the same way nobody is forcing you to walk through the Chapella to see the Caravaggio. But you want to, don’t you, because you and God and the gallerist believe there is something innate and worthy of sharing in the act of creation, in the act of your creations. And who knows, maybe there is, but there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?

KATE MACGARRY (HOSTING CHRIS SHARP GALLERY) — DEBORAH HANSON MURPHY, AIMÉE PARROTT ★★★★☆

Chris Sharp’s programme at Places des Vosges was the first time I liked art with Disney characters in it. Anyway, love what these two artists do when in conjunction to one another. No notes.

MODERN ART (HOSTING CRÈVECŒUR, PARIS) — ALEXANDRA NOEL, REMEDIOS VARO, BENJAMIN PÉRET, ESTEBAN FRANCÉS ★★★☆☆

My first visit to Modern Art, who have immediately endeared themselves to me by having the best press release ever written, which I quote in its entirety now. Ahem.

“Modern Art is pleased to present a group exhibition of gallery artists.”

That’s it folks! That’s all you need! No more of this nonsense about phenomenologic liminality or quiet reflection or societal commentary! Group show, eight artists, most of it good! The Surrealists + miniatures at Crevecoeur also mostly good! Allegedly there’s more on the website but frankly that’s between God and Sam Talbot.

GINNY ON FREDERICK (HOSTING CITY GALERIE WIEN) — SOPHIE GIRAUX, ALBERT DIETRICH ★★☆☆☆

Really liked GoF’s single-artwork booth at Basel Paris last year. This is… not so good. Someone drew the short straw here and it’s hard to tell if it’s London or Vienna.

NICOLETTI (HOSTING MAGICIAN SPACE) — INÈS DI FOLCO JEMNI, YASMINE ANLAN HUANG ★★☆☆☆

Aw man, I feel bad. I like Nicoletti usually. And Huang’s work is really good, I love art to do with books, especially when they are this personalised and this finely crafted. Not to mention it feels like bad luck to give a bad review to a show about female Goddesses. But Jemni’s paintings are extremely murky; she’s tried making up for this with interesting framing and hanging choices (I’m predicting return on the suspended artwork a la Asawa this year). But it doesn’t change the fact that there’s not a whole lot going on on the canvas or the screen, or indeed in between them. Deso les gars, a la prochaine!

GETTING RAGE-BAITED BY CARRIE SCOTT ☆☆☆☆☆

When Jehovah’s Witness’s send young men and women out to knock on doors, they don’t do it because they sincerely believe it will end up with more souls being saved. They do it as a cult tactic to re-enforce in young members the idea that the outside world is a hostile place, so the inevitable rejection functions as “proof” that only the group understands them.

This is precisely what Carrie Scott is doing in her latest Instagram video, where she stands on a busy shopping street in Central and tries to get Londoners to talk about art. Naturally, because the world does not revolve around content creation, many of these people brush her off. Scott uses this as a an excuse to caption the video as follows: “no one in London likes art.”

I’m not going to state the obvious: that her data would have been very different had she stood on Museum Street or Exhibition Road rather than Oxford Street (or that she has, purposefully or not, chosen a context optimised for rejection), or that liking art ≠ willingness to stop and talk in the freezing cold with an influencer about it.

What I will say is that pretending that people don’t have rich, interesting thoughts and ideas about art because they won’t share them with you is a cult tactic that further enforces the worst, most self-serving myth in contemporary art: that there is an “us” (the enlightened, the fluent, the permitted) and a “them” (the indifferent masses) who need to be dragged into culture like stubborn livestock.

I like (some of) Scott’s work and analysis. Many of my friends have worked with her and say she’s a delight, which I believe.7 She even admits in the caption that many people were willing to talk to her. So what is the point of these sorts of videos, beyond rage-baiting engagement and flattering your audience’s sense of superiority?

GETTING RAGE-BAITED BY JUSTIN BUA ☆☆☆☆☆

While we’re on the subject of people making vibeos on da inderned, lets talk about Justin Bua. Bua is not a critic or a historian, he’s a content creator, and unfortunately a very good one at that, because every time he comes up on my timeline I spend a full five minutes arguing with my screen which probably somehow earns him money.8

I say he’s not a critic because he has no real intellectual framework from which he bases his criticism, beyond a vague rage at “the art world today.” This is not an unjustifiable anger, but he substantiates his by slapping his face in front of performance art pieces, usually by young female undergraduate artists, and whining about sheeple and nepotism and money laundering and how we stray further and further from God’s light every day because a woman cut up a cabbage, truly nothing new under the sun since Ruskin.

Bua does what Scott is doing in her last video from the other side; baiting engagement from the perceived “them” of the art world ecosystem, the people being taken advantage of by a system too scared to question the supposed “sickness” of it all. Bua positions himself as the anti-hero solution, brave enough to speak up against the tyranny of contemporary art’s regime of cultural authority; the courageous underdog finally gnawing at its masters leash, leading his army of beaten pets towards liberty.

What Bua fails to realise is that his strawman (pictured above, courtesy of Brad Tromael) is extremely feeble when held to the light. Take the following video, for example, where he criticises the audience for being "sheep [who] sit there nodding and going wow that’s amazing!”. But they aren’t. You can literally see at least four people in the background of this performance smiling, laughing: they recognise the absurdity of the piece. The artist does too; hence the gloves, the act of “separating” herself from this bizarre ritual she’s undertaking. You don’t have to over-intellectualise these sorts of performances to realise the silliness is a part of the show.

I don’t think Bua goes to any contemporary art events or performance. This is fine, I’m not going to snobbishly shame someone for having better things to do on a Thursday evening (there are many), but I do think there’s a certain level of dishonesty to criticising something you don’t engage with at all. Maybe it’s different in New York, but in the various cities I’ve lived in and visited across Europe and America, people at these sorts of events are hyper-aware of the meta-farce of it all. There is no blind adoration; humans are naturally curious and cruel and will generally hang around to talk about stuff like this once they’ve seen it, whether they consider it good art or not, or even consider it art at all. There’s just as much wow, what a fascinating exploration of the ontological intersection of art and movement, the cabbage is clearly meant to be my mother as there is Christ, what a load of tosh, and a complete waste of perfectly good veg to boot, isn’t art stupid, anyway, let’s go to the pub. Bua’s view of humanity as passive receptacles for cultural approval, too stupid to think for themselves and too afraid to criticise for fear of displeasing the imagined tyrant of Big Art, is deeply cynical and unpleasant.

His concerns about “standards” is also particularly concerning. Bua says that these sorts of performances are “dangerous” (to whom?) because they imply a dissolution of standards and encourage artists not to “try… to strive for [ambition]” (again, which ambitions? who is not trying here?) — so, go then Mr Bua, what exactly are the standards that make something Art? I’m going to invoke Godwin’s Law here and say uh oh, you know who else believed in a strict set of [500 word rant against Evola and Italian Futurism].

To be clear, I don’t think Bua is a fascist. He doesn’t have the epistemological backbone for it. But he is actively contributing to the fascist-adjacent notion that there is some quantifiable way of adjudicating aesthetic legitimacy. Listen, I agree that a lot of pure and utter shit is being made these days. I’m not advocating for a let-people-do-things-ism or a complete, postmodern dismissal of any impulse to discipline cultural production. We need to get a grip, we need to start wanting to make beautiful things again, we need to get over the idea that because something is in a gallery it’s good, or that enough buzzwords in the press release can justify just how wretchedly and willingly we appear to be abandoning Beauty and Truth. But does the rot really start with first years at CSM experimenting with conceptual art? These are symptoms, not causes of the sickness.

A final note: a few months ago, after I finally did comment on one of his videos (many of his scripts are also clearly ChatGPT btw), Bua liked a bunch of my selfies. I’m not using this as some humiliating-ritual gotcha, men are very welcome to like my bikini photos (it’s exactly what they’re for, baby, no girls allowed!), but I do find it very ironic that someone constantly complaining about the lack of critical thought in the art world bypassed MONTHS of my art criticism to go straight for the photos of me with no togs on. There’s a lovely theory of aesthetics to be written in that single act.

JANE DABATE’S LEAVING PARTY ★★★☆☆☆

I wasn’t sure what to rate this. Zero stars because Jane is being deported to New York and I’m going to miss her terribly? Five stars because it was a glorious evening? I’ve settled for a three out of six star rating, does that work?

Very good speeches all around. Farewell parties are a bit like weddings + funerals, where you need to get the balance right between the very funny and the very sad. Some excellent words from the coolest couple in London, (do read their interview with Emily Tennyson), hilarious poetry from Colton Karpman (very sad to have missed New Papers last night, where all time fave T.C Hell was reading), and tear-jerking sincerity from Fonie Mitsopoulou (who I adore and is, according to the comment section over at UnHerd, very brave for getting up there and saying all those big words in her second language!). All MC’d by the ever-darling .

The rest of the night involved of finding:

• alcohol (Sauv Blanc, Domaine Guy Allion, Loire, citrus-fruit based, lean texture, notes of elderflower),

• small friends for the stuffed cow I’ve taken to carrying around (courtesy of , Jennifer Kibazo and Sofia Hallström),

• woman friends for me (French, North American, Indian).

MY BOYFRIEND FORGETTING TO CHILL THE WINE ☆☆☆☆☆

Oh, “doing dry January” are we? “Taking care of our body”, are we? “Not being so hungover every Friday morning that we can’t answer important emails from various freelance employers”, are we? Hmph.

MY BOYFRIEND COOKING ME YUMMY FOOD AND LETTING ME SPEND ALL DAY TIPTAPPING AWAY AT MY COMPUTER UNDER HIS ELECTRIC BLANKET WHILE HE DOES MANUAL LABOUR ★★★★★★★★★★

૮ ˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶ ა love you baby

FINAL THOTS

• I’ll be in Mexico City next week for Feria Material covering London-based galleries (including ). If you’re in town let’s hang out; I plan on spending much of my time doing this:

• I know we’re saying readings are over but actually they are only over after February 21st, where I will be reading something life-changingly profound and beautiful and hilarious at Soho Reading Series x ’s evening. More info to come.

• wrote a scene report/critic’s fairy of the London Art Fair for Fetch, go have a read, such a pleasure to edit.

• I wasn’t kidding about credit card debt btw. AMEX are coming for me. They are not going to send bailiffs or debt recovers. They are going to send a man with a gun, because they are an American company and [on second thought I am traveling through Miami and I know customs check your social media now so LONG LIVE THE USA AND GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸]

• Anyway, YOU 🫵 can stop my insolvency by clicking one little button:

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TEXT OF THE WEEK

MING WONG : SALTATIO SOLID IN AQUA @ THE NATIONAL GALLERY
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

I don’t believe that the myth of Saint Sebastian is somehow above re-imagination/contextualisation. Miles Greenberg’s SEBASTIAN (2024) at the last Venice Biennale, which saw the Saint recast as an Othello-type standing on a platform for seven hours and repeatedly pierced by robotic arms, was my favourite performance of the entire program, possibly of the year. The racial motif was exceptionally clever given (perhaps because of) the geographical context, the technological one was even yummier. In fact I am generally a total sucker for basic mythopoetic revision, and I’m not talking Joyce or Eliot here; I unironically have a real soft spot for slop by the likes of Neil Gaiman and Susanne Clarke.

You could chalk this up to bad taste, but I think the reason I (and many others) and drawn to the re-interpretation of myths because it dispels the fantasy of origin. As rational humans, of course we know that myths aren’t “real” in any documentary sense; they’re pressure-forms, vessels for universal anxieties, values, ideals, warnings. Saints are only “realer” by degree - whatever physical, historical men and women may once have died in the name of Christianity, hagiography turns them into narrative allegories of courage, sacrifice, patience, faith, etc. When we revisit these metonymies centuries later, yes, we are engaging in hermeneutic revisionism, but we are also reconsidering the moral labours they were originally asked to perform and, however subconsciously, asking ourselves whether they hold up.

And so enters Sebastian: Diocletianic martyr and patron saint of archers, athletes, plagues and, rather cruelly, pin-makers. Sebastian was, according to Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, a younger soldier called in by Diocletian (who “loved him well”, which could mean nothing) and accused of worshipping Jesus “privily against [the emperor’s] health, and in despite of [Roman] gods.” Sebastian replied (extremely sweetly, I think) to this that he had “worshipped Jesu Christ for [Diocletian’s] health and for the state of Rome.” I suspect if he had left it at that Diocletian may have let the whole thing slide, because if someone told me they spent their days worshipping a forbidden God just to pray for my continued good health I’d fuck them into the mattress, but Sebastian then went on to say that “I think for to pray and demand help of the idols of stone is a great folly”, which got him tied to a stake and shot at by archers from Mauretania until he was “as full of arrows as an urchin1 is full of pricks.”2

He was left for dead, but survived, and was nursed back to health by widow of Castulus, Saint Irene of Rome. I’m including the following presumably ecstatically satisfying moment wherein Sebastian promptly returned to Diocletian’s palace, stood on a stairway where he knew the emperor would walk along, and gave him an earful for trying to have him killed.

Diocletian said: Art thou not Sebastian whom we commanded to be shot to death?

And St. Sebastian said: 😐

Now for the lesser known half of Sebastian’s story: Diocletian, unimpressed by Sebastian’s survival, had the poor boy stoned to death and his body thrown in a “privy”, the sewers of his palace. Sebastian then appeared to Saint Lucy and told her where to find his body: “hanging at an hook, which is not defouled with none ordure.” Her and her servants rescued and buried his body, which had indeed been saved from literal human shit, and he was canonised in the year of his Lord 288.

Sebastian and his mythology here stand for a great many things: the theatricality of conviction; the glamour of refusing the superego injuction (Diocletian as state-father); the Christian talent for converting violence into proof of transcendence; the literal purification of the mortal Real through the belief in the Meta. And, of more relevance to our modern sensibilities, are the natural erotics of the pierced body and structurally pornographic iconography: exposure, restraint, penetration, all the good stuff. Sebastian is condemned for being double: soldier and dissident, intimate and adversary, beloved and disobedient, dirty and pure.

I’m not going to rehash the points I made in my Leigh Bowery piece about our eagerness to overlay well-meaning but ultimately reductionist narratives onto art history, but it is relevant to examine the historiography of his gay sainthood. The most verifiable and likely reading of his queer icon status guerdons the Decadent and Symbolist circles of the 1880s–1890s, attributing the depiction to figures like Wilde (who, ever-subtle, took on Sebastian's name for a time after his release from prison) and D’Annunzio (Le Martyre de Saint Sebastian, written in 1911 in collaboration with Claude Debussy3, which positioned Sebastian as a male Salome-figure, a “beautous youth” who dances for the emperor’s Council of False Gods). Decadent and Symbolist aesthetics were already committed to artifice, excess, inversion and the refusal of moral legibility; this was a temporal framework that naturally encouraged readings of pose, vulnerability and allure over sanctity, anatomy, and suffering.

This can be further seen in Rilke’s 1907 Sankt Sebastian which, in turn, was in active conversation with the likes of Titian, Botticelli and Bellini’s depictions of the saint (I suggest Jane Davidson Reid’s Rilke’s Sebastian and the Painters for a more thorough breakdown of how he looked to paintings to achieve the extraordinary atmosphere of the poem). In 1949, Yukio Mishima’s semi-autobiographical Confessions of a Mask chronicled how the author achieved his first orgasm by masturbating to a Guido Renis painting of the saint:

"A remarkably handsome youth was bound naked to the trunk of a tree…The arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh and are about to consume his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy…That day, the instant I looked at the picture, my entire being trembled with some pagan joy…My blood soared up; my loins swelled as though in wrath. The monstrous part of me that was on the point of bursting awaited my use of it with unprecedented ardour, upbraiding me for my ignorance, panting indignantly. My hands, completely unconsciously, began a motion they had never been taught…Some time passed…I looked around the desk. There were cloudy-white splashes about – on the gold-imprinted title of a textbook, on a shoulder of the ink bottle, on one corner of the dictionary…Fortunately, a reflex motion of my hand to protect the picture had saved the book from being soiled.”

And so, by the time Derek Jarman produces Sebastiane in 1976 there’s nearly a century of explicitly gay readings for him to draw upon, and boy oh boy does he! I hadn’t seen the film before this, mea culpa, but it’s fantastic: extremely beautiful, deeply erotic, punctuated by a slow choreography of violence and a direct, lingering attention to skin, muscle, breath, one of those seventies films that feels like every still could be an artwork it and of itself. The dialogue is all in Latin, the acting is very good, you can and should watch the whole thing on Youtube.

There are also, however, some more unsavoury theories that Sebastian’s queer icon status was not a result of 19th century overlays of desire, but was already the case in the Renaissance - the idea being that Sebastian’s youth and beauty was the only outlet for homosexual monks to discreetly worship the male form. Now, while there’s no doubt that under the influence of revived classical ideals of the male nude in the 15th and especially 16th century artists started used Sebastian to display a beautiful, youthful, semi-nude body pierced by arrows, it feels facetious and homophobic to me to imply this was the start of sexual subtext or some covert erotic code.

Sebastian is hardly unique in his exposure. Renaissance visual culture is crowded with naked or semi-naked saints, not to mention a persistently wounded, stripped, and displayed Christ. To read Renaissance devotion through modern categories of sexual identity is to misunderstand both: I’m sure there were gay boys and men devotionally lusting over Sebastian’s lithe form (and good for them! My first jerk was to [REDACTED]), but the male nude also functioned as a site of anatomical study, ideal proportion, and theological symbolism long before it became a sexual signifier in the modern sense. When we collapse that distinction, we risk mistaking continuity of form for continuity of meaning, and end up reinscribing the idea that queer desire is always already deviant, displaced, or illicit; it reproduces the same logic that has long insisted gay men are constitutionally unable to look without wanting or to admire without corrupting.

These readings are important, because they are the one Wong is working from. Wong takes what he believes to be the universal reading of Sebastian as am achieved fact. He looses the asymmetry of the myth; the saint’s refusal of the Emperor is absorbed into a broader, duller language of vulnerability, multiplicity, and affect.

He relies very, very heavily on the aesthetic language of Jarman’s film. It is essentially a shot-for-shot recreation of several scenes filmed within the National’s galleries, beneath their own painterly depictions of Sebastian. The lines are also in Latin, the choreography and composition are mirrored, the costumes and props are identical, etc. The only difference between “homage” and “plagiarism” is how much you fess up to your own unoriginality, which Wong does, so I’m not allowed to get mad about it. However, with these sorts of things you have to ask yourself what the translation achieves: whatever was was/is being said by both Jarman and the story of Sebastian by translating the saint’s life onto the medium of screen is lost by the formal relocation.

I have no difficulty understanding (or issues with) how or why Sebastian came to be read as gay, or why the paintings these scenes are shot behind are important and beautiful. What I do have difficulty coming to terms with is how Wong has let the queer aspect (as opposed to gay, an important distinction here - to him Sebastian is simply ‘other’, not homosexual) of this interpretation overwhelm the hagiographic meanings of the saint. Jarman’s Sebastian is not a victim in the sentimental sense. He is defiant, luminous, erotically autonomous. Wong’s Sebastian(s) (there are several, played by a range of Asian actors of varying gender identities) are, well, just sort of there: they’re parroting Jarman, they’re aesthetically indebted without being structurally committed. The crucial difference between the two works is site: Jarman stages Sebastian in exile, on the margins of empire, his refusal and desire is dangerous insurgency. Wong places him at the centre: inside the museum, inside the institution, a modern space where transgression (if such a thing is still achievable) is already anticipated and neutralised. We’re repeating the gestures without inheriting the stakes here, and while it’s not offensively bad, it’s just very little anything at all.

Sebastian’s erotic autonomy speaks to the human collective because it is staged against a hostile, masculinised military order. When Wong removes this antagonistic architecture by relocating the saint into the National Gallery’s projected tableau, the myth loses its friction. We haven’t been painting Seb for years just because Renaissance painters wanted an alibi; it’s because we love the idea that a young man stood up to an authority figure and through the grace of an even bigger authority lived (briefly, on the mundane plane, and infinitely on the divine one) to tell the tale. The state is no longer Diocletian; it is the museum, it is Finaldi, only the director has more power than the emperor and far less bite. How depressing, how toothless, weren’t we meant to have figured this out by now?

A final note, and a potentially controversial one.4 I don’t know the gender identities of the actors in Wong’s film, so it is entirely possible that the primary Sebastian identifies as something else, but their body read to me as that of a woman. Maybe this is the point, maybe I as audience member am meant to question my own concept of the militant body, but frankly there is still nothing radical or interesting about watching the female form tied down, burned, beaten, shot at.5 Wong uses gender here as a way of trying to engage with Sebastians’s aforementioned “everypersonness”, the idea being that all people, regardless of sex or identity, can understand universal concepts like suffering and sacrifice. But once again he misses the mark by retroactively spurning the role of masculinity in Sebastian’s original story: the soldier who rejects the Emperor, the son who refuses the law of the father.

The evacuation of masculinity from the saintly scene softens the psychic violence at stake. The scandal of Sebastian is not that a/the body suffers, but that a/the “proper” body (male, disciplined, militarised) declines the superego injunction to serve, comply, and internalise authority. This is something Jarman understood and utilised both to heighten both the erotic and narrative tension of his film; much is therefore lost by Wong’s attempt to modernise the myth. I am by no means suggesting that women don’t or can’t understand suffering and sacrifice, but a shared capacity for suffering does not neutralise the symbolic work gender is doing here.

There are aspects of Sebastian that are irrelevant to his myth-making, his race being one. I sincerely liked Wong’s all-Asian recasting, as I did Greenberg’s racial transposition, which positioned Sebastian as an Othello/Moor figure. Wong’s redoes the scene in which Sebastian dances to mime the Passion of Jesus (the ultimate refusal to worship false idols) as a tai-chi sequence, taking place along the floor beneath Stubbs’ horse painting. It’s terribly ugly in practice, but makes sense in theory: martyrdom through the lens of state management of the foreign body, the evocation of intimacy + betrayal + militarised belonging. Unlike his race, however, Sebastian’s gender/sex is not one such mutable aspect, it is the axis around which the iconography turns. The exposed male soldier, trained to obey, made to submit, carries a different symbolic charge than a feminised body already coded for vulnerability. What does it say about our willingness to swap insubordination for victimhood the moment the figure is read as feminine?

THE GENERAL STATE OF THINGS @ MODERN LITERATURE
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

It makes me want to cry, how ugly everything is now. I walk into Waterstones and it’s all women trying to fuck dragons, or men wanting to shoot women for trying to fuck dragons. I listen to readings and feel like an insane person; what are you freaks clapping for, can’t you see the world is ending? I stare at the pages of the LRB and want to bite someone. Must I resign myself to a life of reading nothing but Melville and Japanese hi-fi manuals to find anything approaching literary beauty? Burke promised such a thing as sublime ugliness, an elicitation of terror at the end of time, but all I feel is a sort of apocalyptic disgust. God smote Gomorrah for less than the sort of writing overheard at Ellie’s on a Wednesday evening.

I stand with the Neo-Passeists in regard to the idea that writing about being a writer should be illegal; I’m now starting to believe that writing in general should be too. Surely we all have better things to do? (fixing women’s Japanese hi-fis, for example).

FINAL THOTS

• Said it before, will say it again, this is going to be a cosmically good year.

• is on Substack!!!!

• Tomatoes

• Spaghetti

• Olive Oil

• Dishwasher tablets

• Eggplants

• Chicken breast

• Breadcrumbs

• Cheese

• Lemon

• Milk

• Egg

• Find me here on Wednesday (which just happens to be the day after the Feast of Saint Sebastian!! told you, cosmic year.) I’m also chairing a panel at the London Art Fair on Thursday. busy lil 🐝

TEXT OF THE WEEK

They generally arrived in the country (like influenza, like Conrad) from the Continent; in staggered waves, trailing wet umbrellas and wicker bags full of the sort of food you might feed a sickly dog or a Macedonian catamite. There was a map of England on the wall, one of those framed National Trust surveys with the blue lines for rivers and the dots for castles. No one knew exactly where they were; not that far from London, not that far from home, still removed in some regards from the real world but very much above Turner’s wine-dark waters.

Lev had once been an art critic. His mother had hoped he’d follow his cousin into mergers & acquisitions, or perhaps war, but God is not always kind to women who choose to bear the children of classicists. He is examining the National Trust poster with something approaching focus. At first glance it appears antique; a closer reading reveals a plastic sheen and the sallow Helvetica of a 2017 reprint. The rivers are too blue; anaemic ultramarine carried from the Afghan. Lev taps the glass — just once — as if it might flood.

“God, you’ve made it, how heroic—”

Bassett (nobody knew her first name) leans against the doorway to the kitchen, soggy hair splayed softly across the shoulders of a white bathrobe. She slips her right foot out of her moccasin and, with a nonchalance afforded to only the very rich and neurotic, tucks it halfway up against the doorframe so that it disappears, heronlike, beyond the silk shroud of her kaftan. “I really thought you weren’t going to come at all, you know, with all the, whatever it was, fucking petrol fires on the M4.”

Lev taps the glass again. “It’s not really blue, you know. Not naturally. Ultramarine was made by grinding lapis lazuli from mines in Badakhshan — sorry, that’s northeastern Afghanistan, I forget you studied communications — worth more than gold, at one point. They used it for the Virgin’s robes to show she was valuable. To God, I mean.”

Bassett is not listening, having pulled a lighter and cigarette from the folds of her gown, knocking the ash onto the surface of the Aga with unconscious precision. “We’re all terrifically hungry. Are you still cooking for us tonight? We tried to order Indian yesterday and got an automated message about, oh, what was it, food corridors being compromised, something simply ghastly like that. Anyway. I can’t stand spice.”

“It means ‘from beyond the sea’,” he says, shrugging off his coat and letting the wet fabric hit the tile with a flaccid thud. She watches him through a spiral of insidious grey smoke — Hestia, hearth and home — as he shifts the basket from one hand to another. The ingredients rustle up against the soft wicker, baby Moses cooing in his nest. “I have the makings of something divine here.”

The kitchen is warm, brightly-lit, smoke-hazed and low-ceilinged. American Sylvia, who started menstruating again after the Salisbury blackout, leans along the wall with her husband Andrei, the only one with any usable Slavic trauma. Silver candles line the oak, stamped with the coat of arms of a family that no longer exists: a heron piercing its own neck, beak dribbling royal blue into the tempered grey. She glances at the dripping bag in Lev’s hands, and when she speaks every sentence is a question. “Thank God, man, we’re all absolutely starving, is it raining outside, Bassett says you’re making us something vegetarian?” She looks at him and lights a cigarette from the wick of a melting candle. “Andy has been teaching himself to can vegetables, haven’t you, Andy?”

“In the event of further escalation.” nods Andrei.

“Further than what, comrade?” asks Lev as he drops a damp cauliflower onto the counter. “I’m making lasagne.”

Amira — beautiful Amira, with her huge wet obsidian eyes, disposed naturally as women from beyond the sea are to small breasts and outbursts of nervous laughter — looks up from her house of cards at the kitchen table and her own partner, a desperate excuse for a Scot called Harry, midway through a brief, furious defence of Tony Benn. “It all gets much worse, you know. God, what is that, is that cauliflower? Is it Marco Pierre White’s recipe?”

Marco Pierre White has a photograph of Lev’s ex-wife on his Instagram. They are standing on a balcony in Spain, arms flung around each other, laughing, one inch of Lev’s overlong brown fingernail blurring the borders of the image. Sometimes he imagines Marco fucking his wife in the chef’s house along the bank of the River Aire, before the blockades, making her eggs and bacon, dropping the viscera of Irish oysters into her mouth like communion, one hand on the back of her soft head, the other holding a copper pan. Lev imagines him in a white double-breasted jacket, sleeves rolled, leaning over the Aga with the heat behind him and her in a silk robe, barefoot, pretending not to notice the helicopters. In the photo, she wears a linen shirt Lev once folded into her drawer in a flat in Kraków. Her bra strap was showing. Lev had cropped that photo once, years ago, to post on his own story. 42 likes.

He retrieves a chopping board shaped like the Isle of Wight, or maybe Gibraltar, and begins opening a tin of canned tomatoes with the focus of a man disarming a bomb. The cauliflower glares at him like he’s in the corner of a hotel room, naked knees clutched to his chin like a child, dickless, meatless. He slices the crown first, the crunching give of cartilage; savages the florets like Oedipus’s eyes; then the bone of the stalk, thick and chalky and dry-marrowed like a ribcage cut wrong. The knife thumps against the wood limply and he looks over at Andrei; his people had been Hussars once, they had ripped open their enemies’ carcasses like ripe papayas and now he cans watercress; and then Harry, long legs spread beneath the kitchen table like broken banners, the soft white flesh of his thin ankles shining like Salome’s, my God, hadn’t the Celts strung adulterous women up by their feet and tits over the Northern lochs?

Somebody, anybody, has turned on the radio. He hears that his hometown — well, not really his hometown, he was born in Oxford for Christ’s sake, but the small beach-bound metropole on the edge of the West Bank that Lev puts down as his birthplace in his grant applications — has been reduced to rubble, another Jerusalem returned to the shape and size of swine’s pearls. This Crusade, this century, is not led by Richard Lionheart, but a fat woman with a degree in accounting from Boston. Harry is speaking:

“Well, of course, the great difference between the left and the right is the same as that between men and women, is that one has to wipe piss from their arsehole far more than the other—”

The conversation swells like seawater, ebbing in and out of coherence, phrases dropped like napalm in the center of Nelson’s dining table as the HMS Victory goes down, which it never did, not really. Lev is sweating as the hoplites would have in their limp canvas tents, shoulders moisture-leaden and weary, still smelling of a better man’s conquest. Bassett is replying now:

“I think the real question is, I mean, who gets to define starvation, women never vote for war, what’s that marvellous Clinton quote—”

“Binky’s brother joined the resistance in Milan, terribly silly, he lost his art history scholarship to Cambridge over it—”

“Lev, you know about this sort of stuff, when was the Last Supper painted—”

Fourteen eighty eight, he thinks bitterly to himself, Milanese tempura, indigo dried and fermented, C₁₆H₁₀N₂O₂, azure wet and hollow slapped along the halls of the Santa Maria delle Grazie. They spat in their paints, back then, filthy cavity-gummed sputum mixed with the cardamom egg yolks, they made things out of war and art and food before, no gunpowder, no saltpeter, just the detritus of wet animals trying to make and mark a bloodless history—

“Are you sure that’s enough spice? Back home we always make it with—”

“What home, cunt?”

“I’ll eat your liver like Achilles ate Hector’s—”

The bechamel bubbles, swamplike, steam mingling with cigarette smoke above the Aga. A single bite of cinnamon rises from the froth. This will be good, Lev thinks to himself, this will be God or this will be food. I will feed my countrymen in a double-breasted jacket and little epaulets made of ultramarine. My wife will be war-bride, Patroculus sick and pale, and I shall make her plump and tanned with other men’s children and shellfish from the Adriatic oilspills, fatty flesh picked at by butter-winged herons.

He imagines Marco Pierre White whispering, What kind of man doesn’t eat meat?

KILLING FRANK GEHRY @ THE GUGGENHEIM BILBAO ★★★★☆

In 2023 I started an Instagram account dedicated to drinking a margarita every single day of the summer, with the eventual goal of convincing the fine folks over at Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville Bar & Restaurants to let me open their first location in the Middle East, preferably on the Gaza Strip. Jimothy Buffet died two months later. I fear I have done the same to Frank Gehry by visiting the Guggenheim Bilbao.

Ostensibly I’m here on a press trip to write about the Arts of the Earth show, which really is tremendously good, and you can read my full thoughts on here should you care about whether I actually think greenwashing in the arts is as evil as everyone says.1 However, it’s also my first time at the Museo in general and I’m slightly gobsmacked at how good their general collection is. The Maria Helena Vieira da Silva show (curated by Flavia Frigeri of London’s very own NPG) is top-notch. This is helped, of course, by the fact that she’s one of the best painters ever ever ever, but the way the exhibition groups and gaps her chronology elevates her work to new heights. I hadn’t seen her figurative WWII-coded stuff before, and boy oh boy did I send a soppy text to my Jewish dad after I had. I want more geometry, in life and in art.

The rest of their stuff is just as good. I can take or leave Koon and Kusama (as one of my journo companions puts it, “I wish the infinity room went on for a bit longer”), but fuck man, the Rothko was superb, Mark Leckey’s sculpture was superb, so was the Chillada, Jesus, even the Holzer got me, and I have an aneurysm every time I get off the Eurostar about how much I hate the piece she’s got up in St Pancras.

And then, of course, is the Matter of Time installation. I’m generally a little unwell about Richard Serra. Well, no, I’m fine. I’m normal. In Vedic and Puranic cosmology, time is vast and cyclical; one world-cycle is made of four yugas, after which the universe is destroyed and re-created by Brahma. When this particular cycle ends, I hope that whatever residue carbon stardust my body is made of in this one gets recycled into the metal Serra uses in the next. I want my bones and soul in these works, in this life, in the next. Whatever. Normal.

Over the press lunch I try recounting ’s charming story about him having a first kiss in the shadow of a Serra, but my Spanish is middling at best, and instead I tell the curator of the Guggenheim that I want to get cracked against Torqued Ellipses (1996-98). I also ask for a blowjob instead of a straw at the bar, but this is the Catelans’ fault for having the word paja and pajita sound so similar.

BIG BIRTHDAY BASH @ THE WINEMAKERS CLUB, FARRINGDON ★★★★★★★★★★

I’ve found an interesting hack to circumventing lost’s ‘no phones’ policy: if you offer to spend enough money it turns out that they will in fact unlock the pouch they shove your mobile in, even if it is just to use Apple Pay. I assume a wave of short stories about pre-alcoholics set in a darkened cinema-cum-nightclub will hit the London reading scene in about 3 to 6 months; they will all be terrible and I’m looking forward to reading every single one of them.

Anyway, my birthday was gorgeous, thank you for asking. Every year my life gets better, my legs get longers, my boyfriends get hotter. I am never more than five days away from being.a woman in a nice dress with a glass of free wine in her hand. What a joyful time to be a pretentious, opinionated young person in London. I recommend it to everybody regardless of age or location; the pretencious and opinionated bit is what matters.

MARTINIS, VARIOUS @ THE WEST INDIES ★★★★★

Speaking of London, this week is the Die Quieter Please ball AND The Toe Rag’s pastoral issue talk AND ’s birthday bash AND SRS at lost, but I am in the West Indies until Christmas, a fact I have decided to be insufferable about in order to combat the FOMO.

It’s so beautiful here, of course it is, everyone is so lovely, the food is so good, etc etc. They’re playing reggae Christmas music at the pool bar. It’s 2PM and I’m slamming my fourth drink of the afternoon. Your email finds me sunburned in the way Mizrahim that have long abandoned their passports get after six fingers of bourbon, petting a fat dog with a bib that says DO NOT FEED on it.

“I am assuming all charges for your room go to your parents?” asks a receptionist so beautiful it makes me feel a sudden kinship with Marlon Brando.2

“Yes,” my father replies, “it’s been like that for 27 years and judging by her career path isn’t about to change any time soon.”

Please find my reviews of various martinis attached.

RUMPRESSO MARTINI
★☆☆☆☆

Dare I say… derivative? I’m not saying you can’t improve on a classic, but there’s a reason the expresso martini works so well; the bitterness of coffee constitutionally matches the sharpness of vodka. Rum is a beautiful alcohol, but it is too mellow, too melodic for the solemn ache of kaluhua.

MANGOTINI
★★☆☆☆

Dangerous. The sort of drink that is so easy to digest you will spend an entire evening talking to middle-aged Floridians about, ah, fuck, I forget now, because at least a quarter of your brain cells were wiped out by pure ethanol. You will give them a sheepish smile when you pass them by the pool the next morning and they will ask if you can still taste the mango. You will hate that they are right.

MANGO MARTINI (not to be confused with the Mangotini)
★★★★☆

I’m absolutely slammed at the beach, which is great, but I’m taking away a star because I’m reading Norwegian Wood, which sucks.3 Every couple of chapters I hear the following tweet in ’s voice:

COCONUT MARTINI
★★★★★

Perfect. Simply perfect. No notes. Creamy, cutting, served by the sort of man they wrote racist penny dreadfuls about in the 80s. I want to bathe in this drink, I want to marry this drink, I want to smoke a cigarette through my left nostril with this drink. *Patrick Bateman voice* oh my god, it even has grated nutmeg on top—

FINAL THOTS

• Just learned that Julia Cameron returned this year with The ‘Daily’ Artist’s Way, which possibly says something very depressing about the current state of things. Luckily I have no opinions on culture, arts education, history.

• BALSHAW DOWN!!! I’ll likely have more opinions about this soon. Send me yours should you have any, especially if you work(ed) at the Tate.

• Earlier this year I drove across America with a drug addict. Ethics Magazine was kind enough to publish my only mildly exagerated schizoversion of the trip in their fourth issue; you can now read it online here.

  ---

TEXT OF THE WEEK

OOO LA LA - MAGGI HAMBLING & SARAH LUCAS @ SADIE COLES HQ ★☆☆☆☆

(A lot of people I like loved this show, apologies if you are one of them.)

I mean it very sincerely when I say I find Allen Jones’s sculptures more servicable to women than Hambling’s or Lucas’s. We fall too often into the trap of believing that sexist things done or made by women are not sexist, or indeed capable of being bad.

There is somewhere floating around the internet an article I wrote in 2020 about Hambling’s Mary on the Green sculpture, which depicted Mary Wollstonecraft naked. My gripes at the time were more social than aesthetic, but as the years have gone on my whining has shifted to encapsulate the visuals of her work too. The less said about her Oscar Wilde sculpture the better1, and the less said about her paintings the best. I tried writing about her particular brand of painterly YBA-era smugness for [redacted] last year and was told I sounded too much like Brian Sewell. What a horrible feeling that was, do you know how catastrophically mediocre your art has to be to make a 26-year-old sound as bitter as the patron saint of patrician disgust? (yes yes, I know that Sewell liked Hambling and some of her work2, even a working clock is broken twice a day)

Lucas is no better. She is not Méret Oppenheim, she will never be Méret Oppenheim, or indeed Eva Hesse, or Bruce Nauman, or Barbara Creed, or interesting. What on earth am I meant to do with these viciously ugly things, I ask myself, these beastly, deflated parodies of women’s bodies, how the hell am I meant to extrapolate meaning or beauty from objects that seem hell-bent on embracing the circumstances they claim to criticise, these derivative masses of nothing? ooooohhh women are (treated) like objects? Even her fans can’t speak of her highly; Kathy Battista dedicates a whole chapter to Lucas’s photography in her 2009 book Ladies and Gents and can’t find anything more interesting to say than she “uses the toilet as a substitute for and an extension of the female form.” This is bargain-bin Freudianism, this is a joke, is this a joke? Am I the joke?

“On the one hand, it’s about looking at the old things,” says Lucas, “and on the other, it’s wanting to bring them right back to a state of freshness that has to have something to do with right now.” Oh, fabulous, so it’s about nothing at all then, excellent, fine. “The one crucial thing that only painting can do is to make you feel as if you’re there while it’s being created.” says Hambling, which is an insane statement, what on God’s great earth are you talking about, what do you mean painting has a monopoly on immediacy, on gesture, on presence? My God, sculpture exists, prints exist, performance exists, everything carries something, you’re not Moses bringing down the tablets, do you look at the Löwenmensch and not feel the mammoth? I’m going to have a fucking heart attack. You’re a smoker for Christ’s sake, we’re on the same side; we’re mean to be better than this. Who the fuck cares that you met at the Colony Room and share the same birthday? What is the connection between these two women and their works? It’s so over for art that it never even began.

My greatest irritation lies perhaps with Sadie Coles. All this money, all this space, and you can’t move away from the Law days. Jesus. At least let the 90s die with a little dignity.

EXHIBITION OF OLD ROPE - DAVID SHRIGLEY @ STEPHEN FRIEDMAN ★★★☆☆

I think I’m meant to hate this show: it’s clearly designed to be the sort of rage-bait that I am usually not above falling for (see above), but unfortunatetly it looks really good, and sometimes we must submit ourselves to the base pleasure of visuality.

Ostensibly, the concept behind the show is some kind of delapidated meta-commentary on the politics of value, of the art market, of appraisal and assesment, which I sort of thought Duchamp has closed the box on, but whatever. This is easily sidestepped by not caring about what art costs. The quality of an artwork is not necessarily unrelated to its value (I’ve been enjoying the back and forths between Jeff Magid and Kenny Schater on Instagram, who have both made some salient points about whether or not we should care about last week’s record-breaking Klimt sale - art is (not?) made in the salesroom, etc), but it’s clear that the valuation of a piece can be (and usually is) totally divorced from its aesthetic and ethical calibre.

There is something freeing in the syllogistic logic of I’m not going to buy this art, therefore its price is irrelevant, therefore the discourse it wants me to participate in does not affect my interpretation. If price is merely an accidental property, then by definition it cannot belong to the essence of the artwork, which is precisely the non-essentialist point: nothing contingent to an object - market value, hype, discourse, press/press releases - can determine what the thing is, even if you’re making fun of that fact. As with Lucas’s approach to gender, satire requires a clarity of purpose and I’m of the firm-ish opinion that making fun of the ecosystem you profit from renders the commentary null by merit of participation.3

So, if the ethos behind the show is tautological at best and redundant at worst (or perhaps vice versa?), it leaves us with pure aesthetics from which to judge it, which I found to be really pleasant and impressive. I’m a huge sucker for braiding, sorry. There’s a bit of post-minimalism here, the classic Richard Serra/Robert Morris ‘dump stuff on the floor and good luck to all future curators/art handlers’, a formal impermanence that I find really yummy. We will never see this rope in the same formation again, which can be said of all trash heaps but makes them none the less beautiful. The show smells, too, which is really cool, different olfactory layerings of plastics and hemp and dried salt.

I also like the idea of discarded rope in general. When does rope, or indeed any tool, stop being worthy of use? How do you decide when an item is too damaged for what it was born to do, what hylomorphic quality of the object makes it “good” enough - for sale, for operation, for life? This is in and of itself a commentary on the tension between Scholastic and Empiricist ideas about value and its relation to reality; Artistole has one answer, Locke and Hume another, Shrigley a third. That being said, I still don’t like any of David’s other works4, so I’m going to be mean and chalk this up to an accidental stroke of cleverness.

SHOW LESS - CLAIRE FONTAINE @ MIMOSA HOUSE ★☆☆☆☆

I originally wrote quite a lot about Show Less for this Reviewdump, relating it back to Foreigners Everywhere and Pedrosa's curation of last years Venice Bienale, but around the 1,800 word mark I realised I had already put more effort into thinking about this show than anybody else involved. Perhaps the title should be taken as advice.

THE ANGELS ARE DIALS - JULIA DUBSKY @ AMANDA WILKINSON ★★★★☆

It is so incredibly tricky to make paintings that know that they’re paintings, especially if they are referencing other, older paintings. This is all Malevich’s fault, whatever, but Dubsky gets it. Fuck, these are beautiful. Dubsky’s actor/painting analogy rests on the idea that an artwork appears doubly, both as itself and as the thing it depicts. Her works, especially her dypitchs, embrace the same truth as Calasso’s Tiepolo Pink, that appearance is the real.

Stars of the show are the recreations of Rosso Fiorentino’s 16th century Cherub Playing a Lute. Il Rosso (“the Redhead”) was already leaning toward what would become Mannerism: elongated limbs, acidic colour, ambiguous space, emotional languor. Reflectographic studies tell us that the Cherub is a fragment of a lost altarpiece; a fact that Dubsky absolutely revels in by treating the missing whole as a kind of luminous, atmospheric pressure. You get absolutely sucked in by the sense that something larger is breathing just off-canvas, that the cherubs are indeed behaving like actors responding to a scene partner. Maybe you’re the other performer, idk, I’m going to be terribly boring and say you really should go and see this show and work it out for yourself. Like, IRL. Yes, I know it’s cold outside, but this is worth it. It’s on until the 6th of December.

BRINK - AARON ANGELL, HENRY GIBBS, SIMONE GRIFFIN, MIRANDA KEYES, ELISE NGUYEN QUOC, CLAIRE OSWALT @ HERALD ST ★★★☆☆

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.

— Shelley, Ozymandias, 1818

This is turning out to be quite a sculpture-heavy week, which Herald St is good at. The last time I visited the gallery they were showing Nicole Wermers, whose fur hoses I didn’t love (I want to see more real animal products in art!!) but whose clay figures I found really delicious. Herald’s sculptors know how to speak to art history; just as Wermers’ works spoke to the Baroque/Sevres tradition, Aaron Angell’s artefacts make use of Anglo-Japanese ceramic techniques to create a kind of unearthed, semi-archeological relic and Miranda Keyes’s glassworks arrest the liquid event. I am sorry to harp on about the Ozymandias Effect, I feel like Gretchen Weiners trying to make Fetch happen (lol) every time I do, but I do find it significant that so many artists are actively (and, in this case, very beautifully!) engaging with the pre-emptive ‘demise’ of their own works.

You can see this in Henry Gibbs’ Futurist-inspired markmaking, Elise Nguyen Quoc’s grainy, urban pigments, in Simone Griffin’s microbial feilds: contemporary objects self-consciously wearing their own future ruin/overgrowth/collapse. Clean, concise, if a little pseudoclinical; the inclusion of Claire Oswalt felt a little mean, not because her work is bad (it’s not) but because if you’re going to commit to the white-and-grey, apocalypse-via-paleology thing then you need to go the full mile and not include any colour at all.

DRINKING A GIN MARTINI IN A FUCK-OFF FLUFFY COAT @ THE DIXON HOTEL BAR ★★★★★

When I was in my early twenties I invented a drink called The Shartini; two parts gin, one part expired caper juice. The name is self-explanatory; you’ll be shocked to know I only made it once. Since then I’ve been very scared of the drink, but I’m slowly coming back around to them.

The gin martini is a fundamentally Girardian cocktail (as opposed to the expresso martini, fundamentally Freudian). You don’t order a martini because you enjoy it; you order it because you want to signal something half-carnal and half-correct about yourself. In my case that something is a very nice coat in a very nice hotel bar. Bonsoir.

FINAL THOTS

• Went drinking at the French House recently with a woman who very wisely pointed out that you shouldn’t fall for any of the bartenders there, for the simple reason that there is a small platform behind the bar that makes them appear deceptively taller than they really are.

• You should buy a copy of Die Quieter Please now right now now now. It’s a very cool lit mag ran by very cool people, with some exceptionally good writing inside.

• Some people have expressed confusion over my rating system. To be clear, I never give shows five stars (unless the gallerist has personally given me twenty-five thousand euros, or maybe an orgasm). Zero and five stars are generally reserved for things like food, sex, people.

• Would love an American, or perhaps a very slimy Italian, to explain to me what is going on with Alma Allen + his galleries.

• call me a pre-alcoholic in their substack, which you can and should read here.5

TEXT OF THE WEEK

BLACK IS A LIVING COLOUR - JOAN WITEK @ BARTHA CONTEMPORARY ★★☆☆☆

Je suis le Ténébreux, – le Veuf, – l’Inconsolé,
Le prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie :
Ma seule étoile est morte, – et mon luth constellé
Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.

— El Desdichado, Gérard de Nerval (1853)

From black-rimmed plates they ate turtle soup, Russian rye bread, ripe Turkish olives, caviar, salted mullet roe, smoked Frankfurt black puddings, game in gravies the colour of liquorice and boot-blacking, truffled sauces, chocolate caramel creams, plum puddings, nectarines, preserved fruits, mulberries, and heart-cherries; from dark-coloured glasses they drank the wines of Limagne and RousiIlon, of Tenedos, Val de Peñas,and Oporto, and, after the coffee and the walnut cordial, they enjoyed kvass, porters, and stouts.

— The “feast of mourning” in A Rebours, Joris Karl Huysman (1884)

If we are to believe in both Greenberg and Genesis, we must believe that darkness preceded light; Fiat lux! said the Lord, and then probably sneezed a little bit. Colour-as-life is both Creation and painting’s endgame and, to the Greenbergian, the logical culmination of medium specificity. Rodencho and Tatlin transformed colour into matter - deploying pigment as one material among others in a rational, constructive syntax - only because the Supremacists had already evacuated it of subsistence. Malevich’s “end of painting” was precisesly that; after his fiat lux there was only the blackout.

Witek’s Black as a Living Colour seeks to fertilise that void by re-entering this exhausted dialectic from a contemporary vantage, attempting to animate the monochrome’s metaphysical potential through tactility and process; watercolours and charcoal on rice paper. The exhibition’s historical ambition - to show that black can still signify anything beyond its nineteenth-century symbolics - is admirable; its achievement is less convincing. By treating the monochrome as something to be tended to rather than confronted (as Klein did and Kapoor does), Witek replaces Malevich’s sublime with sensualism. “The square as a square was not enough for me.” she told John Caldwell in 1984, which is a great sentence, but doesn’t translate onto rice paper.

The result is an aesthetic of over-cultivation. Witek fails to realise, or perhaps to simply communicate, that black-as-life/black-as-primogenitor is neither radical nor unique: Egyptian black, the colour of the Nile’s fertile silt, was the antithesis of the desert’s lifeless red. In early Rome black was associated with the creator class (artisans and makers, as opposed to the white of preists and red of warriors). Robert Grosseteste’s scientific treatise De Colore (c.1220s) contructs a combinatorial view of colours that proposed black is only achieved through the conjunction of light and an impure medium. By the late eighteenth century, Western thought had begun to detach the idea of nature from the Aristotelian quartet of elements (air, water, earth, and fire) and so the Romantics recast black not as one of nature’s fundamental essences but as a contingent and mutable material state. Darkness as a site of generation rather than of absence is a cool and ancient subject; Witek fails to bring anything new to the table.

A BOY FALLING OUT OF THE SKY - ELIZABETH DIMITROFF, LORENA LEVI, LAURA BENSON, DEAN HOY, CHRIS OH, ABIGAIL MCGINLEY @ SOHO REVUE ★★★★☆

Oh, thank God this was good. For full disclosure, participating artist Elizabeth Dimitroff is a friend and podcast guest of mine; and there is absolutely nothing more mortifying than being invited to a friend’s show and realising, with a sinking feeling, that you’re about to spend the evening lying. In the eternal words of Peter Saul interviewing Jim Shaw1: “I pretend to be interested and god—I don’t know what to say. I don’t expect to be interested in art shows. I expect to nod my head and acknowledge talent as its defined.” Luckily, the talent at Soho Revue is genuienly defined, intelligent in concept and unusually sincere in execution.

The show takes W.H Auden’s 1938 poem Musée des Beaux Arts as a framework to examine the formal ethics of witnessing: Icarus and his catastrophe, his white legs in the water, becomes a conduit for the problem of spectatorship. Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus anticipates a proto-modern humanism in which labour and landscape eclipse myth and Auden extends that decentralisation - in Bruegel’s peasant scene the prodigal son is a speck while the ploughman, shepherd, and ship sail on, oblivious; in Auden’s poem suffering “takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

As Dimitroff and I discuss in our upcoming brave podcast episode sometimes you have to squint to see the value in the group show, that it often is just a taxonomic exercise symptomic of broader, institutional anxieties about relevance.2 However, a good group show (like this one), will function as a relational system rather than a categorical one. The competent curator succeeds only by trusting not just in the works themselves but in their capability to be adjacenct to eachother.

In A Boy’s case, each artist stages a different mode of witness. Elizabeth Dimitroff’s blurred, nostalgic figural tableaux distil the notion of the afterimage into painterly form, Lorena Levi turns micro-gestures of body into quiet elegies for the self’s fracture, Laura Benson’s pendants evoke the caol áit, Abigail McGinley uses surrealist imagery as loci of overlooked collective trauma, Chris Oh translates Bruegel’s mythic distance into a contemporary grammar of probability via the use of playing cards, and Dean Hoy recasts the detritus of childhood into fragile, votive objects.

You don’t have to squint to see how nicely these works hold the show’s thesis up: there’s a strong worship of relation here, of new meanings generated by proximity. Dimitroff and Oh’s cosmologies create a kind of double vision (her sense of time as recollection meeting his as chance), Levi and McGinley trace two faces of the body (one intimate, one allegorical), Benson and Hoy approach matter as memory (the shared ‘thin space’ of both mythology and family). The result of these overlapping, interlocking constellations is an exhibition that thinks through its own medium, and one you should definitely listen to me + Elizabeth talk about on the pod next week.

SOHO READINGS SERIES @ THE ROYAL ACADAMY ★★★★★

This was my favourite SRS to date, probably because it involved a lot of women. Olivia Allen, who did not have a £18 martini, treated us to deftly sequenced programme starting with the rawly confessional and ending with the fully performative.

Soon-to-be deportee Jane Dabate opens with excerpts from her diary detailing her volatile schizoationship (“I dream that he asks me to get back together… I respect my father too much to say yes.”). She’s followed by Clara Wade, whose guide to dating male artists lands somewhere between self-help and self-immolation (“it’s a ménage à trois”), equal parts funny and flayed. The night culminates with Jaya Twill and Lydia Eliza Traill’s hilarious, [redacted]-coded satire-performance of a job-hunting intern submitting blood and stool samples to a gallery that calls itself a family; a dystopian HR ritual underscored by laughter that sounds a little too knowing.

All of this is taking place beneath Sawrey Gilpin’s 1798 Horses in a Thunderstorm (in original Carlo Maratta–style carved pine frame, c. 1798; sanded top edge with centred ribbon-and-stave ornament and acanthus-leaf-and-shield moulding in the scotia, bead at sight edge; concave profile with applied ogee, gesso flaking at the corners; 108.5 × 149.4 × 13.3 cm, Royal Academy of Arts 03/290.) There is something oddly appropriate about a late-Enlightenment panic painting presiding over late-capitalist confession-critique. Gilpin, brother of the clergyman who invented the Picturesque and who once painted George III’s horses, seemed constitutionally unable to flatter power; even in his royal commissions the animals are trembling conspirators, all long legs and rolling eyes. His reputation in the period rested on his ability to capture equine temperament as much as anatomy, and you can feel that animism here: the Enlightenment eye straining toward Romantic hysteria, the post-literary nervous system chomping at the bit.

Anyway, all roads lead to the Groucho. Annika Jade Levy and her friends and family were delightful, charming, coherent; I am sure that I was not. Apologies to everybody I groped that evening; I was feeling particularly texture-orientated.

A SUCCULENT CHINESE MEAL @ YOUNG CHENG BUFFET ★★★★☆

The post-entactogenic aftereffects of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine hit me just after Waterloo. Oh dear God, what have I done. I feel like I’m going to die. There is sweat running down planes of my body that haven't seen the light of day since August. Everybody hates me. There are no cash points in this city. I am a damp woodland creature crawling through Zone 1.

This cosmopolitan despair is resolved remarkably quickly by a pile of biege and yellow food in the basement of a Chinatown buffet; rice and rolls and noodles and glistening onions. It’s long been a dream of mine to bite into a full head of iceberg lettuce, I tell my companions. You can just… do that, they reply, with the tenderness of bodhisattvas.

I chew and think of Hundun split open like a pomegranate, seven holes for seven pleasures, steam, rice, the moon an egg yolk. Queen Mother Xi Wang Mu’s orchard blooms only once every three millennia and somewhere above the strip-lights her peaches ripen, the scent of them thick and wet as mercury.

shut up and eat your food, you sinophilic wretch of a woman

FINAL THOTS

• This year, I motion in favour of Wodehouse/Wooster Winter. I’m envisioning three-piece suits, fireplaces, taxidermy, ginger and whisky in the bath, becoming the first transmasc member of White’s, not getting married.

• Please let David Hockney retire. Unshackle the workhorse from the iPad and set him free to graze in green pastures of cigarettes and young Moroccan men. He’s earned it.

• I am currently sick in the way men get sick, useless and damp and moaning like a war-wounded soldier against Nightingale linens, when in reality I’ve just forgotten to eat vegetables for about three weeks. Soup recipe suggestions appreciated.

To revisit Peter Henry Emerson in 2025 is to revisit a question that the modernist canon of photography long ago claimed to have answered: what should a photograph look like? As Peter Blank argued in his 1994 essay Which History of Photography: The Modernist Model, the history of photography is marked by models of exclusivity, of “pure” or “straight” photography that came to erase its own heterodox ancestors. Emerson, with his 1889 Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, stood at the origin of this erasure. His call for ‘truth to nature’ was repurposed by later modernists (Stieglitz, Strand, Newhall, etc) as a doctrine of formalist purity, yet in Emerson’s own practice what we see is a rural phenomenology that prefigures both modernism and its undoing. Derges’ selection, then, reads Emerson through a contemporary sublime: positioning his Naturalism as a precursor to her own elemental mysticism rather than as a critique of it.

As Jennifer Green-Lewis says in her introduction to Pictorial Effect/Naturalistic Vision, “perhaps it is not quite true to say that the ghost of Roland Barthes is abroad in this, the lengthening season of photographs past; but his spirit is certainly being invoked (…) to authorize ways of looking at those images which give us so apparently intimate a contact with the Victorians.” She re-situates Emerson as a philosopher of Barthes’ photographic paradox: the idea that the photographic message presents both a denoted message (the analagon itself) and a connoted message which is “the manner in which the society (…) communicates what it thinks of it."

I think this is where Derges stumbles, by mistaking that paradox for a binary. If, as Green-Lewis suggests, Emerson anticipated Barthes’s antinomy by allowing both the denoted and connoted messages to coexist - the reed-bed as both empirical fact and felt vision of agrarian reality - Derges seeks to resolve that tension in a single, sanctified image. Her methods are technically remarkable (immersing photographic paper directly into rivers and shorelines, using moonlight and hand-held flash light to expose her images directly onto light-sensitive paper), but where Emerson’s Naturalism accepted that “Nature does not jump into the camera, focus itself, expose itself, develop itself, and print itself… The artist, using photography as a medium, chooses his subject, selects his details, generalises the whole, and thus gives his view of nature,” Derges’s photographs seem determined to prove that the medium can transcend selection altogether, substituting the photographic act for the photographic idea.

If, as Blank argued, modernist historiography built its edifice on the exclusion of impurity, then Emerson is its first and most haunting absence, especailly against the mechanical idealism of Henry Peach Robinson. Green-Lewis suggests that Emerson’s practice already intuited what the twentieth century would spend decades theorising: that the photograph, as W. J. T. Mitchell puts it, “both is and is not a language” oscillating between the real and the read, and that it runs on the recognition that to see the world naturally is always to see it through the medium of culture, desire, and mortality.

In this light, the modernist rhetoric of “straight” photography is more repressive than it is evolutionary of/from Naturalism. Emerson’s own writings are steeped in this kind of coercive contradiction (“Do not call yourself an ‘artist-photographer’ (…) call yourself a photographer and wait for artists to call you brother.”) To look at Gatherers or Marsh Leaves now is to watch the tension between the indexical and the interpretive waver, and the photograph trying, and failing, to decide whether it is denotation or connotation.

Marina Abramović @ Saatchi Yates ★☆☆☆☆

I wrote a while ago about the Hesiodic myth-making of Saatchi Yates’ programming. Abramović’s show has done little to prove me wrong. “This landmark show,” reads the press release “re-imagines two of Abramovic’s iconic performance videos - ‘Blue Period’ and ‘Red Period’ - by transforming them from video works into a series of 1,200 individual photographic stills.”

The first question we must ask ourselves is why this translation was necessary - and what it achieves, beyond reaffirming Abramović’s position as postmodern saint. To return to Emerson, the “purity” of formalist seriality can only be acheived if the “impurities” of time, contingency, and interpretation are stripped away. What the show is trying to do (besides scrape out the bottom of the worlds most shallow barrel) is acheive a purification of gesture into image; but when the gestures are so mind-numbingly obvious (nail-biting, hair-pulling, codified theatrics of distress and arousal) you sort of have to concede that the point was never the gesture itself but the trite iconography of “female suffering” replayed until it hardens. What am I meant to do with this, you quite resonably ask, whatever, replies Marina. Is being horny the same as being afraid you ask again, and she stares at you blankly.

Robert C. Morgan describes the act of re-performance as a fetishistic, overdetermined act that risks turning vitality into “unmitigated kitsch” once it loses the historical and experiential ground of the original. “To contemplate the exigencies of performing a work of body art (…) from another time,” he argues in his 2010 article for PAJ, “is like transferring a four-by-five-inch photographic negative into a digital image.” Abramović’s conversion of her own performance repeats that act and becomes, as Morgan warns, “a self-willed fake.” She rehearses the postmodernist fantasy of autonomy by stripping it of whatever noumenal risk and reciprocity existed in the original recital (of which I doubt there was much to begin with), and then she does it another 1,199 times. Whatever.

Pissing @ Groucho’s ★★★★★

Arrive at Groucho’s. Do the sort of drugs that make you ask girls if you can feel their faces at Groucho’s. Listen to women read at Groucho’s. Sit, odalisque, at your boyfriend and his husband’s feet, both Scheherazade and Ingres, at Groucho’s. Embarrass yourself in front of Americans at Groucho’s. Have the longest piss of your life at Groucho’s.

We end up in a flat above a gallery, and I am an absolute angel about having given away all my fags. This is not generosity, this is martyrdom.

My boyfriend owns a vintage car with the sort of engine that makes little boys clutch their willies when we drive past. We drive to the Horniman, and in the cafe he pulls a peice of hair from my mouth with the sort of tenderness men usually reserve for guns and children. My neck and wrists are sore from the sort of sex that ended the Pahvali dynasty. It’s all sort of perfect.

It is not in Rat’s nature to die with dignity, or indeed to die at all. The one strung up in Adam’s truck was clearly meant to have lived forever but alas, the Lord is not always kind to creatures born in Louisiana. I watch it sway in the long stained-glass mirror as we swing onto the causeway over the marsh, dangling like a crucifix, the tail of a spoon in the neck of a champagne bottle.

“Faut l’tuer avant qu’y s’installent.”
(You have to kill them before they move in.)

When Adam speaks it makes me feel like a fascist, or worse, French. His Cajun is slick and slow. When I promised my editor I could speak the language I wasn’t lying but the way consonants curl and droop over that thick lower lip makes no sense to me; I might as well be sitting at the bottom of Babel. The working title is something ghastly and algorithmically generated, Bayou Blood: The Last of the Great Gator Hunters, the story of a thousand little SEO-friendly leeches sucking away.

Rat waves at us sadly while we cannon down the gravel road, the swamps rising on either side as Adam’s headlights catch and cast terrible shadows along the wetlands. An old church looms out of the darkness and he lights a cigarette.

“Ah, yes, well, they’re nasty little things, even in New York.” I say, opening the window as the spark of his lighter catches dead eyes. “Never more than six feet from Satan, that’s what they say!” I joke weakly.

I don’t reply. How the hell did he know I was protestant?

Dulac smells of sick animal leather; the wet marmalade of glossy flesh and flora drifts through the truck’s open window. We drive over something dead – a log, a dog – and the dashboard of Adam’s truck falls open to reveal a stack of sun-bleached, rubber-banded Polaroids. He’s in all of them. Shirtless in some, younger in others, holding up rats, raccoons, snakes, alligators, one where the blood is so thick it fogs the lens, one where the sky is red, each photo staged the same, central figure, outstretched arms, the beast below him.

“You’ve, ah, been doing this long?” I ask, gingerly picking up one where he’s got a headless serpent stretched between his fists like a lasso, the words EDEN PARK ‘04 scrawled in surprisingly neat scripture along the bottom.

“Oé, oé, j’fais ça longtemps.” he nods gravely. “D’puis before Katrina.”
(Yes, yes, I’ve been doing this a long time. Since before the Flood.)

I glance over to him, hoping for more, for some terrible postdiluvian story of a hospital overrun by locusts or a schoolhouse split open like a cantaloupe, kids’ desks floating in baptismal water, something that will get us clicks. Adam only shrugs, eyes slow on the road.

“We caught a lotta frogs that year,” he says, refuting the bait. “Nothing much else to do.”

This was the first thing I typed in the motel last night. My editor is a buck-toothed little fascist from Portland with the moral disposition of a televangelist; it had long since been his idea to send me on a pilgrimage to the swamps. 4,500 words, immersive tone, light regional colour, strong hook, murder of the lower class, keywords: gator, bayou, tradition, extinction, man v. beast, post-Katrina, pest control, Southern Gothic. I pictured smashing his head in with the Douay-Rheims from the bedside drawer while I typed.

We take another sharp turn, following the two other trucks down a narrowing strip of gravel, the flag of Terrebonne Parish hanging limply off the back of the lead vehicle. All three grind to a halt at what used to be a boat launch, now just a mud pit filled with torn netting. Adam flicks his cigarette into the cupholder and we step out into the clearing, the sound of cicadas ratcheting louder through the thick night air.

“Bon,” says Adam, “On pend l’viande là, là, pis là. Pas trop bas — faut pas qu’les poulettes nourrissent les p’tits. Garde l’doigt loin du gâchette, y’aura pas mal de bruit, mais c’est pas toujours elle.”
(Hang the meat there, there, and there. Not too low, the chickens need to bleed out without feeding the smaller ones. Keep your finger off the trigger, there’ll be some noise, but it’s not always her.)

He turns to me. “Elle fait pas d’bulles. S’il y a remous, tu cries pas. Tu shoot pas. Tu regardes.”
(She’ll eat you alive, cunt.)

One of his colleagues cocks a battered .22 Magnum with a crack down the stock. They’re used at point-blank range, straight into the soft spot at the base of the skull. I’d looked it up on my phone last night, in the motel.

Pale chickens are strung from the trees. I watch them go up, one by one, pale little carcasses lynched on great lengths of white wire, dangling in the pitiless glare of the trucks’ floodlights. I’m told to sit near the third line. Gun, camera, light. Watching. Adam, end of Man, squats down next to me and lights another cigarette, cupping it against the putrid breeze. My hands are shaking as I slam my wet fingers against my phonescreen.

“Tu cries pas,” he repeats softly. Like a husband, like a lover, my God. “T’comprends?”
Christ, is that a fucking harpoon?

Peace is the time of waiting for war. I watch Adam like a hawk, crouching amongst the cattails, smoke rising above the flat curve of his shoulders and that beast of a weapon between his thighs. I take one photo: the flash half-swallows his face in shadow, bleached and pre-digested by the slick tongue of the floodlight.

I take another of his colleagues. They were three, but now two, as the Lord devours the unclean thing and makes of it meat. When Ayyūb spoke of arrows and slingstones, of boiling pots over burning reeds, of the glistening wake behind it, one so wide and deep one would think the water had white hair, he did not know of these men. They do not kneel. Flat silence, black skin, rabbit foot.

When she comes it’s Rapture. The floodlights burst as something vast hurls itself from the water and drowns one chicken, two bites, Lazarus in scales, upwards like some uncovered Atlantis of marble-white milk and pink.

She’s so big, too big, she can’t fit in the frame, she snaps her gaping maw so wide it looks like stigmata the sickly blushing wet of wound Fuck I can see lunch I can see the End

According to Google, there is nothing in the Bible about rats. Moses, when he makes it out of the basket, is warned of the mole, the mouse, the great lizard of any kind, the gecko, the monitor lizard, the lizard, the sand lizard, the chameleon.

These are unclean to you among all that swarm. Whoever touches them when they are dead shall be unclean until the evening. When I watch the blood-yolk and maggots and glass explode from Rat’s body I understand shes just like me frfr

NY Labor Law § 27-b apply in louisiana
NY Labor Law § 27-b apply in Hell?

Then Leviathan turns, yes she turns, the pestilence of her huge weight is nothing against the trinity of American steel and the picked cotton and whip-scored flesh of the fields, her claws slip on the cloth, slick with dew and diesel, that traitor indigo, blessed be the bone-gnawed pivot of her girth as she slides from the metal with the flag still foaming at her teeth, salt-ragged, wet-threaded, swaddled like Jochebed’s child in all the ruin of the parish, and Adam shouts—

(NOAH TRIED TO STOP US ONCE BEFORE)

—and he lifts the harpoon writ long in rust and faith, and his boot finds its grip in the ribcage clag of the soil, and he is terrible, he is man, he is Adam before Snake, before shame, before rain—

(ATLANTIS IS A SWAMP)

—when Job’s sweet Leviathan snatches Adam in her gob a single tri-flange slices through the soft sculpture of her head, rod of Aaron halolike baptised in tendon and bile, inward, Jonah’d, knuckle first, it was given unto her to take him as it was given unto the angel to strike Egypt, forgive us Lord, for our weapons and men, for our wretched rattrap of a nation—

When I take the final photo he is smiling.

This peice was inspired by several things, incuding watching a handsome blonde dealing with rat infestation in my parents’ home in the South of France and Dove Chevalier’s latest project, but mostly by a conversation had over a very fine lunch with a man called n-word Joe, who told me about the history of West Feliciana Parish and the Angola State Prison. A longer peice about it, him and our friends called The American Diaries, a semi-imagined sex-and-drugscapade across the red states of the greatest country in the world, has been beautifully illustrated and published by in Ethics. If you live in the USA you can order a copy for yourself (free pickup in NYC) or grab a PDF here.

This is but a brief return to fiction before my longer, nastier, smarter article about Phyllida Barlow next week. Thank you everybody who came to hear me read at Recitations last week; especially my concubine who took care of me for the next twenty-four hours while I threw up and took baths. I would look into your eyes on the floor of a Frenchman’s home for a thousand years.

NIRU RATNAM — Adham Faramawy, The Earth Laughs in Flowers
★★★★☆

“Where Order in Variety we see,
And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree.”

Alexander Pope, Windsor-Forest: To the Right Honourable George Lord Lansdown, 1773

“It is the folly of too many, to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.”

Jonathan Swift, The Conduct of the Allies, 1771

Faramawy’s rivers are Windsor Forest after empire, after smog. Like Pope’s (whose 1773 poem Windsor-Forest: To the Right Honourable George Lord Lansdown, his work takes inspiration from), The Earth Laughs in Flowers’ pastoral vision naturalises political economy and politicises the economy of nature; unlike Pope, whose Thames flows “for all mankind” in perfect balance, Faramawy stages the river as a site of contamination and contest. There is no poetic ratification of peace (or the London coffee-house goers’ version of it), no panegyrical georgic of the Treaty of Utrecht or the Tideway Tunnel.

The use of parakeets as postcolonial stand-in is especially good. London’s wild ring-necked parakeets are often read as an invasive species, despite being synanthropic, hoisted their own mythological petard (originally from East Asia and Africa, escaped from Hendrix’s Carnaby Street flat, from The African Queen film set, etc). In Hindu iconography, the parakeet is the bird of Kamadeva, sometimes Rati, symbols of erotic speech and fertility, which links nicely to both Pope’s feminised Windsor Forest nymphs and Faramwy’s queer-erotic counter-pastoral.

I do fear, however, that video art is dying. You can be as clever and sincere as you like, which Faramawy’s work is, but the problem is not sincerity; it is faith, not just in the form but in an audience virtuous enough to sit down and pay attention to something for 18 minutes. If we had been capable of this after Blenheim, there would be no dead doves in the Thames.

GILLIAN JASON GALLERY — Emily Ponsonby, A Warm Life Through Butter
★★★☆☆

Automatic star awarded for the last name Ponsonby, what a fantastic use of vowels.

Anyway, A Warm Life Through Butter is marginally better than her March show with GJ. These latest works by Ponsonby (God, I’m going to call my son this, that or Victor, short for Victoria the Lesser) are tender, textured, domestic yet lively. I like them a lot, seriously, these are well-crafted and atmospheric works with a lot of feeling behind them; straight up and down, confidant, beautiful art.

I’m just very iffy about works that has to signpost the viewers’ participation. Ponsoby does this with a sort of (Lucian) Freudian fish-eye, a top-down POV/perspective that posits the audience as a contributor to the scenes she depicts: someone sketching at a family-style dinner table, someone shucking peas for an al fresco meal in the sun, someone reading a love-letter at a edge of an outdoor bistro, toes and fingers and hands stuck at the front-bottom plane of the works that suggest that I too, am tucking into a rustic spread somewhere warm and beautiful. This is the fish-eye as mirror stage; the hand that holds the wineglass could just as well be mine, an uncanny body stretched and foreshortened, severed, grafted into somebody else’s dinner.

The trouble is is that I’m not an artist at my found family’s table, nor am I a writer in a bohemian cafe. I’m a hungover 26-year-old chainsmoker in a gallery on Great Titchfield Street with a wet hole in her boot and enough money to buy either cigarettes or dinner for the next week but not both, and certainly not enough to buy any of the paintings I’m looking at. Perhaps this is the point, perhaps the melancholia of méconnaissance is a feature and not a bug of the work, as it is in Alexandra Zarins’ paintings, which employ a similar fish-eye perspective to dramatise the mirror stage as misrecognition, but depict (what I find to be far more fitting) scenes of chaos rather than domesticity. Perhaps it’s just the oldest trick in the book, that slight coercion of “relatability” which lets bourgeois collectors see themselves at the table. Either way, A Warm Life Through Butter still made coming home from the PV to my single blue-lit boiled egg and half-bottle of Sancerre feel rather cold in comparison.

Someone, not me, should write about why these sorts of POV angles are making such a resurgence; one suspects it may largely be to do with TikTok, Evelyn Waugh, the numbers 5, 25, 5, possibly even 19.

MAXIMILLIAN WILLIAM — Group exhibition, A light here required a shadow there
★★★☆☆

“He must buy a new carpet for the staircase. Perhaps she would go with him to buy a new carpet for the staircase. ”

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 1927

Interestingly, more scenes of domesticity here. Surely it says nothing worrying about current society that we are turning to painting to express the kitchen table, the family dinner, the owned home. Lacan argues that “love creates its object from what is lacking in reality” and I suggest the same can be said about representational art.

The curation of this show is divine and does the best it can with what it has; what unites the show despite its stylistic spread is how each painter stages what is missing rather than what is present. Rimantė Mikulovičiūtė’s dining rooms revive the table as a civic form, Arendt’s space of the polis, Lefebvre’s production of space; Dylan Williams miniaturises the Romantic sublime, Turner’s skies only appearing because they no longer exists in real life/outside of paintings/literature/memory; Benjamin Sasserson explicitly evokes acheiropoieta (images not made by human hands; specifically St Veronica’s veil, itself an image of an image)1, Bu Shi piles Buddhist-European vanitas iconography into an afterlife of objects that only accrue power once their living referents are extinct (skulls, coral, crystals); Grant Falardeau… well, Grant Falardeau is also there.

To return to Lacan, what is repeated in these works is precisely what is missing; love, reverence, even beauty create their object out of lack. The title of the show is taken from Virgina Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, when she has Lily Briscoe explain her painting to William Bankes: “a light here required a shadow there.” It’s part of a larger passage where Bankes admires a triangular shape, notices how Lily balances light and darkness in her canvas, not to reproduce a likeness of Mrs. Ramsay and her son, but to evoke something more general; a mood, a tension, a missing centre of coherence. What Lily wants to convey is not presence (the mother, the child, “a subject which, they agreed, Raphael had treated divinely” as Lily puts it) in their full form, but the crossplay between what is shown and what is withheld, what absence makes illumination legible, why Mary is more beautiful sans Jesus. If love creates its object from what is lacking in reality, then Lily’s dictum is its painterly corollary: light is only ever legible against shadow, intimacy against distance, presence against absence. The exhibition takes this seriously, or tries to, but it’s one of those ‘don’t think of a pink elephant’ kind of situations; the more insistently absence is staged, the more noticable its contrivance becomes.

However, five stars for Colton Karpman’s The Shelf staging.
In fact, five stars for the concept of The Shelf in general. I love this gallery.

MY 1980S DISHWASHER, LA MORT DE MONSIEUR KIRK
★☆☆☆☆

Refilling (as one must) my dishwasher this morning I came to the conclusion that it was wiser not to lay my big Le Creuset against my little gay mugs lest it deprive them of cleansing, before remembering that water has no morality; it will, as per Pascal’s Law, fill the space given. This is in some way related to Charlie Kirk.2 He will be afforded the version of heaven he believed in, as will my darling porcelain soup bowls in my 1985 Bosch S610, sluicing away the six-day old sushi from the chopsticks I put in my hair when I’ve given away all my bobbles to handsome blondes. As the only man on Substack has noted, “Rejoicing over someone’s death is vulgar exploitation, pointing out that rejoicing over someone’s death is vulgar exploitation is also vulgar exploitation, this is because immediacy itself is vulgar exploitation.” The only solution, I believe, is to simply never die at all, which none of us ever will. As Heraclitus says, “upon those stepping into the same rivers, ever different waters flow.” There are Kirk’s children, and there are those make memes about the phlegethon poured from an idiot’s throat.

FINAL THOTS

• I am enjoying how increasingly obvious art market reports are becoming. Established price points are causing a “rebound in confidence”, you say? Larger galleries that fast-tracked artists into premature stardom are now “facing the consequences”, you say? Eating the mold growing in the corner of my shower is “bad for my health”, you say?

• Accidentally took an Italian panettiere to Pizza Express this week, who produced a peice of criticism that I feel may be relevant: "the amount in which we debase ourselves to consume [Pizza Express food, contemporary art] is not so abhorrent that we cannot enjoy ourselves." Brecht speaks of this, probably.

• Very, very badly would like get a tattoo above my pussy that says 𒅥, but alas, I fear whatever Sumerian diety I would summon would not approve of my lifestyle choices.

Anyway, I’ve returned to the real world, I have ninety unanswered emails and a martyr complex, please remind/reprimand me if I’ve been useless, etc. Thank you to everyone who came to ’s Antics last month, I’ll be reading again at ’s Recitations at on the 25th of September.

OZYMANDIAS IN HELL, OZYMANDIAS IN ITALY

Desponsamus te, mare, in signum veri perpetuique domini

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
★★☆☆☆

“The Thinker was originally conceived not in heroic isolation, but as part of Rodin’s monumental Gates of Hell.”

— National Gallery of Art web entry on The Thinker (Le Penseur), 1904, by Auguste Rodin

“Think, Reader, if I was discomforted
At utterance of the accursed words;
For never to return here I believed.”

— Inferno, Canto VIII

Allegedly the Italians contributed quite a lot to art history, but to confirm this one may have to speak to an Italian, possibly even a male one.1 However I was offered a room at the Danieli in exchange for some consultancy work (something I’m trying to take more seriously; if you or a loved one have a museum that’s too woke or not woke enough, whatever, please do get in contact; my rates are reasonable and my advice is verifiably good) so I’ve ended up in Venice for a few days.

I’m allegedly here for a celebration of Peggy Guggenheim’s 127th birthday. My hotel is in the Schiavoni quarter, meaning "Slavs" in Old Italian, specifically merchants and sailors from Dalmatia (present-day Croatia and Slovenia). The last time I was in Venice was during last years’ Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. I noted at the time a certain cosmic tension between this theme and the fact that Venice was founded by refugees on the date of the Annunciation: a Marian birth of a city without earth, immaculately conceived in water.2 Their empire ran on salt — salt routes, salt levies, salt warehouses — and salt itself, God’s cum, was sacred: preservative, covenantal, the “salt of the earth” that Christ exhorts his followers to be, haunted always by the Freudian tang of genesis. To imagine Venice as Mary is also to imagine her as saline: virgin, generative, suspended between conception and crystallisation. It makes sense that Peggy Guggenheim, a mother-refugee of another kind, would find her sanctuary here.

However, if we must speak of Italian exiles, then we must speak of Dante; if we must speak of Dante, then we must speak of dantismo. Zygmunt Barański critiques the long-standing cult of reception, scholarship, and public criticism of the writer as weighed down by orthodoxies and an overwhelming mass of commentary, comparing the canonised, modern image of the author to Ravennate sculptor Enrico Pazzi’s monument in Florence’s Piazza Santa Croce. He describes the statue in the first chapter of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Literature, Doctrine, Reality (2020) with the poet’s “head wreathed in a laurel crown and firmly grasping the Commedia in his right hand, (…) loom[ing] pensive and somewhat scornful as he gazes into the distance, ignoring his surroundings, left arm supporting a long swathing mantle.”

This Dante — detached, disdainful, reflexively withdrawing (from) his own work — is to Barański “not just fixed but also set apart, (…) underpinned by an irresistible and unruly mass of exegesis stretching back to the fourteenth century.” Both Pazzi and Barański’s Dante becomes a set of symbols codified by Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante/vita: laurel, volume, mantle; hero, scribe, God.

The reason I bring this up is not because I’m a Dante scholar (I’ve only read La Commedia and the semi-autobiographical Convivio, mostly squinted at through a haze of Dunhill smoke when I was 21 and trying to convince myself that I would do well in Florence)3 but because walking around Venice has reminded me of a very fundamental Lack in contemporary (or at least post-9/11, as Hal Foster would argue) art: our inability to monumentalise.

Barański is not wrong in eliciting the image of a figure warped by retroactivism: Boccaccio’s romanticised biography (written in 1357, nearly 40 years after Dante’s death) has been the basis for the vast majority of the poet’s interpretations. From the editorial authority of Scartazzini and Vandelli to the idealist-nationalist framings of Gentile and Croce, the genteel Anglophone portraits of John Addington Symonds and Paget Toynbee to the patriotic poet-laureate of the Risorgimento, each tradition has constructed its own “permanent” version of Dante; personalised statues produced after centuries of selectively chiseling away at Boccaccio’s vita’s version of his life and history.

I’m not going to rehash the discourse about Foreigners Everywhere, but there are immediate parallels to be drawn between Pedrosa’s treatment of identity and of Dante’s editorial custodians. The codification of ego qua contemporary metonymies (Shakespeare was gay, Joan of Arc was non-binary, Martha P Johnson was trans, etc) is neither new nor interesting; Boccaccio wanted a saint while Croce wanted a revanchist; Pedrosa wants a plural Venice while Flavia Frigeri wants a martyr Guggeinheim. None of these are neutral, and none are eternal, but all are born — as Zizek notes of all restorative/reconstructionist history — of a Lacanian desire to find memetic subjecthood where there is none.

For a while now I’ve been talking about something I’m tentatively referring to as the Ozymandias Effect: an influx of artists and galleries showing work that are trying, however tacitly, to embody what we are afraid will be lost in the face of Antioch; annihilation via nuclear war, climate change, governmental suppression, AI apocalypse, all the good stuff we like to pretend is going to happen rather than worrying about traffic lights or the homeless.

As the concept of dantismo and last year’s Biennale proves, the vast majority of art is a reaction to and not a reflection of contemporary anxieties (no art has produced a revolution, but revolutions produce the best art). This is what we actually mean when we rally around the cry of ‘All Art Is Political’: not that all/any art directly engages or even challenges actual societal structures, but that it tells us something about the socio-economic realities of its creators and audiences. All art, regardless of authorial intention, tells us what materials are available, what restrictions are respected, what censorships are rebuffed, what languages are are expected of their audience. What we have difficulty coming to terms with is that to the future custodian of culture, the text on the back of my toilet bleach will do all of this just as serviceably as a Kaws sculpture.4

Like beasts we seek always to mark territory, unlike them we understand the passage of time. This is the primary function of all literature, all art: to piss in the sand hard and well enough to say I was here (and) this is what I wanted (and) this is what didn’t want me to. Venetian merchants smuggled the the body of St Mark out of Alexandria under layers of pork so the Muslim inspectors wouldn’t touch it. The desired repositioning of man above animal, above death, is as evident as it was in Dante and Boccaccio as it is at the Biennale and Guggenheim. Please remember us, say Saville and Dali and da Silva, please remember we were good, please let my mother’s sandals survive the sands that consumed the King of Kings.

BLASPHEMERS, SODOMITES & MONEYLENDERS

Non fer mai drappi Tartari né Turchi— oddio, il gatto è un neoliberista

Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi, Freudian Typo @ Hayward Gallery
★★★★☆

“Economy… is not simply about not spending money. [It is] the judgment which sensible men make of the wants of the moment, and of the best means of satisfying those wants at the least expense and with the greatest efficiency.”

— Palmerstone, Commons and Lords Hansard of August 1862

“A wiser man than you,
For in his teaching has separated
The intellect potential from the soul,
Because he could not find its proper seat.”

— Inferno, Canto XXV

Sadly this show will be over by the time this reviewdump comes out, but I’m mentioning it because a) it’s very good and b) it touches directly on the problem I’ve been circling: how we navigate the mare magnum of Dante criticism and, by extension, the mare magnum of contemporary art. The tenuous but (as I’m sure you’ll agree) totally genius through line I’m attempting to thread through the needle of my second pint of Asahi is the clash between intellect and affection, reason and emotion, taxonomy and play, the subjectiveness of economy and the objectiveness of art.

Avarzami and Ahadi’s collaboration is concise, humorous, extremely well-curated. There is a natural spatial manoeuvre from left to right, appropriate for a show about the English language, which when combined with use of Enlightenment labelling conventions is an extremely funny and Sapir–Whorfian way of exploring how the English tongue is knotted up with the vocabulary of finance and the development of the debtor/creditor relation. Nietzsche speaks of this in On the Genealogy of Morality, arguing that morality and guilt (schuld in German) are rooted in the same word as debt, as does Maurizio Lazzarato in The Making of the Indebted Man, arguing that that modern subjectivity is fundamentally debt-based; anchored by English as global lingua franca of finance as a mirror of globalised neoliberal control. The word “capital” itself comes from caput, Latin for head, linking money to livestock-counting, “redemption” means both buying back a bond and being saved from sin, “obligation” is both moral duty and financial liability.

Dante, of course, already knew where to put the financiers. In Inferno XVII he casts the usurers into the seventh Circle garlanded by grotesque parodies of heraldry, usually of Florentine families he didn’t like: E com’ io riguardando tra lor vegno, in una borsa gialla vidi azzurro che d’un leone avea faccia e contegno.5 Usurers (moneylenders) are kept beneath the monster Geryon, allegory for Fraud itself, a beast with an honest man’s face atop a serpent’s body and scorpion’s tail. To Dante, usury was not just a crime against neighbour but a violence against Art and the divine order that should govern labour, craft, and creation:

“Arte, come tu sai, è quasi nipote
a Dio, e segue, come ’l maestro insegna,
di lui; e però che l’arte si conduce
a Dio, ne parli io, e non più segno.”

“Art, as you know, is the grandchild of God;
by Art, and Nature’s means, man ought to thrive.
But usurers take another road:
they scorn Nature in herself and her follower, Art,
and place their hope in something else.”

At the centre of Freudian Typo sits Britain’s own Geryon, a hyper-realistic sculpture of Palmerston, the Foreign Office’s late Chief Mouser cat, staring at an electronic motorway sign announcing Truth and Reconsolidation. It begins with the rhyme of The Old Woman and Her Pig, itself a chain of deferred obligations, a miniature economy of delay, dependence, and transaction, then proceeds through five accumulative large works — nursery rhyme, coin, hide, stock exchange, mint, cat — and from there the wall-painted line snakes toward catastrophe. A CRT monitor shows a building collapsing in ultra-slow motion (the suggestion of the Twin Towers is hard to miss) and beside it, an enlarged Monopoly-style board piece for the EBRD on Bank Street. The trail ends with six slabs of flat concrete, pierced with three bicycle racks. It is funny and bleak in equal measure: reason masquerading as affect, affection undone by bureaucracy, no ascent to beatitude, only a stock graph plunging into ruin.

This is where the Dante parallel closes the loop. The question of whether the climax of worship — or of art, of money, the ultimate, ejaculative veneration of God and/or the Gallerist — is achieved by what Aquinas called voluntas (affection, the spontaneity of delight) or intellectus (intellect, the science of classification) is literalised in Freudian Typo: rational taxonomies (finance, bureaucracy, institutional “truth”) collide with the irrational slips of nursery rhyme, typo, humour, play. This haunts Bonaventure just as Baranski’s account of the pensier contemplativi; how do we know God, asks the final canto of Paradisio, when we finally reach the end of Jacob’s Ladder and reach the Fixed Stars?6 Do we meet Him in su l’ultima spera through an appetite for knowledge or delight? What does it mean to seek the peak of a graph that will never end, to pursue limited language in limitless maths?

The theological question persists, although the medium has shifted. Where Aquinas argued that eternal life is achieved via ‘an act of the intellect’ and Bonaventure argued for ‘all intellectual operations to be relinquished (…) for the height of affection to be totally transferred and transformed into God’, today we outsource the climax to capital and quite loudly proclaim the answer is MONEY PLLLLEAAAASEEEE. The affective desire to be adored qua immortalisation is real — otherwise neither galleries nor the internet would exist — but the form has been captured by other institutions. Freudian Typo restages this imago dei of the Beatific Vision; Jacob’s Ladder rising through Saturn to the Fixed Stars transformed into a ticker line descending to the third ring of the seventh circle.

SOHO READINGS SERIES, ON THE RAG, THE REDEATH OF NEO-PASSÉISM

It begins, as all empires end, with a celebration

When I read the article in British Vogue from the gal who failed to get laid at SRS I was massively tempted to call it a skill issue; I got laid so well from my first attendance that I got a relationship and a new kink out of the affair, but when I googled what she looked like I felt it would be too mean. Anyway, there is little to say about SRS that hasn’t been said by and , these are fun social events with good writers and excellent readers (skills not always found in the same body) MC’d by the manically charming Tom Willis, whose talent for keeping a crowd in line may yet serve well at Dealey Plaza.

There were some real heavy hitters this time. Francesca Wade opened the evening with an excerpt from her book on Gertrude Stein that was, simply put, Good Art Writing; I spend so much of my life trawling through bad press releases that sometimes I forget how nice it is to read/listen to descriptive prose of art (even if it is of Picasso). Orlando Reade’s short story about “retroactive jealousy” (a totally valid condition, 20,000 strong on Reddit) was quotably funny, Susie Boyt’s estranged mother-daughter picnic was tenderly distressing, John-Baptiste Oduor’s story was slow to start but had some of the strongest final sentences.

Coleridge argued in Biographia Literaria that the best poetry could survive paraphrase as prose; Andrew Durbin’s work could very well have been written as prose, or perhaps not at all. On dit que lorsque les bons Américains meurent, ils vont à Paris. The poem about angels was breathtakingly good, the others I could take or leave.

The crowning jewel, and accidental axis of my weekend, was Stephahie Wambugu (Lonely Crowds available on Amazon now; Mr Falcon answer your Instagram I still have your copy in my bag). Her reading at SRS was an exceptionally nimble restaging of the exhausting “here’s what it’s like to date in your thirties in the big city” genre; wherein the protagonist starts betting baptised at various churches in order to pick up women. I was reminded of the early scenes in Fight Club where the narrator begins regularly attending cancer support groups in hope of resolving a surplus-jouissance in the other’s suffering; the support group, like the church in Steph’s piece, becomes a mise-en-scène of the objet petit a of sex, where the subject tries to patch over their lack with someone else’s. The fact that, as Lacan says, “desire full stop is always the desire of the Other” is a fact woefully missed by the vast majority of autofiction about dating/relationships but not by Wambugu, who leans directly into it.

I call Wambugu the axis of my weekend because her next reading was at the On The Rag launch party, organised by the equally charming Sammy Loren of Casual Encounterz. CA is likely the reason for Soho Reading Series’ existence; if one were to trace the renaissance of the live reading scene back to anything Loren’s endeavours in LA would be a good place to start. On The Rag takes the intellectual and aesthetic format of a very British invention — the celebrity rag — and combines it with the internet’s basest collective pleasure: anonymous gossip forums. Loren opened the evening with a reading of one such anonymous submission which described the forum’s founder as a ‘complete prick’ — the joke, of course, being that he was reading his own review.

I’m afraid I missed the first few readings (sadly including Holly Connolly’s, who wrote a very good piece for the Paris Review about divorce a few years ago that I think about whenever I find one of ex-husband’s things knocking about my apartment) because Beasy’s (one of the few Soho establishments still manned by bone fide DILFs) was so full that I was driven outside to stand in the street with Phillipa Horan’s rottweiler (picture above). I managed to squeeze back through (dog in tow) in time for Zoe Guttenplan (excellent reader), Matthew Sterling Benson-Strohmayer (more gorgeous men on tables please), and Yelena Zhelezov and Ed Luker (whose pieces both flirted with the now-standard libidinal exhibitionism of autofiction, but pulled it off with just enough restraint to feel earned rather than expected). Wambugu finished the evening off by keeping to her theme of refracted religion and relationships, this time about a New York friend setting her up with an allegory of God/Jesus.

A lot of the discourse-complaints about these sorts of events, both here and overseas, tends to revolve around the idea that it becomes very onanistic (or, to borrow Essendine’s term, Hapsburgian) very quickly. Put a punch of young horny people in a room and they will all eventually end up writing about being young and horny, which I am painfully aware of as I, too, am writing about writing about being young and horny. Live readings always reveal the split subject of literature: the text on the page (silent, private, yours) versus the voice in the room (public, communal, leaking Bakhtinian dialogism). Sometimes good writers are bad readers and vice versa, but either way the event always tips writing into the theatre of being-seen-versus-seeing, being-read-versus-reading. The libidinal economy of this is precisely what Steven Craig Hickman diagnoses in Neo-Decadence and the the corpse of Neo-Passéism: retrophilic necrophagia of the likes of Ronald Firbank, Iain Sinclair, Derek Jarman, Angela Carter, Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson, the “prize-ceremony cathedrals of London”, the careful reassurance that “literature is alive because the corpse still twitches.”

Last week I was chatting to a London artworld persona who has recently agreed to start hosting live readings at their establishment. “This is simply the way things are going,” they say, somewhere between resignation and woe. “But I suppose it’s a good thing, as long as the quality is kept high.” A pause, a sip. Then, almost as an afterthought: “Of course, [the organiser] and I may not entirely agree on what counts as quality.” They look at me pointedly, having just read the piece I planned to present at the next event.

I don’t want to say that what we’re witnessing is another libidinal leak in literature’s long death-rattle, because a) it would admitting I’m part of the problem and b) it really is all tremendously good fun and ran by lovely people, but this is likely the point. What the reader-audience must now decide, I suppose, is whether “ruthlessly assert[ing] the Platonic core of ethical violence” in regards to Making Literature Great Again is worth missing out on getting laid — or, at the very least, writing about getting laid.

FINAL THOTS

• Full Frontal Theatre have produced one of the funniest ‘reviews of reviews’ in living memory. I include a link here. The show in question, Rodney Black: Who Cares? It’s Working! is one of the only plays I’ve seen this year (possibly since 2017) that manages to tackle and interrogate the premise of gender and freedom of speech in art and the culture wars with any humour, elegance or intelligence, of which it has all three of in abundance. Go see it, you’ll love it, or you won’t, who cares etc. It’s on at the Arcola in early September.

• Tabish Khan has predictably joined the War On Artspeak on the side that posits that most art writing is bad because most art writers are bad, and not because most art is bad. Why choose "liminal" over "in-between," "palimpsest" over "layered"?, he writes for Maxwell Museums, Why throw around "ontological," "praxis," and "phenomenology"? yes Tabs, in fact, why use any words at all, as they all mean the same thing, no word is different from another and every word in interchangeable with the next, even the long frightening ones that the CIA invented in 1957, which as we all know are the sole barrier between poor people and 10,000 euro paintings. The only good press release ever written was the thesaurus.

• Some more things we should be importing from the American literary scene:

  • finger clicking instead of applause

  • fist bumps instead of handshakes, cheek kisses, oral sex

  • smoking Parliaments even when you’re not stone broke

  • skipping over multiple pages of your work

  • hand-writing your fiction

  • one single gin and tonic, payed for by a beautiful lesbian

Michael Kirbride allegedly a wrote the The 36 Lessons of Vivec — a pseudo-scriptural account of a warrior-poet god's apotheōsis through sex, violence, and language — by imbibing psilocybin mushrooms and LSD and locking himself in his apartment for a week (the above photo was allegedly taken by current Bethesda CEO Todd Howard after his colleague failed to turn up to work for five days). The only time I did LSD I sat on a rock and thought about triangles for six hours, so this is in my own way a homage to Kirkbride’s writing and worldbuilding.

For those of you who have not played the Elder Scrolls games,
a) do you enjoy speaking to women? are they kind? do they feel as nice as they smell?
b) it’s a high fantasy role-playing game franchise developed by Bethesda Softworks, first released in 1994, set in a world populated by men, mer (elves), and beastfolk whose cultures reflect a dense palimpsest of real-world mythological, linguistic, and colonial analogues. The vast majority of its lore was written by Kirkbride between the years of 1996 and 2004, and covers a world in which divine intervention, dream-logic, and recursive history are central to both narrative and gameplay.

I’m not breaking new ground by suggesting that any modern video game’s lore is heavily influenced by European mytho-historiographical sources. However, one parallel I am particularly interested in exploring is the structural and symbolic echo between The Song of Pelinal and Homeric epic — particularly the Iliad’s account of Achilles, whose grief, fury, and eventual death form the template for a certain kind of mythic masculinity in crisis.

This is a huge departure from my usual art-posting. I assume the Venn diagram of people who care about contemporary art and people who care about The Elder Scrolls is two circles halfway across the continent from eachother, but alas, I have retired to the South of France to eat cheese and have poolside sex until September and therefore am in no position to write about the London art scene for the foreseeable future.1 That being said, sadposting about my divorce seemed to go down well; I hope the same grace will be extended to this piece.

APPETITE AS TRANSGRESSION, THE LAW OF MEAT, PLATO & HESIOD’S CANNIBALISM

“Would that somehow my spirit and fury would drive me
to hack your meat and eat it raw.”

— Achilles to Hector, The Iliad 22.346–347 (trans. Richmond Lattimore)

“All language is based on meat. Do not let the sophists fool you.”

— The 36 Lessons of Vivec, Sermon 27 (The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind)

The Song of Pelinal tells the story of Pelinal Whitestrake, a god-made warrior sent to help the rebel slave-queen Alessia overthrow the Ayleid elves of Cyrodiil. Fighting alongside her consort, the winged bull-man Morihaus, Pelinal wages a brutal crusade, slaughtering huge swathes of Ayleids in bouts of trance-like violence called Madnesses, growing increasingly unstable. When his lover, the hoplite and grain-slave Huna, is killed in battle, Pelinal enters his final and most lethal Madness yet, defeating the Ayleid half-god Umaril the Unfeathered, eventually being ambushed and torn apart by the surviving elf-kings.

The parallels to Achilles are immediate: Pelinal, like the Greek hero, is a semi-divine warrior whose twink-companion’s death — Huna as Patroclus — propels him into a state of apocalyptic fury. His Madnesses mirror Achilles’ aristeia, both acts of vengeful, transcendent violence that rupture the symbolic order. Alessia echoes Helen as both the cause and prize of war, while Morihaus, her bull-consort, reflects Paris in his erotic, non-heroic masculinity. Both heroes inhabit schema of sacrificial transformation, and both would see the world remade through the annihilation of their beloved.

As noted by Jason Pitruzzello in his (excellent) article Crusade and the Mythic Other in the Knights of the Nine, the Ayleids already function within the Elder Scrolls mythos as a colonial fantasy’s primeval Other, both origin and enemy; they are the Nephilim of the Book of Numbers, Virgil’s Aeneids, de Monmouth’s giants, Beowulf’s Grendel, Shakespeare’s Caliban. But they are also the stand in for the objet petit a, the unattainable object-cause of desire: their extermination is a libidinal attempt to erase the stain of alterity, to resolve the trauma of difference. When Pelinal returns to Alessia after one of his Madnesses, he claims of the wet red viscera dripping from his mace that “these were their eastern chieftains, no longer full of their talking.” In Lacanian terms, it is the speech of the Other that constitutes the subject; to be full of talking is to be full of law, of Logos, of signification. Slaughter — physical, manifest, Real — renders the Other’s desire null, their symbolic power voided.2

To confront or consume the Other is to attempt mastery over this, to fill the lack that defines subjecthood. The psycho-symbolism of conquest is a recurring theme within the Elder Scrolls universe as a gesture of metaphysical rupture and heretical power. The Bosmer’s Green Pact forbids harming plant life and ritualises cannibalism as ecological necessity; the dismemberment of the god Lorkhan, whose body becomes Mundus (cognate of Chronos), renders the mortal world itself a site of divine devouring; the Serpent constellation swallows other stars as cosmic sign of endless hunger/annihilation; Ulfric Stormcloak “shouts [the High King Torygg] to pieces.” Pelinal “called out Haromir of Copper and Tea [and] ate his neck-veins” and from the start of the Song is named “the Bloody, for he drank it in victory.” To involve the mouth, to Eat the Other in The Elder Scrolls is to unmake boundaries between self and non-self, body and symbol, mortal and divine.

Contrarily, cannibalism in Greek mythology is used to divide the divine from the mundane. According to Plato’s Republic, the nature of the tyrant in society is that of the cannibal, marked by insatiable appetite and the absence of restraint, ready to sacrifice the well-being of the people to satisfy his own objectives. This id-based savagery is only tempered by humanity’s adherence to Zeus’s laws, an obedience to the superego-injuction as described by Hesiod in the Theogony [535–540]:

ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ θεοὶ ἄνδρες ἐνὶ Μηκωνῇ διερίζον
ἤδη, τότε Πρoμηθεὺς θεῶν ἀγαπητὸς ἀνὰκτων
βοῦν διέταξ᾽, ἀπάτην φρεσὶ μηχανώμενος ἢθε:
ἑξῆς δὲ διήλασε, καὶ διέθηκε σοφισσάμενος,
σπλάγχνα μὲν καὶ κρέα πίειρα ταναὴν ἐνὶ ῥινῷ

But when gods and men were disputing at Mecone,
then Prometheus, dear to the lords of the gods,
divided up a great ox, devising deceit in his mind;
he separated the parts and arranged them cleverly,
the innards and rich flesh he placed wrapped in the ox’s hide.

When Prometheus apportions this sacrificial share between gods and mortals, the gods receive only the burning fat and bones, while the true flesh — the edible meat — is reserved for humanity. Detienne argues that “men received the meat because to live they have to eat flesh, perishable flesh, such as they themselves are made of. The gods alone received the aromas, perfumes, the irrefutable substances which constitute the superior foods reserved for the immortals.”3

Achilles’ desire to eat Hector is, in effect, an expression of his desire to transcend the symbolic limits of the mortal/human by violating the boundaries of law, kinship, ritual. He, like Pelinal, feels wronged by the Gods, not just in his lover’s death but by the shattered mongrel-identity left by his semi-divine parentage. To eat the enemy raw — unmediated by fire, civility, or the social contract — is to revert to a state of pure drive, beyond the law of the father/superego, beyond Zeus’s partition of sacrifice, just as Pelinal’s own act of consumption represents a radical transgression of the symbolic order. Both become what Lacan might call the one who identifies not with the ego but with the drive itself. The dream, to borrow Pelinal’s own words, no longer needs its dreamer. The fantasy collapses, but the subject endures.

RADIANCE AS EGO IDEAL, THE NARCISSISTIC MASK, CELESTIAL SEMEN

“And among them shone Hector with the gleaming helm,
like the bright star that rises…”

— Iliad, 11.62–64

“[And] Umaril was laid low, the angel face of his helm dented into an ugliness which made Pelinal laugh, [and his] unfeathered wings broken off with sword strokes delivered while Pelinal stood.”

— The Song of Pelinal, Volume 7: On His Battle with Umaril and His Dismemberment (The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion)

Both Hector and Umaril the Unfeathered, respective enemies of Achilles and Pelinal, are othered via the fetish-object of the helm; a psychic structure of radiant heroism and projection of coherence, authority, of idealised masculinity. Just as Pelinal’s epithet of “the Star-Made Knight” foreshadows his death, as does Hector’s: the star’s brilliance is not enduring; like Phaethon’s chariot it burns brightest before descent, it is the tragic overreach of the ego, the precursor of the Lacanian eruption of jouissance, pleasure carried beyond its limit, the orgasm right before ejaculating into the stars.

Like Achilles, Pelinal is the death drive made manifest; the castrator and breacher of symbolic order. Their ontological conditions — Achilles’ aristeia and Pelinal’s Madnesses — embody Lacan’s méconnaissance, the mirror-stage of misrecognition (in Pelinal’s case the rejection/overcoming, but more on that later) of a symbolic knowledge (savoir). In Pelinal it is described as manifesting “beneath the Pelinal’s star-armor [as] a chest that gaped open to show no heart, only a red rage shaped diamond-fashion.” For all his martial masculinity, he contains within him a site of generative difference, love without subjecthood, of symbolic unmaking: the absence of a heart is not a Lack but a rejection of the stable, sentimental subject, stigmata invoked by yonic imagery in its gaping form.

Achilles, too, undergoes a female-coded/enabled physical manifestation of fury, a halo of fire: “round about his mighty shoulders Athene flung her tasselled aegis, and around his head the fair goddess set thick a golden cloud, and forth from the man made blaze a gleaming fire.” [18.204-214] He too sublimates his divinity through a visual disturbance that renders him untouchable, both crowned by marks of onto-theological excess that halo them not in sanctity but in wrath. These are bodies radiant with destruction, their glows not redemptive but symptomatic of a psyche split between divine drive and mortal form.

This resulting todestrieb, killing as pure compulsion, untethered from reason, kinship, or symbolic reward haunts both heroes, “enact[ed], rather than [spoken], as language without exertion is dead witness.” [Song of Pelinal vol. 6: On His Madness] When Achilles “raged over the plain like something more than mortal, [and] the river Xanthus boiled with the corpses he flung in, and the water cried out to the gods in protest at the slaughter”, he kills Trojans in a non-human, trance-like state. Pelinal too enters “fits of anger and nonsense [during which he] would fall into the Madness, where whole swaths of lands were devoured in divine rampage to become Void.” After his slaughter of the Ayleids, “Kyne had to send her rain to wash the blood from the villages and forts.” In both cases the natural world becomes the site of resistance/reconciliation, the Real pushing back, the tempered, liquid-feminine ego soothing the earth-bound male super-ego, the fag hag outside the nightclub feeding her gay Evian after a fight with the bouncer.

Yet where Achilles eventually returns to the human through mourning (his final gesture toward Priam), Pelinal does not. He is incapable of symbolic closure; there is no recognition, no funeral rite, no reintegration. His rage is recursive, his love apophatic, his myth refuses containment; he is not even complete when his dismembered head speaks with the bull Morihaus after being slain by the Ayleid kings’ own vengeful madnesses. Even his speech at Alessia’s deathbed, years after his own demise, is canonically recognised as impossible. He is Achilles without catharsis, he is the Real that persists beyond the story’s need for drama: “I watch you watching me back (…) like when the dream no longer needs its dreamer.”

CHIM AS EGODEATH, SURVIVING APOPHASIS, DREAMING BEYOND THE WALL

“And Garid of the men-of-ge once saw such a Madness from afar and maneuvered, after it had abated, to drink together with Pelinal, and he asked what such an affliction felt like, to which Pelinal could only answer, ‘Like when the dream no longer needs its dreamer.’”

— The Song of Pelinal, Volume 6: On His Madness

“Just as a man in a dream, pursuing his quarry, cannot seize it;
yet the other cannot escape,
so neither did Achilles reach Hector, nor Hector evade him.”

— Iliad 22.199–201

I am hardly the first to suggest that CHIM is the Elder Scrolls’ metonymy for egodeath, the dissolution of the coherent self often brought about through spiritual or psychedelic experience. For those of you who fornicate, CHIM is the canon achievement of cosmic awakening within the game’s mythos, the realisation that the entire Elder Scrolls universe is in fact a dream taking place in the mind of the godhead Anu.4 Most mortals upon attaining this awareness either go mad (as Pelinal does) or disappear entirely (a fate known as zero-summing). The CHIM-attainer, however, maintains their identity within the illusion, he is unique in that he survives exceeding symbolic structure without collapsing into psychosis. In narrative terms, CHIM is the attainment of narrative authorship from within the fiction: once a video game character realises that they are in a video game, they can achieve divine subjectivity without solipsism, godhood without oblivion.

This symbolic annihilation, this rupture of identity and overwhelming of the subject by drive or divinity is rife in Greek myth — Actaeon’s transformation, Agave’s psychotic misrecognition of Pentheus, Orpheus’s subjective fracture and subsequent dismemberment, Heracles’s funeral pyre — but Achilles’ aristeia is perhaps the most self-conscious. He is fully aware that his return to battle means death: “So let me die at once, since it was not my fate to save my dearest comrade. […] Now, since I am not returning, and was no light of salvation to Patroclus or to my other comrades, many who have died at the hands of noble Hector, I shall sit here no longer. I must go forth.” [18.98–104]

This Lacanian traversal of the fantasy is not a heroic affirmation of identity, but an encounter with the Real that annihilates symbolic coherence. He does not simply choose death, he relinquishes the fantasy of heroism as a shield against loss, unmoored from stable subjectivity. His desire to devour Hector, to eat the enemy raw, literalises this unmooring: it is the wish to consume the Other not out of hunger, but to annihilate the distance between self and loss, between ego and drive. Achilles’ rage, his mad return, is itself a dream-event, a return to a narrative that no longer requires his belief to continue. It is this same logic that undergirds the experience of CHIM: not the acquisition of power, but the endurance of ego-death without disintegration.

The superego-injunction that both characters reject once they transcend is illustrated in the reactions of their metonymic Gods: in The Song of Pelinal, Alessia is “forced to make sacrifice to the Gods to keep them from leaving the earth in their disgust” and in the Iliad [20.19–23], Zeus frets that “if Achilles shall fight alone against the Trojans […] now that his heart is grievously enraged over his friend5, I fear that he may elude Fate itself and storm the walls.” When the internalised voice of divine and paternal law is rejected, as Freud notes, what is detonated is a primal compulsion that eclipses moral function, and ultimately crystallises a jouissance‑inflected subject who is both dream‑performed and dream‑obsolete: “Civilisation” he writes, “obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” [Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930]

This fear — that the hero-physche might escape the bounds of destiny, outstrip divine architecture, rupture the story from within — suggests a becoming that destroys the need to become, a transcendence not upward but inward, catastrophic in scope and irreversible in implication. Both are achieving, through their own fury, what the Gods have indirectly attempted to quell in their respective quarries: in Achilles’ case, the reversal of Zeus’ subjugation of his own father Chronos, in Pelinal’s the obliteration of Aedric linearity itself. This is the same supersecession achieved in Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: not a replacement of one system by another, but a rupture so total it renders civilised modes of function obsolete.

WHERE TO NEXT, SERJO?

I started this essay after finishing Oblivion Remastered and Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey in the same week.6. It’s lazy to suggest that The Elder Scrolls VI (whenever it finally emerges) will suddenly be good if Todd Howard just sits down with half a tab of acid and A Brief Introduction to Greek Classics, or even to assume he hasn’t done so already. It’s even lazier to attempt the assignment of a rigid mythic archetype to any RPG protagonist, because the choices and motivations of the character will naturally differ from player to player.

The power fantasy of video games means that you simply can’t slap some pre-written classical template onto a character whose narrative is retroactively authored by the player. But this is why characters like Pelinal, Vivec, Sheogorath and Mannimarco, all of whom know they are in a video game, all of whom transcend their own format, are so good: they reject the narrative containment that allows them to be witnessed by the player in the first place. of published a very good rant about where and how modern video games fail to fully engage with the idea of metaphysically and moralism, and I think a sincere return to a transcendence of their own ontology is overdue.

Achilles’ threat to eat Hector raw, his aristeia, his rejection of the sacrificial logic that binds men to gods, ego to superego, is is no longer legible to us in the mode of 20th-century humanism, which cast him as a tragic figure of choice and pride. But in the 21st century, with our Bataille, our Lacan, our Deleuze on loop, we might finally read him as something else: a site of rupture, a tear in the symbolic fabric that no longer asks what the hero means, but what violence the myth does. If the last century asked how myth expresses the human, the media of ours might better ask how myth annihilates it.

Pelinal is of course a video game character; but he is also the dream refusing its dreamer, the scream that outlives the throat. The Elder Scrolls is at its best when it dares to follow that scream, when it cannibalises the structure that grants it’s own story meaning, when it— whatever, Todd please come to the South of France and do drugs with me please please please

No companion this week, due to the fact that many people appear to have “other friends” or “real jobs.” Whatever, losers. Turns out that this Thursday was the ‘100 years of Cork Street’(??) so I had plenty to sneer at by myself.

Kearsey & Gold: ‘Ave It — Ezequiel Suranyi
★☆☆☆☆

The press release starts with the rather baffling statement that “sports generally - and football specifically - rarely find a place in the world fine art.”

In 1953 the FA held a ‘Football and the Fine Arts’ competition (including some charmingly sexy paintings of the Arsenal’s mens changing room by Clifford Fishwick). This year Juan Mata, Hans Ulrich Obrist (!) and Josh Willdigg are curating something called Football City, Art United for MIF25. As for sports in general, one of the core subjects of classical art is athleticism and the ideal male form. Degas painted racehorses. Warhol made silkscreens of Muhammed Ali. And then there’s Paul Pfeiffer, Matthew Barney, Jeremy Deller, David Hammons, contemporary artists who all make use of the semiotics of sports(manship) to make art, some of it even good.

“Suranyi captures the game and it’s [sic, c’mon guys] masses prior to the proliferation of iPhones and influencers that have taken so much away from the game.” This is a non-sequitur at best and a deeply snobbish attitude at worse; modern football audiences are doing exactly what Suranyi was, which is taking photographs of athletes, their fans, and their environs. This intentionalist disdain runs throughout the whole exhibition — the Maradona series is not particularly good, but because its him, and because he’s framed by a Helmut Newton-esque poolside in Marseille, then it is apparently elevated from the “dreary, recycled, and formulaic photo scene the football world has become today”. This may well be true, but that doesn’t save it from being a part of the dreary, recycled, and formulaic scene of early 2000s photography in general.

Not to get too Bourdieu about this, but you can’t claim that the art world refuses to treat sports/football culture as high brow and then dismiss contemporary visual culture because it’s on a phone. George Best was just as much of an influencer as some Turkey-toothed gymbro from Love Island. If the exhibition wants to argue that Suranyi offered something singular in his approach to football, it needs to make that case with more than just nostalgic reverence and vague sneering at the present.

Tiwani Contemporary: Munoonei kana makadistarisa nahi Mwari?/What do you see when you look at me ohh God? — Virginia Chihota
★★★☆☆

The basis of this show is laid bare by the name: Chihota wants us to confront the terms of divine and human perception.

This is an ambitious phenomenological framework to build a show around. Merleau-Ponty’s ideas re: the lived body, not as object but as the subjective locus of experience, resonate with the awkward poses and ambiguous forms she portrays. The stool is a literal and metaphysical platform for self-regard, what Fanon calls ‘epidermalisation’, the internalisation/platforming of hierarchal ideas re: race, power, God. Unlike Fanon’s trapped subject, however, Chihota’s figures don’t collapse into, or even submit to the suture between self and society — but they also don’t do much else.

Chihota uses space very well, but there’s not much more to be said from that. I enjoy the abstractionsm of her figures, but it gets murky very quickly on a painterly level, which if you wanted to be clever I suppose you could argue reflects the spiritual nebulousness she’s gesturing toward, the collapse of the inner and outer worlds, etc. The problem is that the gesture rarely coheres into something with teeth; there’s symbolic intent, plenty of it, but little pictorial pressure.

Holtermann Fine Art: Balancing Acts — Neil Gall, Michel Pérez Pollo, Olivia Bax
★☆☆☆☆

Baffling selection. Yes, all three works embody/rely on, well, balance, but that’s really where the similarities end.

I have no time for works that try to be cute about object versus image, so paintings of sculptures (and not even particularly good ones) I find particularly heinous. Bax and Gall’s works are only slightly more tolerable.

Stephen Friedman: Jaune Quick-To-See Smith — Rooted in Memory
★★☆☆☆

There are two exceptionally good charcoal pieces in this show that save this from being a one star. I think this show’s major issue is that Jaune never really settled on a style, which isn’t in and of itself a bad thing, but of all the various avenues she took none led to anything particularly beautiful or interesting. This is somewhat of a retrospective (Smith died earlier this year), so I’m not too fussed about coherence, but I am concerned about articulacy, of which there is very little. The Virtuvian-Man-as-Woman of her final series feels like a pastiche of better ideas — there are, I guess, comparisons to be made between Annie Lennox and the Imago Dei, but simply putting one in the position of the other is simply not enough. The political subjects of her other series — various unpleasantries done by the US powers against her people — are powerful, but it’s difficult to see what her message is beyond “it’s fucked up to kill Native Americans.”

I am however very willing to admit that the subtleties of this show are probably lost on me because my appreciation of NA culture is limited to a) a few bedtime stories about thunderbirds and b) a weekend shacked up on a Pipa Aha Macav rez, which was mostly dedicated to doing what was affectionately referred to as “white-woman amounts” of drugs and discussing Nevada gambling regulations.

Waddington Custot: Bernar Venet — When Steel Dreams of Code
★★★☆☆

A surprising win from Waddington Custot, whose artists I’m usually pretty unmoved by. Venet’s generative art is possibly the most interesting it’s ever been, partly because his concept of chance, entropy and systematic variation is so similar to how GANs use/present these notions today. This is especially true of linguistic/word vectors, the numerical representations of words/phrases in a high-dimensional space (like, for example, LLMs): according to Venet, the beauty of two lines is grounded in the fact that “represent a rare form of visual purity [that] unlike abstract or figurative imagery, which may carry multiple interpretations, angles belong to the language of mathematics.” He was wrong, of course — as JR Firth notes, “you may know a word by the company it keeps” — but neither Venet nor Firth had any real way of knowing just how applicable to idea of drawing lines between words would become in by the mid 2020s.

Venet is fundamentally an anti-expressionist, maybe even a Barthesian, certainly a Duchampian, in that he re-contextualises chunks of readymade visual language into static image. His poetry is much better than his art, but you can draw parallels between the two forms: forms/words are repeated, reordered, exhausted of meaning by a pathological reduction to rhythm, duration, shape. It’s all very anti-humanist, very post-1968, but surprisingly elegant in person, wearily sublime, monosemic etc. I appreciate shows like this, or the excellent Electric Dreams exhibition at the Tate (I assume the Phillip K Dick references are not accidental), for deciduously defending the role of technology (especially generative) in modern/contemporary art that goes beyond the AI-is-bad-for-the-planet angle.

Goodman Gallery: Ghada Amer, Astha Butail, Monique Frydman, Jared Ginsburg, Kapwani Kiwanga, Liza Lou, Unathi Mkonto, Chung Sang-Hwa, Naama Tsabar and John Zurier — Lifelines
★★★★☆

Well well well. Another surprising win from a gallery I usually have very little time for. Goodman usually shows art that is designed, both in ethos and form, to be hung on rich people’s walls. To be clear, this art is also art designed to be hung on rich people’s walls, but this time it’s the kind of rich people I like. There are some stonkingly good works, like Naama Tsabar’s Work on Felt (2021) that takes whatever Robert Morris was doing and makes it far more beautiful by dragging it off the floor. I’ve previously written about where, how and why I think post-minimalism failed to carry itself over into the postinternet age, and I agree with the curationial direction GG have taken here in acknowledging that time and labour, a new dignity in craftmanship — a slightly Zizekan, maybe even Marxist, yet nonetheless correct attitude to correcting the faults of contemporary art — is the way forward. These are not works designed for the screen economy. They’ve upped their lighting game, too, the whole hang was genuinely one of the best of the night.

The best piece I totally failed to note the artists’ name, and I haven’t been able to find any information about it online, and so I include a photo above. If I was to walk into a rich man’s flat with this hanging on the wall I would definitely stay for a drink.

Alison Jaques: Emma Amos
★☆☆☆☆

I’ve officially given up on this gallery. I originally found them after they produced a really gorgeous exhibition dedicated to Guy Brett’s collection in early 2024, which was really exciting because a) he had tremendous taste and b) it’s very rare to see critics’ collections given this sort of institutional reverence. I mean it sincerely when I say it was one of the best shows I saw last year. Then I saw their booths at Basel, and then at Frieze, and (possibly?) LAF, and they sucked so fucking bad, and they continue to suck so fucking bad.

Amos was simply not a good artist. She doesn’t understand texture, weight, anatomy; there is no convergence of message or material, there is no pressure, no force, nothing beyond a dry, stray surface of vaguely germane figuratism and bland, unbalanced iconographies. Her collage work is fine (although it should be better seeing as she was a protege of Bearden), the rest is clumsy, ugly, puerile. Worst of all, to quote Danny DeVito in the best episode of IASIP, it’s derivative — not just by the general standards of late 20th century Afrofeminism (Amos’s work has none of the charm of Ringgold’s and none of the technicality of Pindell’s) but by the standards of Spiral itself. Amos’s tolerated position within the group — the only woman, and significantly younger than the others — has become central to the mythos around her, but the pressure to retroactively correct her exclusion has led to an overcorrection that now mistakes symbolic significance for aesthetic achievement.

How on God’s green earth are you going to argue that Amos was “under-recognised” and, in the same breathe, brag that she has been featured at the Tate Modern, Brooklyn Museum, The Broad, MFA Houston, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Getty LA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and had a retrospective at the Georgia and Philly Museums of Art? What collector interests are you trying to capture here?1 Amos was born in Atlanta and died in New Hampshire. She did extremely and impressively well for herself. Do not insult her extraordinary accomplishments because you want liberal whites to spend more money on pop-feminist bullshit.

Linda Sormin: Origin Myths
★★☆☆☆

I fuck with the ethos behind these pieces — reintegrate ancestral histories, use of material as a conduit for diasporic repair, bridge the violent gaps between what was taken and what remains etc — but I just don’t see it in action. As I always say, if I need the press release to understand the point, then you’re not making the point well enough.

Her ceramic forms have a visceral, eruptive quality that can be thrilling up close, but the wall pieces in particular don’t conjure the severity or encoded symbolism of her source material. All the Batak manuscripts I’ve seen are extremely austere in their aesthetics (I was lucky enough to see the zauberbuch in Lübeck a few years ago, a wretchedly magical object, as well as the one next to the North Sumatran medicine horns in the Volkenkunde in Leiden) and I’m personally not convinced that the bright, blobby, texturally muddled works she’s got on show here are accurate translations of the tightly packed ritual script and muted materiality that make the OGs so impressive. Not all responses to history need to be mimetic, but whatever shamanistic language she's trying to channel here gets lost in translation.

FINAL THOTS

• Two non-Cork Street shows I saw this week that I did like: Rich Folks Don't Explain Shit by Zofia Pałucha at miłość, and Soft Opening at Palmer. I’ll have longer pieces about them out when whatever drugs I took this weekend wear off.

• Was recently added to the official Chinese Communist Party’s television’s press mailing list. Not sure what to make of this apart from 万岁我们的光荣领袖，请赏点钱吧。

• Thinking often these days about getting head in the back of a 1978 Lancia Beta

Spirulina macaron iced latte — Prêt A Manger
★☆☆☆☆

Of all the everyday beverages in the Western world, coffee is the one that satisfies the superego injunction the most: it is a fundamentally adult drink. In Freudian terms, caffeine is not only a submission to principle - a wakeful, productive, regulated self - but also the ascetic penance paid for existing in a capitalist society. You drink it to work, you work to afford it. The cat-o-nine-tails-whipcrack of this ritual penance is perhaps best felt in Paddington’s Pret A Manger.

The spirulina macaron iced latte is a whimsical, vaguely aristocratic concoction: the macaron, sign of Pre Revolution bourgeoisie decadence and excess, Spirulina, the snake-oil of the clean-girl noumena, coffee, symbol of empire and colonialism. As Lacan might note, there is a jouissance here, a dialect beyond the pleasure principle, a castrating submission to the rituals of consumption via a willing return to the ‘objet petit a’. The Hondurans who died to bring me this drink surely agree.

Pret’s sickly-sweet, faintly swampy latte is a drink designed to remedy the hauntological Lack via the neurotic pastiche of post-millennial ‘adulting’. It feels a bit like having sex with an American, or perhaps a woman who attended Westminster. The act begins with a hard, rigid cylinder - the paper straw, already tinged with its own ecological guilt (an effete, castrated echo of its nobler, longer-lasting plastic predecessor) followed by a punch-penetration of the tight, disposable vagina detenta of the lid, and through the repeated act of sucking, the straw becomes progressively soggy, limp, flaccid in a slow-motion collapse of potency, witnessed and enacted by the drinker with a kind of resigned inevitability. And, once this ritual fails, you discard both straw and cup entirely in a final gesture of subjective disavowal. You kill Agamemnon, you abort young Master Samsa.

A drink by nobody for nobody.1

The act of collecting, argues Freud, is a rejection of anal retention taught during early childhood. The urge to hold onto, accumulate, and neatly classify objects is seen as a sublimated version of this stage; it is of course extremely funny that the compulsive, domestic, totemic act of ‘collecting’ coffee each morning makes you want to shit yourself almost immediately.

Five cigarettes — Stewards Enclosure, Henley Royal Regatta
★★★★★

“Who the FUCK is smoking?”

It’s me, dear reader. I am two pints of Pimm’s down and the wry siren call of Polish Marlboros has been straddling the few soft wrinkles of my brain since the first sip. The Sloane Ranger who asked the original question, one half of a deeply agreeable rowing sorority sharing our table, realises that I am the nominative answer to her inquiry and apologises profusely for her rudeness. I’m sweating so hard I think I might be sick.

Later, I overhear a woman nervously asking her husband if he thinks she can light up a cigarillo, at which point I rip around in my seat so fast I nearly shatter a vertebrae. Let us form an alliance, I say. It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, nods her moid.

YES DO YOU KNOW HENRY WADHAM-WOOSTER THE THIRD
YES YES MY COUSIN HARRISON SPINKS WAS HIS CATAMITE AT ETON
YES YES YES I PLAYED COMPETITIVE SOGGY BISCUIT WITH CECIL “BUSSY” COCKMORTON

YES YES YES YES I LOVE BRITISH MEN I LOVE YOUR SILLY LITTLE ALLITERATIVE NAMES LET ME SUCK YOUR CHILD-BEARING SHOULDERS

The Umpire boats are called Ulysses, Argonaut, Herakles, Boudicca, Artemesia. There are objectively older sports than rowing but none as pathetically pleasing; God you say to yourself I wish I could move like that, I wish I was the ripple of muscle along the water, I wish I was the puddle of sweat in the seat, I wish I was the cushioned crack of skin and oar. I am Nausicaa, washing my wine-stained laundry in the Scherian river, wet while watching Odysseus sweat in the sweet heat, rowing anywhere but home. My companions mother can never join the British Navy because, for a brief stint in the 80s, she rowed a to-scale trireme replica along the Aegean coast. The Greeks’ slaves were stocky, and the modern British masters’ version was filled with posh women.

“It makes you proud, doesn’t it?” I say to my companion. We flutter our fans and swan about like Jane Austen characters, watching wealthy whites doze under great sycamores and feeling great affection for Seurat.

BEERS — Beto Fame, Found on the Way
★★★★☆

“Ultimately, Beto Fame’s painting reveals itself as a visual form of poetry.”
Found of the Way Press Release, Shannon Botelho, 2025

”Milton has told us his idea of poetry in a single line --
Thoughts that voluntary move / Harmonious numbers.“
On Poetry In General, William Hazlitt, 1818

The primary angle - if you’ll forgive the pun - of Fame’s work is geometry, and how any subsequent concept of material society fits into it. This is a disagreeable start because it is one of the few cases in art where you truly can argue for subjectivity. I personally am a Fluddian in regards to where I believe nature, maths and language intersect, whereas Fame is more aligned with Descartes/Leibniz’s ideas that geometry reflects natural harmony, not through magic, but through rational, pre-programmed order.

There is obviously no right or wrong answer to this (well there is, and it’s Vic Is Correct About Everything Forever), but the ambiguity of the subject matter — which is not actually God or architecture or national identity or poetry etc, but how we communicate our perception of these things to ourselves via the primogenitor Other — works in Fame’s favour. Botelho‘s claim that Fame’s work reveals itself as a visual rep of poetry is not incorrect; it’s just that the poetry it mirrors I would not find particularly good.

Luckily this is not poetry, it is just a conduit for its contour. As my companion remarked, the great joy and ruinous aftershock of art since Duchamp is that you slap whatever you like on top of whatever you see and, at most, hope someone finds you intellectually/physically attractive enough to believe in whatever tenuous connection you make and how beautifully you make it. Fame’s work is entirely, and aesthetically, aware of this fact: he knows that there are very few people in the world that will understand how the semiotic architectures of Rio and London compare (including myself), but he manages to bridge the gap. The murky green of the Thames become the soft verdant blues of the Brazilian jungle, the deep neutral blues of blueprint plans cover up the chalked outlines of construction-orange, and frankly I’m too lazy/satisfied to even talk about the erotics of the fruit. This natural coherence takes a while to pick up on, and longer to acknowledge (as Burke notes, immediate taste is rarely attained and if it is it is rarely right) but once you do it works.

I just wish there was more technical care. I am sick of looking at the sides of canvases smeared with fingerprints, of loose tape marks, of art that reminds you it was made by somebody you don’t love. Strindberg talked about killing himself after misplacing a line in one his manuscript submissions, and frankly he was right.

FINAL THOTS

• A man has convinced me to finally read The Apology, Euthyphro, etc. So far it is only confirming my theory that hating your father lies at the heart of all good literature (c.f. Kafka, Amis, Shakespeare).

• I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been using ChatGPT to play DnD, a fact I admitted outloud at a dinner party few weeks ago and got a bewildered mention by in Bungacast’s aptly-named Insane-Washing episode. George will be delighted to know I’ve moved on, and am now using to it to write softcore erotica.

• Eddy Frankel has produced another addition to the ‘art sucks now because press officers run the word’ canon, this time for ArtReview (lol). He argues that “We’ve created an artworld filled with puppies, and you can’t kick puppies.” To be clear, the monetised archetype of the traumatised artist was established decades ago by postwar dealers playing on American sympathies for the ruined European continent. We’ve been coddling puppies since Van Gogh; let us stop hiding behind our spurious distaste for modern identity politics to pretend otherwise, especially when complaining about ahistorical recontextualisation. A lot of us are out here kicking puppies right in the pussy, you just happen to be taking money from publications who are only brave enough to let their writers bark at strawmen rather than actually piss on them. If you want your opinion to mean anything I suggest biting the editorial hand that feeds the warhound, pet.
  

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My gallery-hopping companion this week is one of my least favourite ex-boyfriends and Fetch’s perkiest cultural attaché (he brings me cheap cigarettes from Hong Kong and has cost the British government 2.56 man years in freedom of information requests). He knows nothing about contemporary art.

White Cube - Anselm Kiefer
★★★☆☆

You can - and many have - quite easily divide Kiefer's work into 'before' and 'after' the fall of the Berlin Wall. Critics have gone back and forth over whether or not the element declancheur of this shift should be viewed as rupture or continuation. James Hyman has made the argument that the answer lies in 17th century English Rosicrucian Robert Fludd and Kiefer’s visual appropriation of his diagrams of the mystic macrocosm/microcosm, specifically the image of the Everyman as a cosmic centre surrounded by stars, planets, and humours. I’ve always read this as WWII-as-Deleuzian-Event, with Kiefer’s works orbiting the same detonated core of modernist ambition that most contemporary art and politics now spins around.

I wasn’t convinced by Hyman’s cosmological argument until I saw this show. Sunflowers are simultaneously celestial (sun/stars) and corporeal (seeds/blood). Kiefer uses them to allegorise life cycles, sacrifice, and transformation. His use of red, yellow, black, and white connects to the alchemical colour stages of nigredo, albedo, xanthosis, rubedo. His wheat fields use the germinating seed as a symbol of the Vaterland stripped of national significance and reimagined through universal alchemical logic i.e. not German wheat, but wheat as the Teuton homunculus’s umbilical cord, a stalk growing from the ruined corpsewomb of European ideology. Clytie, whose unrequited love for Apollo earned her a sunflower metamorphosis, offers Kiefer a mythic blueprint; a sincere national body fixed in grief, a subject-spine continually craning toward a neglectful patriar-sun:

[Apollo] the god of light no longer visited Clytie, nor found anything to love in her (…) impatient of the nymphs, night and day, under the open sky, she sat dishevelled, bareheaded, on the bare earth. Without food or water, fasting, for nine days, she lived only on dew and tears, and did not stir from the ground. She only gazed at the god’s aspect as he passed, and turned her face towards him.
Ovid, Metamorphoses Book IV, lines 256–270

It’s a rare and impressive thing to see Expressionist formalism married with so many ideas from the universal, cosmological carrion of both personal and global realpolitik. We are all, in our own ways, heliotropically lifting our heads towards Gods and men that have stopped loving us.

The next logical step is to make it nice to look at, but I fear this is too much to ask of the Germans.

Mandy Zhang - Jade Annalise Gaskin, Natasha Malik, The Daughters that Dreamed
★★★☆☆

I assume one of the great difficulties of running a gallery dedicated to non-European artists is explaining what, to sixty percent of the world, is extremely obvious. The subjects of both Gaskin and Malik’s works are deeply steeped in domestic and social ritualism — tea sets, consumables, bedtime routines — re-interpreted through the symbolic language of Pakistani and Chinese iconography. This is neither a faultline nor a hinge, but it is a good entry point for broader, more boring discussions about Women™️.1

The most interesting thing about the art is the attempts to bring in Western psychology. The press release claims the fawn is a symbol of innocence and youth — which it historically isn’t, unless you’re on the side of Tumblr that gives you anorexia — but avoids the fact that in most cultures, polycephaly (Malik’s deer have three heads) are generally associated with demons (Ravana and Brahma in Hinduism and Buddhism, the Triskelion/Cernunnos in Celticism, Cerberus in Greek tradition, beast of seven heads in Christianity). It is a noble attempt to drag this into “the relationship between woman and nature” but falls a little flat. They are beautiful works to look at - extremely well crafted on a technical level, especially the details (God knows how thin those brushes must be, although the cropping/composition needs some work) but the ethos behind it bothers me: a three headed doe is not an inner child, it’s a sleep paralysis demon. You can claim that you are “play[ing] with natural motifs to influence and denounce societal expectations” but you also then have to tell me how.

Gaskin’s works are fine but also a little flat. It’s a bit of Saville, a bit of Bacon a-la Cavagnolo, a lot of Arthurian imagery (A Strange Starless Night, 2925, rocks, my favourite painting of the week). Her monotypes are really interesting in that they reframe the very obvious theme of momento mori (skeletons on beaches) and props them up next to 1920s French Riviera style illustrations of naked chicks hanging out, which to me is simultaneously more and less interesting than Malik’s figures.

Not to rehash the Sabrina Carpenter discourse but is having “female subjects on all fours, mouths agape, gaze uninviting” really “challenging women’s need to conform to society’s rigid standards”?

The story about Malik having to smuggle her works across the Pakistani border is fucking badass.

Hypha Studios/Greycube- way too many artists, Symbiotic Epidermis
★★★★☆

As always, one very biased review: partly because I’m very fond of the curator, and partly because I’ve been on a transhumanist tear since finally sinking my teeth into the Phantom Liberty DLC of Cyberpunk (I’ll be talking with about video games and contemporary art very shortly). The premise of this show is relevant, interesting and well-researched: what does skin mean in a world that pushes the boundaries of the material body more and more?

There are some absolute flubs — photographs of sculptures should be considered a war crime — but also some really great interpretations of the theme. Olivia Bloodworth’s (great name) Giger-esque paintings are glorious. I could take or leave the huge vagina paper sculpture. We’ve all read O’Keefe’s letters to Alfred Stieglitz and Anita Pollitzer. Her New York paintings were better.

The faux-Bourgeois sculptures in the window are interesting, not because they are good, but because they are touching on the Erotic Abstract ethos of the Courtauld show. To get back to the idea of Women, I find it genuinely exciting to see how in the world of plastic surgery, Facetune, etc, artists are (re)turning to the grostesque to speculate on what it actually means to have a human body. Nothing good, presumably.

FINAL THOTS

• Life is excessively good anyway, but has been further improved by the kind of bacchanalian, flashback-inducing sex I can only assume, judging by their recent and reverentially enjoyable hornyposting, is also having (featuring such killer lines as “A Juggernaut ready to crush her womb” and “You have to think of pussy in Lovecraftian terms”). This likely has something to do with God, Nick Mullen, Soho Reading Series, crab shells, the summer solstice, etc

• Thinking of starting a Pevsner Architectural Guide-style enchiridion of London pubs based on whether they have a) hot staff b) strong hand dryers c) seated smoking areas.

• Ed Atkins blows

• Summer so far feels like Watt’s own Clytie, bronze, 1860s:

  

• And also like this: