PISS about town 003: Meta Phantasy at the Gay Club (PART 2)
PART 2 with the piss chapel, the McSublime, show speed round and other inane shit we like this week.
Hey wicked pisser,
Welcome to PART 2 of PISS about town 003, your short and sweet overtime account of all the other things we did (and what we bought!)
The McSublime
Not to be a McBitch, but I really think that the U.K. is a strange place because of its peripherally central role in developing modern consumerism. While many of the machines and practices which underpin captialist labor originated in European Industrial Revolution, America supersized it. When I saw the McDonalds/Texaco collab next to Victoria Miro gallery I was transported back to the earnestness of the American strip and the way we design for business transparently.
Remember this iconic picture of an American highway town? AI could never. Well I went on a Reddit deep dive and found out it’s a town called Breezewood from a trucker. This is a space which exists in the American vernacular taken by people on the internet as emblematic of decline, by me too at first. But this trucker highlights that humanity thrives even in the hideous:
I am a truck driver, and I was in Breezewood about 12 hours ago. I go through there fairly often.
The PETRO:2 station whose sign you can see in the picture was bought by a local company and is now a Pilot/Flying J affiliate. The truck stop is crap but the showers are nice.
The Perkins restaurant closed last year due to health code violations and hasn't been re-opened as far as I know.
The hotel that you can partly see behind the "GIFTS & SOUVENIRS" building burned down back in...November, I think.
Post from 5 years ago, his profile here.
This is what made the McTexaco stand out for me, this sense that I knew that non-Americans look at these spaces with ridicule, but I knew better and remembered hot nights at the WAWA down the shore and filling my own tank in PA for the first time on January 6, 2021 on my way to see Amish mini-horses unaware of the chaos. I am protective of the sprawl. But don’t ask me what exit I’m from in Jersey, you asshole (24 on 78 lol).
You can buy your very own Mac Hat on eBay for $191.98, $131.99, or $108.00.
The Piss Chapel
If there was a convergence of all we hold dear while pissing about town it would have to be the Piss chapel outside of St. Leonard’s church and in proximity to Maureen Paley and Emalin’s new space at The Clerks House:
It is a urine plinth designed for holy relief with three plastic dividers and churchy chode spire so the thing can be lifted up and out when full.
I would be remiss if I also didn’t mention that the Rochelle Canteen, attached to the Rochelle building housing both Maureen Paley gallery and GmbH also has a pot for those in desperate need of art and relief! And as we know, it’s impossible to think straight (or gay) when you’re got the pee. Related reading:
Speaking of the Rochelle School, they have FREE BOOKS!
There are also free, YES FREE, books on the second floor of the building that Maureen Paley is in which will be recycled if they aren’t taken. How absurd as well, to recycle books instead of donating them to a library! Send the intern! I got P.H Henderson by Nancy Newhall, a monograph of the photographer’s work and its role in getting photography taken as a serious art.
Gallery Speed Dating
Here are the other shows we’ve seen this week (and also last week bc we’ve been busy!) in a curt form. I kinda feel like a gallery pimp lol. There’s also this fair called CONDO going on here, which is a hilarious name to give a collaborative art show across London during a housing crisis. But we can’t afford flats or art so I guess it’s not meant to be aspirational. Anyway, here we go!
Wilhelm Sasnal 2021-2023 in Los Angeles @Sadie Coles HQ, 62 Kingly Street until MAR 16.
This show was fantastic with Sasnal’s work looking into Los Angeles as a place of concrete identity, random violence and a cinematic sublime. The central work, Section - Homeless, 2022 can be circumnavigated and you can get close to the edges of the canvas propped on a metal ladder. Sasnal paints with ambiguous brush strokes, meaning they make a recognizable form beyond the individual. As they write in the release:
Each painting invokes clear intention whilst also allowing space to build associative connections that invite non-linear readings of the work. We see what it means to be both in and of the world; what it means to be both a consumer and producer of the visual landscape and how we contend with our complicities in such a mode of being. Sasnal’s paintings do not ambivalently depict the world but invite us to consider our place within it.
This was refreshing after looking at art and reading texts which were intent on forcing their narrative upon me which I find tiresome.
CHRISTOPHER AQUE, ALEXANDRE KHONDJI Condo London 2024, hosting Sweetwater, Berlin @Maureen Paley Studio M, Rochelle School until FEB 18, 2024.
This may close before you see it, but not this space for Maureen Paley which enables interesting site-specific work. Great studio. I won’t rate.
“118 1/2,” Group Show (with so many people I cannot type them all sorry and their site doesn’t like my computer so I can’t copy it!) @Emalin’s The Clerk’s House Space until MAR 16, 2024.
There are delicate panels for walls in the upstairs where stunning built-in details hug the place where a fireplace used to be, painted white, their form hinting at a past function which has been stripped in an effort to place art in a space which resonates with history.
Parts of the interior date to the 16th century and until recently was part business and residential. I wonder how the past tenants lived in the space? How wonderful to commune like this. A piece in the corner of the second floor stairwell has used water to damage the space, and is dated 1735-2020.
The art exists in the space with varying success, but for me, how could I look at some foam on the ground when hundreds of years of design history played out before me? Go for the house, the art is a bonus. If I did half pissers this would get 2.5.
“The Main Entrance,” Tolia Astakhishvili, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Vati Davitashvili, Stefanie Heinze, Simon Lässig @Hollybush Gardens until FEB 24, 2024.
This was great and I’m glad I saw it. Really interesting photography and character studies which evoke Byzantine aesthetics and a clearness of image which is refreshing. Great space with a nice collection of art zines on the second floor.
Gerhard Richter @David Zwirner until MAR 28, 2024.
This has got to be one of the worst shows I’ve ever seen. My notes were as follows: sloppy paper, high school drawings and paintings which would do well on Instagram among people who haven’t been to MoMA. Selfie station, check.
“Conversation Galante,” Nina Chanel Abney, Ana Benaroya, Katherine Bradford,France-Lise McGurn, Sofia Mitsola, GaHee Park, Henning Strassburger, and Didier William @Pilar Corrias until FEB 24, 2024.
I wrote to myself: (Douche water) don’t love the rendering but it’s funny lol. Cosmic anal piss rays?! Big titty bitches. It was an interesting show but at times twee. Go if you’re already around.
Labour of Love, Claudia Kogachi @Phillida Reid until FEB 17. **
This show has now closed, but the happy lesbians were nice and they had a bathroom, which I’m sure they would let you use if you asked politely. The people working here were the nicest to me! I won’t rate.
I’ll end on La Maskarade who did a collection with the heads of American idiots:
OK! All done :) See you downstream!
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