Hey wicked pisser,
This week’s PISS about town is also our second art schlep and I’m in London. I have been to some of the coolest art venues in my life this last week, spaces which really make the work possible at scale (large and small). I’ve been thinking a lot about fabulation, fantasy and PHANTASY and the meta. It seems to me (via
) that we are getting out of the irony era. And I really hope so because watching that dumpster fire Elena Velez show from across an ocean was painful! More thoughts on that soon. But maybe we are approaching an era in which we produce fictional things that reflect reality in some sort of meta fantasy. Admitting the things we make and look at are a construction and if they’re really just ‘trying’ to be rather than just being. I mean that’s really what art is anyway, the amalgamation of media to form an image, or feeling; so why oversell it as profound or profane in isolation when the world is perceived by people not ideas?I saw a lot of shows, but the ones that made me feel something were the ones that played with my secret desires to enact my unfulfilled wishes outside of my mind from comical revenge (stoogey) to dance floor rendezvous (hot!) and looking fucked up and not caring (basic). I hope I can save you the trouble of cycling from Soho to Bow like I did! I also found out there is a Texaco next to a McDonald’s in London and somehow that felt like home.
And here’s the PISSOMETER to remind you how to be a discerning and careful critic. Cause flinging praises around willy-nilly is dangerous!
These are the highlights! Speed round and what we picked up in Part 2. Ok, enough of this rambling. Let’s look at shit!
“Night,” Doron Langberg @Victoria Miro until MAR 28, 2024.
A few weeks ago I read Hari Nef’s review in the New York Times of The Bars are Ours, a book about queer night life. I interviewed the writer Lucas Hilderbrand on Wednesday about the gay bar’s history spanning 1960-present and traversed time through Nan Goldin’s Boston, tales of Drew Macaroni-and-Cheese, slitting the seat of your jeans to take dick in a basement room. This is the continued history that Doron Langberg captures in colossal canvases of queer bodies, lit dimly in communion on two floors of Victoria Miro’s London gallery.
Processes of scarping and reduction on top of layering of color and form extract limbs, asses and head (yes, that kind!) from the scenes. He paints enigmas of nightlife, bodies which move in and out of coalescence and in and out of each other, rendering the intimacy and the religiousity of queer dance spaces in carnal shades of reds, purples, oranges and blacks. Evoking Frankenthaler at times in the corners and in figures whose bodies move ecstatically, the work pulses with sweat, cum and love.
Like the night itself, the work was in once instance aligned with a color palette and mood you’d find on Pinterest or Instagram suggested posts, more rainbow than basement. But that’s ok. For me, a gay man, the work activated a part of my imagination which longs to me among my fellow queers and be unashamed of where I’m looking of what I’ve got to look at. The work feels like a window into a forbidden ritual of trance dance and a feeling which I haven’t felt in a long time.
Langberg’s asses look freshly fucked, his rooms muggy, his subjects engaged. As prophetess Caroline Polachek once said, “Desire, I want to turn into you!”
Nef writes: “By moonlight we walked on the beach to Cherry Grove. We strode into the Ice Palace, which opened in 1970, and took off our clothes. Muscles writhed in the dark to a house track I knew but couldn’t name. I took David’s hand and shook my head as we disappeared, gay or queer, into the bodies.”
Langberg paints the departure from this scene. The work takes up space which I am afraid to myself. I watched in stasis as I imagined these bodies moving, the bodies going home. I cried.
“brave and pathetic and better than drowning in shame,” Josefin Arnell and Max Göran @Cell Project Space until FEB 25, 2024.
This is some straight up wild shit in one of the coolest art venues I have been to in a while. There are two parts: Downstairs, Josefin Arnell’s film Beast and Feast, and upstairs, Max Göran’s Dieseline Dreams. This is worth seeing.
The two artists have worked together before under the name of “HellFun,” and maybe that’s the best way to describe the half stable (which the space used to be), half killing room which Arnell’s film plays in downstairs. It’s pitch black, the floor is covered with a thick layer of hay that immediately made me think of ticks and depending on when you enter the first thing you might see is a campy decapitation of a horse girl by officer Annina, only for her head to be magically reattached moments later.
“I’m not invited to this party… because I don’t have a horse?!”
Much to the chagrin of this police officer, who is bullied for being the only one in her squad without a horse to ride, the head falls right back onto the horse girls shoulders… and it goes on! This is evocative of the kind of delirious, substance induced dream trances we have right before waking, where the plot of nocturnal psychosis is so close to reality with our daily characters but twisted into a place where the conscious is trained not to go.
Watch in the dark as negligent cops discover a body and take selfies with it, a young witness lies about the killer, they drink coffee and eat over-boiled eggs. It’s like a world where children’s play ethics have been transported into a LSD trip for horse girls. But it’s this weird fantasy about the insecurity of motherhood, abuse and cycles of violence. I was relived when another person came in so I could make sure I wasn’t laughing at things I shouldn’t be. The film wasn’t concerned with this kind of thinking though. It was campy. I wondered if the director was gay. In its absurdity, Arnell’s film lets you reflect on the frightening inner lives we each lead. This was one of the most interesting things I’ve seen in a while.
Göran’s film upstairs was less successful because the pacing wasn’t as engaging and the imagery wasn’t as clear. But maybe that’s just luck showing up at the time I did. You should look into HellFun for a true reflection of the artist’s collaboration. I couldn’t say what I missed in a tale of a wannabe trucker and artist, mirroring a journey that the artist himself took after the got tired of working at a gay sauna. But unfortunately this film was overshadowed by the space it was in, with vaulted ceilings and bits of light streaming through cracks in the walls. I felt like I was back in Arnell’s barn, so why not just stay downstairs?
“vision of the sun,” Nina Porter @a. SQUIRE until MAR 2, 2024
This is where I confess I’m a photography nerd. This show, housed in a teeny tiny space on Princeton Street, is Porter going super saiyan on the pinhole camera.
In high school, I had a student teacher who was a local photographer and introduced me to the math and science of photography, counting steps, doing math to determine what opening would allow me to paint with light. This what the artist is doing here at scale, apparently schlepping her massive camera tubes around Frankfurt’s red-light district.
The iridescent light captured by Porter is a layering of positive and negative, and for me the show isn’t about this close up detail, but the way in which the elongated filmstrips reflect a meditation of process. Up close, the mundanity of the imagery becomes less poetic. I would also like to applaud this gallery for using white lights to illuminate the space.
“Love Love Love,” Gina Fischli @Soft Opening, until APR 6, 2024.
This was a show for which the promo had nothing to do with the actual contents (no food art or pizzas to be found), which was little critters made out of fabric which the gallery calls a “runway show of urban animals” in its very nicely designed notes. It conflates overbreeding of domestic animals with the travails of capital F fashion by freezing the creatures processing down a catwalk, with three peripheral furry (but not) friends watching on.
I can’t land on a word to describe what the art is trying to be. What was crazy to me is how they didn’t just go for the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show reference here. I get it’s cut up clothes, but isn’t that the real kind of fashion pageantry we force or little animals into?
I met up with Ella Slater today, an art writer in London contributing to PISS (an essay of SALLY MANN!) who was at the opening of this show. She was saying how you can imagine someone taking one of the small fabric things home because yes, they’re kind of cute, but who’s going to go for the kind of ugly (my words not hers) larger, more totemic fashion roadkill?
This concludes PART 1 of PISS about town 003. Part 2 coming Monday, 19 FEB!
P.S.
This week’s runaway critter is not a tale of liberation, but loss! So peel the eyes so the lady who sells overpriced rhubarb can get her puss back.
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