‘Simply’ Exhibition Text for BestWishes Unlimited Exhibition

Benjamin Slinger, Jib Door

13.02.2026 - 13.03.2026

If Obama was still our daddy, the Epstein Library would look like his White House interior design planner: A scrapbook of beaches replacing potential painting acquisitions, redactions produced of brushtrokes not Google Doc squares.

He really is so tasteful. Did you hear that Trump’s DOJ redacted the fucking Mona Lisa?

If Obama had released the files, I’m sure they would be handled with more tact. A delicate binder of bespoke annotated letters and images would have been slowly dispersed over four to eight years to the major broadsheet journals, a wisened editor would then make the correct curatorial decisions to pick the works that best articulate the agreed upon most relevant and emotionally evocative information which we could then acceses through a support-real-journalism-paywall.

aww Don’t be too sad, I miss him too. I wish we could just go back…

Back in 2009 an anonymous sender delivers an email to Jeffrey Epstein sharing a couple’s holiday with the subject heading: simply, paris. It is one of many update-style emails from presumably young girls about their love lives that the pedophile received while serving his sweetheart-deal for prositution of a minor. In the grand scheme of the three million files, a series of heavily redacted holiday photos would not typically make the news. But in one image, from a trip to the Louvre, it does appear that the DOJ blacked out the Mona Lisa to protect a potentional victim. This begs the perfect late-night-show question: Does the Trump Admin not know the most famous painting in the world?

A binder of Artworks for the Obamas to consider to loan for the White House. Assembled by Micheal Smith in 2008, featured in Elle Magazine in 2020

A phillistine pedophile. At least Bill Clinton likes Jazz.
On closer look, the Arts publications and news anchors that took glee in this story of cultural superiority in the face of sex trafficking may be embarrased to realise, of course, that this painting isn’t the actual Mona Lisa. It is a tourist trap cut out in which a victim’s face is ostensibly peaking through a hole. This should have been fairly obvious. I hope I’m not being pedantic to point out that Da Vinci did not paint his skies neon green.

There is a snob’s trueism regarding Trump’s taste and why his extremely loud displays of wealth don’t alienate his working class support base. He lacks the WASPish sensibility to protect generational wealth behind beige wallpaper and The Rowe sunglasses; instead, he seems to enact the ‘factory worker’s’ fantasy of winning the lottery: driving around their low-income hometown in a sports car yelling about how they’ve made it, throwing a solid gold bar at an old boss. As Fran Lebowitz puts it: “Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person.”

Censored Mona Lisa reproduction from Epstein files, 2009. Originally reported in grayscale, 2025...

The ‘factory worker’ is Lebowitz’s idea of a poor person. The same peple who make this argument and laugh about how naive this perceived relatability to power is buy books like Designing History: The Extraordinary Art and Style of the Obama White House by Michael S. Smith (2020).
Whilst listening to their President’s yearly curated playlist and cooking his wife’s favourite White-House-grown recipes, they see no correlation with their own fantasies of being represenated as the most tasteful, well-read, cultured, and most powerful person in the world with the codes for total nuclear anihilation.

The celebration of Obama’s sense of taste is always framed as that of the aspirational middle-class intelligencia, even when we are discussing a Monet painting in his bedroom or Ali’s boxing gloves watching over staff-cooked meals. The White House itself, under his presidency, transforms into an Ivy League University—a bit much sure—but it’s really just an old reveredpublic institution The East Wing is simply your humble professor’s dorms.

I’m reminded of Will and Kate’s branding strategy nicknamed “the Waitrose Royals” wherein their immense god-bestowed wealth and status is always framed as just allowing them to wear a high quality gillet as they do their weekly shop. When Charles was coronated, the polite public were agast with how tacky their sashes and gowns really looked in high defintion. How very gouche. When Trump strips tears down the White House and blows up Jackie’s Rose garden, is he really blowing up history? Maybe he’s just allowing the Neoclassical palace to appear more true to intention oncemore.

Clowns in a Cubicle: Cat Valentine’s Notes from Inside Ormside Projects

29 January: Performances by Bornweekend, Gabrielle Levie and Charlie Osborne

Pepe at the door gives me the iconic Ormside stamp. I’m sure someone, somewhere in South-East London, must have it tattooed.

I walk up the stairs. I smell the incense they always burn there.

“I haven’t been here in a while,” I think to myself. “And I’m glad to be back.”

Ormside is where I did my first line of K. Ormside is where I first learned a little bit about who and what is happening in London. A couple of years ago, Ormside introduced me to a certain type of millennial — the ones making deconstructed club music, putting on riverside raves, orbiting Dean Blunt. Music sounded experimental in a literal way, not in a genre way. People’s vibes were austere and spiritual - A kind of woke militancy. Lara Croft dressing mixed with keffiyehs. Clunky military shoes slowly giving way for streamlined activewear trainers. People walking around in those five-toe Vibrams, or the weirdest, froggiest Y2K Diesels you’ve ever seen.

Everyone who plays there seems to want more fog, more strobe, more layers of haze to hide behind. The room immediately evokes nostalgia and occasion, like you’re early to something that doesn’t know what it is yet. It’s the opposite of Cafe Oto, which could book similar acts but feels institutional — ICA-ish — somewhere you go to see something that’s already been decided is worth paying attention to.

I was a bit drunk and ketamined and remember almost sending [redacted] a sad text along the lines off:

“i canr believe ur not here.. youre missing the WHOLE THING.. Dont u care anymore?!!”
<\3

Let’s talk about what that WHOLE THING was.

I arrived into a cabaret performance by a life-sized nutcracker doll: Gabrielle Levie. Her movements were perfect, somewhere in between a music-hall ventriloquist act and an Oskar Schlemmer figure — those Bauhaus dancers dressed in geometric costumes, bodies turned into moving objects — half human, half prop. Gabrielle’s costume is self made.

She was lip-synching to old French cabaret music. It almost sounded like the voice she was channeling came from her, but not quite, which I like. If lip-synching is too good it stops being good — it feels like trickery, like someone hiding the seams. The good ipsyncher channels the voice in an idiosyncratic way.
Gabrielle ended her set by walking into the crowd, throwing little dice around. The room felt hazy and carnivalesque, like a travelling show back room only meant to exist for one night.

When it’s in between sets, Ormside visitors disperse over three main areas:

Outside smoking.

Buying a Vodka-Mate

Standing in line eagerly awaiting a bathroom cubicle door to open. When a door opens, often not one, not two, not three, not four, but five, six, sometimes seven people spill out of one tiny cubicle. Like clowns in a car.

Whispers start going ’round the three main areas that the next set is about to be on. Everyone reassembles in the main room, except for the poser losers who stay back doing drugs and taking pictures in the cushiony, loungey sofa area in the back. It feels vaguely clandestine back there. Like a soft-furnished VIP section no one officially declared VIP. I imagine this is where scene overlords whisper co-signs into the ear of the Next Big Thing.

Sometimes I am one of the poser losers, but not tonight, because next up it’s… Charlie Osborne.
Charlie is wearing a red-and-white maiden gingham dress with her logo screen-printed onto it. It looks strangely pristine, like it’s been through a cartoon laundromat — flat, glowing, unreal. Which is funny, because Dylan McDonnell told me he worried it would smell off the million cigarettes he smoked while sewing it together on the floor of his tiny room.

Charlie’s set-up is a table with a MacBook and something that looks like a keyboard but is actually a synth. Beside it: a mic stand. Beside that: a drummer. I think his name is Pike.

Charlie keeps moving between the stage and the audience, circling back to the table, blending sounds — stuff she’s produced, stuff she’s sampled, scraps of speech, glitches ripped from obscure videos — then a guitar loop, or a piano, orchestral and dramatic.

She sings live, mic in hand, then slots it back into the stand and starts clicking again, doing laptop wizardry on what I imagine is a completely overcrowded desktop: a hundred tiny files, half-finished exports, things called FINAL_FINAL2.

She’s in performance mode. There’s a manic twinkle in her eyes. Her voice isn’t the soft-spoken Charlie voice I’m familiar with — it feels possessed. Sometimes a digital witch, sometimes a distant child.

At one point she pukes green slime down the front of her dress.

At another, she accidentally plays a well-known song from her laptop — breaks character for a second, like “sorry hahahah” — then keeps going.

I love the drums. They have that Midwest-emo, sample-pack crispness — thrilliamangels-type drums — except live, so there’s heat and air around them, perfectly locked into whatever chaos Charlie’s building.
Let’s call this chaos a digital orchestra.

Thrilliamangels makes digital orchestra too — stitching together loops, vocals, scraps from all over the internet. They sound like songs, not mixes, but you can hear the seams, hear the collage. When he plays live he doesn’t try to hide the digital collageness. He doesn’t perform it either. He presses play on the CDJs and does a weird, funny dance. I like his irreverentness to IRL-ness, he lets the bedroom sample construction speak for itself.

Charlie makes it come to live.

The drummer makes it live. Her running back and forth to that crowded laptop makes it live. Pressing the wrong thing makes it live. I feel the labour.

After Charlie’s set I need a break. I go for a cig. I run into my friend Gulliver.

“I saw you in the audience headbanging, you looked cool,” he says in a sardonic Gulliver manner.

The Ormside whispers make their rounds to me: Bornweekend is on.

I amplify the whisper:

“BORNWEEKEND IS ON.”

As I watch Bornweekend’s set I become a sexy emotional robot-bug.

Bornweekend is wearing a grey oversized suit. He confidently speaks poetry into a microphone stand. He is not hiding behind fog or strobes, he is right in front of me, in yellowish light. He moves mechanically, like a tin me. He asserts himself physically - shoulders squared, planted stance - but his eyes reveal a slight bashfulness.

The lyrics feel intimate and emotional, but filtered through something non-human. Not quite “his” feelings. More like feelings processed by a small metal creature inside him trying to understand the world.

Hopes, dreams, little fantasies — textured with biology and debris and artificial sweetness and stickiness.

Rhymes like:

Little purple dinosaur, always leaves you wanting more. Engine running in my chest. Can’t you see I tried my best. Cracked skull full of smudge. Trying not to hold a grudge.

It’s not really diary-writing. It’s more like: the world through the eyes of an emotional robot-bug, maybe a bug with some Laurie Anderson DNA running through it. Everything disasters, love, the internet, random objects nicely flattened into the same deadpan tone.

Cupcake… Earthquake….
Empire state… Exaggerate…
Barely there… jump scare…
Like, share, comment, yeah….

He speaks his lyrics over a backing track he produced himself. Bassheavy and quite minimal, there’s room to hear the sounds he uses as individual textures. They sound squishy, slippery, wet, bubbly, squeaky, clicky, carbonated, plasticky in a bit of an oldschool way. They also sound fun and satisfying and like I want to dance with my hands in my hair, sexy on da dancefloor.

I look around the room and see people like me dancing with their hands in their hair, I see my editor bobbling around with a smile on her face, then I see her making out with a guy.

When Bornweekend plays his last song the audience cheers and claps and demands another song.
“I don’t have another song hahahh” Archie AKA Bornweekend replies. I think he played the entirety of his Photo Album.

He looks happy, he looks a bit overwhelmed. He slips off the stage, people pop up from everywhere congratulating him. I ask him how he feels… how that was… He replies something along the lines of:

“I’m glad it’s over hahahah.”

I personally wasn’t glad it was over but I was excited for what would come next…

…the afters…

Writing this I had to google “what is a keyboard thing that isn’t keyboard called?” Also: this wasn’t the whole night. I only caught three acts. Later, when I was asking my friend Rosie what she thought the angle for this article could be, she showed me one of the tiny dice Gabrielle had thrown into the crowd — she’d kept it in her pocket like a little souvenir — and told me there’d been a wedding band on earlier. Apparently it had a spooky, retro, kitsch-from-the-past energy. I think she was referring to the Faux Fibbers.

I missed them.

You never actually see the whole thing. You just catch your corner of it. Or read about someone else’s.

This valentines day we would like to dedicate our love to The Femcels.

Not that they need it — as we have heard they are totally not celibate!!! We aren’t mad about the fact these e-girls are fuckin' — but MANY MEN ARE. Especially the enormous chud contingent of Welcome Jpeg's 2 million followers.

OUR ORIGINAL ARTIST TAKE WITH THEM IS HERE

Much like Jesus Christ,
first they hate you for being sexy
Then they say you’re LARPing

Although we are shrewd businesswomen who make so very much money from our mega underground cultural criticism, we really are just sentimental at heart!

So, we would like to put our heart out to our first post, their first press, nearly a year ago we introduced The Femcels (to our then 300 followers) .

Gosh — doesn’t our first post look so primitive?
Now we are pros on adobe express- it’s our Xerox machine, the cursor our scalpel. Gen X eat ur heart out.

So we ask them, in the wake of their album release, is there anything that they would like to express that they have not yet expressed?

ROWAN PLEASE:

“I have a huge spot to the left of my chin which I always have when I kiss someone famous but this time I think that it means that we are going to be famous.”

Thank you, The Femcels.

if the British TV broadcasting had any sense, you’d already be on Mock the Week.

We also would like to rank our favourite tracks:

1. Come Let us Adore Him. This song is like the Femcels if it was the film the history boys.

2. She Seems Kind of Stupid. The perfect Fifa 14 song and the whistle at the end reminds me of Revolver.

3. No one Will fuck me if I wear two different shoes. Bc Gabby talks about a) the green room and Rowan talks about b) fucking a rockstar.

4. You're Gay and You're in Love With Me

5. I'm So Fat. Dating twinks is a hatecrime to your self. I like a man with meat on his bones??? eat a burger.

HSR correspondant, artist Tasneem Sarkez bravely brings her trademark wit to the vibelessness of one of those Exclusive Art Parties... in NYC!!! It was vampireville, duh. Reader, you're better off in the streets...

Walking in through the clear glass doors of the Whitney museum in 10 degree weather, to the Dare djing in front of Glenn Ligon’s Rückenfigur (2009), amidst a crowd of millennials who paid for the price to feel like an emerging artist, made the work come full circle in a way that for a split second the stupidity of the room faded to a whisper and I heard Ligon screaming in my ear saying "You seeee!!!”

The Whitney art party is a fundraising event, particularly shaped by what the Whitney imagines to be their “young and cool networks…” The average age in the room was at least 37. And the party ended at midnight with no afters… The People weren’t even drunk or coked out enough to start giving me their real thoughts on Whitney, the party, or the “art world” for that matter.

The young and cool art crowd kept finding each other gasping for air in between conversations with older folk who related that they were a member of the Whitney, and that they paid for their ticket, but that on top of all of that they’re an "aspiring painter.”

The best part of the party was finding the similarly minded young people laughing at how gimmicky this all felt. Drinking into the irony of the situation, because the meme “is the art world in the room with us rn?” never felt more true. None of it felt real, nor pertinent, but it all made sense when you think about the pretentiousness the art world likes to manufacture.

“It’s all the people that want to be around the cooler younger crowd–without the cooler younger crowd”

The PR team was trying to drink from an empty fountain of youth. Why have the dare dj when 75% of that room don’t know who he is, and an even smaller percentage could understand why “the dare” and “the whitney museum” being in the same sentence is a funny joke.

The elevator bar went up and down all night offering people tequila shots as drunken art fans walked around the floors of the Whitney, making sure to have a photoshoot in front of the latest exhibitions.

Random woman: “Is it over?? Or is it just dead??

Elevator Bartenders:

“I’ve been going up and down all night…super fun though”

A friend of mine recently joked that if art is to recover, it needs to bring back a punitive sense of shame. During the pandemic, a silent and collective surrender occurred. As billions in stimulus credit were pumped into the global economy, the last shred of embarrassment dissolved. Every artist I know periodically screws their face up in bemusement; they bleat out, “Why have things got so bad, so empty?!” For all the handwringing and punditry, the diagnosis is simple. This is what happens when a culture is in a lot of debt.

For half a century, access to cheap credit has left an overhang which is now at absurd levels: global debt is at 337.7 trillion USD. Art and culture, through both design and unconscious reflex, have become a blind scramble to prove society’s creditworthiness. In the FT last year, as Frieze 2025 opened, Tristram Hunt published a short plea article, “Don’t move to Dubai – this is still the place to be”, stating that “this month’s Frieze London art fair will prove that, despite Brexit, we are still a cultural behemoth”.

Screenshot of Live readout of USA National debt fromusdebtclock.org

Art has become a corporate culture. Corporatism is the administrative and disciplinary infrastructure of debt culture. Because art has no inherent utility, it relies on consensus to legitimise its monetary value. Therefore, art in a debt society, untethered from centralised patronage like the church or nobility, produces a priestly class of bureaucrats who toil to induce confidence in their investors, to prove their spending will pay dividends. Despite their antagonism, both Marxist-inflected art academia and market-driven dealers are debt-culture bedfellows. Both share the same impoverished ontology: art is reduced to an instrumental entity, stripped of any intrinsic or metaphysical good. Each leverages the financial precarity of artists to produce a ‘paper economy’ optimised for their respective pensions or bonuses.

The legalistic jargon of this unholy alliance is ‘critique’: a pidgin dialect that unburdens audiences from having an adversarial or individuated inner experience. Consensus over consciousness please! Critique facilitates growth: an expansion of customers.

To survive the desert of critique, artists, viewers and art sector functionaries are all expected to cosplay a sovereign intellectualism. After internalising the “problematics” of dirty money and hysterical moralism, admission to the tenancy of the ‘art world’ is granted. The more globalist the marketplace becomes, the more acutely artworks zombify into empty vessels, hollow enough to pipe critique-adjudicated stuffing into, the way custard fills sugary doughnuts.

Art has attempted to be industrial, but the bigger it grows, the less the audience cares. This expansionist corporatism seeks to maintain a numbed-out present; history and the future exist only to prop up the ‘contemporary’. Their proper function, which is to contest the present, is a taboo. This is because, in a debt culture, fear of the future’s insolvency is unspeakable. Thus, aesthetics taper into disciplined homogeneity, an amnesiac beige sludge. How quickly can we forget the next Marvel movie or faux Ab-Ex painting keeping collectors away from Dubai?

So be it. To the real artist, the above is of no concern. They are like the stringy marsupials after the meteor hit Chicxulub: against rational self-interest, they will go on making art. They do not have a choice; to be a real artist is both a vocation and a pathology. Furthermore, the artist must confront, and even love, the present, no matter how ghastly or petty it is served up to them. The pervasive death loop of preening nostalgia and vain nihilism is neither critiquing nor transforming anything.

This is why, standing in Tala Madani’s exhibition ‘Daughter B.W.A.S.M.’ at Pilar Corrias Gallery in London, I felt awash with relief at its humane agitation. The exhibition is ensconced in some prime real estate. Across the street on Savile Row is a lobotomised Nicholas Party exhibition at Hauser & Wirth; to the other side, a Bape store with hoodies slung over chromed mannequins with shark heads. The New Routemaster trundles by, designed by Thomas Heatherwick, one of the most egregious flunkies of the debt-nostalgia tundra. The barbarians are at the gates.

The exhibition is deliberately overhung, a spoofing of the locale perhaps, bait for the red-chip aficionados driving past in Lamborghinis. It is also a nod to twentieth-century conventions, into which the exhibition’s satire of technocracy and progress sinks its teeth. An army of gleaming cyborg women languishing in the loading bays of spaceships would be enticing for accelerationist crypto bros, were it not for the repeated accompaniment of humanoids of shit. As corporeal turds splash and smear their way down Duchampian staircases, reconstituted as gen-AI condominiums, the question arises: are the noble genres of satire and mannerism the most pertinent avenues available to painters at the present time?

Installation View of ‘Daughter B.W.A.S.M.’

Tala Madani has the admirable discipline of not fussing with her paintings too much. The surfaces are always fresh, zippy and erudite. In ‘D.B.W.A.S.M. (Teddy)’, the synthetic polymer panel surface has an embedded sparkle; a smoky figure is fumaged sub-dermally, accompanied by a dashed-off teddy bear in globs of lemon and chrome yellow. At times the paintwork is buttery and porcelain-like; in others, clunky. There is an enticing control: the audience gets pin-pricked as soon as they relax into carnal voyeurism.

As with all good satire, this is a humane display of both revulsion and attraction to the subject matter. Madani is wallowing in the muck whilst flinging it against the windscreen. Picabia and Duchamp both produced virtual erotic machines, their fantasy of sex deconstructed into vapours and pistons: a castrated kinematics. Tala Madani’s paintings invert this fantasy of bodiless bodies. They are ciphers of big tech: super-nervous crash dummies painted to feel stimuli which are usually pumped through their image, into the brains of a smartphone audience.

In ‘D.B.W.A.S.M. (Head Birth)’, two sister robots sit on a park bench, upright like Old Kingdom Egyptian figures. Their pregnant bellies blend from neoprene peach to swirling diarrhoea brown, eliciting a visceral sensation of pain. The shit figures and cyborgs interchangeably role-play children and parents, their fears and desires intermingling into a circular feedback loop, from tender intimacy to frantic desperation.

*Tala Madani D.B.W.A.S.M. (Head Birth), 2025 Oil and ink on synthetic polymer.

Detail of D.B.W.A.S.M. (Head Birth)*

The sex-meets-death fantasy of acquiescing into a perfect machine is potent. We are the ‘technological animal’ and desire ourselves as such. Narcissus loved his externalised avatar. There is no place more conspicuous than sexual reproduction, where the immaterial self is starkly contrasted against the machine of the body. For Madani, her maternal and debased figures are a kind of post-Hobbesian ‘body politic’. Gone is the masculine, pyramidal god-king, astride the ocean with sword and sceptre in hand, the masses within his chest cavity. The androids and shitty companions are a Beckettian reduction of the Leviathan into feminine sprites. The populist debt economy is hell-bent on depersonalising the body politic; it does this through an excessive pornographisation of political conventions. This produces an incel political appetite: the virtues of civilisation are converted into fetishes to be debased and exhausted for libidinal reward.

Frontispiece Detail of Hobbes Leviathan by Abraham Bosse
D.B.W.A.S.M. (Teddy), 2025 Oil and ink on synthetic polymer

Madani’s paintings function as cathectic amulets, much like the fascinus dick figurines of ancient Rome, welding together the animal body and eternal soul to ward off the influence of a corrupt polity. They are a warning: even if the axis of personal and political desire succumbs to a bleached sex-bot proceduralism – eros without a body – there will never be the libertarian fantasy of a society without society! New proliferations of disharmonious kinship will wriggle free and need to be arbitrated outside contracts and laws; intimate biological desire and revulsion will always be mixed into mass psychology. The holy subject of the mother and child, their conjoined self, refutes the toy-model democratic voter, utility-maximising creditor or sovereign bitcoin holder.

At the back of the exhibition, an animation of a sloppy turd figure imitates a woman from Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of figures in motion. This Shit Daughter/Mom jumps rope, waves a handkerchief and even embraces her human counterpart. Ghost-like, she is a premonition of the coming technological century, ready to haunt the sensors, CCTV cameras, and surveillance drones of modernity. The contemporary fantasy of neutral instruments replacing the mythic body is naïve. Humans desire their own destruction and hobbling, as Madani said in a conversation for the Vienna Secession in 2019: “Children eat their parents; they kill them with love.” With her painting, it is unclear who is biting chunks out of whom; it is a frenzy of mutual exhaustion. Catharsis is not an anaesthetic – it hurts.

So how does a society get out of debt fast? Mostly through innovation or stealing. Thus, we see Silicon Valley’s marriage to the military. Poindexter Google execs are made army commanders in a force which roams the planet, plundering fresh resources. Tala Madani’s work cajoles artists to get off their hands and knees, it asks culture the question, “Whom do you serve?” If it is not the ravenous golem within, then you are most likely an indentured servant in the bureau of debt.

Remember Tom Otterness? The New Yorkese artist who, in 1977, at the age of 25, adopted a dog from an animal shelter just to tie it to a tree and shoot it. The whole thing, recorded on camera, has been titled Shot Dog Film… played first at a Times Square theatre and then on Christmas morning in 1979, aired on Manhattan Cable TV where hundreds of families watched it, unwrapping gifts and happily eating turkey breast.

After several months of pressure from the Animal Protection Institute, Otterness reinvented himself at remarkable speed and the scandal faded from public memory. He reemerged as one of the most in-demand creators of public sculpture worldwide. His impish, bronze figures now populate parks and civic spaces in Los Angeles, Toronto, Seoul and New York. Anyone who has passed through Manhattan’s 14th Street-Eighth Avenue subway station has likely encountered his work.In the same spot and for a fleeting, almost imperceptible moment, a critique/parody piece nodded to his prior morally dubious act.

In 1985, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority created what was then called Arts for Transit and Urban Design as part of a broad capital improvement effort intended to counter years of deterioration in the subway system. Part of this intiative, and installed in the year 2000, Tom Otterness’s Life Underground features more than 130 bronze sculptures that rise from the floors and interact playfully with the station. Some figures carry oversized versions of the tools used to construct the subway, while others appear to sneak into it; according to Otterness, the moneybag heads seen on many of the characters reference the work of 19th-century political cartoonist Thomas Nast, particularly his depictions of Boss Tweed and the corruption tied to Tammany Hall.

For over twenty years, references to Shot Dog Film were almost entirely absent from print. Glowing reviews from the 90s framed Otterness’s sculptures of dogs in chains as elements of “a fable about desire, curiosity, and folly,” seemingly unaware (or perhaps willfully so) of the artist’s earlier, sadomodernist, micheal-hanekian treatment of dogs.

In 2025, My Life Underground is the title of a show by Jeffrey Joyal,. We see eleven plaster-made figures formed from polyurethane, urethane, mdf plus some burlap here and there. The funny-looking characters, representing New York’s daily commuters, are displayed upon a black table in the centre of the room. Most of the sculptures trace the outlines of a recognisable silhouette. Those who, as the press release says, “used to hang Boss Tweed with ink and paper (...) now they are adorable, everlasting, and twice as guilty.”

This is the panorama on which J.J.’s underground life begins its procession; in what resembles a right-winged conservative ballroom or/and a cult congress room the curator and artist, Marc Kokopeli, appears as a post-Fordist Willy Wonka (less chocolatier, more foreman of the affective economy) delivering golden tickets via email inbox, an emissary from the attention-industrial complex…

Even the promotional materials got caught in the machinery. Prompted to generate a festive animation of one of Otterson’s works, the algorithm interpreted “snow” with the grim literalism of the contemporary image economy and the realism of the art one: a paunchy elf in a tailcoat snorting a suspicious white line on a park bench. The AI did not malfunction so much as tell the truth, overproduction meets under-control; the visual field buckles. More Myrtle Avenue at 2am and less someone's grandmother's mantlepiece indeed.

But this isn’t Brooklyn. This is Astoria, Queens, specifically: Aristotle Psychological and Biofeedback Services, where the word "Aristotelian", on the building’s façade, hovers in the cold air like a pillar-of-hercules-shaped bullet you can’t slalom.
Gandt reopened from below, or perhaps beneath even that. On Saturday, December 6th, someone lifted New York’s steaming manholes and forgot (accidentally or performatively) to put them back. Things fell in, others climbed out; it’s impossible to know the difference anymore.

The exhibition’s room is staged as a colossal piggy bank, or at least it is the impression it delivers; through a narrow slit, tons of other tokens clatter onto the floor and scatter like panicked insects. Mud-smeared Beagle Boys marshal them with the shameless swagger of early-2000s bling culture, dollar signs glinting with the sweaty sincerity only cartoonish mascots can muster. The choreography hovers between Scrooge McDuck and municipal collapse.

Within the cultural horizon of the post-2016 moment, where the public domain is routinely reimagined as a resource to be monetised, the impoverished and easily degradable replica of a shared artwork operates as a cynical gesture. It functions as an act of hollowing-out, akin to Richard Prince’s rephotographs of Marlboro cowboys, which recycle commercial icons to expose their mythic emptiness, or to Rachel Harrison’s sculptures, conceived as cultural debris already obsolete at the moment of their appearance. Joyal’s work operates by its fragility, staging what Andrea Fraser has described in her 2005 From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique as the impossibility of separating art from the institutional and ideological conditions of its circulation.

Everyone is here: sun-tinted police officers; the fragile; the anonymous multitudes; and an improbable menagerie of animals that look more Rudyard Kipling than MTA. Every morning they all board the grey bullet train that bisects the city, a civic ritual structured like Russian roulette; no winners, no losers, just the suspended mechanics of chance.

An otter in a stupid little hat is chewing on a coin (my Life Underground 01). A crocodile tugs amiably at someone’s jacket (my Life Underground 06). Nobody protests. Bodies fold and unfold, smiling even as they lose limbs and colleagues. As the 20th-century Russian poet Sergej Yesenin in his poem The Black Man (1925) claimed,

Amidst storms and squall,
In the frost of daily life,
In grave losses and in sadness,
Showing oneself smiling and simple
Is the highest art in the world.

HSR correspondent Eileen Tweaking Slightly chatted with Jawnino at Exit, Glasgow. It was packed, no one on their phones, etc. Half the conversation was lost to the wind/redacted, but he told HSR he was the laziest artist in the UK and put us onto other stuff too. Read below.

'Nonchalance' is a word often attached to the some of the most contrived, boring fashion people you have ever met. It was used in the RA bio to sell tickets for Jawnino at Exit, Glasgow, but I think that is an inappropriate gloss for an evident, unforced, lack of ego and artistic curiosity for the world, outside the eternal recurring mirror of our For You Page.

Anyway, we are at Exit, a nightclub space taken over by a young man with a vision. I'd spoken to a friend of mine, a professional whistler, fresh off her European tour, who gave a hint to the nightclub's lore. There are the two floors, the upper part used to be an artist studios/strip club and the lower section - which makes up the club - also used to be a strip club, except the lower strip club was dodgier.

There was a staircase going between the two named ‘pigeon world’.

'Why?' I ask.

‘It had dead pigeons in it.'

We speak in the backrooms of the club where everyone seems to be laughing about Jawnino's rangers jacket.

Jawnino: 'They're booing! Someone in here must be supporting rangers. Somebody.’

(There's lore here that's too much to go into right now.)

Jawnino: “We’ll excuse it tonight”

Hollywood Superstar Review: Where would you take a girl on a date?

Jawnino: “Som Saa in Whitechapel, it’s the best Thai food, they do a little 2-4-1 deal.”

(It's loud so we go outside on the street.)

HSR: Laziest Artist in UK right now?*

Jawnino: That's a dark one. I'm going to have to say me.
I just feel like, flow-wise and just, I’m just talking a lot. I’m not really spitting and rapping as hard as a lot of people go. I’m just talking my truth. Like, it's not really a rapping thing. And I feel like I could have more output, so I’d say me.

I mention that HSR are trying to contact Eline Vehrodia.

Jawnino: Yeah, yeah. There's another girl I think you'd tap into. She's called Angel Gray. She just released one song recently. It's called "Outside." She's who I'm fucking with right now, UK-like, female-wise. And obviously BXKS, like, that's my... that's my sister. But like, Angel Gray is tapped.

HSR: First grime record that made an impression on you?

Jawnino: **Skepta, Mike Lowery.

HSR: And then 2026 is the year of...

The Firehorse.

HSR: Firehorse?

Yeah, Firehorse. It's not just a horse, it's the Firehorse.

HSR: It's the Firehorse. What's the Firehorse?

Jawnino: It means more enjoyment, more litness. We're growing up. 2025 was a period where we enjoyed and we take it back, we enjoyed what was going on, we understand. But 2026 is where we let go, unleash, and do our thing.

One autist on another...

Lo, Autistic Barbie, daughter of Mattel, Inc., nubile identity doll, is born. Bearing a teensy fidget spinner and iPad communication aide, this Barbie is sanctioned by the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. Her uncanny visage joins a lineup that includes Down Syndrome Barbie, Blind Barbie, and Broken-Arm Barbie—the "Diversity Barbies," you might call them.

But I propose an alternative name: the “Biopower Barbies,” or alternatively “Foucault’s Angels.”

Autistic Barbie and her compatriots are both cutie-pies and population control apparatus. Wearing her striped purple dress, Autistic Barbie exerts pastoral power: With love and affection always, she shepherds naïve subjects into nanny-state segmentations that arrogate to define the personalities of tomorrow.

Parents might use her to teach their children the specialized verbiage of care and control starting from the earliest moments of self-awareness. These are new heights of influence for Barbie, who once merely enforced the social norm for femininity. Now she is free to patrol the contours of neurotypicality.

In her world, the touchscreen replaces the human voice, and the fidget spinner simulates a meaningful occupation. She carries with her the gift of the medical establishment, and reminds the rest of us to demand our rightful alienation, too. She is the harbinger of a new Western psyche—an Autistic Civilization that, as the DSM-5 instructs, cannot recognize human emotion.

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.