Germanness or Omni-Casuality at Maureen Palel by Dirk Diggler

Maureen Paley, Build from Here, Wolfgang Tillmans, 3 October – 20 December 2025 Sprüth Magers...

A late December Saturday afternoon trawl of galleries offering their end-of-year shows netted two specimens of note. Firstly: Maureen Paley, Build from Here, Wolfgang Tillmans. Maureen occupied 21 Herald Street for over two decades. She was moved out to make way for redevelopment six years ago; given the context of London’s post-2000s boom in crass, viral, "render-core" territorialisation, coming as it did shortly before Covid and the onslaught of Brexit, it was a sad state of affairs.

The actual space has some history from when Tillmans used it as his studio and hosted some very debauched parties there in the 1990s and 2000s; I recall a performance of drag queens giving a fake baby in its buggy a particularly rough ride. I once staggered out of one needing to buy some sobering crack, only to find myself driving down Whitechapel High Street on the wrong side of the road. Later, in 2011, Hotel gallery hosted a show of Keith Farquhar’s sculpture here; at the opening, I watched while a visiting writer snorted a couple of lines of morphine off one of the artworks.

But in these more somber times, the show isn’t really about the art; it’s more about the apparition of Paley’s return to Herald Street. There’s no mystery about the show; Tillmans is often used to herald the opening of one of her new spaces. It’s more her return—like Napoleon escaping from Elba—that interests me. This latest manifestation of her roster of galleries is a statement of intent, almost revenge. Entering the gallery, the first detail is the newly restored handrail of the balustrade: perfectly fitted, pale grey rubber. The fanatical painting of stairs and walls only prepares you for the first floor.

Stepping into the gallery, I thought, maybe I had died and was journeying through the tunnel of light to the afterlife, as I was hit by the force of the whitest, blindingly bright light my retinas have ever had to deal with.
Maybe ASML had installed a clean room, or I was coming to in an operating theatre after having been hit by a bus.
The extremist level of sterile clinicality burned into my consciousness; I could imagine a fly’s worst nightmare would be to have found its way in here on a balmy summer day with absolutely nowhere to hide.

The door to the office is an exact replica of the one from 21 Herald Street—it may even be the same door that has been sitting in storage for the last half-decade. Its polished stainless steel frame holds a single pane of toughened glass, and into this intense environment, a display of Tillmans' photographs, photocopies, and paper works lurks.

It’s hard not to see Tillmans' work as an exposure of him as a figure. In many ways, he is the German version of a YBA artist; coming of age as he did during that heated 90s era, he perhaps suffers slightly from a constraint common to much of their work: early success putting the brake on development.

Much of his output seems to rest in a self-contained appreciation that the spectator needs to "know," but in actual fact, like his British contemporaries, he seems stuck within a banality of his own making.
It ends up feeling like an echo of the worst of day-to-day German culture -—a kind of normcore, "omni-casual" style that hides a very thin interior.

It’s hard to think about his work (and there’s a lot of it) without simultaneously seeing the image of the artist himself as a clinician. In so being, the artist and his production help to back up the return of Paley to Herald Street in a fastidious examination of the accumulation of tedium that our present day will be noted for…

Meanwhile, in another part of town…

Seriously, Curated by Nana Bahlmann, 21 November 2025 – 31 January 2026

Seventy-one artists have been summoned into the show Seriously, curated by Nana Bahlmann. Sprüth Magers, along with their fellow mega-gallery owners, from time to time host group shows that easily rival those of museums—even if they are sometimes employed to contextualize their primary artists with historical works and test out fresh talent. ### This show is a "banger." One doesn’t need to compare it with a fellow group show around the corner at Pace (which is terrible); this one stands on its own as an utter tour de force—and I mean force, as in: open your eyes and get sucked in and off. There’s too much to really give it credit in the space of this short review.

Perhaps the biggest mention should go to the curator; Nana Bahlmann, each room makes utter sense without having to know why or read the press release. From the first work - —Andreas Gursky’s Desk Attendants, Provinzial, Düsseldorf, 1982, a work that literally welcomes you - —to each wall arrangement, the composition, balance, and juxtaposition are first-rate.

Running through the works on show, the carousel in my mind shutters one image after another: buried artist, large breasts, big tits, acid dissolving, dogs watching porn, dildos, toys, Elvis, Kiss, banana eating, smoking child, water towers…

While the idea of photography, as Barthes put it, was the noeme (the essence) - —which isn’t really correct anymore as AI is dissolving this myth -—it is most often the distillation of people into images, usually posing or caught candidly in front of the photographer. The resulting image is a document of the relationship between photographer and subject, probably best examplified by the upcoming Nan Goldin show, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, at Gagosian.

This show isn't that. This show is very funny, in part because the artists have really thought about the image they are making. It's not that photographers don't, but what they tend to do when "smudging" their subjects is rely on their personality as perceived by the subject, resulting in an intimate, personal moment that we spectators look on as a third party.

As witnesses giving light to our sense of observing a fellow being, we are caught in a moment of imagining ourselves in the scene -—a desire that almost immediately decays: gone forever, rendered unto death. But these artists, for the most part, are not doing this; instead, they have crafted into images the pause that humor needs to create the moment of confusion and wonder that jokes require in order to trigger the "LOL" response.

It would be impossible not to mention that among the works on show is Ceal Floyer’s work 644 (2025), which sees a photographed field of sheep, each being numbered, as if through a surveillance camera (totalling 644) believed to be one of her final pieces. She passed away a few weeks after the show opened, which brings the show’s reasoning sharply into focus: even someone who was regarded as "super serious" can be very funny.

What A Shit Show at Carl Kostyál
11.12.2025 - 17.01.2026

Last year I planned to write something about Callum Eaton. About how his photorealistic and life-sized paintings of ATMs, vending machines, lift doors and telephone boxes (openings in public space) cleverly messed with our ideas of surface and impenetrability. I was going to write that his paintings render in paint what Lauren Berlant calls capitalism’s ‘cruel optimism’: the way that it repeatedly offers us up a faint hope of passage to freedom whilst keeping us sliding endlessly across its greasy surface. Using Berlant to comment on these paintings is superficial: but now is the time of surfaces.

Public space is dominated by adverts, locked doors and shiny cladding that reaches all the way to the pavement. London is a hermetically smooth surface with no cracks to squirm through. I thought his paintings were about desire and fantasy in capitalism – of openings that appear to allow us a way beyond them but are just more surfaces (saying nothing of openings in other people’s bodies!). I was going to argue that Eaton’s paintings spoke to the claustrophobia I feel when I look at the screens in Picadilly Circus, or the empty shells of houses behind green park.

I was going to write that I thought that his paintings were witty – that they tricked the rich people who bought them into staring at a depressing trap of their own making. Their easy commodification was part of the critique.

But Eaton’s latest show at Carl Kostyál trades in the cleverness of his previous work for banality. He’s still making photorealistic paintings, except now he has ditched openings in public space as his primary subject – seemingly in favour of relatable moments (a lime bike?) and things that lend themselves to being painted photorealistically (a crashed car, a fire extinguisher, a parking ticket). There is no denying that the paintings look good, Eaton does photorealism well, but instead of the angular constraints and clean lines of his previous work we now get a series of paintings depicting a benign jumble of crumpled and shiny objects that do little more than showcase his technical ability.
Gone are the formal restraints found in his earlier work to only paint rectangular openings in public space. Now he can paint anything you like (read: commision), on a canvas perfectly matching its shape. This comes off as a gimmick.

If I had to try to redeem these paintings, I might write that the invention of gimmicks is the substance of neo-liberal life and that Eaton makes fun of this repetitive cycle of newness. To argue this I would point to Rear View (2025), a painting in which a man looks through a rear-view mirror at a car crash he has just avoided, the only one featuring a person. The viewer is the guy in the car, the archetypal subject of late-stage capitalism, always just escaping disaster and gliding towards the next gleaming thing that grabs our affect. Surfaceness doesn't get to us as long as we keep on moving. On this reading Eaton implicates us in the neo-liberal game of constant newness as we move through the gallery from painting to painting looking for a meaning which isn't there.

But the gap between satirical invocation and mere reproduction of capitals machinations is narrow. The show’s title: ‘This is a shit show’ indicates that Eaton fears he is on the wrong side of it. It’s overcompensation gives away the fact that there is not a shit in sight, there is no actual difficulty or discomfort for us in consuming his paintings, no real moment of crisis - just its fantasy. This is a clean line of product, vacuum packed and ready to be shipped. It’s a difficult line to walk, to be fair, making something popular and commodifiable that critiques its own commodification. Eaton is on the wrong side of it here, pivoting from the wry unctuous critique to providing the slick, oily, capital required to grease the wheels of the endlessly self-ironising collector.

Unlike Gili Tal’s Leperello work at Terminal Projects for example, which successfully incorporates adverts found on London’s hoardings (walls around building developments) to mime superficiality without replicating it.

A hollowed out shell visits an empty hell, spotted with colonial relics in the form of deluded collectors, inconsequentially related. Qingyuan Deng’s historical dispatch from Miami basel. An alternative to the normative, self-deprecating and ironising art week “diary” proffered in Spike's 2024 Miami coverage and Plasters recent report (ironic sensation without feeling). Deng is unabashedly searching for closeness in the desert.

I tried to arrive on Monday night, to make it to a few gallery and museum openings, but I utterly failed in Miami. I seem to have a pattern of missing flights in or out of Miami.

I was worried because I planned to only use public transportation in Miami.

Luckily, my mother gave me her credit card information last minute.

I was staying in a beautiful Airbnb rental 5 minutes from the beach, with my friend A, an artist-turned-advisor, from San Francisco. Last year in Miami, we were also roommates in the same rental. The only difference is that last year I was single, and she was not, and this year the fortunes reversed. On my flight to Miami, I wondered how fruitful, or not, this pairing might be. I woke up Tuesday morning at 7am, straight to work at the NADA fair. A few VIP collectors were supposed to show up at my boss’s booth at 9am, but they never did. But again, the booth, featuring my college best friend Q’s conceptual photography about the production of desire and the tyranny of psychoanalysis, witty and incisive as it is, might be too challenging for early morning viewing.

The collectors who did show up later in the day were amused enough to take selfies with Q’s appropriated images and ask many biographical questions but not enough to pull the trigger. A former reality television superstar who uncannily resembles Pamela Anderson (but only her character in The Last Showgirl) and a local gay couple exclaiming that writing erotica can resist the ascendancy of fascism in America finally bought a few pieces in the last two hours but after that sales dwindled, plumbing into more abysmal states as the week progressed. Since the inventory barely changed in quantity, I found myself staring all day at abstracted images of anal sex extracted from pornography. In each photograph, penetration appeared as a modernist composite of all possible physical and emotional scenarios of such acts across universes and timelines, rendered with an earth-shattering precision that muddied and degraded the erotic aura of its source.

What remained was a devastating desperation, a search for interpersonal truth that sex alone, stripped to its mechanics, could no longer guarantee. At moments, the images seemed capable of lifting me out of the banal temporality of work, toward the subconscious or even the atomic fabric of matter itself. Yet the spell always broke. I was reminded that these photographs, however aggressively anti-representational, are still representations: packets of information several degrees removed from fleshly materiality, already caught in circuits where sensation hardens into data and data slides toward matter’s becoming-property. But no one wanted to claim them. I was utterly bored at the lack of enthusiasm, or even depressed about the state of collecting, but luckily I had wonderful booth neighbors, a more productive place to linger than the dangerous political economy.

My left-hand booth neighbor is a daughter of major Korean collectors. She decided to open a gallery to support her artist friends from international school. I liked how secretly erotic her booth was, full of funny paintings that harbor neurotic seeds, neuroticism about body’s limits. I didn’t like their overly optimistic color palette, but I used the paintings as an excuse to start a conversation, which eventually arrived at Japanese colonialism, with the young Korean woman. We both agreed that it is permissible for us, alienated by the frictionless experience of contemporary cosmopolitan lifestyle, to entertain colonial nostalgia a little bit. We then reached an addendum that it would be smart and the right thing to do to contain the romanticization of violence and oppression in art. Subjugation is seductive, to a certain degree only. We also circled the point, rather abstractly, that we can hold our complicity in class reproduction at a critical distance instead of disavowing it outright, and occupy a position between desire and responsibility with our tendency to accept subjugation. I forgot to get her number after a few days of being in the booth together, so I never got to ask her what she thinks about the fact that Nam June Paik received his elite education from wealth made by his father, a Japanese collaborationist. Perhaps that was a good thing, as the conversation would have shifted too uncomfortably close to the real and real guilts otherwise.

My right-hand booth neighbor was another young woman dealer from Germany, stellar in her ability to close deals. She showed four difficult paintings made by a young white male from Idaho, who is only concerned with the ontic properties of digital images, with no regard for real world events. In Miami, a lot of paintings being shown did comment on the nature of imaging technology but usually ground such exercise in depicting fleshly bodies. My German neighbor, however, was only interested in promoting paintings that are pure, in this case formally devoted to the recursive experience of being implicated in the virtual. Somehow, she was able to sell 2 of the four paintings. I was pleasantly surprised. One night, over drinks, she told me the paintings were coded with esoteric references to underground resistance groups hidden among the general Chinese populace in Kiautschou Bay Leased Territory. She felt guilty for not telling the story, as her great-grandmother lived under German rule and worked as a maid for one of the administrators and so did the painter’s great-grandmother. But again, business is business. I did regret not asking her if they were related at all.

Every night after leaving the convention center, I felt restless, easily tired, and terribly hungry. I couldn’t stay long at any of the museum openings. The shows all looked refined and expensive, but I felt disturbed by the number of women attending these openings hoping to find a high-earning man. I wanted to be honest with them and tell them the tragic truth about life. Still, I decided against it. It would be good karma for me to let them live with their illusion of what Art Basel is for a week. I did become friends with a Polish conceptual artist seeking American representation at the ICA Miami opening. We bonded over cars. He makes sculptures about how they traffic libidinal investment and I have always wanted to learn how to drive. Every night, we skipped parties in membership clubs and island houses and enjoyed big meals at gentrified ethnic restaurants in Little Haiti. He was attracted to me, I could tell. Alas there was nothing I could do about his useless attraction.

I was more flattered when a girl at a Silencio party thought I was straight when I was complaining about how boring the party was and tried to get free drinks out of me. I liked her until she mistook my question of “Where are you from” as an interrogation of her origin. I was more interested to see if she is from New York or a Miami native. It turned out she was Vietnamese and grew up outside Miami, only without the ability to speak the language. I was disappointed, with understanding, nevertheless. It must be alienating growing up Asian in one of the several American cities not built by or for Asians.

I had more joy living vicariously through my temporary roommate, A. I was happiest when I learned she had sex on the beach with a film producer from London, a man who specialised in transgressive indies, whatever that means. When I woke up at 7, she just returned from clubbing and told me beautiful stories of horniness and sensuality. In Miami, even casual sex feels loftier and takes on more stakes than it does in New York. Last year in the lobby of Edition Hotel, I kissed an Italian curator before he started crying and telling me how desperately he needed to go back to Europe to fix his collapsing relationship. I cried with him too, shedding tears for my own unrequited love. This year, I missed him a little on my flight to New York, but I soon remembered his name and looked him up. I realized that he curates exhibitions that favor the experiential over the theoretical, often platforming painters and sculptors who are too eager to mask their lack of agenda as radicality. I also realized he makes more money than I will ever make. I started to resent him, not because we did not reach the stage of sex, but because curating contemporary art is an ideological battle, a life-and-death struggle, and he is my foe, not my friend.

Cat Valentine takes us down a magical mystery tour of a flatshow in Kilburn, writing up the wisdom of bassnotesonhope, a choir-band of ‘naive socio-geo-political’ inspiration.
If it takes a village to raise a child, it took a global village to raise these beautiful singing children in their twenties, and an Abby Lee-Miller-esque level of determination to rally them into performing. Melodia’s flat hosted the line-up: Charlie Osborne, Bassnotesonhope, WorldpeaceDMT, Floods in Atlanta.
Beaming into the instagram live at the party of dreamers, last night we blurred the line between audience and actor… last night was an episode of Dance Moms…

I’m Cat Valentine, member of choir-band bassnotesonhope. This is my report on the second gig we ever played.

"Almost as if it was just a random houseparty filled with people who, full-time or occasionally, dream of being rockstars."

It was a Christmas show put together by Leo (WPDMT) after he asked on his IG story if anyone had a free house to host. From what I understood, a random kid responded by offering up his mom’s house (without permission) while she was away, under the condition that he could play the opening set. He was in strict charge of the RSVP list and neighbours weren’t a concern of his. I pictured some kind of underground-music-loving Cartman figure who would force us into listening to some awkward set for half an hour.

On the night of, when my Uber dropped me off in residential Kilburn I was kind of stranded with all my instruments for a while. I couldn’t really Google Maps my way to the house, but slowly I started noticing e-girls and hediboys flocking around here and there, so I knew I was getting warmer. They approached me kindly, asked if I was playing, and then offered to carry my instruments and help me find my way. I remember this guy Harry who carried my keyboard—shoutout to you, Harry, if you read this. My bandmates were waiting outside and we all went in together, saying thank you and see you later to the cute e-girls and hediboys, who were made to wait until the “doors” officially opened.

Inside the house I realised that me and my band members were basically one third of the total capacity of people who could fit in this flat. As I was daydreamin about the problems the size of our band will cause for the future shows all over the world we hopefully one day get to play, the “kid” whose house it was walked up to me and asked if I was “Cat.”

“Yes, I am Cat Valentine. Is this your house?”

I was a bit surprised. Turns out the random “kid” wasn’t a random kid but a guy with a music project called Melodia. The house was his and his bandmates’ flatshare.

They opened the night with a cool set. One of them played electric guitar and sang in a nice, vulnerable way; the other played bass guitar using a violin bow. With the exception of Ike and Leo annoyingly having a vain photoshoot throughout most of the set, everyone else was locked in, sitting on the floor subtly head-bumping. To me it felt like being somewhere in between that trancey listening-party space in Berlin—where everyone lies on the floor listening to a set that’s oddly quiet because it’s in a residential area—and what I imagine it must’ve been like (idk, I can only imagine, I was personally a high schooler in Amsterdam at the time) to attend a Double Virgo gig when they were just starting out.

After Melodia it was Charlie Osborne’s turn. She prepared poetry and read it to a score of her friend Eric playing banjo. Charlie’s voice sounded soft and beautiful, and Eric’s banjo playing took me to a fictional place. I sometimes long for: an American road trip in an America I imagine from a YouTube clip of Townes Van Zandt playing Waiting Around to Die, every spaghetti western I’ve ever seen, and the movie My Own Private Idaho.

At this point the living room was so packed I could barely see anything, but for a brief moment I caught them sitting on the floor with their backs against each other, looking magical.

Then I had to gather my troops. We were on next. I found some of them mid doing a line, some doing vocal warm-ups in the toilet, some doing final touch-ups on their costumes. I felt like Abby Lee Miller, losing my shit about choir members losing their stage props and not knowing the order of the setlist (JOJO, HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING?!).

Abby Lee Miller is a good analogy here actually, because bassnotesonhope takes inspiration from naive socio-geo-political themed children’s musical, theatre, and dance recitals.

Think Dance Moms season 3, episode 12, when they prepared a dance recital in honour of Rosa Parks, and for a moment the role of Rosa Parks was undecided between Nia (the obvious choice, as she
was the only black girl in the group) and Kendall (a cute white girl with an overbearing mom who calls her “My Little Kendall,” which on TikTok has now granted Kendall the nickname MLK). In the end Nia got to be Rosa Parks, but Kendall will forever be MLK.

For the Christmas show we prepared a set in honour of Somalis and their right to return to their promised land: Minnesota. If you’re a reader who doesn’t understand what I’m talking about, I’ll briefly explain these geopolitics to you. There’s a large Somali community living in Minnesota. Some of them kinda don’t really integrate in the way certain Americans want them to, prompting Trump to talk a whole lot of shit about Somalia during a press conference. Somalis responded to this by rage-baiting Americans on X and TikTok into believing that they think “The Minnesotas” were promised to them in the Old Testament 3,000 years ago and that they’ll soon be mass immigrating through birthright trips to the promised lands. Bassnotesonhope stands in solidarity with the Somalis. Bassnote memberMartyna read a short text describing how Somali explorers found Minnesota 3,000 years ago, followed by a choral version of Coming Home (not the P-Diddy version—strictly Skylar Grey).

Choir member Bexley came up with the idea to sing from the perspective of Americans welcoming Somalis into Minnesota, so we sang Glad You Came by The Wanted.

We closed with Homemade Dynamite by Lorde, aligning ourselves with peoples worldwide forced to fight back against oppressive states and regimes through guerrilla warfare whether online or IRL.

Our set flew by, and then it was time for the headliner: WPDMT. Rowan Please looked phenomenal.
She’d painted her face and had been painting other people’s faces throughout the night to raise money for the homeless. I briefly spoke to her manager, who had a blue butterfly painted across his face, which was very cute.

Everyone—WPDMT member or not—was singing along or playing some kind of instrument, receiving soft instructions from Leo. When they played Year of the Dragon, an acoustic version of a Bassvictim song, Maria M put a phone in my hands.

“We’re live on Bassvictim. Record.”

I recorded the whole thing, and afterwards we realised the sound had been off during the live.

“I DON’T FUCKING HEAR ANYTHIIIIIIING” a Bassvictim fan commented.

So we did the whole thing again, sound on this time. After that I requested Love Yourself. They played it. I loved it. At that point everyone was just yelling stuff. Someone yelled Beatles! Across the Universe! so we collectively played Across the Universe. Chords kept being played, people yelled random phrases, and out of that the beginnings of a new song were written: Bassnote member Isobel’s line "All of our loser neighbours... can’t stop us from dancing....” spun into a twenty minute jam session, which ironically caused the neighbours to complain massively and then the party was shut down. Unfortunately Floods in Atlant last on the lineup, didn’t get to play his set.

I was asked to review this night, and I don’t think I can objectively do that, since I was part of it. But if I try anyway, and be as ruthless and critical as possible, I’d give it a ten out of ten—because it was fun, DIY, and collaborative in a way where the boundaries across acts, audience, and performer completely disappeared.

Almost as if it was just a random houseparty filled with people who, full-time or occasionally, dream of being rockstars.

It’s a Saturday evening. I’ve just finished work, and I’ve got a pint in my hand. After staring at a kitchen sink for most of the day, I’m looking forward to seeing Merlin Carpenter’s solo show David’s Soul at the Quality of Life Gallery in Glasgow’s West End, which I hope is going to be more exciting. As I wait for a friend to arrive, I check the gallery's Instagram bio which reads: “We are the best gallery in London, we just happen to be somewhere else” - I’m still struggling to decide whether this serves as a diss to Glasgow or just another instance of the exhausting Londoner-in-Glasgow attitude.

There’s the occasional self-imposed belief that they are the first to discover the city, and then proceed to go on to explain to everyone, including Glaswegians, about why Glasgow is so great. Being a student at the GSA, I’m all too well accustomed with the unfortunate inevitability of shittily painted cans of Tennents lager or the shallow holiday maker, arts and crafts-esque work by some of the relocated students. Although knowing Merlin Carpenter for his constant ability to avoid being categorised by style or subject matter, I know this show will be far removed from the former. My friend arrives, and we look at Google Maps to plan our route to the flat in which the show is taking place, only to be shown that the gallery is on the same street as us. Perfect.

I overhear an American voice confirming that I was probably in the right place. Heading up to the top floor of the tenement flat we are greeted with a dram of whiskey in true Glasgow fashion. We enter the living room of gallery owner Richard Parry’s family home where four Mercedes-Benz dual suspension patronise the carpet. I'm quickly airdropped to 1990s Cologne with Kippenberger et al. Present. The steeds are lined up in the centre of the room, taking the form of either trophy horses or the swaggering cool kids in the school playground. I sat down against the wall and began to read the fifteen-page press release. Around halfway through, I look up and see musician and artist Joanne Robertson get told off for grabbing the handlebars, which made me giggle. I too was wondering how well these bikes could do a wheelie. The press release serves as some form of ancient manuscript regarding the mystifying history of the bikes, their conception, storage and eventual delivery to the living room of Richard Parry. To quote from the singing voice of a mouse who had eaten its way through the bike's brake cables in the barn where the work was stored:

“I'm truly sorry Man's dominion, Has broken Nature's social union, An' justifies that ill/
opinion, Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor, earth-born companion, An fellow-mortal!”

It feels only fitting for a press release of such length and esoteric nature to accompany Carpenter, who is also esoteric and lengthy in nature.

The bikes dominate the living room. It should feel like a salesroom of sorts, although Richard Parry's pastel blue walls mute that sterile feeling that we’re more used to experiencing. We can see Carpenter express his distrust for the art world as the bikes embody the flashy and cocky collector. Carpenter’s been known to criticise the art market before with his work, such as the painting slash performance The Opening (2007) at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in which he vandalised his own show, scrawling phrases like “DIE COLLECTOR SCUM” and “I LIKE CHRIS WOOL” across canvases. It’s quite clear that he struggles to come to terms with being a participant in the fried, shitty, circle-jerky viewing and buying domain that we all take part in. But, I think these themes become more apt when explored with less blatancy: in an obviously comsumer targeted, branded parternship, specialised object-artwork, like a mountain bike.

It seems as if I should have no connection to something as pointless or outwardly exorbitant as souped-up Benz bikes - I felt submissive to its glamorous and sharp aesthetics. They feel inescapable and ambiguous: similar to how BMW gatecrashes its way into high culture by sponsoring Art Basel. Something is troubling about seeing a non-art object collide into a high-end artefact, accompanied by the collective bewilderment of looking at eighty grand worth of bikes in someone else’s very nice living room. It’s here that Carpenter can engage us with his interests in Marxist Theory. I’m going to outline commodity fetishism again because it’s been long enough since our readership read theory.

The work references Marx’s theories on the transcendent value placed upon objects as they become commodities. This, in turn, disregards any value of labour required for the production of the objects. Carpenter presses this further as he re-authorises the readymade and, in turn, exploits the labour further, giving it a surplus of higher and more disillusioned value.

The pieces have previously been shown at Galerie Christian Nagel in 1999; Art Basel (2007) Kunstverein (2007). It's important to note this is the first time the work has been shown in almost 30 years. The white cube is becoming increasingly further from the status quo, and with that seems to come accessibility. Art is coming back into the hands of neighbours and being shown in kitchens, living rooms, old shops and basements.

Very few of us have reason or desire to go to Art Basel and turn on our bullshit sieve in the hope to see those one or two archive pieces we've been waiting for the IRL moment with. It’s exciting to start seeing more physically inaccessible art in less capitalised spaces. There's becoming a reduced us and them attitude regarding established and grassroots projects.

A review of "Banana Karenina" by The Pegram Collection and Alex Heard, which took place on a bridge in Archway last month.

I have 5 minutes at home to change into a dress adequately chic enough to fit my role as fashion show attendee. I am going to Bananna Karenina, a “performance featuring 9 dresses,” which will be staged on Sussex Way bridge, a no-where landmark vaguely in Archway.
To hold a show in public is to trust in the participants to behave when the hierarchy between audience and artist is removed. If vulnerability was hiding behind the texts of another man, the cracks in the lo-fi setting made the whole thing feel unassuming and human.
The show is a collaboration between artist Alex Heard and designer Mack Pegram, aka. The Pegram Collection. Described on Instagram as a museum in Buckinghamshire, a place random enough to blend into the brown and grey mush of Somewhere in England.
I make it to the bridge, where I am greeted by a horde of familiar faces I hardly ever get to see this far north of the river. The bridge overlooks a train track and I feel pride at recognising the reference despite never having read the book. Anna Karenina (1876) is one of those books that is so solidly book it feels you should have read it, haven’t read it, but probably really, actually have read it. It is like the bible, or Pride and Prejudice (1813).. If the railway was once a symbol of the modernising forces of industry, we now find them to be slightly ruined, going on as if they didn’t know how to stop.
People are holding pieces of paper and I. I want to get my hands on one. I ask someone where they got theirs, and I am interrupted by a youthful man in a suit who runs around the corner and emerges with a sheet for me. He is one out of two bow-tied servers carrying trays of water and wine. The servers wear suits for the very reason I am wearing my chic attire: servers wear suits.
Swooning music starts to play out of a boombox to my left, quiet at first and then loud enough to recognise it isn’t accidental and that the show is starting. The first model appears across the bridge. She is wearing a long and shapeless white robe, plain except for lines of black text which become legible as she gets closer. A friend speaks into a microphone and recites the text on the dress.
First, the front. Then, after the model turns, the back.
Though
Kitty’s
Toilette,
coiffure
and
all
the preparations
for the
ball had cost her
a good deal of trouble
and planning..
The next 8 models come and go similarly. The text appears in bursts of differently sized clusters, varying in dramatic and comedic effect.
Simple, natural, graceful - and, at the same time - gay and animated..
The words, ripped out of Tolstoy’s novel, are ready-made statements which have miraculously been given legs to walk on. No longer sitting next to Tolstoy’s characters, they can stand for everything.I feel that some of them are descriptors of the models themselves. Sometimes two words are placed together in a way that makes me laugh or seems to represent some distant truth that I know about the world. Or that I have been told I know about the world, and what our story is about, and how things go wrong, and so forth.
The models are styled in regency-era themed accessories: feathered boater hats, a basket of apples, twigs and other pastoral trimmings. An English re-reading of the novel’s original Russian setting. It’s 3pm on a Sunday in November and the sun is beginning to set over the bridge. When the music cuts in between songs, it is replaced by the rustling in the trees, the sound of wind blowing hair into the models’ faces and the fabric of their gowns in and around their legs, making it hard for them to walk. When the models pause long enough over the bridge, things seem still and I am tricked into feeling like everything fits and makes sense.
Families, lime-bikers and stray pedestrians are forced to meander their way through the obstacle course of cameras, speakers, and the bodies of former and current art students. One man, who looks smart enough to stage his own show, or has maybe gotten lost on his way east to join the other old and hatted eccentrics of London, is asking what this is all about – “it's a fashion show, I think.” A woman walks and runs as close to the edge of the bridge as possible, hoping to disappear into the brick, but this only makes the fashion-art-audience giggle harder. Others stop and will stay till the very end.
A man is filming the whole thing on his iPhone camera. Gliding around models and audience, up and down the catwalk. I learn later that this is one man out of a collective behind the Instagram account @27b.6_. I have seen their wordless and voyeuristic portraits of pedestrians before. The camera lingering uncomfortably long till their subject(s) start to crack in a Warholian screen-test fashion. The account representative was invited by the artists themselves; though they may not have anticipated him stalking the catwalk as he did.
When a bright orange train of the London Overground passes the tracks and the models change back into their preferred city attire, a leftover bouffant hairstyle will be the only reminder that the audience has seen any art at all. We scurry back into London’s walls.

Introducing the press release is Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence. A helplessly romantic push toward self-affirmation, it also stages life as an absurd play of recurring archetypes, charged with the history that shapes them. The collection pokes fun at the city’s self-seriousness and fashion’s obsession with the future. Clothes are read too quickly, identities too fixed. Designed away from the city, the garments return mischievous, repeating our absurd metropolitan codes, but askew.

Mack is selling t-shirts on the table at the post-show reception. People are trying on the various prints, trying to find one that will fit their vibe. G puts on a tank top printed with a big “It” and M is happy with hers because the question mark at the end of the sentence will poke out of her cardigan in a nice manner. If the lines of text imitated the nonsense of optometric eye-tests, we are failing hard. The alphabet is to us only nice looking shapes, decorating a white backdrop.
Coming away from the show, I realise that I am wearing a '60s-vibe top and that my outfit is awfully charged. My outfit is the beige lint roller of all of history before me, and my '60s top is a ball of hair caught in its sticky tape.

Hollywood Superstar visits Hannah Taurins studio in Brooklyn. Represented by Theta gallery, Taurins paintings are a step forward for contemporary figuration, which can sometimes fall into the gutter between ironic grotesque john currin derivations and tired imitations of Francis Bacon's phantasmagoria. Taurins captures the archival impulse - media is an ouroborus - with the pechance and kitschness of Audrey Hepburns Funny Face (1957).

Her mannequins, her muses, are drawn from the torn pages of now defunct fashion magazines, or scans from the FIT library. She preserves the flaws of the copier in her pastels and gouache. Inspiration ranges from carefully curated wedding boards on Pinterest, to the editorials of brands like Kiko Kostadinov.

Taurins work, for this editor, when paired with the accelerating relationship between fashion and art, encapsulates the habits of a certain level of online personhood. Mining for information, for images, nostalgic or futuristic, through digital and traditional archival integration.

Hannah Taurins reminds us most of Francis Picabia, "He's such a freak" Taurins says, "I love him".

Her exhibitions, including solo show God, Let me Be Your Instrument (Theta, 2025) and Cabin Pressure (2025) on view at Air Service Basel. are dramturgical, following the rise, hubris and desire of her female protagonists.

Hollywood Superstar

How do you source images? What do you look for? There is a trend at the moment for artists working in both traditional and non-traditional mediums to search for slightly retro, editorial images on Pinterest. It's a new kind of source material. That and the mannequin trend, but I guess models are just mannequins, in a way.

Hannah Taurins

I’m not above Pinterest - it’s crazy - like for the next show I'm working on a bridal theme, and obviously, Pinterest is perfectly engineered for bridal planning.

You can often tell when the original poster is just a really passionate researcher with a scanner. I like to use libraries at FIT. Thefashionspot.com is a big one too. I follow a bunch of fashion magazine scan accounts on instagram. I used to use Flickr when I was using freakier, niche photos and was more paranoid about copyright. Deviant Art, too.

It’s tough because not every good photo is going to make a good drawing. That’s why I felt challenged by the Kiko Kostadinov images. They were such compelling photos, but hard to translate into compelling images.

With some works I have to take on more responsibility for the “why” of the drawing.

I used to not draw men at all, I just didn’t feel interested in it. This has changed for me recently. Lately I’ve been drawing men in a fantasy lover role! This has been lots of fun for me, and I think is a result of some recent healing. Plus I love men. Maybe before I felt as if to make a successful work I had to embody the subject, and I felt far away from men. But now I just love to put them in as a little vessel for desire.

HS

When you work, you’re drawing from a photocopy of the original photograph, so you're twice removed from the actual photographic scene. Your backgrounds, too, have a semi-abstraction in them, like you’ve captured the detritus on the surface of the photograph, or the glare on the camera lens.

HT

My images are distorted from the magazine. I like the idea of incorporating a glare or translating the glitch that comes with the photocopy. It’s exciting to me that you noticed that. Sometimes the decisions I make with color are a result of my printer running low on ink or something. But even to include a margin or to draw the stack of pages underneath the page with my reference.

HS

Do you feel like there's a trend in figurative painting, or drawing, toward using super niche internet language?

HT

I've felt this way since Tumblr. The source material feels like a natural part of my practice. I had a fashion makeup blog - which I deleted when I was in cringe mode. I pick the images in a way that I can say something about myself. For my last show at Theta, God, Let me be Your Instrument, it was about this groupie. She is following this musician around that she's enamoured by, and she reaches stardom, but then she falls, and she dies. It’s super personal, that story.

I remember in high school making paintings of screenshots from snapchat messages. My teachers hated it! They had no idea why I was doing it. I was fascinated by how my friends and I were communicating with each other.

HS

There is a painting of her called Groupies Live Forever, 2025 where her soul is coming out of her body - she finds herself spiritually reborn. How did the concept for this piece arise?

When I first thought of it, I knew the show would be about rock stars. All the images I had been compiling were fashion images referencing music. I thought the protagonist of the paintings could be a groupie. I did get my heart broken by a musician while making this show. I remember doing a walkthrough at the gallery with a drawing class from Princeton. I turned totally red when I told them the show was about my breakup. It was so vulnerable but that’s how I knew it was right for me to share. What better catalyst for personal transformation than love and heartbreak? This painting is about that. In life if you do it consciously I think one dies and is reborn many times.

HS

So what about the next show, the bride? That’s a kind of another nostalgic kick, bridal couture is such a specific niche but a huge industry, every Pinterest user can recount being accosted with a million bridal mood pages.

HT

I want to do a delusional bride. I’m building the storyline now - what is her character arc? I’m the age my mom was when she got married and had me. I’m curious about the fantasy of the perfect bride and holy union, and the anxieties surrounding that. I feel caught now more than ever between being a sort of perfectly self contained artist for the rest of my life, taking lovers, whatever, and really buying the marriage story.

There’s something there too about Jung’s Animus - the unconscious masculine in a woman. The first work I made with this show in mind was of a pregnant woman. It’s my fantasy about self-fertilization, the result of integrating all parts of oneself and achieving this kind of creative fertility.

HS

How do you feel like your practice and Instagram interact with each other? This idea of looking, being looked at. Your work have these female protagonists that appeal to a gaze - but also to a digital lens. Like, your paintings do well on Instagram. When your refiguring these photocopied images, or painting a steven meisel campaign, do you feel the gaze changes at all?

HT

I used to feel shameful about this, but I no longer do. Making work that does well on Instagram is important to me - fuck it. People have fantasies about what artists are like - my work is about meeting people halfway, creating things. That’s where desire comes in. I think viewers desire something naughty, an insight into me as a person, or into the artwork.

I am often looking for an energy - one for myself and one that I want to bring to the work, as well. It feels so earnest, it's my own creative and sexual desire, and if that's a traditional male gaze…then.

I think you can tell my work is made by a woman. I went to Cooper Union when it wasn’t super fashionable to be making sexy figurative work. It was conceptual work that went down easier there. I’ve gotten a few bad reviews - this vlogger went into my show and talked about this one work, Spread. He comes into the gallery and starts talking about the work, but doesn’t want to be told about it, he’s monologing like:

“I’ve just been seeing images of this painting all over Instagram, and had to come see it myself, it must be a fluke, it collapses modernism and postmodernism into one painting, and theres no way that Hannah Taurins could have been aware she was making such a brilliant move”.

Something about Barnett Newman, lines, abstraction and Courbet’s origin of the world. He just couldn’t give me the compliment. He couldn’t acknowledge the sensuality of the show for one second; he even described the painting as prudish.

Hannah Taurins work installed at Salon (October 16th-19th, 2025) by Hollywood Superstar, Chess Club and Gnossienne Gallery.

HS

Talk to me about your process of making. Do you ever paint from live models? Or only printed images?

I much prefer working from printed images because I can be kind of weird and intense in the studio. I like to get very stoned and listen to the same songs over and over again. I feel moved to draw at odd hours and can’t predict when I need to step away for a walk or a nap or whatever.

When I'm making work, this shift happens. I'll be looking at something and being so present in my body. I find that the hardest thing about my process is to let myself be that present, and when there's someone else in the studio, it's so much harder. I have to completely objectify them. There's a shift between looking at someone as a person in your studio, and breaking them down into shapes and lines.

And that switch doesn't happen when you paint from images?

HT

It’s almost automatic but once it happens, it feels like there is no separation from myself and the image. I am just a vessel for the work. I’m addicted to that space, and have been since I was a kid.

Hollywood Superstar publishes Italian director Pier Pasolini's Cosair writings (1973–75). These excerpts examine the international style of counterculture and the political adaptability of fashion via the infamous fascist long-haired males. The second extract is the conclusion to one of the more famous essays from the collection, which identifies the “new fascism” with its “pragmatic” and “American” style. The Corsair Writings remain remarkable, contemporaneous to Pasolini's final film, Sàlo (1975), which depicts the depths of fascist libertine depravity.

It has been nearly 50 years since Pasolini’s body was found on the beach at Ostia. In the film Amore Tossico (1983, dir. Claudio Caligari, Italy), two young heroin addicts overdose, draped together over the memorial to the director. Like the doomed characters of Caligari’s film, Pasolini’s posthumously collected Corsair Writings were written as raids on the public consciousness, steeped in the counter cultural capture of a moment when clandestine state actors were widely suspected of obscuring or enabling far-right terror, cultivating a sense of crisis that would come to define Italy’s long decade of uncertainty. This so called “strategy of tension" cannot be read in history books.

How do you categorise your average political assassin? Computers are seized by government agencies, who release the facts when and how it suits them. Can anyone be certain of the political signs that the Trump shooter, that the Charlie Kirk shooter, left floating in their virtual worlds? British police impregnated left-wing activists, the US government was all over 4chan, and the EDL still gets more cash from government agencies than Stephen Yaxley-Lennon knows what to do with.

This Anonymous Hollywood Superstar feels better for not believing MI5, but that’s just what they’d like...

When we can’t tell who is killing whom, or why, scapegoats are found and order must be seen to be enacted. Pasolini warns us of a “hasty” attribution of blame to those who are treated as “congenitally destined to become fascists,” the “eighteen-year-old boys… who plunged into this horrible adventure simply out of desperation.” Young men are blamed for violence but immigrants are blamed more; the Prime Minister invokes the fear of the illegal worker to justify a totalitarian digital ID system. When the confusion is mundane, when the sense of disorder is complete, when communities are atomised, it is imagined that fear will make them cry out for their own suppression. But an enlightened public does not have to ask for any protection that they are not already capable of giving to each other, and that’s a fact.

"The Discourse of the Longhairs"

January 7, 1973. Published in Corriere della Sera under the title, “Against the Longhairs”.

The first time I saw longhairs was in Prague. Two young foreigners, with hair hanging down over their shoulders, entered the lobby of the hotel where I was staying. They walked across the lobby and sat down at a table in a secluded corner. They sat there for about half an hour, observed by the customers of the hotel, including myself, and then they left. The whole time they sat there, and as they walked through the crowded lobby of the hotel, neither of them said a single word (perhaps—although I don’t recall right now—they whispered a few words to each other: but I suppose if they did it was something strictly practical and pedestrian).

In fact, in that particular situation—which was completely public or social, almost official, so to speak—they did not need to speak at all. Their silence was strictly functional. And it was functional simply because words were superfluous. Both of them, in effect, used a different language from the one that is composed of words to communicate with those who were present, with the observers—with their brothers of the moment.

What replaced traditional verbal language, rendering it superfluous—and immediately finding its place in the broad domain of “signs”, in the domain of semiology—was the language of their hair.
In a single sign—the length of their hair flowing down over their shoulders— all the possible signs of an articulate language were concentrated. What was the meaning of their unspoken and exclusively physical message?

It was this: “We are two longhairs. We belong to a new human category that is now making its appearance in the world, which has its center in America and which is unknown in the provinces (for example—indeed, above all—here in Prague). We are therefore an apparition for you. We are performing our apostolic mission, filled with a knowledge that is both totally overwhelming and totally exhausting. We have nothing to add orally or rationally to what our hair says physically and ontologically. The knowledge that fills us, as we perform our apostolic mission, will belong to you some day, too. For the moment it is something New, a great Novelty, which generates, together with scandal, expectation in the world: it will not be betrayed. The bourgeoisie are right to look at us with hatred and terror, because the length of our hair constitutes an absolute contradiction of their ways. But don’t think of us as uneducated savages: we are well aware of our responsibility. We do not bother with you, we keep to ourselves. You should do the same and await the unfolding of events.”

I was the recipient of this communication and I was immediately able to decipher it: this language that lacked a lexicon, grammar and syntax could be understood immediately, because, semiologically speaking, it was nothing but a form of that “language of physical presence” that men have always known how to use.

I understood, and felt an immediate dislike for both of them.

Later, I had to swallow my hostility and defend the longhairs from attacks by the police and the fascists: I was, of course, as a matter of principle, on the side of the Living Theatre, of the Beats, etc.; and the principle that caused me to side with them was a strictly democratic one.

The longhairs multiplied—like the first Christians—but they remained mysteriously silent; their long hair was their only real language and they felt no need to supplement it with another. Their language coincided with their existence. Ineffability was the ars retorica of their protest.

What did the longhairs say, with their inarticulate language that consisted of the monolithic sign of their hair, between 1966 and 1967?

They said: “Consumer civilisation nauseates us. We are protesting radically. We are creating an antibody against this civilisation by way of our refusal. Everything seems to be going smoothly, right? Our generation is supposed to be integrated, right? But take a look at how things really stand. We refuse to accept the insane fate of becoming ‘executives’. We are creating new religious values within bourgeois entropy, precisely at the moment when it is turning secular and hedonistic. We are doing this loudly and with revolutionary violence (the violence of the nonviolent?) because our critique of today’s society is total and intransigent.”

I don’t think that, if they were to be interrogated in accordance with the traditional system of verbal language, they would have been capable of expressing the meaning of their hair so articulately; but that is essentially what they said. As for me, although I have suspected ever since then that their “system of signs” was the product of a subculture of protest that was opposed to a subculture of power, and that their non-Marxist revolution was suspect, I still stood by their side for a while, finding a place for them at least in the anarchic element of my ideology.

The language of these longhairs expressed, although ineffably, Leftist “themes”. Maybe those of the New Left, born within the world of the bourgeoisie (in a dialectic that was perhaps artificially created by the Mind that rules, beyond the consciousness of particular historical Powers, the fate of the Bourgeoisie).

Then came 1968. The longhairs were absorbed by the Student Movement; they protested with red flags on the barricades. Their language expressed an increasing number of Leftist “themes”. (Che Guevara was a longhair, etc.)

In 1969—with the Milan massacre, the Mafia, the emissaries of the Greek colonels, the complicity of the government Ministers, the trama nera, the provocateurs—the longhairs were everywhere: while they were not yet the majority from the numerical point of view, they were dominant in terms of their ideological impact. Now the longhairs were no longer silent: they no longer delegated the totality of their communicative and expressive capacity to the system of signs of their hair. To the contrary, the physical presence of the longhairs was relegated, in a way, to a different function. They once again returned to the traditional use of verbal language. And I do not use the word, “verbal”, casually. In fact, I place special emphasis on it. They spoke so much between 1968 and 1970 that, for quite a while after that, they would no longer be able to speak at all: they devoted themselves to verbalism, and verbalism was the new ars retorica of the revolution (leftism, the verbal disorder of Marxism!).

Although the longhairs—re-immersed in their verbal storm—no longer addressed their agitated listeners in their former nonverbal way, I somehow summoned the power to sharpen my decoding skills and, amidst all the noise, I tried to focus on the unspoken discourse, evidently uninterrupted, of their hair that was always getting longer.

What did their long hair say now? It said: “Yes, it’s true, we are now speaking of Leftist themes; our meaning—while performing a purely secondary role in support of the meaning of our verbal messages—is a leftist meaning…. But…. But….”
The long-haired discourse stopped there: I had to finish it myself. With that “but” it evidently wanted to say two things:

1. “Our ineffability is revealed to be increasingly more irrational and pragmatic; the preeminence that we mutely attribute to action is of a subcultural character and therefore essentially Right-Wing”;
2. “We have also been adopted by the fascist provocateurs; they are mixing with the verbal revolutionaries (verbalism can lead to action, especially when it mythologizes it): and we constitute a perfect disguise, not only from the physical point of view—our disordered flowing and waving locks tend to make all faces look the same—but also from the cultural point of view: in effect, a Right-Wing subculture can quite easily be confounded with a Left-Wing subculture.”

In short, I understood that the language of long hair no longer expressed Leftist “themes”, but rather expressed something equivocal, something that was Right-Wing/Left-Wing, which created a situation that made the infiltration of provocateurs possible. About ten years ago, I thought, among us—the preceding generation—a provocateur was almost inconceivable (unless he was a magnificent actor): his subculture was different, even physically, from our culture. We would have known him by his eyes, his nose, his hair! We would have exposed him immediately and we would have immediately taught him the lesson that he deserved. Now this is no longer possible. No one in the world can distinguish a revolutionary from a provocateur by his physical appearance alone. Right and Left have merged physically.
And then came 1972.

In September of that year I was in the city of Isfahan, in the heart of Iran. An underdeveloped country, as the horrible expression goes, but also, to use an equally horrible expression, a country on the path of development [in pieno decollo—“taking off”].

Upon the Isfahan of ten years ago—one of the most beautiful cities in the world, maybe even the most beautiful—a new Isfahan has been built, modern and horribly ugly. On its streets, however, on their way home from work or just taking a walk, towards evening, you see the kind of young men you used to see in Italy about ten years ago: humble and dignified boys, with their smooth necks, their nice clean-shaven faces under their proud shocks of hair. And one evening I saw, walking down the main street of the city, among all those old-style, beautiful young men who were so radiant with an ancient human dignity, two monstrous beings: they were not exactly longhairs, but their hair was cut in the European style, long in the back, short in the front, drawn back and artificially slicked down around their head with two ugly shanks of hair pasted back over their ears.
What did their hair have to say? It said: “We do not belong to these starving masses, these miserable underdeveloped paupers, held back in the age of barbarism! We work at the bank, we are students, sons of rich people who work for the oil companies; we have been to Europe, we read books. We are bourgeoisie: and here is our long hair that testifies to our privileged international modernity!”
Their long hair therefore alludes to Right-Wing “themes”.

The cycle has come full circle. The subculture of power has absorbed the subculture of opposition and has made it its own: with diabolical skill it has patiently transformed it into a fashion that, if it cannot be called fascist in the classic sense of the word, is nonetheless really a phenomenon of the “extreme right”.

And so to my bitter conclusion. The disgusting masks that the young men put on their faces, making them look obscene like old whores from an absurd iconography, objectively recreate in their physiognomies only what they have themselves always condemned: reminiscent of the old faces of priests, judges, government officials, false anarchists, court jesters, pettifogging lawyers, Don Ferrantes, mercenaries, swindlers, self-righteous weirdos. The radical and indiscriminate condemnation that they pronounce against their parents—who constitute the evolving history and prior culture—by erecting an unbreachable wall against them, has ended up isolating them, preventing them from attaining a dialectical relation with their parents. Only by way of this dialectical relation—even if it is dramatic and extreme—can they attain to a real historical consciousness of themselves and advance beyond, or “supersede”, their parents. Instead, the isolation in which they have enclosed themselves—like a world apart, a ghetto reserved for young people—has severed them from their undeniable historical reality: and it has implied—inevitably—a regression. They have actually regressed from the position of their parents, resurrecting in their souls the terrors and conformities and, in their physical appearance, conventionalisms and miseries that once seemed to have been finally abolished forever.

Now the longhairs are repeating, in their inarticulate and obsessive language of non-verbal signs, in their underworld iconography, the “themes” of television or advertising, where is it currently impossible to find a young man without long hair: something that would today be scandalous for power.
It causes me sincere and immense displeasure to say this (in fact, true desperation): but now, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of the faces of Italian young men are looking more and more like the face of Merlin the Magician. The freedom to wear their hair as long as they like is no longer defensible, because it is no longer freedom. The time has come to say instead to our young men, that the way they wear their hair is horrible, because it is servile and vulgar. The time has come for them to wake up and free themselves of this guilty, anxious yearning to conform to the degrading order of the horde.

Here is one, for example. In the article that gave rise to this controversy (Corriere della Sera, June 10, 1974), I said that those who were really responsible for the Milan and Brescia bombings are the Italian government and the police: because if the government and the police had wanted to prevent them, these attacks would have never taken place at all. This is a commonplace. So, at this time, I will definitely get a few laughs by saying that we, too—progressives, anti-fascists, leftists—are responsible. In fact, in all these years we have done nothing:
because talk of “State-sponsored massacres” did not become a commonplace and everything stopped there;
(and more serious still) we have done nothing because the fascists do not exist. We have condemned them only to gratify our conscience with our indignation; and the more strident and petulant our indignation the more tranquil our conscience.

In reality we have behaved towards the fascists (I am speaking here only of the young ones) hastily and therefore ruthlessly, we wanted to believe that they were congenitally destined to be fascists and, faced with this predestination, there was nothing we could do. And let us not deceive ourselves: we all knew, deep down, that when one of these youths decided to become a fascist, it was purely by accident, it was nothing but a gesture, unmotivated and irrational; one word might have been all it would have taken for this not to happen. But none of us ever spoke with them or to them. We immediately accepted them as inevitable representatives of Evil. And maybe they were adolescents, eighteen-year-old boys, who knew nothing about anything, who plunged into this horrible adventure simply out of desperation.

But we were incapable of distinguishing them from the others (I am not saying that we could not distinguish them from the other extremists, but from everyone else). And this is our appalling justification.

Father Zosima (literature for literature’s sake!) was immediately able to distinguish, among the crowd of people in his monastery’s reception room, Dmitry Karamazov, the parricide. Then he rose from his chair and prostrated himself before him. And he did so (as the younger Karamazov later said) because Dmitry was destined to perform the most horrible act and to endure the most inhuman suffering.

Think (if you have the courage) of that boy or of those boys who planted the bombs at the public square in Brescia. Wouldn’t it be necessary to get up and prostrate oneself before them? But they were youths with long hair, or with Edwardian moustaches, they wore headbands or maybe a cap pulled down over their eyes, they were pale and presumptuous, they were obsessed with dressing fashionably, all alike, to have a Porsche or a Ferrari, or motorcycles so they can drive them like little idiot archangels with their ornamental girlfriends behind them, yes, but modern, in favour of divorce, of women’s liberation, and of development in general….

They were, in short, young people like all the rest: nothing distinguished them in any way. Even if we wanted to, we would not have been able to prostrate ourselves before them.

For the old fascism, even if only by its rhetorical degeneracy, stood out: while the new fascism—which is completely different—has no outstanding qualities at all: it is not rhetorical in a human way, it is pragmatic in the American style. Its goal is the brutally totalitarian reorganisation and homogenisation of the world.

A few weeks ago, when the Frieze Fair came to London town, Hollywood Superstar sat down (in the DM) with a radical and Instagram-powered neo-gallerist to talk about network painting and speedrunning shows with no nation. Here is the interview with Arden Asher-Tate, aka. Pirates of the Carbomb Infantry.

Best group project since Reena Spaulings...it incidentally, or on purpose, has a overlap with the artists. Like Merlin Carpenter. They also don't priotise silly things like spelling, visual aesthetic cohesion, or neo-liberal graphics, much like the editorial over here in Hollywood.

Have you been asked to submit a project? If you haven't, maybe you need to be:

a) more underground

b) less commercially viable

c) worse at instagram

Access the project here.

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

Hello Percy Jackson's Mom. I am very glad you have liked exhibits. The project is anarcho nomadic space run by myself, sculptor Arden Asher-Taste.

After schooling I went to New York with very romantic idea of finding group of artists like Franco Polish Black Jean Porno Club.

I found painters who piss in corners and galleries in apartments, but you know these kids pay 3000 dollars now for an apartment? That was the case in New York. In Europe provision and scrappiness push against confines of bureaucratic rules but in Brooklyn my friends wanted art lifestyle outside capitalist careerism. I too wanted no rules but my Visa had run out and my money had run out. So now I am back in Berlin and there are painters who piss in corners here too.

HOLLYWOD SUPERSTAR:

What is there to be gained from nomadism in Today's World?

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

hen you live nomadic you meet many artists and you become less of a tight ass because you need people to take you to bars and places to sleep. You take the train all over with university rail pass and never graduate and meet many artists and God forbid you see their artwork or you might puke. But you need these friends and they too are contours that help define your own taste.

HSR:

More than travelling between cities, which are all expensive and full of corners of piss- there is travelling through DMs. I have found you coming closer and closer as my friends excitedly report being asked to 'make solo show'. Pirates of the Carbomb Infantry sail the seas of the social fabric to make decisions about programmes? How do you choose?*

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

I follow back artists if I like their work and usually I ask them to make show. Two hundred artists have been asked to do exhibit, and I wait on images from one hundred more. But there are no tags and sales and no open bar. So the whole anarcho nomadic project space continues as decentralised accelerationist system driven by desire to make show.**

HSR:

It’s iPhone realness. And perhaps a way to solve the problem of recording performance/art. You speedrun the opening: it instantly becomes a memory on an iPhone. It is a collective camera roll. One of the reasons why I admire the practice because it is just so lean. What do you say to the idea that The fat that gets cut out to make your lean gallery practice are the people. That it’s a non human and semi anonymous non event. In this case, you are looking for some purity, no? No messy human ‘buzz’ involved?

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

I like very much the idea of a speed run. In the states there are massive conferences of streamers who run through video games as fast as possible. They find gaps in wall collision detectors and niche tech to skip cut scenes. Boys in bedrooms spend hours a day breaking the game and finding optimal routes to the endpoint. Reclusive artists like me can watch from my studio in Berlin, and live the route vicariously. I don’t romanticize efficiency programs, but I see value in breaking the game of exhibition and art career.

Now there is need to interrogate networking from the angle of social practice, and while the project cuts out the physical gathering, the event of the iPhone opening is intrinsically social, by means of distribution.

HSR:

One thing that brings your shows together is the printing out of things, the use of printer paper. Do you see any other patterns in what people present to pirates?

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

Yes. With printing there is cheapness and informality, but also a rich history of expediency. In the same way this space rethinks need for context and infrastructure, many of these artists are challenging material value structures, focusing instead on communicating. Screaming nonsense is also communication. That is the speaking of growing babies.**

HSR:

Do you want to 'break art career' of 'big' artists for a moment? Or is it more important for these 'small' artists to be together?

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

Hito’s show was very good. Over a 10 minute rant the performer linked together Georgia Alliata’s POCBI selfie exhibit, Guzzler, bad Jake Shore work, and her own theoretical oeuvre. These social games of in-jokes, forgery, and trolling are the same strategies the Real Fine Arts artists were playing with Network Painting in the early 2010’s (I use Network Painting from Jana Euler, in how she uses for self/scene-referentiality in her work. Later it was used by Zach Feuer gallery in NYC for the show Context Message, curated by Real Fine Arts.) We are interested in not big or small, but a familial conversation. Everyone points up to their big sister and makes mocking face. That is a part of family love.