Acknowledging that is more profitable for Advertisers (and Universities offering Curation MFAs) to encourage us to edge ourselves to our publicised interpretations of each other, the Hollywood Superstar believes, senso generis, in the need for more irl fucking.

So let's hear from an archetype on the problem: the un-fucked 'Contemporary Art Baddie', who suggests that the way to reconcile your feelings with the hot new bods in the gallery with the hot new works on display is to make the whole space less sterile. Riffing on Andrea Fraser's fields of contemporary art diagrams, C.A.B creates a map of the girls that keep the world running.

This is the first in a series on love and exhibition, so get pitching... and bear in mind: the Superstar likes to debate but she also likes to say: Fuck you and your trad wife.

The Baddie Paradox by Contemporary Art Baddie

After the sudden resurrection of my “love” for art in the years post-academy, I’ve found myself in a sexual rut. I am stimulated by the colours, shapes and concepts that present themselves to me in exhibition spaces. I visit artist run galleries, big and thick institutes, tight little spaces, commercial spaces, non profits, churches and more… But everywhere those plain white walls. Guys, get a grip - where is the fun in all of this? The white cube has no sex appeal, it’s sterility doesn’t necessarily create the right ambiance to ask for the new gallery kid's number (we’ve been making sober eye contact for the past 30 minutes) Or is it just me? The “Contemporary Art Baddie” status that intimidates men into not talking to me at openings? At this point, there are only curators in my DMs. And yes, they are there to work.

At my lash-tech appointment, I thought of Elke Krystufek’s 1994 Masturbating in Kunsthalle Vienna. Then Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003), a commissioned work where she videotaped herself having sex with an art collector. He paid for the videotape as an artwork, not for the sex itself. Both works stage the paradox of sexual performance, vital acts are sterilised in the presence of the institution, the commerce and the recording.

Elle Krystufek (Top) Andrea Fraser (Bottom

And that’s the core of The Baddie Paradox:

• High visibility, low approachability: Desired, but rarely approached.
• Sexual aura ≠ sexual access: Style, confidence, and self-possession read as sex, but aren’t the same as sex itself.
• The Madonna–Whore complex still lingers. Baddies are often fantasised about but not pursued sincerely.
• Power dynamics. Owning your space shifts desire: some fetishise it, others retreat.
So is it just me, or are all girls in the arts fucking - except the Contemporary Art Baddie? Or maybe that’s the paradox: she is fucking, but what she really wants is intimacy. Sexual aura does not mean sexual access, and neither guarantees intimacy.

Bruno Zhu and Meme on Hoes

Inspired by Andrea Fraser’s The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram, I developed a 4-Venn diagram to grasp not just the art world but the girls who keep it running: the Indie Literature Hottie, the Gallerina, the Art Hoe, the Community Artist - and, of course, the Contemporary Art Baddie, who encompasses them all. What are they moved by? Their motives? Overlaps? And importantly, do they fuck?

baddie_vendiagram-1.pdf

Q3 Curated by ProblemChild Advisory

September 4 - October 19, 2025

Albert R. Sawit takes us on a journey through "Q-3", an exhibition curated by Problem Child Advisory - another psychologically tortured and semi-autonomous guerrilla art Instagram page - and Alyssa Davis Gallery, the renowned nomadic downtown gallery that’s been curating shows with chic posters since 2016. “Q-3” is a reference to the third quarter of the fiscal year, paired with a selection of artworks whose summary could be described as "post-internet" and "girl-art", "digital grotesquerie" and “machinic fetishistic art akin to transformer toys”. Together, they generate an exhibition geared unabashedly toward Silicon Valley cash flow. Digital solutions to real art world problems!

Featuring work by Diego Gabaldon, Kyle Gallagher, Nina Hartmann, Leif Jones, Gyae Kim, Danka Latorre, Jack Lawler, Sean David Morgan, In June Park and Cameron Spratley

We experienced complete context collapse on Henry St. My father and I, like many of the others assembled on the sidewalk for Q3, had attended the Armoury Art Fair beforehand. By the time an ‘art world enthusiast’ arrives at the exhibition, they have probably seen close to 100 small shows in the form of individual booths dotted across several fairs. Perhaps a few more cohesive openings in Tribeca or Chinatown.

It would be safe to say these viewers have encountered 500 works of art, easily destroying any strong or certain idea about what world we exist in by the time we got to the show. Outside of Q-3, there was a different kind of crowd - dirtier and younger – some kids blowing smoke across the sidewalk, baseball caps with frayed edges – more cargo pant pockets than I care to recall – and the kind of Chinatown glitter that sees rhinestones all over everything – hats, tees, and teeth. Who is Problem Child Advisory? A seemingly ownerless, Instagram-centric sort of whose-who type of visual storytelling-based insights on art, whose niche (or populist) selection of internet artists draws an above-average crowd.

The first thing to grab my attention was a picture frame that looked like it had been made in an auto body shop, Diego Galbadon’s SPEEDFRAME (1,2, and 3) 2025 series. It was as if the people who made the car from Speed Racer had a side hustle in framing. Macho-centric, jacked-up accelerationist framing that appeals to both the consumer critical CSM graduate and the technocrat. Galbadon’s obsession with sport as ritual is reflected in the gargantuan architecture of his framing device, like a baroque baldachino.

I was moving a bit too quickly to actually stop in my tracks, but I did take a picture. Upon further inspection of the image, I realised it was a soccer game – or a rendering of one, with the words "DARE TO DO" spelt out by the fans in the crowd. It was a commentary on the sports industrial complex: the commemorative cups, the scarves, the sea of inevitable merch that comes with being at the top of your ‘field’. The most important part of this deluge of liquid merch is the container that holds it all together - a stadium. Like the football stadiums that accompany the most notable empires, the frame becomes this celebration of the work inside, a protector, a reminder, but most importantly, an indicator of value. V Q3.

The next attention grabber was a furless, silicone deer, covered in overlapping tattoos. Leif Jones, Bed Bugs Cure Laziness (Deer 1) 2025. A work which also appears on the cryptic Instagram account of its maker @leifffffffffffffffffffffff. The tattooed skin recalls a bad stick and poke given by friends - the sort of Instagram grid post to go triple platinum on drainer feeds.

The last work I’ll bring up is a painting I liked because of its transparency and honesty. Sleight of Hand 2025 by the artist In June Park. It was a simple airburst image of a few handshakes occurring simultaneously; it stood out as a reminder of forced exchanges. The art world is for rich white people – it is their playground, and we are all just here because of their ego. No matter how much we stylise or abstract the narrative, at the end of the day, the art world is about creating capital and moving it through various systems so it can accumulate value. Sleight of Hand alludes to the vectors of financial manipulation, but to its formal qualities: slight blurring, JPEG light texture, creating an impression of artists' increasing freedom through digitality.

All of the works in Q-3 can be categorized as "Net Art" - Problem Child Advisory surpasses the traditional gallery system - in a way - by sourcing artists outside of the network, defying the brick and mortar space, Sam Altman style. The works speak to each other through unfiltered internet language - this isn’t super flat - or digitality prematurely re-packaged as a movement, these are, and I quote, a purportedly “anti-establishment” and “anti-gate-kept” forms of art making.

Does this mean that if you see a work on the Problem Child Advisory Instagram, and like it, you can just purchase from the artist directly? Curating in works such as Sleight of Hand (2025) suggests that cutting out the middleman might be welcomed by the page. Would love to know if this is actually the case. Slide in our DM'S.

Correspondent Maria Juana dives into the "Saatchi Yates Rave", or the concept-store gallery's venture into the London underground. Marina gained acclaim for her psychologically terrorising performance art about state oppression, and now she's in the same line up as Fake Mink. If not exactly a net good, the event leant toward the absurd rather than the abyssal. God bless the dichotomy.

In London you either die a hero, or live long enough to put on an event. It seems that upon her return to the city, Marina Abramović has met the same fate. To initiate Saatchi Yates into her exhibiting repertoire, the help of the infamous, London-based collective Virus was enlisted. With its tenuous links to clubby acts on both sides of the Atlantic, I can't deny that my interest was piqued.

Marina is the kind of person I'll always have a soft spot for. Like an ex, or the celebrity crush of my teen years. Nothing awful they might do could ever truly negate how they once made me feel. I stood by her when she attempted to 'raise the vibration of Glastonbury' and consequently 'heal the world' in a custom Riccardo Tisci dress, and if these DJ rumours were true, fuck it, I'll stand by her now.

As my best friend aptly pointed out, we were witnessing "mixed-levels of swag." The well-to-do fashion kids stood in stark contrast with the abundance of quote-unquote 'normies.' Quirked-up women in their 40s and suited blokes in their late 30s lined up right alongside the London ravers and people who- if you squinted hard enough- had an instagram that hovered next to them like a ghostly and well-followed child. In fact, the whole night could have been Phillipa Snow's Trophy Lives: On the Celebrity as Art Object, adapted for a kinaesthetic learner.

As the night grew closer, the plot thinnened. There was still no lineup to be seen. Anyway: a black cab rolled up, and out stepped Marina herself. As the groups of shaggy-haired boys thrashed their not-so-quirky locks into a frenzy, I felt in the flattening flash of a fit pic, a not-quite-profound levelling of worlds.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't have fun - even if Marina didn't end up making her DJ debut. That said, rumours of Lady Gaga's presence in the collectors' room replenished the intrigue. As 11pm hit the clock and the normies dissipated, the real freaks could come out (and listen to LV Sandals). Just another night being on the cutting edge, I guess.

Actually though, the music was really good. The lineup justified itself, Wraith9, Mechatok and Charlie Osbourne tore. Free WhiteClaw on tap gave brief respite from the £16 doubles I'd drunkenly spent. And as I'd so desperately prayed, Marina's aura was left intact.

It’s not hard to see why the PR team took this particular route, as plastic surgery and culture-at-large bring Charli XCX and Abramovic closer and closer together. It makes sense in the meme-marketing landscape that has been cooked up in coked-out Shoreditch new-builds over the last few years. If the intention was to entice the younger ‘alt’ crowd into buying shit from Saatchi Yates, I think that falls flat - especially since some miscreant (allegedly) robbed one of the £1.8k prints. It becomes part of their larger project of art-as-clout-proximity/socially-mediated experience that the gallery are pushing through their buy-in membership system.

According to my elementary calculations, this exhibition would see a gross profit of £2.16m. This largely mystified night kicked off a mega-sale of her works- with 600 blue stills and 600 red stills up for grabs. It's a huge chunk of change to try and make in one go. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know there’s a 2008-style financial bubble about to burst. From an outside financial perspective, it seems like Saatchi Yates’ diversification through their infamous membership scheme needs some interim revenue-smoothing. It’s typical crypto-mentality, applied to pop-culture: buy low and sell high. And get out before the bubble bursts.

Whilst New York Film Festival got swishly underway, our distinguished Milanese superstar cut her teeth with this write up of what might have been the roughest film festival I've ever heard of. Finding it to be a bit too straight-boy: less Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, more poliziottescho, Holli Would says that you might wanna WIPE your hands after you leave Milan's Amateur film festival.

I want to meet the plug and I meet the plug.

Shortly, I’m half drunk in a taxi bound for a too-many-thousand-meters complex of abandoned offices turned into an artist-run liminal space which is actually patronised by some mysterious entities and led by people with seemingly little control. Most importantly, this space called Bim is far from everything but itself. I don’t go often. I've been literally twice including this one.

Despite the miles of distance we came to take part into this cultural momentum, when we arrive we’re not focused on the independent screening program being held outdoor as much as we are in the provisorily abandoned bar spot that we, just being there, vandalise. I feel people are annoyed by our too open disengagement and we’re annoyed by them judging us.

And so we sit and start watching, and soon enough this turns out to be a terrible idea.

It’s a short movie by Cane Morto, a trio of white Italian guys from (maybe) Geneva, who seem to both endorse and mock a bubbling cauldron of underground signifiers and languages. I feel a little embarrassed for them.

I check them on socials, and what I get is a disturbing level of multi-hyphenation. In what looks like their 16-post-grid chase for artistic recognition, Cane Morto have already done performances, painting shows, video works, public art commissions, organized drawing auctions, happenings… and the list goes on. But none of it seems to really grasp anything reletable, at least to me—and this, trust me, has nothing to do with their possibly being outsiders, naifs, or with whatever backdoor they might have used to get into this world.

I could just call it a case study in ridiculousness—they’re ridiculous amateurs rather than people who actually channel irony within their art practice—but what worries me is the hint of shortcuts being taken.

If anything, they give off an alarming “I-could-do-conceptual-art-too” vibe, like some rookie schoolboys that just want to conquer art—use it, squeeze it, put it to work like a capitalist machine, instead of even sitting down with her, giving her some time, talking with her.

I’m talking about the type of guys who think that they’re smarter than everyone else in the class, including the prof, and this faux belief blinds them to the point that, after the first months of course—maybe after a lesson on Duchamp—they think they’ve already hacked some secret, deep-seated logic behind conceptual art. Fueled by a certain dumb excitement, their little eureka moment convinced them that they can churn out tons of stuff that costs them little personally and can be produced at full speed: this is the conceptual work, this is the concept, the idea, the meaning, and you can multiply is as many times as you want.

Didn’t I deserve an A? Isn’t this how art works, prof?

I need a drink.

Right after, the video we came from far away to watch is finally being screened. Since before it starts, big noise is being made for Loris, Bernardino, and Tres Bones, the trio gravitating around a more expanded Milan-based videoart orbit—operating under the name of NoText Azienda—who, in some capacity, worked on this piece.

Under the lens of a trademark erosive colour treatment, a tough, indigestible story about an immigrant man scammed by his lawyer unfolds. The monologue, describing in first person the experience of the scammed one is poignant, and it keeps it brilliantly simple, it makes me feel the desperation, the hunger, and the praise for revenge, like it was blood in my mouth after I’ve bitten my tongue. It ends into an orgy of sex, abuse, and torture, inflicted to the scammed into the abandoned park of a Milanese suburb.

I stand up and cheer and scream and I couldn’t be more enthusiastic not only because of the coke. I'm so glad these atmospheres can still slip into art realms through those beloved backdoors.

Men dressed like Italian dandies, with 70s suits and haircuts and gelatine in their air, eating in squalid spots with their shirt open to show an hairy chest and a gold chain, bringing on stage their Califano-drama and the squalor of their existential conditions.

Let’s just no bullshit: despite the art world last-decade interest in the last ones, in the ones who lives at the margins, in the long-time misrepresented, these kind of subjects are too ugly, apparently even too virile, and their bad taste is too unredeemable, to be taken into account by Art. No matter how their condition actually is one of misery and crisis, no matter how this world is hurting them, chewing them and spit them on the asphalt.

Downtown New York's Baudelairean beauty has been canonized in Nan Goldin's photobooks, but Italy's national popular discos aren't the ones you'd find there. The poetry rippling through the wrinkles of these old guys ripped straight out of a Poliziotteschifilm resists that kind of canonisation.

The night ends in a bath of drugs, squalor, and misery, to the point that I feel kinda like one of those characters. The day after, a text from Bernardino thanks me for the kind words. I can’t remember those words, but I do believe them now more than I could ever.

ITALIAN TRANSLATION

Ennesimo mansplanning non richiesto né tantomeno necessario di ciò che la donna solitamente nasconde nelle mutande: senza scrupoli ma con tanti salvaslip, così leggiamo la nuova apertura firmata Thaddaeus Ropac a Milano, Sabato 20 Settembre.

Al di là del fatto che non una singola faccia fosse bella o gioiosa durante l’opening, forse data l’assenza di una qualunque bevanda alcolica presso il catering -composto da acqua naturale e succo di pesca- la nuova sede della rinomata galleria è presso Palazzo Belgioioso.

Da depliant, i due artisti dialogano su livelli molteplici nel corso della mostra ma, come sostiene il curatore Luca Massimo Barbero, in definitiva non sono legati da "una prossimità formale né da un'affinità di linguaggio, ma da una tensione condivisa. L'idea, cioè, che l'arte non rappresenti ma annunci, che non descriva ma evochi, che sia prima di tutto, un atto di apertura verso l’origine”. Non occorre una gran immaginazione per ricollegare la apertura al punto dove tutto ha origine, la vulva. Courbet lo sa meglio di chiunque altro. A quanto pare non è il solo.

Le pareti delle sale espositive sono un glory hole fatto e finito ma del resto ognuno ha i suoi gusti. Chi siamo noi per criticare?

Concetti Spaziali di ogni taglia e nazionalità, cavità violate tutte dalle lame di Fontana, che altrimenti non avrebbe venduto più una tela. Sex sells, when not consensual more. I numeri parlano, si invita consultare il sito XNXX.com e il prezzo di vendita di queste opere. Fortunatamente al piano secondo dell’edificio la mostra culmina aprendosi su un ufficio con tavolo, sedie e contratti d’acquisto: qui si ritiene più consona la categoria Anal.

“Woman written by a man”: un’autoreggente spaiata, un orecchino d’oro, un tubino nero con glitter e in ultimo una gomma da masticare Big Bubble che una puttana ha portato a passeggio una nottata intera sotto il tacco a spillo; questo rosa shocking porta il titolo La Fine di Dio (1963) e ci piacerebbe questo Dio fosse il maschilismo.

Nostro alleato Baselitz appende uomini a testa in giù con una tavolozza scrupolosa di bianchi, neri, gialli e rosa. Tutto gli si può rinfacciare meno che il non essere inclusivo, difatti da bravo contemporaneo a colazione mangia cancel culture. E gli uomini appena citati, da titoli, sono in realtà donne, una, Rosa Riposa (2019).

Scrupoloso Georg lo è anche in ritratti espliciti come Ohne Titel del 2024, un inchiostro rosso su carta di una signorina che si copre il sesso. Come biasimarla; l’eccezione che conferma la regola e se ne compiace. Lui non mette titolo perché è senza parole come “non ogni uomo, ma quasi”, davanti al rifiuto.

Un Arlecchino (1950) in terracotta, al servizio dell’amore fa capolino da dietro un arco; sproniamo a far riferimento all’immagine per cogliere suggerite assonanze che purtroppo scadono sempre nel monotematico. Noi dovremmo forse fare di rimando psicoterapia, freudiana. E un test STD.

Lasciando l’edificio, un rivolo di scale foderate di rosso. L’Aurora Viene è il nome dato all’esposizione; se questa Aurora fa riferimento al flusso mestruale, stringo la mano al sig. Barbero. È quel periodo del mese, ma non si preoccupi, come parecchi curatori al giorno d’oggi ho la buona abitudine di lavarmene le mani.

Osservando il palazzo dal cortile, vicino all’entrata una grande scultura fallica, il primo uomo in mezzo a tante donne. Solleva vedere come quantomeno ci avessero avvertito: che fosse una mostra del cazzo era in introduzione, quella che viene spesso saltata nella lettura. Si può dire di questo opening che è un vero e proprio salto della quaglia e di noi che l’abbiamo scampata bella, amiche!

ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Yet another unsolicited, let alone unecessary, example of mansplaining about what women usually hide in their underwear: without scruples, yet so many pantyliners, this is how we must understand the opening by Thaddeus Ropac's in Milan.

The new location of the renowned gallery is at Palazzo Belgioioso (trans. beautiful and happy face building)- despite this fact, everyone looked ugly and unhappy- perhaps due to the lack of alcoholic beverages during the function.

According to the brochure, the two artists engage in dialogue on multiple levels throughout the exhibition but, as curator Luca Massimo Barbero argues, 'The idea is that it the art is first and foremost an act of openness towards the origin’.

It doesn't take much imagination to connect this opening to the vulva. Courbet knows this better than anyone. Apparently, he's not the only one.

The brash masculinity of this 'act of openness', however, turned the exhibition into a glory hole. And anyway, to each his own.

Concetti Spaziali of all sizes and nationalities, cavities violated by Fontana's blades, who otherwise would not have sold another canvas. Sex sells, when not consensual, even more so. The numbers speak for themselves; please consult X.Videos to see the selling price of these works.
Fortunately, on the second floor of the building, the exhibition culminates in an office with a table, chairs and purchase contracts: here, the Anal category is considered more appropriate.

“Woman written by a man” : an unpaired stocking, a gold earring, a little black dress with glitter and, lastly, a piece of Big Bubble chewing gum that a bitch wore all night long under her stiletto heel; this shocking pink piece is entitled La Fine di Dio (The End of God, 1963) and we would like this God-ending to be male chauvinism.

Our ally Baselitz hangs men upside down with a meticulous palette of whites, blacks, yellows and pinks. He can be accused of anything but not being inclusive; in fact, like any good contemporary artist, he eats cancel culture for breakfast. And the men just mentioned in the titles are actually women, one of whom is Rosa Riposa (2019).

Georg is also meticulous in explicit portraits such as Ohne Titel from 2024, a red ink on paper portrait of a young woman covering her genitals. How can we blame her? She is the exception that proves the rule and is pleased with it. He does not give it a title because he is speechless, like “not every man, but almost”, in the face of rejection.

A terracotta Arlecchino (1950), in the service of love, peeks out from behind an arch; we invite you to consult the image for suggested similarities that unfortunately always end up being monothematic. Perhaps we should refer to a Freudian psychotherapist. And take an STD test.

Leaving the building, a trickle of red-lined stairs. L’Aurora Viene is the name given to the exhibition; if this Aurora refers to menstrual flow, I shake Mr Barbero's hand. It's that time of the month, but don't worry, like many curators nowadays, I have the good habit of washing my hands of it.

Observing the building from the courtyard, near the entrance is a large phallic sculpture, the first man among many women. It's good to see that at least they warned us: it's a dick of an exhibition.

We can say that this opening was a close call and that we got off lightly, my girl-friends!

July 12 — September 6
2025

The apparatus of Her Selected Works struck me: railings holding the artworks and the postcards on the rack display as you walk in. They kind of carried the show.

I was under the impression that the works on show were a part of Carlotta’s “collection”. I.e. She was a collector and the works she had purchased were a product of her taste. The curatorial angle is that these are works which could have been collected and kept in storage, so their arrangement is like a hide-and-seek of meaning. As a curator, these works are still, invariably, part of her taste - but it would have been a relief to know that some kind of circular economy existed between the chic state-funded central european art world and the significantly less financially supported London artistic circuit. It would be great if this exhibition signalled that some kind of a) collecting and b) economic transfer had taken place. Gave the vibe of the scene in Tenet (2020) where he breaks into the tax-free hyper-secure non-dom art storage facility. Untaxable offshore funds.

Andreas Schmid’s work Figure Nr 1, 2025 was a highlight: a conttraposto cubist figure whose frame is constructed from various watercoloured ovals is painted on antique card. Schmid constructed a frame for the card, akin to an Ilizarov apparatus, which holds the folds upright with brass poles and screws. Daniel Zeballos’ it’s dark train of thought with too many carriages, 2025 a fine graphite drawing on torn paper, has been seemingly drawn, then torn and re-assembled. This play between material, texture and tromp l’eoil is also present in Gritli Faulhaber’s Ohne Titel (La Solitaire, Zitronengelb) (2024) where 70’s wallpaper-appliqué surrounds the silhouette of a 1920’s flapper. The work was previously shown as part of Les Garçonnes at Gauli Zitter, Brussels, where I think it was better served, contextualised by Faulhaber’s other paintings that muse on the relationship between decorative pattern and depiction of the human form, ala Alois Riegl.

A Deconstructed archive-on-display-type-beat is very cool but actually super hard to execute in principle, especially if the works displayed form a cat and mouse of meaning that is not ever fully deciphered. It would have been great to have some more presence - even heavy handed - from the eponymous "collector".

Kern Samuel, Rough Draft, 12 July–6 September, 2025

If this was a review based upon taste - the show would not score so high. But actually, its hard to fault. Soft Opening‘s curation and programming tend to be pretty exquisite, boasting a museum-level attention to detail that smaller/newer galleries itend to overlook.

No one would forget the catwalk-like structure built for Gina Fischli’s April 2024 show, Love Love Love, or the stainless steel industrial floating frames that housed Maren Karlson’s ectoplasmic graphite drawings for Staub, Storeng. At Soft Opening, it is usually a “no notes” situation, which cannot be said for everyone in the clean-goth-come-gallerist circuit.

In Rough Draft two stretches of stitched canvas hang in the centre of the gallery. Bars and Blocks (Janky Hankies) (L) and ® droops onto the floor three-quarters down, the underside of their stitched panelling clearly on display. You can examine up close Samuel’s building of patchy coloured canvas, sometimes bleached, sometimes block colour. One half of the title, “Janky Hankies” refers to the colour-coded signalling system popular in West Village gay communities of the 70s and 80s. It could mean “top” or “bottom” or - according to Bob Damron’s Address Book (1980) key sexual information:

Left Worn Brown Bandanna = Scat Top

Left Worn Mustard Bandana = Has an 8” plus

Legible at the edge of (R) and (L) is a faint imprint of the artist's foot. Is this historical, homo-social colour coding, paired with his bodily imprint, a biographical component (personal or otherwise).

(R) and (L) imitate strip quilting—a form of piecework quilting originating in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, which was pioneered by a community isolated by systemic racism. In Gee’s Bend, compositions were fabricated using salvage cloth, ultimately resulting in arrangements that rejected both convention and symmetry. Rather than following pre-existing patterns, Gee’s Bend quiltmakers group their works into categories: ‘Abstraction & Improvisation’, ‘Pattern & Geometry’, ‘Housetop & Bricklayer’, ‘Lazy Gal’ and ‘Work Clothes’ - Samuel’s title “Bars and Blocks” references this arrangement.

Samuel builds on the idea of fabric as an everyday communicator of repressed codes, sexual or otherwise…fabric as an identifier, a symbol, an illicit message. Even the display of ® and (L) imitates a code of the past - each spring, the quiltmakers of Gee's Bend would “air the quilts” as a way of exhibiting an otherwise private, domestic object.

In 9 Lives a wall drawing of a nonagon is filled with nine other nonagons in various shades of green chalk. The sketchy wall drawing contributes to the relevance of the exhibition's moniker, Rough Drafts, but also mimics a talisman, beacon, or mural. Hence, I guess, the hermetic reference. The number Nine is also a magic alchemical number which, according to the press release, apparently harnesses “the ephemeral nature of site specificity to enact a tension between resolution and transition”. Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers and alchemy: that’s the esoteric art-history knowledge holy grail.

The pièce de résistance of the show was 3 Stacks. Thirty stacks of brown, well-handled A4 sheets were placed upon a custom-built timber desk, each containing a variety of diagrams, collages, marks and a biscuit in its wrapped labelled "DIA COOKIE". It resembled a children’s workspace, or Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne if he went to steiner school. The nïave, or frantic, gestures of 9 Lives are echoed in the pieces installation. As the night went on the papers found themselves increasingly scattered across the floor. Leafing through these pages felt strangely utilitarian —the opposite of the usual East End gallery space filled with unattainable concepts. Samuel’s work makes me feel like I'm lying on a quilt and catching the stitches with my hands.

3 Stacks has the feeling of rummaging loosely through papers with little purpose other than to feel them flutter.

I wish that all objects had been able to be touched, as quilts are intended. Call me craft centric.

Just as I was starting to get tired of the same shade of beige that seems to wash over every 15 Orient show - I was granted a great show of Hudinilson Jr's exploration of material, queerness, assemblage, abstraction, movement. Above all, a sense of the artist’s own historicity.

One thing about this show I enjoyed was Hudinilson Jrs. use of the Xerox copier in conjunction with bodily movements, that were then integrated into drawings, collages, etc.

Throughout the show it felt like I was involved in understanding his process, research, and culmination of it all, to a body of work that felt heavily considered. A good show for the gays.

Directly lifted from the press release:

"Reclaiming space,”
“a tribute to New York's layered art ecology,”
“a statement of presence”.

There is a reason why the press release reads as horribly as it does, and that's due to a majority of the works falling short of aligning themselves with any of the aforementioned phrases. Perhaps due to the emptiness of these phrases (used ad-infinitum) in today’s art-speak lingo.

I’ll give credit where it’s due, work by artists like Amanda Ba, Cannibal (2025), Tucker Van der Wyden Spiral 3 (2024), Eli Tamarkin Girls (2024), Kembra Pfahler Wall of Vagina II (2004/2018), Aramando Nin, Maggie Lee, Sassy (2024) - great.

Obviously, you throw the New York kids a bone with works from Dash Snow, Young Men with a Future (2007) and Mike Kelley, Extra Curricular Activity Project Reconstruction (2004-5). Predictable.

Yet, unfortunately, if you have also watched this show via an Instagram story post and decide to see the works in person, you’ll walk away with an appreciation of perhaps a few names, but mostly an appreciation for art that is not on display at Market Street.

It’s a predictable show with predictable work, and if you were going to paint Spider-Man getting his dick sucked, at least spare oil paint and use acrylic.

A lot of these works play into the aspect of a “storefront spectacle” as the gallery describes, so much so that Revolve reads more as a “pop-up” store than an exhibition. The works inside are akin to the miscellaneous, mass-produced items for sale in American Candy stores and Soho tourist traps: their bright, eye-catching colours admonish viewers for their short attention span.

Made possible with support from Supreme NYC

I always found it interesting how “art people” dressed.

Body Count - an exhibition by Miriam Simanowitz and Thibault Aedy - imagines individual style as it looks online rather than “IRL”. London-contemporary-young-up-and-coming art scene {that incorporates fractals and subcultural visuals hailing from Camberwell, Goldsmiths, CSM, UCL and UAL et al until ad infinitum] may appear as though they have been transplanted from the 2010s. The reasons for this are twofold: a desire to return to a pre-META Utopia and the all-too rapidly ageing Generation Z. The first work in the show, Miriam Simanowitz’s Mise En Scene (2025), supposedly mocks this dress code.

Simanowitz squeezed her friends’ pelvises, elbows, and spines to gauge the size of their bones before recreating them in metal and covering them in plaster. The result is an almost unrecognisable, disturbingly uncanny deviation from real life. To dress them, Simanowitz opted to trawl Vinted - an app that has overtaken Zara in volume of sales in France, due to the success of its algorithm. Instead of pushing curated resellers, it lulls you into a sense of feigned individuality, seeking out gems in a middle-aged woman’s redundant All Saints collection. In the exhibition, the mannequins wear scuffed-up suede Isabel Marant heels, beaten ballet flats with peeling soles and discoloured slouchy leather bags. Simanowitz included sequinned dresses, bows straight out of 2010, cutey tumblr esq staples and flat caps worn ironically, set against equally ironic slogan t-shirts and hoodies. One black hoodie proclaimed the words “NOT A STEREOTYPE” in white bold writing with a keffiyeh strewn over the top.

Mise en scene fell victim to itself, in the sense that to anyone outside of the bubble of 2010s artschool dress codes, the artwork does not necessarily translate. To employ Roland Barthes' object language, the effect of committing to the total look of a period on the surface connotes an awareness of current trends. However, the metalanguage, or denotation, signifies cultural capital. The result, in my opinion, is a uniform that is not in line with a classical subcultural dress code. I.e, genuine expression. Rather, it appears like a scene, but one that feigns individual style in the absence of genuine ideas.

Past Mise En Scene is where Miriam and Thiabault diverge from sceneology, and the real point of Body Count is unveiled. Here, it borrows far more from the playbook of the 1960s body art movement, but from a contemporary lens, exploring new ways to open up sex as the artistic subject.

Thiabault’s study is rather an abstraction, as he seeks to create “reductions of the body” in “abject subject matter.” Apparently, Thibault’s mum has influenced this fascination with gut health, often bringing out the Bristol Stool Chart for reference. I’ll let you Google that one. Blood in my Stool (2025) is a play on words and form. Thibault seems fascinated with introspecting the relationship to the impenetrable internal world or our insides that we try to decipher or connect to. For example, lying on the floor is a large cylindrical rubber-coated tube that has the appearance of an intestine, but the idea is best encapsulated in the work Suppositoires, a curtain that consists of the anally insertable medications, which he suggests are “more popular on the continent.”

If Thibault explores how the internal body is negated, Miriam’s work appears on the opposite end of the spectrum. It is the first time in a long time that I have walked into a gallery space and been shocked, and to achieve that in our digitised world, I think, deserves commendation. Without spoiling the performance, three screens depict different rooms, one of which is where Miriam plays Mrs Claus. The performance duration is 2 hours, involving around 20 men she knew to varying extents, though some were found via Instagram. Part of the performance was live-streamed on Instagram, which led to a surprisingly productive analysis between the men about their parts in the performance and real life. The experience seemed to have shifted the way they viewed their roles. But more than anything, it was about the dilemma it had caused internally for them, and how they were perceived. The first question they asked one another was, “Did you see people online?” This moved onto “If you start looking with intention, it’s like- okay. But you become conscious again of people watching you after a while.” And “The natural response is more interesting than the more formative response.”

In short, Body Count is best when it’s corporeal.