A note on solidarity—as I write this, the US-Israeli killing machine continues to annihilate. My heart is with Iran. May Western imperialism collapse and the entire empire fall… No amount of art discourse comes above this.

Manic! That’s how I was feeling. I didn’t go to any of the actual fairs (cuz honestly you don’t need to), but I went to about 10ish fair adjacent happenings in LA and experienced shock… delight… confusion… everything in between…

I started my art week rendezvous Monday night at untitled (halo)’s performance of Ryan Trecartin’s BUCKLE YUP: CUE SHOES at the Kiko Kostadinov store on Western. It took me 40 minutes to find parking and I had 3 cups of complimentary white wine. Trecartin was not present (as far as I know—I had grandly misassumed that there would be some showing of Trecartin’s video work that I was dying to see), but it’s okay cuz untitled (halo) was great. I had the most fun when I was getting my third cup of wine and impulsively asked the Kiko Kostadinov bartender if he was single and he said no but that I was “really pretty” and he was “flattered” and we laughed about it and wished each other well and it was honestly a beautiful, vulnerable moment…

Fast forward to Friday, my day began at 99CENT—a show by Barry McGee and his “100 closest friends” in partnership with galleries Jeffrey Deitch and The Hole. When you first walk inside that pink 99 cent store on Wilshire, you’re hit with a distinct smell that’s a mix between the stale scent you’d expect from a defunct 99¢ store and the light b.o. radiating off the mass of bodies in there with you (doesn’t help that the weather has been in the high 80s—in fahrenheit, clarifying for all my readers in better parts of the world where celsius actually means something other than an energy drink). But what you experience in the nose is quickly eclipsed by what you’re intaking through the eyes. You’re visually bombarded by just a million artworks sprawled across the floor, the walls, atop the cash register (even video works playing from the cash register screen), the ceiling, and inside the freezer sections, patiently situated amidst the many people (somewhat slack-jawed) weaving between it all inside this grungy retail space built to sell cheap mass-produced goods.

Now to quote my Create Mode post that inspired this piece,

“I witnessed the "skaters" people [by “people” I mean DIVA CORP who had posted about the skaters on their IG story] were talking about — every time they did a trick there would be an awkward pause and then a small woot and some light clapping. The reaction was so unsure and the moment was almost underwhelming but also endearing because it was awkward and honestly you literally can’t help but have fun because the inside of the store is just Pure Spectacle and the sheer mass of art and objects to see in there meets the viewing-pace of a public whose majority would identify as having fried dopamine receptors like the experience of consuming the art in there requires my eyes to glaze over slightly the way they do when I’m watching Reels and like I really can’t hate that because it satiates every need to see More More More New New New…”

The overwhelming “chaos” of sorts is certainly an entertaining, sensorial experience the way the zoo or even Disneyland is. With the skaters, graffiti, floor-to-ceiling cardboard structures, and grime all in that one abandoned store (“abandoned” being disputable here because allegedly it was previously occupied by mutual aid groups), there’s definitely this street aesthetic and post-apocalyptic vibe happening. I befriended one of Barry McGee’s “100 closest friends” in the aisle he was working out of. Through him, I learned that the show actually came to be kinda randomly and is very much tied to the graffiti scene. It’s funny because Barry comes up on Google as an “American artist” but this show was less about him and his artist friends than it was about him and his graffiti friends. The show supposedly started as this casual invite from Barry to just throw some stuff up in this empty store with these graffiti guys but because the store was too big, they got like galleries, brands, and other people on board—it’s all a fuzzy, haphazard web of both loose and tight connections but I think that’s the appeal. Also don’t quote me on this because this is secondhand information.

My new friend (who I’ll call “G”) is also a graffiti writer and he said that’s how he got to know Barry since Barry is one of those legends in the scene I guess (Barry’s tag is “Twist”). G had to teach me all this new vocab… No we don’t call ourselves “graffiti artists”... We just say “graffiti writers” like “yo what do you write?” and then you’ll say “I write _____” and the blank is your tag name—the name that you graffiti. G was running the aisle that had art and clothes made by himself, his friends, works from John Doe gallery, and merch from NYC-based brand Homerun. I ended up going back to the show again on Sunday when the Anti-Fascist Zine Fair was happening so that I could gather this intel. G introduced me to the guy who runs Homerun (who is also a writer but I can’t remember his tag) that’s like this buff, charismatic guy with nice teeth who supposedly had G and some other dudes doing pushups in the aisle the day before (similar to the skaters it’s like spontaneous performance art but not really). That was the day they had already done the “5k Run Against Fascism” from the Nike-funded Homerun x John Doe Gallery popup on West Adams all the way back to 99CENT on Wilshire. It all contributes to the What Is Even Happening feeling of it all.

G and I debated about the show calling itself anti-fascist (with many artworks shitting on Trump, ICE, etc. too), clashing with things like the Nike collaboration, displacement of the mutual aid groups there, and many of the galleries in or promoting the show still being these larger white cube galleries whose clients are probably in the Epstein files. While my personal opinion is that there’s definitely a reduction of anti-fascism to an aesthetic or spectacle experience happening (Walter Benjamin tap in), I was comforted by the conversations I had with the folks running zine booths there who are actually engaged in mutual aid groups and a Real Praxis. I guess it should still stand to mean something that an event calling itself anti-fascist drew such a large crowd that there was a line to get in that Sunday. Glass half full… Glass half empty… You choose… At the end of the day, what I’m satisfied with is this feeling that I’ve cracked open some kind of secret, guarded underbelly of LA—the graffiti scene—and its ties to the greater art world here.

If I wasn’t already over my word limit, I’d really get into the other great shows I saw but here’s my blurb of honorable mentions:

Sayre Gomez at David Kordansky (Precious Moments). As a city, we will never tire of art with a keenly LA Aesthetic, and frankly neither will I. I’ve always believed in divine coincidences but when I just so happened to see the real Play Pen building after seeing Gomez’s Playpen (2025) painting earlier that day, it felt like a kiss from the universe. Truly.

Ryan Trecartin’s visiting artist lecture at the UCLA grad studios in Culver City. This time I got to see Trecartin in the flesh. He screened a new video piece (funded by Fondazione Prada I think) that featured the uncanny post-millennial personalities of his late-2000s-era work but this time their faces and movements were being morphed and mutated by AI. Love his vibe. Not sure how I feel about the AI direction. Don’t even want to talk about how nice the studio space was compared to mine that’s on main campus. I have no space for envy in my heart.
{optional image tbh}

The Worst Rave In The World at And/Or Gallery presented with Dem Passwords. And/Or is one of the most special places in the world for browser-based artists like me or really anyone who has ever cracked open a book about Net Art. Legends like Olia Lialina, JODI, Cory Arcangel, and Petra Cortright have been inside those Pasadena walls. The Worst Rave In The World was an installation of animatronics and multi-channel videos by Matt Barton and Extreme Animals (Jacob Ciocci and David Wightman). From the show notes: “The show plunders from the failures and noise of contemporary culture, which, when recombined, is no longer bad or good…” It’s truly the worst rave in the world, but also possibly the best rave in the world? The figures dance in this clunky, jerky way that is so pathetic yet endearing that you feel for them as if they were human. By the end of art week, I felt like the slumped figure in the back gallery—there’s a realism to this “rave” because yeah exactly there’s always going to be someone k-holing in a dark corner.

Maya Man’s performance lecture StarQuest. This isn’t the exact wording, but I was most struck by the line, “It isn’t about Images and the Real. It’s about Images and Power, and who gets to win…” There were references to the reality TV show Dance Moms, Addison Rae, Charli D’Amelio, the renegade, Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, and the world of competitive dance that is all too familiar to me too. I have a picture of me doing #TiltTuesday around somewhere. Of all the artists working with AI, Maya is the only one I can really get behind. [There’s more I want to say so I shall save it for a future review perhaps!!!]

Sizzler as part of Wilshire Online (on the same block as 99CENT) curated by Grant Edward Tyler. Inside of that dim forest green interior of an old Sizzler restaurant, there are works adorning the booths, the walls, and a particularly eye-catching light installation inside what used to be the salad bar. 99CENT had a more energetic bustle that kept you constantly moving in the space, while Sizzler was more still and conducive for a hang-out vibe. People were perched in the booths and against the walls chatting, having a smoke or a beer outside… Fab.

Wondering what the landlord for these vacant retail buildings on that particular strip of Wilshire thinks about the art world and this compulsion to show artwork in these defunct spaces… What you feel inside these spaces is kinda what you feel when you’re on Main Street inside Disneyland. Non-places that are imbued in a mysticism yet haunted by the Real—the ghosts of the actual Sizzler restaurant, 99¢ store, the Colorado and Missouri towns that Main Street is based on… These shows felt like temporary shelters for art (and the people who want to see it) that have their appeal in the post-apocalyptic, grungy aesthetic of it all that exists as the “cool” “edgy” alternative to the clean, glossy fairs across the city. You’re reminded of the dystopian state of the world we live in, but it’s really only kept at bay at the back of your mind, until the art week frenzy and haze lifts and you realize it’s time to get back to Real Life. Art can only do so much before Reality sinks in.

Dextresss took us to LA. Which we happen to be crafted from the left rib of, like Eve, by God.

Did y’all in Bethnal Green know there’s more to LA than DIVACORP and David Kordansky? They even do ketamine. We take a trip to Fiona Alison Duncan’s Hard To Read, a literary social practice.

Chinatown (1974) and EVe Babitz may have made the pre war kitsch Los Angeles Art Deco famous, but Ffidunks capitalised on it, hosting a cabaret art experiment in a 1920s building titled “The Playhouse”.

Yes, you have seen Lexee smith on your feed. But what about the screening of Robert Boyd’s 2006 video, Xanadu? OR the performance by punk group War pigs?

Love was in the air at the Variety Arts Theater on Sunday night. In the afterglow of Valentine’s Day, the theater had never looked so romantic. Largely because many of its visitors had no idea it was open, or even existed.

Originally built as the playhouse for the Friday Morning Club, a women’s political and social group, the venue has been passed through a plethora of owners, each more kitschy than the last, the later ones performing triage on the dilapidated building. Clark Gable made his debut performance there in 1925, the Butthole Surfers threw a show in 1987, and it was once the host of the annual Erotica Awards. Hillsong LA, the Bieber-affiliated evangelical celebrity cult-church, signed a fifteen-year lease and renovation plan for the building in 2015, which they promptly abandoned. While their particular spiritual-psychosis magic and performance might have fit right in, I thank god for their broken promises. The theater served most recently and diligently as a haunted house, but was reopened for the Julia Stoschek Foundation’s “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem” curated by Udo Kittelman.

I arrived at the theater’s grand Neo-Venetian entrance at 6:00 on the dot, seduced by the aroma of buttered popcorn (served all night) and the sound of awkward beginning-of-event chatter. The theater is a six-floor maze, made slightly clearer by programs passed around with directions plucked straight from Alice in Wonderland:

“basement, near the sound of soft waves” “second floor, the old library” “behind the red curtains” “the dressing room; down a long corridor, take a right, walk towards the red and blue lights…”

My instincts led me straight to the bar in the basement where Barbara T. Smith sat on a stool, drinking what I think was a glass of pinot grigio amongst friends and lingering adorers. I wandered through the shipping container-esque entrance into Bunny Roger’s Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria(2016), where I finished my first glass under the falling paper snowflakes. The sound of raucous music drew me tipsily up the stairs, haunting old Hollywood glamour disrupted with the sound of resistance. The War Pigs, a Laurel Canyon-based children’s punk trio banged and clashed away, filling the lobby with head-banging bodies. I spot my old boss looking glam on the mezzanine, we smile at one another, and continue watching the room’s energy rise.

Snow continued to fall from the sky at the entrance/”smoking area” where I attempted to catch Barbara T. Smith throw her and Richard-Rubenstein’s computer-generated snowflakes from the balcony, and realized I’d completely missed the event, left to stare at the 8.5 x 11 copies wedged into crowd-control barricades, stopping to shove a few in my bag. Everyone takes a smoke break, unofficially scheduled but maybe anticipated by our gracious host, Fiona Duncan. I returned to the cave-like basement where I had become distracted in the first place, entranced by the infectious sounds of Olivia Newton-John’s “Xanadu” playing from the loudspeakers in the saw-trap of a room displaying Robert Boyd’s 2006 video piece of the same title.

Less raucous than the punk music, and perhaps less ethereal than Smith’s snowflakes, I paused in one of the many dim corridors for a bit of the performance-on-loop by Alicia Novella Vasquez, who is lying on the ground caressing a receipt drawn from a coral handbag, engaging wanderers for two hours. An endurance exercise.

Lexee Smith joined the program’s directional tone, posting cryptically on instagram alongside a photo of a feather held behind a frame, “9:30 … come early. Only 25 viewers at a time. 3 chances”. The entire first viewing group was made up of VIPs (because this is Los Angeles). The rest of us lined up in the dressing room’s corridor, sending our couriers to grab another glass from the bar and hoping they’d remember how to find us in the line through the maze of the basement. As we entered the 250 square foot dressing room, five women in black bras and underwear sets lounged about forming a kind of live intimissimi ad. The performance was intimate… the room was so small there was no fourth wall to break. Each performer methodically pulled clothing from a pile in the corner of the room and dressed themselves. They bore holes with unrelenting gazes into the row of tall individuals grouped together in the back row. Lexee Smith emerged from the pile as a black swan, contracting and reposing on the pile of women, now dressed and lying in the corner, enveloping them in her wings. The remix of Madonna’s “What it Feels Like For a Girl” fades. Lexee lifts her head, a little bit of red lipstick on her nose - “thank you” she pants.

New York took the challenge of offering a finale to a night of well-loved performances. Donning their uniform of chemical-handling gloves, white polos, heels, and black slit skirts, their background visuals on the massive projector swallowed them in with a minimalist, Lucinda Childs sensibility. Lawrence moved through impulses in a clunky and endearing dance, Samba tethering Lawrence to the stage with a different, but complementary swagger. “In the Bronx… I walk”.
The crowd seems to be in great spirits. Never have I ever seen Angelenos commit to performance like this, happily meandering from room to room with a sense of joyful discovery… I ended the night doing rounds of Julia and Udo’s duet (Stoschek and Kittelman’s combo of chilled vodka and champagne) with a bartender who insisted we call him Zamzolio and shout his name as we drank.

https://renaissancesociety.org/exhibitions/557/isabelle-frances-mcguire-year-zero/

Isabelle McGuire has given us an America in tripartite form. Inside her show Year Zero at The Renaissance Society in Chicago, a life-sized recreation of Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace cabin, whose ‘real’ equivalent (Kentucky’s ‘Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park’) is itself a facsimile cabin, alongside two slightly undersized figures of Santa Claus and Jesus, who prostrate on wood-and-dirt-mound pedestals. These cultural figures’ apparent exhumation, however, feels almost entirely depoliticized, positing them in the press release as “‘revisiting the past, re-animating old models, or re-wilding familiar symbols”. This seems like a poetic way to say that you’re picking and choosing from a cultural consciousness that you know will be shared but defining it as active engagement. I am more inclined to feel that “re-wilding” is predominantly passive: a languorously ironic presentation of referents, successfully bolstered by confident and considered choices of material and scale. It does not share the high buzz that McGuire’s more directly funny work exudes - a child’s call of duty cosplay and animatronic baby Yoda at King’s Leap, SuperBaby2(Unmanned) {“The Child”, “Reborn”} (2023) spring to mind. But the eerier tone (the Lincoln house approximates the haunted house) provides visual dividends for a show of empty spaces and characters to be projected onto, even vampirised ones. I enjoy work that pokes at open-ended interpretation, and there are lots of threads to tug, but don’t tell us to look out for it in the accompanying text. Reticence works far better when simply shown, not didactically spelt out.

The Renaissance Society occupies the odd position of being Chicago’s closest approximation of the Kunsthalle format, geared toward commissioned work by living artists. TRS has shown Ghislaine Leung and Aria Dean - always leaning towards reasonably reticent content which balloons to gorge on its own context, for better or worse, under the guises of various forms of sculpture and new media practices, with a yearly-ish dense yet star-studded group show. This is fine and usually stands out in Chicago, not only due to its usually high quality, but by a relative dearth of that form of contemporaneity’ in other art spaces. Given the literal academic backdrop of the space (on the UChicago campus), all the vitrine installations in the hallway vaguely blended in with the incessant postering of doors and walls you see if you climbed the four flights up to the show. Supplementary material, choices for how you might approach the work in the main space, completely separated from the grist of the exhibition. It sucked because McGuire’s sole video in this, Frankenstein in the Underworld (2024) shown in a vitrine, was fucked-up and really good. It firmly illuminated a strain of body-mod which runs through the show. The two disinterred figures are qualified as “bodies printed from medical CT scans of anonymous women” in the accompanying text and fit nicely with McGuire’s previous relation to kitbashing (creating new models from an assortment of different parts) and video game culture.

The show poster, Depo Provera (2024) a work in itself, listed on the checklist - which I don’t think I’ve seen before - shows a staged photoshoot of McGuire injecting her mother’s behind. It was named after a dubiously effective hormonal birth control her mother had been taking while pregnant with McGuire. This oddly heart-warming personal history complicates the previous historical referents. But, when combined with the specificity of the CT scans and the exclusively male personae in the work, spins a discussion around the agencies of differently gendered bodies. Year Zero (alt-history, rebirth, cycles, sublimation, etc.) is a satisfying show, and at its base has a tonal consistency and specificity that I very much appreciate, even though that was exactly what I expected. More of this in Chicago, I think.

Nine Bridges: "Fire Flood and Calamity", curated by Johnny Brown. 15-17th January 2026.

In the gothic schoolroom there are still boys misbehaving. The higher-than-eye-level windows of 5 Washington Street were fenestrated a century-or-so ago to prevent the distraction of Victorian schoolchildren, and today two tall young men reach past the work to write their tags on the January evening condensation. Furtively, they look over their shoulders in perfect symmetry and meet my eyes. ## What do they think I am? I suppose that at its least resolved and most base, the image of the critic can be transparently superimposed over that of a schoolma’am… Or, in this world of the degraded word, perhaps the critic might now be something more akin to a supply teacher who doles out advice from the standpoint of nowhere.

The tall boys were reaching past Celeste Guinchat’s Pardonne-moi de t’idealise: two dolls hollowed out and painted white, you could see that inside their bodies’ keyholes, there was a flashing green light. One brunette and the other shocking blonde, both had the proportions of a Barbie, but their abdomens had the articulated carapace of a doomsday locust. Their eyelids were made of the same clay as the widened distal epiphysis of their radii, such that the ossified and the flesh could be read over each other. I imagine those 19th century schoolchildren playing with them after the eventual occurrence of their presbyterian-coded eschatological event.

In 1889- the year the schoolroom was built- the possibility of socialist revolution was a real fear/hope, preached with the same regularity and fervour as judgment day. The apocalyptic predictions of the “Scottish Nostradamus,” from which the title of this group show is taken, come from a semi-mythological figure who probably lived at the end of the 16th century and has been credited with a number of prophecies. Perhaps the most evocative is the prediction of “fire, flood, and calamity,” which seems uncannily to have been realised after the construction of the ninth bridge across the Ness in the form of the Piper Alpha disaster- a preventable fire that claimed the lives of 167 workers. The number of survivors could have been much higher had the company Occidental- the safety practices of which were overseen only by the Tory government- turned off the flow of oil after the first explosion on the site. Instead, the lives of 167 men were needlessly lost in an event which has come to represent the sacrifice of Scottish workers' lives at the behest of Westminster’s capital.

In this repurposed room, holding an intensely historical press release, I wished for the augural nature of late 19th century socialism born of the radical moment before the bread and circus of liberal reforms. Listening to Coinneach, we are reminded that the augural is not opposed to the industrial, but realised through it. We can find some contemporary relief when we look to the future, as long as we ground ourselves in the prophecy that is foretold through the logic of capital.

The difficulty of representing the interconnections of political entities is represented by the incomplete display of Jacob Heaton’s maps, who has connected dozens of radical/militarised political groups of the 20th century in a manner that recalls the paranoid diagrams of Simon Dovey’s Eye of the Chickenhawk, a timely, legendary and schizoid exposition of the link between the CIA and international child trafficking and abuse. Like much ‘conspiracy’ writing, the void at the centre of Dovey’s analysis is motivation- what makes them do this evil? Without attention to overarching historical forces, these diagrams, the world becomes disparate, flat, incomprehensible.

Talking of the incomprehensible, I overheard an older man saying he was ‘tired of the whole nomad gallery thing.’ Show me the money, sir! As if young artists should wait their turn to be shown in the ever-dwindling number of galleries? As if we ought not explore our cities, find locations on gumtree etc.? ### You shouldn’t make a complaint like that unless you are going to write Johnny Brown a cheque.

I also overheard a woman tell Fleur Connor that she ought to make eighty versions of her painting ‘Bitch thinks she fly, she can’t even get off the ground by herself.’. “Do it,” the woman says to her, “I can sell it to those freaks in new york…” Zombie formalist hawkers in 2026? it’s more likely than you think… On a canvas slightly larger than a large ipad, Connor has gouached a green-grey sky split by a Lockheed jet. Describing herself as a ‘screen-cracked impressionist’, I can’t help but agree with that woman- I’d like to see her depressedly Monet-out on the LED simulations of the military-industrial complex.

Above Daniel Zeballo’s mysterious commodity critique- the pale bricks with its cryptic Michael Craig-Martin-ass material list- on the opposing wall, Brown has hung Theo MacKenzie’s Mannequin Head with Bonnet. Looking at his simple, smooth grey paint is both satisfying and sad, like the tumblr moodboards from which he lifts inspiration. The bonnet is a nostalgic and fashionable item, something that would be sported by a member of his twee-ker set, or perhaps most likely, by his muse and sometime Hollywood Superstar Contributor, Floss Crosresley- a woman I picture in my mind’s eye with digital grain, with the instagram filter ‘Tokyo’. An ancient headcovering meant to signal deference to God, the empty desire of the mannequin head painted from tumblr, reminds me of Kracauer’s 1927 essay on the commercialising power of cinema over the subject, ‘Little Shop Girls go to the Movies’.

And now we come to bread and circuses, or panem et circnem, the title of curator Johnny Brown’s photograph, a portrait of a boy. Johnny Brown had found his subject stood, hooded on a freezing cold pond. The child is absorbed in the flashing lights of a machine used in the detection of paranormal spirits, entirely distant from industry, he plays on the blue carpet of a hollowed-out office space. In a place without a trace of history, we are subject only to distraction. I am fascinated by the staged premeditation of the composition, where I feel a very human witness to the ‘measuring and folding of the cloth of time itself’.

On a related and paranoid note: searching for post-modern theory-ghosts of the 90’s, examining nostalgic affect in the year of our lord 2026 is an unutterably miserable waste of time.

Tying together this corner of the gothic schoolroom are these beautiful objects made by the young that will not prevent the cycles of fire, flood and calamity. However, their studied difference, personal care and careful attention to history, make good meaning. Johnny Brown putting his own work in the show could be read as blurring the lines between self promotion and collective display, but I read it more as an assertion of:

1. his own curatorial voice
2. the city of Glasgow as a significant site for the development of a loose collectivity of young European artists who regularly show together, sometimes- as on this occasion- drawing quite the crowd.

Instructions to give your audience the impression that they are encountering ‘the void’ for €10 (using just a gallery film of 1 hour and an expensive set of speakers):

1 Project an image of a naked woman on a huge screen.

2 Arousal makes your audience feel like something is really happening so make her sexy.

3 Keep the room dark, with concrete walls and high ceilings. The back room of Berghain would work perfectly.

4 The flickering light from the screen should never be quite enough to get a full sense of the room’s dimensions.

5 Accompany your film with dramatic electronic music (crackles, roaring static). Surround the audience with speakers.

6 Have your naked woman crawl and writhe around on the floor – ensure she looks naïve and childlike. Better still if she is cold, bruised and vulnerable.

7 Get a good look between her legs – get the camera right up in there. Vagina = void (Freud said it first: ‘dark continents’!!).

8 Scoop out her face and put another dark gaping hole in its place (She has got to be depersonalised and inhuman enough to be ‘post-human’ but just human enough so that her tits stay perky).

9 Place her in a desolate otherworldly landscape (…a ‘dark continent’). Make sure your landscape has some big craters (more deep dark holes to get the blood flowing).

10 Give her a C-section scar (but don’t think through its implications of birth and new life too much, her body must continue to stand for a masculine fantasy of the void as death and otherness).

11 For the final flourish, opaquely cite Wittgenstein in the explanatory post-film interview (conveniently leave out his most famous line: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ or… shut the fuck up, the void is right there in you already you silly man).

Review of Legacy: Lana Von Thorn, at Pivot

November 23, 2025 - January 18, 2026, London

In the best traditions of internet minimalism, Legacy proposes communication as a binary that should be easy to understand. It stages a dialogue that looks simple, almost harmless, until you stand there and realise how invasive a question can feel, and how unstable an answer can become.

When I enter an apartment—be it my own, or one where I am only a guest—I expect to feel a
certain comfort. These apartment galleries are no exception to this expectation - I refuse to believe that the entities living there are
curators; I believe they are animate, real people who require some kind of cosiness to live
cheerfully. As Legacy, Lana Von Thorn’s exhibition at Pivot, the so-called APARTMENT gallery, prohibited any sense of domestic amenity.

As I stepped inside, in the living room, I was confronted with a large question mark: a wire-mesh structure (way larger than an ordinary young lady) lingering apathetically in the air. Its presence is intimidating, as the question impliedfills the room with existential discomfort.

I hate being asked questions; they invade my
personal space, and for this moment, I feel like a child at a family gathering, some unknown,
unnamed aunt asking me what I plan to do after school.

The intrusion imposed by Von Thron’s work is similar to one, famously directed by Jenny Holzer’s Truisms (1978–87), a series of text-based installations that inject themselves into public space with brief, provocative maxims. In daily life, there is never a need to encounter such atrocious confrontations, yet they find us somehow; they somehow appear.

I hate it here.

I move through a long, windowless corridor, an architectural pause, reminiscent of the liminal space between a question
and an answer. The emptiness of this passage does not soften the
experience; it sharpens it. It is not a neutral space, but an uncomfortable delay between being
confronted and being able to respond.

On the balcony, placed in an opening in the wall of the opposite building, sits the “ok”—a simple
word, an icon even. Its clarity, though, is unbelievably relieving.

It uses the sky as its substance for the otherwise empty carcass. It becomes an active participant in creating the sweet-sweet taste of relief.

The weather and time of day shift its tone, giving the “ok” a specific liberty of expression and comprehension, despite the limiting
nature of its form. This answer provides closure in its simplicity, yet remains fragile—its
meaning can turn tender or cold with only a change of light.

– I didn’t mean it like this.
– OK.

It is known to be the smallest possible emotional statement that is still legible and has rightfully earned its place as an ephemeral typographic object, a linguistic button. And while it is highly context-dependent (or in this case meteoropathic), it serves as a signal, saying I acknowledge ___ without declaring.

Lana Von Thorn’s work’s physical emptiness brings me to a feeling reminiscent of the absence of presence described by Ivan Tcheglov in his Formulary of a New Urbanism (1953).

The transparent wire mesh accentuates this distress, questioning the reality of the dialogue the sculptures represent. A question mark and its corresponding “ok” are not simply symbols; they are structures that contain nothing and somehow still overtake both physical and semiotic space.

Pivot’s apartment setting makes this mediation unavoidable. There is no distance, no white
cube neutrality, no escape into detachment. The work unfolds at the scale of the body, in the
language of domestic space, making the viewer’s response part of the exhibition’s logic.

In the end, Legacy is not asking us to decode a message. It is asking us to recognise ourselves in the discomfort of being questioned, and to consider how often a hollow “ok” doesn’t serve a function as an emotional exchange, but signals the absence of communication

My only suggestion: next time, try using a 👌emoji, it might feel nicer.

Bathmat3000 is the second generation of online feminine mind-readers and her account can be found here. Click to understand the glamorous women in your life, click to try but you will never understand...

I will always wanna scroll Bathmat3000 because ummmmmmmmmmmmm

I will always wanna scroll this page because I'm model-pretty stonergirl and blogging is my bread and butter.

I will always wanna scroll this page because sometimes I see my little girl self in the affirmation posts and sometimes I see my future self who is glam like me but has more 💲.

there's no credit on the images because its posted for the feeling

The only straight man who I follow who also follows bathmat is Ariel Pink...

We sent Andy to ask the questions because she's elite.

HOLLYWOOD SUPERSTAR: Bath Mats are gross. Is that why that’s your username?

I was standing on a bathmat when I chose my username.

If your boyfriend went to the strip club; would you break up with him?

Probably #leovenus

Would you have gone to Epstein’s Island?

Y’all wanna know what like the BEST filling maybe of all time? Definitely of all time, the best feeling of all time is when - okay. You know the blent you smoked this morning? The one you woked up to roll. That one. Okay. And then but you only smoke half of it. Okay. And then you work all day long. You go to fuckin work, you do the fuckin job real fuckin good. You’re like-you’re the best. You do everything you boss asks of you. You are real fuckin cordial with your coworkers. All the customers love you. All these custies come in and they just like they think you’re the greatest. You’re the greatest of all time. You worked all day long. In theEeEnd, you come home, and you smoke the other half of that blent. That’s the greatest feeling ever ‘cause it’s just like so…it’s…this is some old-ass shit too! Like…I’m a grown-ass woman, I’m an adult. And this is my laife. That’s, theHEH, that’s the breakdown of my everyday life for y’all. It’s……incredible. My fat…my fat fabuhlous life. Iiii’m about to get so fucking high, too. Sooo hiiiigh. I’m gonna li-should I light it on camera? Should she light it on CAMERA? Hell yeah, she should light it on camera. Actually, I can’t because I gotta, um, I gotta use both of my hand. I’m using my hand to hold my phone. Oh my god, that’s not, uh, that’s not me, I’m not that fat. Speaking of that, I need to work out. But the thANG is is that I feel like I walk so much, like, living here, you knoooow. Like, I just can-I can’t. I don’t wanna work out. I wanna like - shit. I wanna, like, get back actIIIVE? Like, maybe, like…nobody wanna be in a…no one wanna do…no one wanna play with me. No one wanna play volleyball with me. No one wanna play fuckin nerd shit with me. Everybody I-Everybody I know just wanna get fucked up. I need some better friends. I need people who wanna do shit, you know? Like, I don’t wanna fuckin just get fucked up all the time. And like…that’s a waste of your laife. Like, I wanna be active. I wanna snowboooard or whatever. Oh my-I’m so high already, you guys. That’s the per-this is the perks of life.

Re: Epstein he used the term Pizza Party; aka Pizza to describe girls / shipments probably. What would be your cover name for a secret operation?

Y’all wanna know what like the BEST filling maybe of all time? Definitely of all time, the best feeling of all time is when - okay. You know the blent you smoked this morning? The one you woked up to roll. That one. Okay. And then but you only smoke half of it. Okay. And then you work all day long. You go to fuckin work, you do the fuckin job real fuckin good. You’re like-you’re the best. You do everything you boss asks of you. You are real fuckin cordial with your coworkers. All the customers love you. All these custies come in and they just like they think you’re the greatest. You’re the greatest of all time. You worked all day long. In theEeEnd, you come home, and you smoke the other half of that blent. That’s the greatest feeling ever ‘cause it’s just like so…it’s…this is some old-ass shit too! Like…I’m a grown-ass woman, I’m an adult. And this is my laife. That’s, theHEH, that’s the breakdown of my everyday life for y’all. It’s……incredible. My fat…my fat fabuhlous life. Iiii’m about to get so fucking high, too. Sooo hiiiigh. I’m gonna li-should I light it on camera? Should she light it on CAMERA? Hell yeah, she should light it on camera. Actually, I can’t because I gotta, um, I gotta use both of my hand. I’m using my hand to hold my phone. Oh my god, that’s not, uh, that’s not me, I’m not that fat. Speaking of that, I need to work out. But the thANG is is that I feel like I walk so much, like, living here, you knoooow. Like, I just can-I can’t. I don’t wanna work out. I wanna like - shit. I wanna, like, get back actIIIVE? Like, maybe, like…nobody wanna be in a…no one wanna do…no one wanna play with me. No one wanna play volleyball with me. No one wanna play fuckin nerd shit with me. Everybody I-Everybody I know just wanna get fucked up. I need some better friends. I need people who wanna do shit, you know? Like, I don’t wanna fuckin just get fucked up all the time. And like…that’s a waste of your laife. Like, I wanna be active. I wanna snowboooard or whatever. Oh my-I’m so high already, you guys. That’s the per-this is the perks of life.

Insert Favourite Meme ever.

Did Catherine Zeta Jones actually post this?

In my heart she did

What’s your screen time?

Bad.

Relationship to your schizophrenic device?

Homoerotic codependent female friendship

Where do you scroll and find most?

Mostly tumblr but the gals on pinterest have been resonating w me lately.

How would you describe your iG page? Curation? Moodboard? Dump?

Curation of what I feel or what I think someone else feels or what I think everyone's feeling or something I noticed in someone I don't even know.

Have you ever posted cancellable content?

No I'm perfect and don't make mistakes

Favourite Porn website?

https://m.ok.ru/video/903023692335

Favorite Account on Ig?

baileyjmills99

Favourite Youtube Channel?

lushiousmassacr

If IG was deleted tomorrow would you be ok darling?

Actually, no 🪽

Selfie:

Pic of Feet ( can be in socks):

Ok but yall are only getting one foot.

Dream Blunt Rotation?

Timmy Thick, Emma Mae Jenkins, Woah Vicky, Slavoj Zizek, and my gay ex bf

My name is also Andrea. It means brave. Are you?

Yes and no and yes and no.

What do you do for $?

Suffer

What do you spend most $ ?

Shows and alcohol.

Favourite fast food in Texas?

The fast food here is rly not that good. Growing up in PR showed me that nothing compares to the church’s chicken over there.

Texas Lit or You want to move away?

Ive always wanted to leave but I luv my ppl here so idk:/

What Foot Tattoo would you get?

None, it'd feel ugly.

Who are you currently listening to?

Kesha, beverly hills mom, blonde suppermacy, eatmewhileimhot, a lot of 80s music

Why should people follow you?

To See Within A Beautiful Latina Balkan Woman's Heart

In our Trump/Andrew era, lazy liberal publications might want to drum up nostalgia for the softer and less offensive Special Relationship aesthetics of the Obama/Will+Kate era.

If the news emerges that Kier Starmer has covered Downing Street entirely in grey crushed velvet, trust that HSR will not give a toss unless he hangs up a big oil painting of Tommy Shelby in place of Thatcher's. In which case, the editorial bitch team might be pleased for a moment. HSR says Kill the Royals, even if they weren't eating babies, they were eating babies.

Here is Hollywood Superstar Regular correspondent and woman-about-town Floss Crossley, we publish here her exhibition text for BestWishes Unlimited's exhibition- 'Simply'.

‘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 brushstrokes 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 revered public 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 aghast with how tacky their sashes and gowns really looked in high definition. How very gauche. 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.

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 their 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 thats self-produced, stuff they've sampled, scraps of speech, glitches ripped from obscure videos — then a guitar loop, or a piano, orchestral and dramatic.

They sing live, mic in hand, then slot 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.

Charlie is in performance mode. There’s a manic twinkle in their eyes. This 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, they pukes green slime down the front of their dress.

At another, they accidentally plays a well-known song from the 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.